I must admit, I’m a little (or a lot) behind when it comes to Twitter. I signed up for an account a while ago but never got round to doing anything with it. Well, today I finally twittered (or whatever you call it) for the first time.

So if someone wants to keep up with what I’m doing, you can find me at http://twitter.com/jmz360.

I might of mentioned this before, but I’ll mention it again now =P

For the past 3 months now I’ve been working on a huge project of mine. The project is focussed on photographers and will allow them to create and manage an online portfolio of their work without having to worry about hosting, finding software, designing anything or basically anything else that is remotley technical.

I’ll post a full list of current features when I get time as well as a list of features that have been earmarked for future inclusion.

At the minute the basic engine behind the site is fully working but with me working 4 hours a night overtime (tonnes and tonnes of customer websites to do!) the development of this project has been slower than I had hoped.

The name of the site is PikFolio (incase you hadn’t guessed) and you can head on over to PikFolio now to put your name down for a beta invite if you like. You can also keep checking the dev blog for more information on how the project is coming along.

Finally, if anybody thinks this would be a cool project to get in on, let me know at jamesowers [ a t] gmail [ d o t ] com I have noticed that this is a much bigger project than is wise to take on by myself so any designers, coders or marketers let me know!

If you’ve looked at your stats you may have noticed something called bounce rates. Now, you probably never thought they were anything important. Well, they are.

A bounce is when a visitor comes to your site and leaves, either by closing their browser, clicking the back button or moving on to a new site without going to a second page on your site. This may not seem very important but, if you have a 70% bounce rate then that means 70% of your visitors are leaving your site without having a look at more than one page, which obviously isn’t very good.

Obviously there is very little chance of you getting a 0% bounce rate but there are a few things you can do to keep it down.

First of all, dont clutter your page with ads too much, if a person comes to your site and they cant clearly see the page title and content they were looking for or if the page is full of ads or unrelated text then they are pretty likely to bit back on their browser.

Make it easy for users to navigate around your site. Content rich sites are good, but dont make your navigation & logo so minimal that people can find them.

Make sure the content is the first part of your site that people see. This part is pretty similar to the first point but it is important! If people have to look for your content they will most probablt just leave.

Finally, and this could be just me but I hate sites that have big, flashing or noisy ads, especially ones that make noise or play videos automatically. If anything like that happens I’d click the back button as quick as I can and find what I was looking for on another site!

The last thing I wanted to mention is social bookmarking sites. If you are advertising your site through any sort of social bookmarking site such as Digg then you pretty much just have to accept that you will have a higher than average bounce rate. This is because the Digg user will probably have seen your article and thought “I’ll read that!” then read it and headed on over back to Digg for more articles. There’s not a lot you can do about it, but if you follow my tips above you might be able to get your overall bounce rate down.

Over on the Wordpress Development Blog they recently added some screenshots of WordPress version 2.7.

If you have a look at this post you can see pictures of the new post screen and the dashboard.

I must admit, I’m especially excited by that dashboard view. It seems to have built in statistics and a top searches facility which would be very nice additions to the wordpress admin panel!

I recently set up a new site for film buffs, containing news and film reviews of the latest films being released.

Anyway the site started 19 days ago as a pagerank 0 and 19 days later I checked the pagerank, only to be surprised that it’s jumped to 2 already! I’m not going to get too carried away because it could be some sort of fluctuation but fingers crossed!

What really amazes me is that I haven’t done any sort of link building or anything, all I did was to regularly make a post (I’ve tried to keep to one every other day at the least) and set up a large ping list (a guide on this later).

Anyway you might want to check out some UK Film Reviews