My friend and colleague Will Swayne from Marketing-Results.com.au has just posted a great 7 part series on website optimisation, and outlines a lot of the tools he uses as an internet marketing consultant.

• Part 1: Advanced Conversion Tracking
• Part 2: Cross Channel Tracking
• Part 3: Getting Your Emails Open and Read
• Part 4: Retaining Email List Subscribers
• Part 5: Boosting Website Conversion
• Part 6: Visualising Where Your Visitors Are Clicking
• Part 7: Keyword Conversion of Natural Search Campaigns

I'll be applying each of these techniques to my Restaurant Web Site Design service that I have just launched.

Over the easter long weekend I setup a new blog that I plan to grow over the next 6 months. Zero RC is a RC hobby blog running Drupal 5.1, the Aurora theme (that I customised to be 760px wide and not full screen), and a lot of different modules. My aim is to get several key authors who each have a different expertise (RC Cars, RC Planes, RC Helicopters and RC Boats).

The modules I'm currently using are:

• Blogs (to handle multiple blog authors)
• Path, Pathauto, Metatags
• Google Analytics, XML Sitemap, Adsense
• Ping, Diggthis
• Search
• Comments, Trackback, Akismet, Captcha, Textimage

I've also customized the node.tpl.php file to insert Adsense code between paragraphs like this:

<?php
  //Split the content based on closing paragraph (</p>) tags
  $content_array = explode("</p>", $content);
  //Rebuild the content and add adsense in between
  $new_content = '';
  foreach ($content_array as $key => $value) {
    if ($key > 0) $new_content .= "</p>";
    if ($key == 1) $new_content .= adsense_display($format = '468x60', $group = 1, $channel = 1);
    if ($key == 4) $new_content .= adsense_display($format = '468x60', $group = 1, $channel = 1);
    $new_content .= $value;
  }
  $content = $new_content;
?>

So, if you're a fan of RC toys, check out the site and contact me if you would like to become an author (paid of course).

I mis-typed a Google URL today and ended up seeing Google's 404 page which looks like it hasn't be updated since the 90's. Check it out here.

This prompted me to see what google was like in the early years by taking a trip back through the wayback machine. The wayback machine, if you don't know, makes an archive of websites and stores them on their server. All you need to do is search for a domain, you will be able to see all the archives it has. I don't know how many sites are currently archived, but I think most sites over 6 months old are.

Here are some highlights from google's archives. 

The Name

10^100 (a gigantic number) is a googol, but we liked the spelling "Google" better. We picked the name "Google" because our goal is to make huge quantities of information available to everyone. And it sounds cool and has only six letters.

Also, this page has some logos that go back when they called themselves BackRub.

Anyway, checkout the archive of google pages.