Price: $0.99 Get it from iTunes →

This month I bring you another great iPhone game from some more guys I studied with at QUT. Yes my course included some talented individuals as you’ll remember my last iPhone review (BW News Feb 2010) also mentioned fellow course mates, The Voxel Agents, who created Train Conductor.

This month however, it’s all about Fruit Ninja! Developed here in Brisbane by Halfbrick Studios, Fruit Ninja is an amazingly simple swipe and slash game that just works. It looks beautiful and while the game’s premise may be simple, the mechanics of it are so polished and executed brilliantly, that it makes for the perfect time passer.

But don’t take my word for it, watch the trailer below from their website or download today to see for yourself. You’ll be craving fruit salad in no time…

Fruit Ninja is fun, fun, fun. It’s an instant pleasure.”IGN.com “It’s simple, fun and best of all challenging.” – toucharcade.com

I stumbled across an interesting blog post from the Google Webmaster Central team on the weekend.  It was the result of an audit which Google performed on over 100 of their different product pages and came in the form of a SEO report card.

It details how the main pages for these various products stacked up in their own search results and how they fair across a number of common SEO topics. It was designed to provide the product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products’ pages using simple and accepted optimisations. These optimisations were intended to not only help search engines understand the content of their pages better, but also to improve the users’ experience when visiting their sites.

What did I learn?

• Google, arguably the biggest & best search engine, still has to consciously think about search engine optimisation.
• By following simple rules you can greatly improve both your search engine rankings and your users experience of your website.

They’ve released the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters can learn from the report, which is filled with a heap of great examples taken straight from their products’ pages. It’s an interesting read, and shows that even the Google team make mistakes when it comes to some of the simple rules of SEO.

SEO Brisbane: If you’d like some help optimising your website and getting found on Google, call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

Disclaimer: The C+ image was created and added to give my post a little colour. Google and their products don’t necessarily deserve a c+, this was merely added for illustration purposes. Google, you get a A+ in my books, keep up the great work and keep releasing these great resources and products!

I’ve learnt a lot in the last 12 months at Bluewire  - I can’t believe it’s been over a year already!

But one particular area of knowledge has helped me immensely, not only with the work I do here, but also with my side projects – search engine optimisation.

About six months ago the team had a quarterly priority to take on and participate in some P.D - The goal was to learn something new or extend our knowledge in a topic. I picked SEO.

There was an ulterior motive in this selection since my partner and I had just  launched the website for Home Spa, a mobile beauty & day spa business servicing the Brisbane area. Starting from scratch and having no real client base to build from, we really needed to be found in search engines before any business came our way.

Just today I’ve noticed we have improved the rankings for a couple of our targeted keywords which has increased the number of leads, and eventually appointments, we get through the website. I was proud of my ongoing efforts so thought I’d share some of the useful tools I’ve used along the way.

While they won’t necessarily help you get to #1, (I’ll leave that to the experts), these tools are super useful in tracking your progress:

Analytics gives you a plethora of information about how your users are finding your website, what they’re doing there and what they had for breakfast the morning they visited (well almost).  I’ve recently found creating custom reports to be particularly useful. With these we’re able to pull out quality information like which particular keywords are resulting in turning visits into conversions (or appointment requests in our case).

Another Google product – (yes I love them) is Google Webmaster Tools. It gives you a whole lot more specific information on what your website looks like to Google and where you appear in the index. If you can see the world through the Google Bots‘ eyes it will go a long way in helping to understand why certain tweaks to your code & copy help your rankings.

A great tip I got from a  friend over at Reload Media was to check out the SEOMoz.org website. It has a number of free SEO tools you can use along with a heap of quality information on their blog on SEO in general. You have to create an account but a basic account is free.

Rank Tracker is one of such free tools on the site, allowing you to track your ranking in various search engines for particular keywords. It also keeps a history of your searches so you can view your progress over time.

The above screenshot is the rank history for ‘Home Spa’ for the keyword phrase ‘mobile beauty Brisbane’.

The results I found using Rank Tracker:

• When I first checked in November, we were nowhere to be seen and outside the top 50.
• By January 19 we had improved and moved to #8
• This week we’ve hit #4!

What SEO tools do you use?

SEO Brisbane: If you’d like some help optimising your website and getting found on Google, call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

In a busy week for Bluewire Media Developers, two projects wrapped up on Wednesday with the new St Patrick’s College and Summit Events Centre websites launching within hours of each other.

The Summit Events Centre is the only high-end, 100% customisable and versatile, fully serviced events and function centre in Brisbane and without a website they weren’t able to show off their world-class venue to the searching community.  That’s where Bluewire Media stepped in to help, putting together a website to match their stylish venue and show off the Summit’s classy packages & services. Check it out - Visit the Summit Events Centre

Stay tuned for more website launches or check out more of our previous work in our Web Design Portfolio.

Anyone would think that designing & developing websites was thirsty work with the Bluewire Media team heading along to three big events last Friday. Work was put aside as we all took half-days and attended the Brisbane Advertising Association’s (BAA) Annual Christmas Lunch at the convention centre which was followed by the official after party at the Melbourne Hotel, which was then followed by the exclusive Bluewire Media Christmas Drinks at the Orient Hotel.

The Bluewire team was joined by our SEO & SEM partners & friends, Reload Media at the lunch and then again at the Orient for some Christmas celebrations. The food was good, the drinks cold and the entertainment hilarious! Arj Barker had the crowd in good spirits over lunch firing a few low blows to the local advertising scene along with his usual comedy gold routine.

There were plenty of prizes up for grabs at lunch with over $10,000 in cash and prizes enticing punters to fork out for the raffle tickets for the charity fund raising effort. The BAA is to be commended for its great contribution to charity donating $5,000 each to the Hear & Say Centre, the Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation and the Starlight Children’s Foundation. Well done BAA!

It was a massive day and lots of fun was had by all. (You could almost say a few people had a little too much fun which I am definitely guilty of!) However with Operation Unite in full swing that weekend, you will be happy to know that no Bluewire Media staff members were caught up in the police crackdown on party revellers. Everyone was well behaved and a good, safe night was enjoyed by all which was a fitting celebration of all our hard work this year!

Be sure to check out more of the photos and videos on our Facebook page!

Plus here’s a video of some BAA streamer madness. You’ll notice Nic cops one in his eye, but he made a full recovery!

Being the 30th, I thought I’d put together an animation and take you on journey through the month that was Movember!

Nic & myself as The Bluewire Media Team, managed to raise a total of $265.00. (Not bad for a couple of hairy lips) Donations are still open if you’d like to chip in…

To date, (over 6 years) Movember has raised $60 million globally for the fight against prostate cancer and depression in men. And, more importantly, as a direct result, male awareness of health issues has improved with Movember helping to spread health messages directly to millions of Mo Bros & Sistas around the world.

Below is the tally for 2009! Great effort everyone! Thanks to everyone who dontated!

Our quarterly theme at the moment is “Expertise” so to tick of one of my goals for the quarter I sat down with Andrew McFarlane, our Digital Strategist, to learn a bit about his job and his area of expertise.

First of all, what does ‘digital strategy’ mean?

It’s a very loose term that gets thrown around quite a lot but in terms of what we do here at Bluewire it’s a channel clients can use to meet business & marketing objectives online. It’s all about coming up with the roadmap for a project and can encompass many things.

Internet or Digital Strategy falls under Step 2 (the green section) of our methodology diagram. It is the discovery and planning phase that happens before anything is actually built. It is all about defining the blueprint for the project.

Bluewire Media Methodology

Why should companies embrace a digital strategy? What are the advantages?

It allows thorough researching & planning to happen before moving into the digital space. Digital is becoming more & more part of our daily lives and so companies would be silly not to take advantage of the massive market that exists and look at having a digital strategy.

What do people commonly get wrong?

The planning phase is vital. All bad digital strategies can be tied back to poor planning.
Another common mistake is engaging the wrong audience online.

How should clients approach a digital strategy? What can they bring to the table to make your job easier?

The best clients are open minded and willing to take on suggestions however they have the best understanding of how their business works so just articulating what the business is about is a good start.

• They should have knowledge of their organisation and what their core business objectives are.
• They should know who their audience is.
• Where/what they want to achieve out of taking the business online.

We can then come up with the strategy to achieve these goals.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved?

Andrew comes from a Business/I.T background. He has been working in digital for 8 years dealing with a range of projects and companies from small business to large international corporations. He has worked on projects ranging from websites, email marketing, social media to digital strategy & execution.

Do you have any good resources that you can share?

Because digital is a constantly changing field, you really have to keep on top of your game to stay relevant. Good resources Andrew uses include knowledge expert blogs, TechChrunch, Brand Republic, Marketing Week, B&T

Digital Strategy Brisbane : Call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394 to plan your next digital project.

If designing & developing great email marketing templates wasn’t already enough of a challenge, (one we take pride in here at Bluewire Media), Microsoft has decided to use Word to render HTML in the latest version of Outlook 2010.

This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS definitions like float and position, no background images and lots more. This not only provides us as designers & developers with a challenge but it also means non-technical email marketers will be forced to be more reliant on their web designers to ensure their emails are readable and not broken. Which is a real shame…

This screenshot put together by the Email Standards Project* is a great example of the progression (or lack thereof) of Microsoft’s Outlook since 2000. This is the same email rendered in Outlook 2000 & 2010.

But it’s not all bad – Microsoft have been listening and you can get involved and have your say by visiting fixoutlook.org.

It’s a shame my first blog post is a whinge but it had to be done!

*The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.

Email Marketing Brisbane: for help getting your email newsletters looking great (despite the difficulties), call Bluewire Media on 1300 358 294.