Patrick Oak

I'm an internet consultant. Over the past 10 years, I have built my own online businesses and helped companies build theirs. From strategy to development to marketing I am a jack of all trades and love sharing my experiences and advice.

Adobe CS4 is out - what's new?

Chances are that if you're a web designer or developer, you use one or more Adobe products.

Adobe's Creative Suite, which includes programs like Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver, is one of the most popular software suites known to web professionals because of this.

by Patrick Oak 29 October 2008 08:30am 0 comments

Fast and easy - web application design tips

This past weekend, the New York Times published an interesting article.

In it, Matt Richtel and Ashlee Vance discussed the computer industry's plans to offer PCs that boot up more quickly.

by Patrick Oak 31 October 2008 08:45am 0 comments

Ratings and customer reviews crucial, 5 tools to add them

According to research firm eMarketer, "Online product research is very popular in the UK and traffic to price comparison sites is up as consumers try to stretch every penny."

by Patrick Oak 24 October 2008 08:30am 1 comment

Consumers say etailers are sending too many emails

According to Forrester Research, over 150bn emails will be sent to consumers by retailers and wholesalers this year.

And many will be received by recipients who don't really want them.

by Patrick Oak 22 October 2008 09:00am 1 comment

Opera - most HTML code isn't standards compliant

Last week, Opera released the results of a survey conducted using its MAMA (Metadata Analysis and Mining Application) search engine.

The engine, which currently indexes 3.5m web pages, is designed to track "how web pages are structured."

by Patrick Oak 20 October 2008 09:45am 4 comments

Add search to your website - 10 hosted site search tools

If your website has a lot of content, offering your users search functionality that makes it easier for them to find the content they're looking for is a usability must.

It can also enable you to track which content is most popular.

by Patrick Oak 17 October 2008 08:45am 2 comments

Tracking your conversion goals with Google Analytics

I'm a big fan of Google Analytics and consider it to be one of the best free analytics tools for the average webmaster.

One of its most useful features is the ability to set "goals" and track how well they're being achieved.

by Patrick Oak 15 October 2008 08:45am 1 comment

To link or not to link?

Recently, Tim O'Reilly asked "Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web?"

In his post, he observed that many online properties are linking to themselves more than they're linking out, oftentimes by building aggregators of some form or another to do so.

by Patrick Oak 14 October 2008 08:30am 1 comment

Google Trends: a means to fast search engine traffic?

There was an interesting post yesterday on TechCrunch about the use of Google Trends to drive editorial.

Apparently, a number of publishers are leveraging the data from Google Trends to find hot keyword trends, and taking advantage of the blazing speed at which Google spiders new content on blogs and content sites to produce content catered specifically to those hot keywords.

by Patrick Oak 10 October 2008 08:45am 2 comments

5 places where e-business owners can find cost savings

With the global economy getting worse by the day, even those businesses that felt confident going into the downturn are getting ready to batten down the hatches as a nuclear winter sets in.

by Patrick Oak 08 October 2008 09:00am 6 comments