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Inexpensive Explainer Videos

Inexpensive Explainer Videos

Posted by on Jan 23, 2013 in Marketing, World Wide Web | 1 comment

I wanted to A/B test a new home page on Vogogo featuring an explainer video. Having been involved only loosely in the process before, it didn’t seem like there were many options outside of using companies that specialized in the creation of explainer videos. Unfortunately, they all seem to fancy themselves as modern day Donald Draper’s who want thousands of dollars, and months of design and review, to create just one video. A video that you have no idea how it will impact conversions until you release it into the wild, making the whole process seem rather dated compared to the rest of the web.

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Posterous to WordPress

Posterous to WordPress

Posted by on Dec 8, 2012 in Marketing, World Wide Web | 0 comments

I finally got around to moving from Posterous to a self hosted WordPress instance. The future of Posterous is unclear, since they were aquried by Twitter, but that really didn’t influence my decision to move. My main reason for moving are the limitations of Posterous such as the disallowing of embedded Javascript and not having the ability to do sitemaps. Initially this wasn’t a big deal, I just wanted something quick to set up. At the time I looked at Tumblr, Blogger and WordPress.com and landed on Posterous. Matt Warren had set up the WordPress instance we use at Vogogo and, after playing with it for a while, I was sold. The community support and the amount of plugins available set it ahead of pretty much everything else, assuming you want to host it yourself.

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The New Vogogo

The New Vogogo

Posted by on Jun 27, 2012 in Marketing, Programming, Startup, World Wide Web | 2 comments

Last weekend we launched a completely redesigned vogogo.com based on customer feedback and usage metrics collected over the last year. The new system is significantly simplified over it’s predecessor, written in a technology stack that speeds development time and will allow us to introduce new features with greater speed and confidence.

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Vogogo Radio Ads

Vogogo Radio Ads

Posted by on Jan 11, 2012 in Marketing | 1 comment

Part of our marketing effort at Vogogo has us exploring local radio station advertising as a way to reach potential customers that are not actively looking for an online payment solution. The ads just started running yesterday so it is too early to see any impact.

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Open Graph Image Over HTTPS

Open Graph Image Over HTTPS

Posted by on Sep 28, 2011 in Marketing, Programming, World Wide Web | 0 comments

Open Graph (og:image) over HTTPS doesn’t work. Title, description, etc.. all load fine over HTTPS and Facebook respects 301 redirects so someone can mention vogogo.com or https://www.vogogo.com in their status and Facebook is able to pull the right content. At first I thought it was an image dimension problem. The Vogogo image used is 195:65 which is exactly 3:1, the ratio limit imposed on og:image images, so I loaded up some smaller images to test and the results were the same. Facebook tries to load the images but gives up. After some investigative work by Matt Warren and some subsequent Googling around it appears others are affected.

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