David Leigh

It’s not until you try and use a website that its sheer user-unfriendlyness can come to light. One of the big examples is the website of RENFE, the Spanish railway company, which although it looks good and is translated into a handful of languages, completely fails as a useful tool.

My girlfriend and I are planning to go to Valls on Sunday to attend the annual calçotada festival, and since it will involve two of my favourite pastimes - eating and drinking - we thought we would be better off if we took public transport rather than drive. The problem is that the website has never been designed with the idea of getting information out in a way that actually anybody to anyone. In fact it is a simple question of marketing; what does the train using population want when they use the website?

A simple question, but one that has been messed up badly. The site is subdivided into different areas of operation which are imposible to understand - why would I know whether I want one service or another?

The practical upshot of this is that the site may tell you that journey from A to B is impossible, simply because you’re in the wrong area of the site. If you go into another section you’ll find it is possible - I first noticed this when finding the timetable for a journey I have travelled before, only for the website to come up with a blank.

Why was it so difficult to design the RENFE website to be actually useful? Did anyone ever site down and think how customers were likely to request info? And why bother translating it when a tourist is even less likely to know which train service they need for any given journey.

It takes a special talent to do this.

Two of the universal laws of money seem to be 1) people who become materially much better off than they are accustomed to have an overwhelming desire to demonstrate gross bad taste a la David Beckham or any lottery millionaire and 2) that once they have had their gold-plated billiard table delivered and the appeal of a diamond encrusted mobile phone is on the wane they go out of their way to find someone to threaten with legal action.

That happened to me this weekend; alas I didn’t win the lottery, but I have had a client reaching for his lawyer a little too readily with the promise of a lawsuit attached, although I will point out that I don’t know anything about his financial circumstances. I don’t know why this only ever happens to me in January though.

The threat of legal action is always unpleasant and can quickly spiral out of control, but at the end of the day it’s often all about game theory. When neither side can clearly win (remember lawyers are always the winning side) the time and energy required by both parties means that often it is a question of outbluffing your opponent until they are willing to accept a sensible offer.

So don’t threaten to sue me - I don’t crumble at the threat of legal action and I’m entitled to the free legal aid that comes from living with a lawyer, so why don’t you be reasonable and I will too.

If you ever read any of the webmaster/seo forums you may have come across mention of the so-called minus 30 penalty. It is easy to find out if your website is suffering from it because none of your pages rank above page 4 of the results (position number 31) and even if you search on “www.yourdomain.com” in Google you won’t find your site listed until the 4th page.

One of my sites was struck by it mid-September, when many pages that were top ten (and usually 1-3) suddenly plunged in the SERPS. I didn’t notice the pattern for a few days though, where almost every single search enquiry ranked at 31 for that domain.

Since then I’ve reworked the content, added plenty of new pages, got some good new links, got listed in Yahoo Directory and filed a reinclusion request with Google. However, all of this has been to no avail and public facing Googlers won’t let us know what we are doing wrong - they regard us as web spammers.

Well, thanks for that Google, but I’m trying to run a legitimate business. Tell me what I’m doing wrong and I’ll sort it. No problem, ok?

Since my rankings are so poor in Google I’ve decided to run a little experiment. First I’ve blocked Google from almost the entire site using robots.txt. When “www.domainname.com” ranks where it should in the SERPS I’ll start allowing the Googlebot to access other areas of the site.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

I was in the centre of Barcelona yesterday morning for a meeting, but beforehand I needed to go to Fnac to exchange a CD that I’d given for Christmas. After Fnac I walked accross Plaça Catalunya and was a little surprised to see a large, much-tattooed man wearing nothing but skin tight briefs.

Aha, I thought, some kind of advertising stunt.

It took a moment longer to register that his skin tight briefs were in fact a tattoo and so he was stark naked in the middle of Barcelona and on very public display - from this I decided he was either mad or bad, and very probably dangerous to know. 

A very curious thought went through my head at this point - that if I am ever attacked by a madman I don’t want him to be a naked madman.

Anyway, he didn’t, but I thought I’d find a nice friendly policeman/woman while walking to my appointment and tell them that there was a mad/bad naked man in Plaça Catalunya. Of course Barcelona being Barcelona there were no police in sight.

Can you imagine the same situation in Trafalgar Square?

Adsense arbitrage is something I’ve thought about doing in the past but never got around to actually doing. This changed just before Christmas, when I read a report written by Brad Callen regarding a client of his who was making good money from it. Although he didn’t give full details, Brad did at least outline the method and I decided to give it a go.

As I was making a few dollars a day I decided to read up on Adsense Arbitrage a bit more - you can read an excellent explanation of “traditional” Adsense Arbitrage at Graywolf’s SEO Blog.

I decided to explore this a bit more - first I bought Brad’s Keyword Elite software and after some more success decided to go full out and bought Adsense Arbitrage And Leverage by Michael Plante. The book describes the exact process he uses to earn somewhere in the region of $200 per day in profit.

I’ve been applying the model that Mike decribes and I’m happy to say it works beautifully. I’m not at $200 per day yet, but I’ll continue working it and see how far it goes. My feeling is that Google will get wise at some point and clamp down on this, but at the moment Mike’s method is an excellent opportunity, so use it while you can.

Last night saw the first round of the Barcelona derby with Espanyol playing host to FC Barcelona at their home stadium on Montjuic. In fact the I can see the stadium from the front terrace and if I stretch a bit the other way I can also see Camp Nou - or as most Anglophones insist, the Nou Camp.

But what a terrible performance put on by Barcelona - the score was 3-1 to Espanyol, but could easily have been 5-1. They just didn’t get it together as a team and Ronaldinho was completely missing the spark that makes him Ronaldinho. I can’t wait for Messi to return to fitness and see if the team returns to form in the second half of the season.

Even the normally calm Frank Rijkaard managed to lose his cool at one point, slamming his fist into the perspex side of the dugout, knocking out a broken section and thereby drawing the close attention of two members of Espanyol’s ground staff.

BTW, you can buy FC Barcelona tickets online and save yourself the hassle of getting them when you’re in Barcelona.

I don’t know about you but I received some great presents for Christmas. One of them I’d been meaning to buy for ages but I thought would make a nice easy present if I gave enough hints (you know what I really need…). Luckily I did receive it. Unluckily it is close to useless.

What I’m talking about is the so called universal remote control. You know when you’ve got a separate zapper for the TV, the video, the DVD, the digital box and potentially a few other devices too, you’re sat on the sofa relaxing, want to switch from this channel to that, adjust the volume or stop the film you’re watching and listen to a CD instead. Seems easy - except you can never find the right remote. So what a great device the universal remote contol should be, one remote to control everything.

But when you try and set it up you find that it’s anything but universal. I did manage to get it to talk to the video and the DVD player. But the TV? No. And the digital box? No. And I couldn’t do much with the devices it did talk to except switch them off, and what use is that?

I’m sure that if you have the right devices and the right universal remote control then everything works perfectly. But if you go for non-standard equipment like me, just don’t bother. It’s a bit like Esperanto, a nice idea but completely impractical - my advice is to chain your existing remotes to to the sofa instead.

One thing I was happy to see in Casino Royale was the appearance of the Vesper. This drink is featured in the book and, as in the film, it was concocted by 007 himself and later named after the heroine.

Now, one of the ingredients in the Vesper is Kina Lillet and author Kinsley Amis took Ian Fleming to task about this. Amis’s take on it (in The Book of Bond) was that the quinine content of Kina Lillet was too high and the drink would be too bitter and what Fleming really meant was Lillet vermouth. It is interesting to note that the film makers cock a snoot at Amis because Vesper mentions at one point that the drink has a bitter aftertaste.

However, Kina Lillet is no longer available - the name was changed long ago to plain a simple Lillet and later Lillet Blanc (when they introduced a red version). Finally in the 1980s the recipe was altered to make it much less bitter, so the film makers decided to go with Fleming on this rather than fact. Anyway, I recently saw an article that mentioned adding quinine powder or bitters to the drink to give it that genuine Fleming touch, so decided to give it a go. Lillet isn’t easy to find, but you can order it online to do this test and no, vermouth won’t do.

So which version of the drink wins, with or without the bitterness? No contest actually, the version with a couple of drops of bitters included does make a better drink, the bitter-less version is powerful but missing something, so my take on this is that Fleming did get it right after all.

Here’s the recipe:

3 measures of Gordon’s gin
1 measure of vodka
½ measure of Kina Lillet (buy it in the UK or US)
2 drops bitters (optional)

Shake until ice cold and serve in a deep champagne goblet with a large thin slice of lemon peel

What do you think?

Links:

The James Bond Cocktail Bar ebook

Kina Lillet - UK supplier

Kina Lillet - US supplier

I live in Barcelona where I have run a number of websites since 2001.

Before that worked in the UK, joining the internet industry in 1998 at Demon Internet for a number of years in various positions, including Product Manager for ADSL when it was first rolled out.

I later moved to Bulldog Communications in their startup phase, again as ADSL Product Manager.

Relevant qualifications include DipCIM from the Chartered Institute of Marketing.