Vottle Vooma

Another month whizzes on by, and with that, we are past the half-way mark of this intense year. Here are the highlights from Vottleland from the month gone by:

- we had a big drive to migrate parts of the site onto Ajax - this is very much in line with global Web 2.0 trends and has already shown significant increases in performance for us, both in terms of page loading times as well as saving many tens of thousands of database queries a day

- we are also on a drive to improve our 'natural SEO' (different to the 'paid-for' Google reach through Adwords) mainly through the use of SEO-friendly URLs - this again is very much the trend not only for the largest global players in the classifieds space, but on the Web in general - we already have the structures in place to support this and should be rolling this out gradually over the next week or so

- we are now live with Premium listings and Featured adverts - these are part of our paid for services whereby users can pay for premium Vottle space with their credit card - we are going to put some focus now on marketing these new services

- we are busy with a test for our first sponsored links campaign with Dial Direct – we’ve had a good initial response in the first two weeks - if the test phase is successful then the plan will be that they upgrade to a paid-for service - there are a couple of other potential customers in the pipeline, and we are looking at improving the granularity of our internal stats to help sell advertising to potential customers who require detailed per-subcategory stats

- we are busy making further strides in our effort to move completely towards a Linux based platform - we are currently busy migrating our automated data feed engine

- we are busy investigating various options to effectively identify and deal with abuse from an IP address level - this is proving challenging since it is difficult to determine the validity of a particular IP address (legitimate Web crawlers or malicious hackers) so we are also looking at throughput control

Posted by the Vottlers