The Redesign of BigTunaInteractive.com

May 31, 2010

After three weeks of usability testing, we are proud to officially announce the re-launch of BigTuna Interactive’s site! The features of this site are a product of our San Diego web design skills that we have advanced tremendously over the past few years.

Here are some images of the old site. Please click on them for a full screen graphic.

We used these technologies and design techniques on the new BigTuna Interactive website:

CSS Sprites

We really went nuts with CSS sprites on the redesign. Sprites are images with various usability states. These states could be either current, active or hover. Sprites are a great way to increase page speed and reduce server calls. In the past, you had to use javascript to accomplish the effects of sprites. However, you can develop them using strictly CSS today. The first sprite that you will see is our navigation.

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Facebook Social Plugin API Tips

Apr 27, 2010

Facebook social plugins are becoming a core component of social media campaigns. Facebook’s api is very robuts; however, their documentation needs some work.
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Bing’s Online Marketing Launch Strategy

Mar 18, 2010

The launch of Bing in June of 2009 was a very thought out and integrated online marketing strategy. Below are the key learnings from Tuesday, March 16’s SXSW session titled “Bing: admit it, you thought it would suck”:

Bing had a strong online marketing campaign to launch their product which emphasized an emotional connection to a brand. Word of mouth, relationship marketing provides 40% emotional proximity to the brand. Tactics to pull this off are talking to friends and family, writing for blogs, participating to the online conversation through social communities, etc. Continue reading

Twitter At Platform

Mar 15, 2010

Evan Williams was the keynote speaker on Monday’s session at SXSW. Evan announced Twitter’s At Platform to which allows twitter into websites. This feature shows a jquery tooltip when you hover over a link with a twitter name and allows you to follow them directly without going to your twitter tools or twitter.com directly.

The at platform gives a platform to have you juice up your network and pull more twitter streams into the conversation.

Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web

Mar 14, 2010

The Beyond Algorithms session at SXSW was filled with with an All Star cast. Danny Sullivan, Editor for Search Engine Land and one of the most respected thought leader was a surprise addition to the panel.

The semantic web has been the most emerging topic in search engine optimization and the overall usability of search engines. The term semantic web has a lot of different meanings from different people. My definition of semantic web is that it is a higher level, or more concise matching the search query to the user’s intentions. Continue reading

Optimizing a WordPress Post

Dec 9, 2009

Click to Watch!

This video the shows the proper on page optimization processes for a WordPress post. It covers the correct title structure, category alignment, more tag positioning and use of the All in One SEO plugin. There are hundreds of other factors that go into optimizing your WordPress pages. This tutorial shows the basic best practices for what to do with the default settings and the all in one plugin. Continue reading

SlickMap CSS Site Map

Sep 16, 2009

I added a SlickMap CSS site map to this site today. Slickmap provides a “mind-map” like sitemap. Surprisingly, you would think that this site map would have been written with jquery. However, it is written in pure CSS, with no javascript.

Site maps are a staple web usability feature. They give visitors a quick way to find information. Site maps are also great link juice for search engine spiders. Continue reading

Best Practices for on page WordPress SEO

Sep 12, 2009

I recently sat in on a best practices for on page WordPress SEO at WordCamp LA. We’ve been using WordPress as our blogging platform and CMS of choice since 2006. It was fun to hear other SEO consultants take on WordPress. Key findings :

• The H1 Tag recently had its relevancy downgraded
• Flat site architecture is the preferred structure for url’s. In the past, the /%category%/%postname%/ permalink structure was preferred. To keep it flat, use /%postname%/.

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Iomega YouTube Brand Channel

Feb 16, 2009

BigTuna Interactive recently launched a YouTube brand channel for network storage heavyweight Iomega. Through the process we learned several interesting facts about YouTube Brand Channels. These facts included:

• To get the full functionality of YouTube Brand Channels, you must either have a yearly ad spend of $250,000 or be a consistent content producer
• The full YouTube Brand channels offer more bells and whistles than normal brand channels. These bells and whistles may be more ad spaces or the ability to place hotlinks on your page
• Many well name brands are still not even using the basic Brand Channel functionalities.

Even if you have a small YouTube budget, still customize your brand channel. There is plenty of space to incorporate all of your branding attributes. You can also throw in a couple of calls of action.

Check out the Iomega YouTube Brand Channel that we created.

Thanks for stopping by

Nov 23, 2008

Welcome to the new site of BigTuna Interactive. Due to the demands of clients, this site isn’t finished yet. Stop by shortly to see the full offerings from BigTuna Interactive.

Until then,

BigTuna Interactive