Online Marketing at Canada's Web Shop

Video Blog: Treat Suppliers as You Treat Your Clients

John McDonald — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:21:35 +0000

In this video, John talks about the importance of maintaining a good relationship with your suppliers, and the benefits of doing so.

“Resource Already Exists” on a Citrix Netscaler when adding an SSL certificate

Chris Chatelain — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:51:21 +0000

I ran into a bit of trouble with a Citrix Netscaler recently. It wasn’t letting me upload an intermediate CA certificate for geotrust so I could link it to a server certificate I had already added. It was giving me the error when uploading the intermediate CA cert that the “Resource already exists”. I found [...]

Black Dog Syndrome – A Valuable Marketing Lesson

Chance Hoggan — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:57:19 +0000

Marketing touches our lives from our first to last breath. We are bombarded with marketing messages 24/7 and virtually everything we own has a brand name or logo prominently displayed. A constant battle for front of mind awareness and market share is being fought by slick marketers with big budgets. Marketing influences and persuades, brands [...]

5 Actionable Search Engine Optimization Tips You Should Start Today

Omar Zulfi — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:25:21 +0000

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of making your website findable through search engine’s like Google and Bing. SEO is one of the best online marketing tactics available to businesses with an online presence. It can have a significantly higher Return On Investment (ROI), if done correctly, than other types of online marketing. [...]

Canada’s Web Shop “In the House”: The MCA Men’s Curling Bonspiel

Cheryl Hill — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:40:54 +0000

Betcha Didn’t Know – Canada’s Web Shop & the MCA Men’s Curling Bonspiel are Like This! It’s Manitoba, it’s -30, it’s Curling Season, and Canada’s Web Shop is in the house! (Sorry for the blatantly obvious pun…) Here at Canada’s Web Shop, we pride ourselves in being part of Winnipeg’s community. For the past 3 [...]

SOPA: Make the right choice, choose the Internet

Danny Wood — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:41:40 +0000

Chances are that after today, even if you hadn’t heard of SOPA or PIPA before, you have now. The large-scale protest by some of the biggest websites on the net has made these American government bills impossible to ignore for people around the world, due to their global implications should they be voted into law [...]

Google Plus: Impressed or Not, They Mean Business

Matthew Shepherd — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:04:09 +0000

At our last Social Media Manitoba Tweetup we were lucky to have Susie Parker present to the group on the pros and cons of Google Plus. This lead to some great discussion and some surprisingly varied views on the service. Some of the group expressed feelings of being underwhelmed loving its potential but mourning its lack of innovation; [...]

Video Blog: Ensure the Value of Online Marketing Tactics

John McDonald — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:53:52 +0000

Today, John is speaking about the importance of implementing Online Marketing tactics that have a direct benefit for your business’ bottom line, as opposed to tactics that simply are “hip” and popular at the moment.

Microsoft Cleartype Breaks the Internet

Alex Trauzzi — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:04:30 +0000

With the news that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 has - finally - fallen to 1% of U.S. browser share, the modern internet is now coming to grips with the next problem from the folks down in Redmond...

Make it wider.

Chris Savoie — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:49:57 +0000

“It’s a little skinny, can we make it wider?” More and more these days our clients are coming back to us after viewing a new design mockup on their modern high-res, wide-screen 16:9 displays, and have a common simple request. Make it wider. We are big fans of the 960.gs grid system here at Canada’s [...]

Is the collective nature of the internet making us stupider, or only seem stupider?

Chris Chatelain — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:15:01 +0000

Many of us are used to text messaging speak or instant messaging our friends in some form of shorthand, some of it made up on the spot. Facebook is full of terrible grammar. Take a look in many IRC channels and you’ve got plenty of people not using capital letters and dropping punctuation at every [...]

Open Is Better

Alex Trauzzi — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:38:41 +0000

It's too early to say for certain, but could we be looking at a Facebook that finally understands the value of being more open?

Using Google-API-PHP-Client with Google Analytics Core Reporting

Jonathan Dart — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:57:40 +0000

Google’s PHP client library for their GData API hasn’t received as much love as their client libraries for other languages. Despite the lack of high level service classes for Google Analytics’ Core Reporting API it is possible to work with it using google-api-php-client. The below is a quick and dirty self contained example based on [...]

Third Party On-Site Search Tools

Jonathan Dart — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:03:15 +0000

Here at the Web Shop, we like to take advantage of existing tools, whether they’re free or reasonably priced. One tool that we opted to not roll on our own is a site search. From time to time clients require them and the first third party search tool so used was Google Custom Search. It’s [...]

QDF ( Query Deserves Freshness ) Update

Chance Hoggan — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:52:35 +0000

A few months ago I wrote about Google’s QDF algorithm. QDF is an acronym for Query Deserves Freshness and it’s a method used by Google to provide fresh content in response to queries. When I first wrote about QDF around 17.5% of queries were affected, the latest update double that figure to 35%. At this [...]