Zahira Kharsany writes for the Mail and Guardian: ‘This year will probably be remembered as a time when blogs came of age, with more than 600 000 internet users visiting blogs by their fellow South Africans in just one month.’

Arthur Goldstuck, head of World Wide Worx, said in this week’s Thought Leader ‘blogs will not only be a mainstream component of most online media in South Africa, but they will also be a dominant component’. He believes that we have reached a tipping point in the South African social media environment.

This is exciting stuff. We at World Wide Creative are currently working on a number of online projects where we’re integrating websites with social media platforms. Some of the things we’re developing include:

• A social media intranet platform for Cape Nature
• A twin launch of a website and a blog for a top Young Designer Emporium brand
• Two business networking blogs for the international networking organisation BNI
• A leisure and accommodation blog to integrate with a hotel website we’re designing

The timing seems to be just right. Roland Stanbridge, a founder of Rhodes University’s New Media Lab, said in the Highway Africa conference on Monday: ‘There has been a total paradigm shift in media in the last 12 years. Mainstream media are certainly taking blogs seriously and using them in news sourcing. There are so many factors changing the media landscape. Primarily, it happens with broadband access. What happens in Europe and America doesn’t take long to get through to Africa. We are at a transitional period where very exciting things are happening with media.‘

- Fred

This is not web related but I feel sooo disappointed that I have to get it off my chest and share it with the world. My Cuzzie Sean is going to quite a few of the games for the RWC. I am back in the UK Next week and thought I would jokingly ask if he knew of any spare tickets to watch England beat the Bokkie? Here was his response:

"I have one spare for this weekend…..we have a seat in the car, hotel room and ticket to SA v Samoa and best part is, it is free. Unfortunately, England v SA has been penciled in since last year, so no tickets there dude…..sorry."

Noooooo….. A free game, hotel and transport for this weekend and I’m not going to be able to get there.

Anyway. I feel better now I’ve shared my pain.

- Mikey

Whilst working through the statistics of various sites this week, as part of our web marketing analysis, I remembered I am only on tip number 4 so must share some analytical discoveries with you.

What is a Bounce Rate?
In my opinion a bounce rate should show how many people left your site without using it, i.e. bounced back to where they came from.

Mike told me a couple of months ago that Googles calculation of the Bounce Rate is not necessarily what one would expect it to be. I then made contact with the analytics team at Google and they sent me the following definition of the Bounce Rate within Google Analytics:

The Bounce Rate report shows the percentage of single-page visits (i.e.visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

Therefore, a Google bounce is when a visitor only visits one page on a website. The trouble I have with this method is: What happens when a visitor is interested in the landing page and spends 5 minutes reading it? Or calls the company directly from the telephone number at the top of the page because they have been compelled to take action?

Should this visitor be classed as a bounce? In some cases the visitor might hang around a bit on that page and not convert. Is that then a bounce? Or should a bounce be someone that comes and goes straight away and has no interest at your site after a quick glance? Too many questions for my little head!

I sent these ponderings to Google and received the following reply:

A visit will be considered as a bounce even if the visitor spends close to a minute on a single page if he does not visit any other page on the website.

Because of the questions I have raised above I have a problem with this. For me a bounce rate would better be based on a correlation of one page visitors and time. I would like it to be calculated as the percentage of people that left the site within 5 seconds (the time for an average person to make their mind up about a site so Im told) and didnt go on to another page. These are the people that really arent interested in what the site is offering or dont instinctively like the site.

I did an experiment on 5 websites to see how similar Googles bounce rate was to a time based approach (note: we can only check 10 second visitors or less from within Google Analytics):

Not too dissimilar but unfortunately doesnt provide me with the real information I want. I suppose my tip here is be aware of what you are measuring and what it actually means.

- Nicola

Ok, so I’m back. I came back from McGregor last week Wednesday, just in time to attend Verity’s amazing presentation at the Heavy Chef Session. What a gal, and what a voice!

Work this week entails finishing off some long-standing projects. We’ll announce them next week so that you all can take a squiz and give us some feedback.

This week is all about design, design, design. We’re cracking on with a whack of new sites including a hotel company, a golf estate, a pharmacuetical company and a potential new account which is also in the hotel industry.

On the web marketing side, we’re getting loads of enquiries which is keeping Mike on his toes. The future is filled with TLA’s (three-letter-acronyms) – e.g. SEO, PPC, B2B, P2P, etc.

Take care and have a great week!

- Fred

P.S. If ever you want to stay at an amazing, peaceful and positively fantastic place for a little getaway, do yourselves a favour and book the place we stayed at last week: ‘Jubillee Cottage’ via the Allure Collection website. It truly is a magical retreat set in a magical little town!

Last week I was amazed how clever my spam email had become. I saw the following email in my inbox and thought that somehow the spammers had related Fred and Mike and me and were now sending emails accordingly:

I was just about to delete this when I thought I should show Mike because this was definitely a potential blog post. My amazement was disheartened when Mike told me it was the test run of our August Newsletter and not spam. Luckily we take our own advice and send out test runs to our team.

A title of the email newsletter must entice the receiver to open, but at the same time must not look like spam. I think the words buck and sensation were the deterring factors of this title for me.

- Nicola