We have undergone another rebrand here at NSM HQ. It is the first part of a total restucture of the site as we look to consolidate ourselves as one of the leading online promotional companies within Scotland.

We have many visual changes ready to be unleashed over the up-and-coming months which we hope will drive even more traffic to NSM.

As our new design instigates a new beginning, we thought it would be fun to look at our progression since our inception back in late 2006.

So, for your enjoyment here are our rebranding changes since we first launched as an online media company. We would love to see other similar companies and how they have shape-shifted their brand through the years. Infact that could be a future blog post that would do well within social media circles.

Anyways, here’s NSM changes since 2006 …

2006

2007

2008

2009

Nobody can denounce the success of Twestival last year. An online global success where cities around this big planet of ours get together and help host events in support of a local cause. Well, Glasgow is no different and this year the event will be held at The Living Room on the 10th of September 2009. The charity that has been chosen is No Strings Attached Scotland (NSA) that offer help to young people in Scotland that suffer with asthma.

The event this year will be held at The Living Room (nothing wrong with a wee bit o’ repetition) located at 150 St Vincent Street, Glasgow, G2 5NE, Glasgow and will run from 7pm til Late.

The schedule for the Glasgow Twestival night includes:

7.00pm – Glasgow Twestival Local 2009 kicks off!
7.15pm – DJ set from We Sink Ships
8.00pm – Panda Su playing a live acoustic set
8.30pm – DJ set from Lucky Hamilton
9.00pm – Any Color Black playing live
9.30pm – An introduction to the Twestival charity No Strings Attached Scotland then the big prize raffle and auction followed by a DJ set from Glasgow Podcart
10.30pm – Pooch playing live
11.00pm til late – DJ set from Jahnzilla

Tickets are still available from the Tweegie Ticket Centre and cost just £10.00 per person

Did you know that oor Lynne (listen to me, you’d think ah knew the lassie) who runs Polr actually designed the Glasgow Twestival logo (below) – if your going to the meet-up and wonder who she is then memorise this image from her Twitter account because she looks just like that… you can also follow Lynne at twitter.com/PoLRweb

Unfortunately, I can’t make it (I have a real job to get on with – watching the wains – the Wife works Thursdays) but hopefully there might be some live streaming taking place so I can still join in with all the fun.

Remember, Glasgow Twestival takes place next Thursday the 10th of September at the The Living Room on St. Vincent Street. Enjoy all.

People to follow regarding the Glasgow Twestival

@gtwestival
@tweegies
@mckayflooring
@nsdesign

I may be a bit late about posting this, seeing as I took a 6 week break from blogging up until a couple of days ago but anybody that knows me, understands I’m a BIG comic fan, so guess my excitement levels when I noticed that iGoogle is now doing custom comic themes. Awesome! Having quickly flicked through the available comic themes, my favourites so far are : Captain America, Dilbert, Batman, Blackest Night (Green Lantern), Iron Man, Superman, Hulk and Hellboy.

Comics I would like to see featured would be Tranformers, Sponge Bob Squarepants, X-Men and Spiderman to name a few… perhaps throw in some Star Wars, Dr Who or Lord of The Rings … anyway here are a few screengrabs of what they have on offer :

Captain America

Dilbert

Batman

Blackest Night

Hellboy

The Hulk

Iron Man

Superman

Always one for being at the front of the queue to light the touchpaper, Edward Lewis of SEO Consultants ran an interesting test on a wide and varied selection of sites involved within the SEO and SMM industry and reported how those stood-up to being validated.

I’m glad to say that North South Media passed and got in the SEO Green Team.

I was suprised to see that we had 30 odd CSS errors and have quickly rectified this problem : NSM Valid CSS.

When I first viewed the results this morning there were about 8 sites that had achieved SEO Green Team status. Now, there are around 14 sites. SEO’s are a proud bunch

Of course, having your site validated won’t mean big bonus points for you in Google’s SERPs but it does mean that your site should function across many browsing applications including mobile – which if your smart, you’ll understand that mobile browsing is becoming a more popular way of viewing the web.

Protx has finally rebranded to Sage Pay. Following on from the initial announcement on the 16th of April, the Protx brand is being deconstructed to the new Sage Pay. The payment gateway pages have all now been madeover to the new Sage Pay look and feel.

Also gone are the old Protx images used to help reinforce consumer confidence that they were using a well known, secure and respected gateway for credit card transactions.

You can download your images at www.sagepay.com/developers/downloads/logos.html

Must admit I’ll miss the old Protx, its name meant an awful lot to helping with consumer confidence and at this moment I haven’t removed the old Protx imagery from any of the eCommerce Web Designs that NorthSouthMedia manage for our clients. TBH, I haven’t seen any drop-off on sales from sites that now display the new look and feel Sage Pay Payment Screen (top image), quite the opposite in fact. But even with this fact in-hand I’ll leave the Protx in-place at the moment.

What would have been better was if Sage Pay had issued images with a ‘formerly Protx’ signature instead of having developers and designers worry about this sort of thing and marketers wring their hands incase conversions plummeted.

Still, I have a lot of positive things to say about Protx Sage Pay as they have served myself and my clients very well in the past.

Ask.com has brought back their popular man-servant ‘Jeeves’ as part of a UK facelift to entice more searchers to use their search engine instead of Google et al.

Jeeves, himself looks confident in his new look, displaying the thumbs in his jacket lapels displays a very assured look, indeed. Not only, has Ask brought out Jeeves from a 3 year retirement, they’ve also let him loose with their Twitter account (although, their pushing everything through the Hootsuite Toolbar, so expect ads very soon) and also bundled a Facebook profile with him as well, which should be fun.

Ask are hoping the new look will help bump up the numbers of the search engine : they claim it has 15 million monthly UK users.

Google has recently begun serving up local results for generic terms. I first noticed the change on Sunday the 5th of April, but plenty have witnessed the change earlier on different datacentres. So, what does it all mean? Well generic terms are one or two word search queries such as ‘plumber’ or ‘bingo halls’, which are semantic noun searches. Now when I type into Google, ‘plumber’ or ‘bingo halls’, I am given a local business map result along with my organic and paid search placements.

Great! Now, I’m being served up the option of some local companies for my generic term, except not quite. You see I’m about 25 – 30 miles away from Glasgow, hardly local, and if I ran the same query at home, it gets worse, Google serves me up ‘bingo halls’ from the London area.

Ok, its obvious here, that Google is taking my ISP location as its starting point to serving me with local businesses that I might find interesting. It does offer me the chance to alter my location by typing in my address or postcode if I click on the ‘Change Location’ link – as highlighted in the above image. By selecting the ‘remember this’ checkbox, now when I run a generic search such as ‘plumbers’ I’m greeted by local businesses from in-and-around the Kilwinning area.

This change in serving up local results with generic keyterms is going to change how a lot of SEO’s work in the future. If you want to learn more about Local SEO and its benifits to your online business then a good place to start is whith my recent interview with Dev Basu regarding Local SEO.

I just signed up for the Think Visibility conference at Leeds in March 2009. I’m really looking forward to this, as some of the guest speakers include Tim Nash, Patrick Altoft, Tom Critchlow and Dave Naylor. Of course there are a whole host of other names that I’ll also be checking out. But the best thing about this conference is the price … £30.00 … that’s right, thirty smackeroos to hear some of the best names in search talk … it dosen’t get much better than that.

If your interested in giving Think Visibility a go, then you better get a move on … there was only 70 odd tickets left when I booked up and because of that fantastic line-up they wont be on sale for long … so, get your ass into gear and quickly book your Think Visibilty Tickets. This is my first ever conference and I’m really looking forward to meeting like-minded guys and gals and having a sup or two of some yorkshire hospitality even if it is warm beer

If your a Twitterholic you can follow the latest Think Visibility Twitter updates : here.

A great new social bookmarking and voting site has been launched just for Scottish news and happenings : My Scottish Stuff : it looks cool and has already started to make waves.

You can also win an Ipod Shuffle, 1 of 5 available, if you become an active user, getting 20 home page newsworthy stories. We here at North South Media give myScottishStuff the big thumbs up and know where we’ll be submitting our stories from now on.

In a recent Google Blog post, Search experiments, large and small by Google engineer, Ben Gomes, in which he stated that at any one time Google are running anywhere between 50 – 200 experiments on their search engine results. From slight eye-test white space adjustments for a number 1 search result helping with better click throughs, to complex algorithm changes. Its interesting to get an insight into how Google, continues to manage its results.

We all are aware that experimenting helps with understanding of a certain subject. Investigating, on a technical level, yields better knowledge. As Google, continue to ‘tinker’ with their search engine, one of the most insightful pieces in Gomes’ post was the web 2.0 interaction piece where users of the engine can comment on certain result and drag ‘n’ drop results to suit their own needs. Gomes, goes onto quickly say ‘At this point, I can’t say what we expect from this feature; we’re just curious to see how it will be used.’ – not if it will be used but how.

I can’t wait to see if this is released into Google Labs, I did a check earlier but there was nothing of its like in the ‘experimental search’ page. Still, will be interesting to see how Google will move forward with this one.