Clickable keywords and SEO

A friend pointed out that our competitor websites have clickable keywords on the product pages. Well, I was going to add this feature some time ago anyway, so today I finished it. Now we also have clickable keywords, only better then our competitors. Besides, this seems to be a good thing for Search Engine Optimization. Especially, when keywords go to static pages instead of dynamic pages. Try this page 3D model of a car rim and click on keyword tire. What will happen is that you will be transfered to the page http://www.exchange3d.com/cubecart/3D_catalog_tire.html which looks like a static HTML page. Thanks to apache mod_rewrite tricks!

New feature on the website

Luckily for exchange3D artists I had nothing to do today. Why? Because, it means a coding spree for exchange3d.com. So, I fixed some bugs that I was going to fix for a long time, and added some features. So, why exactly it is a good thing for exchange3d.com artists? Because now, when you type an artist name into the search box at the top-left corner of the home page, the search script will treat this request as if you were searching for models of this artist and include the models by the matching artist at the top of the results page.

20 people read this blog yesterday

This is actually surprising. Seriosly! I did not know anyone actually reads this. I guess, I can write more...

Someone is watching our content with a critical eye

Looks like I will have to be much more careful when accepting bad models for our online store. Someone just started a pretty brutal content watch blog on 3D models and has no mercy for lame models. I thought, we were free of dumb models, but no - they found something on us too: Stupid 3D model on exchange3d.com. Although, I cannot say that I completely agree with the author, for example, this 3D model looks pretty natural to me. Yes, it does not look like a Hollywood star, but, hey, it actually looks like a real woman (less the hands), or maybe I am missing something.... anyway, it is a fun read if you are not foreign to 3D.

To 3D artists who wonder who buys their models online

When artists ask me who would buy 3D models online , I always respond with a long list of industries that involve art, graphics and illustrations in any way. Many of the artists are very surprised to find out that there is use beyond gaming and video production. Here's a comprehensive proof. I Just came across this wonderful article on the blog of a British CG Magazine "3D World". The article discusses how CG and 3D is used in print advertisement and print illustrations.

One year without MS Office (offtopic)

It has been about a year since I used MS Office applications on my laptop. No, I didn't set on a year-long office-deprived journey on purpose. I just did not have a use for it! Although I still have MS Office installed on my laptop, because there was no way to get a decent laptop from Dell without one, I have never opened Outlook, Word or Excel. All my spreadsheets are done online on Google Documents, all my email is in online mail services such as GMail hosted and Zimbra, and for documents I use OpenOffice. I am happy to say, I do not miss waiting nervously for several minutes while Outlook is launching (that's on 2 Ghz/2Gb Core Duo machine)! I do not miss Excel's lousy window management, and most of all I do not miss having to carry around a jumpdrive with all the documents that I need to access from different machines and fearing that I will loose it! I do not miss spending a day on reinstalling, reactivating MS Office and resetting all the preferences every time I reinstall the OS or get a new machine! Goodbye bulky software, hello SAaS (Software As a Service)!

Should I be writing to the blog to up the traffic?

Well, I haven't had time to look at Google analytics for my online store since May. It's a shame, but yes, for the last 4 months I did not track the performance of the website. So, I decided to catch up with the analytics and examined at the graphs. To my surprise, I noticed that in the last month I had more traffic spikes then before. So, I started looking for the events that may have caused the spikes and they correlated 100% with posting to this blog and submiting the posts to digg. Duh! I guess, I have just discovered one of the basic axioms of webmarketing that all professional web marketers know by heart. But hey, I am just a software engineer with a hobby of creating online businesses! Digg it up readers!