This morning started with the discovery of yet another website paradigm. Andria one of my mates from Australian Boot Company in Toronto, emailed me to share that our company had been faved:

We’ve been ‘faved’. It’s a website, ourfaves.com owned by Torstar, and it’s a platform for letting people share their favorite businesses, destinations, products etc. We have two reviews on it. The community development co-orindator was in to tell me about it. Seems interesting. When you google “winter boots Toronto”, it comes up 5th or so as Our Faves – Australian Boot Company.

Our faves seems well positioned to take on the world. You will notice if you go to the site that they use toronto.ourfaves.com. A sure sign that this domain name is poised to take on more then Toronto. mmm let me check what other places they have faved and how they are managing that domain to deal with it. mmmmm queenstreet.ourfaves.com

No luck..Firefox can't find the server at queenstreet.ourfaves.com So I tried a few more being the curious type I am. Such a great idea they must be onto more. Lots more 404 errors and then I cracked one, I am becoming a hacker... montreal.ourfaves.com

Under Construction

The site you are trying to view does not currently have a default page. It may be in the process of being upgraded and configured.

Please try this site again later. If you still experience the problem, try contacting the Web site administrator.

How exciting. What is even more exciting is that ourfaves.com.au is not registered. I just checked. Gotta go grab that one and bring ourfaves down under or better yet cyber snatch it and sell it on ebay for millions. On second thought I might just save the money for registering the domain and use the money to buy a few of my favourite things when I visit Toronto is a couple of weeks.

Thanks for the fave Andria...a great way to start my day.

Bush Branding & Marketing is organising and hosting a Joomla Day on Sunday May 11th starting at noon. For those of you not familiar with Joomla here are a few links and info bytes:

What is Joomla? An open source content management system and web application framework. Translation--A powerful tool for web developers and their clients that enables relatively easy updates to websites.

Who will be presenting at Byron Bay Joomla Day? Stars of the Joomla project Andrew Eddie and Brad Baker will be our lead presenters. Following them will be Bush Marketing's long time associate Jason "Scout" Ferris and a number of Joomla case studies including some exciting news from Hans Lovejoy from Byron Bay's local community newspaper--the Echo.

How much does it cost? $20 Book soon as spaces are limited to 50 people.



Pictured Bush Marketing's Briony Moore and Greg with some of Google's Open Source Progams Office bling donated for Byron Bay Joomla Day. photo by Kavi.

Thanks to Leslie Hawthorn
Program Manager - Open Source
Google Inc.

Bush Branding & Marketing got its big start in search engine optimisation in 2001 when the Australian Boot Company asked us to boost their search engine rankings. This was the start of a steep and steady learning curve that has been one of the most challenging and rewarding parts of our business.

Things have come a long way in SEO since the heady days of meta tag fixation. Bush Branding & Marketing has offered SEO and SEM as part of our services in various forms. Our biggest successes have come from clients who have retained us to manage all aspects of their brand. Our biggest failures, especially from a financial perspective, have come from people looking for the SEO silver bullet. In other words, you did not make our pages rank # 1 in Google within 24 hours so we won't pay you.

Introducing the Standard search engine optimisation service:

• Keywords: 160 character description and 25 key words
• Webmaster for Yahoo, MSN and of course good ole Google
• Google Analytics with scheduled report delivery
• Site map

We are offering this starter search engine optimisation service at a cheap and cheerful price of $500. Please contact us if you are interested in this or to discuss our other search engine services.

Less is quite often more. In the case of using www. in front of web addresses we could not agree more. For more on this subject visit this no-www.org dedicated to the subject. Next time you are including your website address on something have a look at it with and without the www. Why clutter up your url with superfluous letters?

Back in the day setting type was an art. A very time consuming, laborious and expensive aspect of advertising and publishing. More type is being set then ever today; however, far less time, if any, is spent thinking about how to best present letters and words in a pleasing and effective manner.

Most of today's type is consumed on the screen. By this I mean we read less on paper and more on our computer and other electronic screens. Thank goodness there are serious limitations on the internet. Not all fonts are web friendly, here is a good wikipedia reference on this subject.

In simple terms there are less than a dozen fonts that you can count on displaying properly. Here is an example based on the fonts that are available in blogger.

Typesetting for the screen-Arial

Typesetting for the screen-Courier
Typesetting for the screen-Georgia
Typesetting for the screen-Lucida Grande
Typesetting for the screen-Times
Typesetting for the screen-Trebuchet
Typesetting for the screen-Verdana

The Steam Whistle story begins in the spring of 1998 when three friends were on a canoe trip in the Ontario heartland. Greg Taylor, Cam Heaps and Greg Cromwell had all been colleagues at Upper Canada, a craft brewing pioneer in the late 1980's and 90's - before it was bought out by Sleemans, a national brewer and closed down. As they sat around the campfire, the self-named "Three Fired Guys" dreamed of running their own brewery one day.

They wanted to make a Pilsner that would compete with the best in the world. They wrote a plan and quickly attracted investors with their vision and passion.

Which brings us to the subject of this blog "Brewery Wanted for Fired Guy". Bush Branding & Marketing's Greg Cromwell has been fermenting for a decade to get stuck into the micro brewing business again. If anyone knows of a Good Brew Brand that could use a hand, contact Greg. He's all fired up and ready to grow.