The Pope concedes that Facebook is a more important social network than the Catholic Church

The Pope used an iPad to send his first tweet yesterday.

His Holiness also conceded that the Catholic Church is no longer the most important social network in the world in the description of their new Facebook app, Pope2You. 

"Pope2You for Facebook lets you receive the messages of Pope Benedict XVI through the most important social network of the world. So you can meet the Pope on Facebook, listen to his words, see his pictures, receive his messages of congratulations through “virtual postcards”. The postcards can be sent to your “friends” on Facebook and the application can be shared with anyone."


Pope2You also includes a YouTube channel and an iPhone app.

3 ideas for optimising landing pages

 
Using Eye Contact


We've known for a long time through trial and error that images of faces capture customers attention, especially if they are making eye contact. 


But did you know that you can also use faces to guide people to important content, headings and calls to action. Read this blog post written by James Breeze from UsableWorld.


Usability testing of 106 people illustrates that not only will customers focus on a human face, but they will also look at what the person in the ad is looking at.


Testimonials

Using testimonials on landing pages immediately generates trust with visitors to a website and can be incredibly effective in converting visitors into paying customers.

Assurances

If your site has accreditations or is a member of a professional organisation, place 'trust icons' as close to your call to action as possible.  A quick search for "London Plumber" found a site which illustrates this point well.

This has been proven to work with security certificates, credit card logos and industry awards.

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Google's new voice search

Google has released Voice search for desktop PCs.  All you need is Google Chrome 11 or higher and microphone.  Voice search can speed up the time it takes to find what you're looking for, especially if your search term is long such as "Magento developers and search engine optimisation in West Sussex" and your typing speed is slow.

Voice search also has an advantage when you're struggling over the spelling of crepuscule or sesquipedalian. It may also be helpful when your hands are otherwise occupied such as cooking or knitting!

If search by voice is not appropriate perhaps the new search by image feature will help.  Simply drag an image from a webpage or the desktop into the search box and Google will do the rest

Yahoo, Bing and Google join up for new search project

The three search giants have joined hands and launched a new project called schema.org.

Schema.org explains that "many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data.

Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web.

Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure."

Specific schemas have been developed and documented for many different types of data such as books, movies, TV programmes, local businesses, restaurants and general products.  There are also embedded 'non-text' objects for audio, video and images.