Which is why I really really love Google Maps and use it every day. I was recently in Vegas and didn’t have data for my phone or the ability to find locations in Google Maps on my phone and I kinda felt lost without it.  That and Vegas is just damn confusing.

Google has really done an amazing of job of organizing the world’s content so people can find what they are looking for quickly and easily.

But herein lies my main issue with Google Maps: It is now relied on heavily by the general public and regarded as correct 99% of the time – any incorrect information is forwarded to the map subject as it’s seen as their fault.

BUT IT’S NOT THE FAULT OF THE BUSINESS 99% OF THE TIME!

If you’ve read my previous blog post about this you’d know about how Google Maps lost the Town of Sechelt. Without the help of Rebecca Bollwitt (Mrs. 604) we’d still be off the map.

And yes, they corrected the problem after it was blogged and tweeted about extensively. But before going public it was reported by hundreds of people on the Sunshine Coast via Google’s internal ‘report a problem’ mechanism and for years nothing was done.

Get your business listed

Get your business listed!

Google is proactive about getting your business listed with their mapping service and extols the advantages in terms of search engine results and traffic to your website.

But my last three experiences with Google Places and their ’report a problem’ mechanism have meant hours of work and painful communication and left me wanting to run for the hills. I am not a GIS professional, nor am I a Cartographer. To quote that Dyson guy…”I just think things should work properly.”

Why we can’t verify

Google Places wants you to list your business and it uses a number of helpers to find your location properly. But it restricts you to your postal code. This is a huge issue in rural, non-delivery areas where Canada Post assigns post office boxes.

This became a problem for many businesses located at a physical address completely different from the assigned postal code.

It looked like we had one massive organization – Google – not communicating well with another – Canada Post.

When I needed to get a Google Places listing for Ridge Meadows Recycling we couldn’t use the postal code as a business locator. So I had to report the problem and then explain how the post office works in rural Canada. All of this took two or three emails once they acknowledged the problem. And then we had to get an employee with a company email address to reply to Google saying that yes this was the actual business location, etc. etc. etc.

Once we did all of this the business was actually listed properly and users could find the correct location of the recycling depot.

But it took a month and 4 hours of emailing, forum posting, issue reporting and checking for accuracy.

While the client was happy and people were now able to type in Ridge Meadows Recycling and find the correct location of the depot, the entire process felt like I was trying to give birth to an elephant.

Our business listings have been merged

My web design business is still a small operation with myself as the only employee,  along with a couple of contractors. It is growing, but for the time being I use the offices of The Network Hub in downtown Vancouver, along with a number of other similar businesses located in the same building.

On a Sunday morning in March I got a call from Britta Curkovic at aromawebdesign.com who also uses the services and office space of The Network Hub. She said our business listings were merged. These are two independent businesses, with different phone numbers, website addresses, and services offered, yet for weeks our listings were merged. I had an owner-verified listing and I was told by Google that my listing was going to change and I should check this for errors. All of this while we were frantically emailing Google Help trying to get things back to normal. Eventually the listings were split again and we were finally able to be located as independent from one another.

The total time it took to undo the mess was 14 business days and 6 full hours of un-billable time, emailing back and forth with Google and the other business owner, posting to the Google Places forums, and checking for quality assurance.

The problem was corrected but it had to be explained carefully to Google and we had to exhaust all other options before they would even look at the problem.

You are already trying to verify your business

My third issue, and the one that is currently causing a client a lot of pain, is the business listing for Uprising Breads Bakery. After 30 years, Uprising decided to open a new location. To coincide with this they updated their website with a new look and listed the location of the new café. Back in October 2011 I had sent in for verification on the new location. As the weeks and then months went by I sent and resent requests to Google staff to keep a lookout for this.

Finally, after reading about a page Google had recently set up to report problems, I was told by a human at Google Places Help that since there was already one listing that wasn’t verified the new listing was seen as duplication.

The representative was kind enough to verify the listing on the spot and Uprising Breads was very happy to have their two listings.

From start to finish it took 3 months to get the listing verified and at least 10 hours of work from everyone involved.

But wait, there’s more!

Uprising Breads Location Merge Issues

Six months later Google saw that both listings had the same website address and the same phone number; they surmised that it must be the same listing and combined them. So now (as of May 10th, 2012) Uprising Breads Bakery has photos of one location and the address of the other.

Well, you say, you must be old hat at this by now and know how to fix it.

In the Google Places forums (logged into via Uprising Breads Account) I am told by a top contributor:

This may be due to sharing a common phone number and name.

Seriously? This is why?

What about McDonald’s? What about Domino’s Pizza? What about Starbucks? Places that have dozens of locations in a given city that all have the same name and the same website, similar phone numbers but many different locations.

My best advice remains to give each listing its own phone number, thus reducing the likelihood of future mergers.

His best suggestion is to get a new phone  number? Automated phone systems are commonplace…they save businesses thousands of dollars in employee time and cost. I know that this is the opinion of a top contributor and not an actual Google employee, but my God this is odd. To get a proper website listing you need a new phone number?

Google also doesn’t have a field in Google Places for phone extensions; if we tried to put the extension in the phone field this would error out making his best advice completely useless and actually doing more harm then good.

Sigh…

I could cite even more examples of how I reported a business that closed yet had its Google Places listing for years after, even when Google Street View had replaced its imagery of the location. But, because it was an owner-verified business, it stayed there for three years after the business closed down.

People over those three years came looking for the business that wasn’t there anymore…they trusted that Google was 99% right. Why is the business listing still available (even though it does mention it is closed) after it has been closed for so many years? What purpose does a three year old listing serve the user?

To Google’s credit

To their credit, Google has tried to improve this and made the user edit more viable through Google Map Maker tools. But, after making hundreds of edits to the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver, one day a number of them were deleted – not denied but completely vanished – and I felt all my time and effort volunteering to make Google Maps better in my neighborhood was lost – I haven’t returned since. Also, a lot of the edits that were made and approved by the community of editors were never made live on Google Maps, but  only showed up in the Google Map Maker ecosystem.

So, as an owner of a small business and as a contractor to dozens of medium businesses, most of my interactions with Google Maps / Places has been less than stellar.

Changes would I make to Google Places if I could

Easier verification for rural Canada

Run a seasonal kayaking company and changed your location after 20 years? You should be able to easily verify your business listing so that doesn’t require it to be in the same postal code as your business address.

(I understand the restrictions put in place for verified business listings to be associated with a postal code, but as I explained earlier, areas of Canada that do not have street delivery service must use a post office box that might not be in the same postal code.)

Easier reporting of issues

With Uprising Breads there was no easy way to report the issue we were coming up against. Even the top contributor suggested that our issue was an odd one.

And if your problem is “odd” there isn’t a response sequence that describes it.  So long as you get to a form where you can fill in some blanks and hit a Submit button, you will hear back from Google.  It’ll be a week or a little longer, but you will get an email from a person on the Places team. If that person’s answer doesn’t seem to fit your problem, you can email back and further explain what is happening. They will eventually understand that you have two listings merging and start the process to un-merge them. Unfortunately, that process takes 4-6 weeks.

Paid support

As a designer running a web design firm I have encountered these problems numerous times and yet each time is as laborious as the first, even though I know exactly what the problem is and what needs to get done.

I would pay a yearly or monthly fee to have some dedicated support – somewhere or someone I could contact who would be able to help resolve problems for me and my clients quickly and efficiently.

Right now the current system in Google Places costs me time and money it completely confuses clients. The results can change at a moment’s notice, without warning about problems that might arise.

Final thoughts

I do know one thing…the problem isn’t going to go away. It will only get bigger and more complex as more businesses, rural and urban, want to be listed with Google Maps.  Users will notice errors and business owners are held hostage by whatever information Google decides to allow into its ecosystem.

PS. For any commenters out their who suggest that I should report these issues using the tools provided… I can only say… I do, I have and I will…

The movie Short Circuit

With that Homage to the 1986 movie Short Circuit about robot #5 who is electrocuted and suddenly gains consciousness. The number 5 is very much alive and doing very well.

But I am actually referring to Site5.com a hosting company based in Denver, CO… And yes Site5 is very much alive as well. (site5 has no relation to the movie I am just trying to be funny)

See, back about a year ago when I was first working with Bikes on the Drive they were hosted with Site5 and it was my first experience with them. I was still with my old host (who will remain nameless, this post isn’t about them) at this time. As the summer drew on I noticed considerable service differences between site5 and my old host, I also noticed the down time I was getting compared to Bikes on the drive at how quickly any service request I had with site5.com was answered quickly.

Come August 09 my old hosting provider server was completely bailing after 8 years of almost uninterrupted service. I decided to jump ship and move every site I had over to site5 and I really haven’t looked back.

What has kept me with site5 after the first year?

• With out a doubt the customer service I have gotten from the site5 team and their ability to answer questions, sometimes complete out of scope for a hosting provider has been remarkable.

• Reliability, only a few times have I had a customer support request that was critical to my sites performance keep me and my clients from their websites for more then a couple minutes.

• Easy to use control panel for me and the clients who want access to it.

• Google has started including how fast the server delivers the site in it’s search engine ranking it has become important for the site operate as fast as it can.

• You can email the CEO directly (or follow him on twitter) and he will email you back. (try that with go-daddy)

Site5 Logo

All of the customer service reps I have recently had contact with have been good but I really have to commend the support from Dawn. She doesn’t just provided the answers to questions, but more wants to know why your asking the question. Dawn seem have this uncanny way to understand the level of server knowledge you have and then provide you the easiest course of action to your level of expertise.

This one little thing is crucial to support. In my schooling I was never taught a thing about how servers work and the commands you may or many not need to perform the daily tasks in setting up a site and most tech support center’s don’t seem to understand this.

This also reduces my needs for service levels in the future as many support personal at site5 take the time to explain what I need to do instead of just doing it for me. I don’t have to ask again. Nor am I sent down the wrong path not knowing why I am doing this and what it will do.

I have also been asked why don’t you host with servers in Canada?

I wanted something larger then the mom and pop shop I had came from, but I didn’t have any need dedicated hosting and after a searching around a bit I couldn’t really find anything in Canada that matched the just right hosting I got from Site5.

So yes, number 5 is very much alive!

Since that memorable, hectic, time, I’ve said a sad goodbye to East Vancouver and Commercial Drive, one of the great little neighbourhoods in Canada. I met phenomenal people there, friends and neighbours with whom I shared ideas and initiated collaborations.

Pondering how to turn an economic downturn into a personal upturn, I moved back to the Sunshine Coast. I applied for and was accepted into the Aspire Program, which will help me shape my experiences with web design, marketing, art direction and photography into my own business.

There is trepidation, as the path chosen comes with a steep learning curve; but no one ever promised it would be easy. I’m comforted by the security of living at home as well as this program’s 15 years of proven success. Knowing the number of graduates still operating their businesses, and learning of the program’s reputation among coastal residents, I know I’ve made the right choice, and I’ll be launching my business come this late November.

Chris Young Photography

British-born and Toronto-based photographer Chris Young contacted me about improving his website. He wanted to have a site that was more search-engine friendly, had bigger images to display and something that fit his sense of style and colour scheme.

I showed Chris what I had done with Andy Clark’s site as well as my own and we started on the design process.

Chris wanted the flow of a flash site but none of the drawbacks. So through a process of trial and, admittedly, some error. We found a clean looking site with all the functionality he needed.

Being a freelancer, Chris also wanted a site that would increase visit’s to his site from first-time visitors and hopefully increase sales of some of the spectacular images he has taken.

Making a Splash

Accordion Widget

For some splash pages there are antiquated pieces of the Internet’s past. But for a photographer they do play a key piece of branding as you want to make an impression with your images as soon as possible. I took what I learned from the devious behaviour site and made the entry page one large image that adjusted to the size of the browser. I also did this with CSS and not javascript so it would be compliant across multiple browsers.

I suggested a wide horizontal image and suggested to Chris he use the Stonehenge photo. It is certainly a powerful photo that captures your attention immediately.

My developer Kevin Ganapathy did some programing so that Chris could change his background image from the user interface and not from the confusing FTP.

Playing the Accordion

Chris also wanted some way to hide the thumbnails. So, I took the accordion that I had been using on my own site and Kevin programmed the thumbnails to show up only in the different categories.

We then installed a WordPress blog and styled it toward more of a photo-blog format. Both Chris and I are pretty happy with the results and had a lot of good feedback on the clean aesthetic look.

Well my summer has been a lot different than the usual tree planter. Instead of working in a camp in the middle of a clear cut, I am working for Bikes on the Drive (BOTD) on Commercial Drive, which is pretty much the center of East Vancouver.

I walked into the shop some months ago and talked with ilan Handelsman, manager of BOTD about telling their story and getting some more traffic to their website. What happened was ilan told me the story of The Tree. A bike conceived by the staff on BOTD out of frustration with the current trends in the commuter bike industry.

Bikes on the Drive Tree

What happened next was truly something amazing. I had one opportunity to convince BOTD that I was the one who should tell the story of The Tree. But to do this I had to explain social networking. The problem is that much like everyone else I didn’t really fully understand social networking in terms of marketing and a return on a shop’s investment. But what I did have was time on my hands.

I sat down and two days later with the help of OmniGraffle I had built a three-page flowchart that somewhat explained social networking to the bike shop and how it could be measured. A full two months after my first conversation I then presented this two month proposal to Tina the shop administrator and owner.

I am happy to say that three weeks ago a three month contract was approved by Bikes on the Drive and I have barely had enough time to do laundry since then. (I said barely).

So we have taken The Tree to the Bike to Work Week BBQ’s, Commuter Stations, Mexico thanks to Bugsy, Critical Mass and the bike is already a Museum Piece and it’s barely two months old.

So far it has been the biggest internet marketing project I have ever taken on. Here is a short list of what we’re working on:

• Microsite dedicated to the bike.
• Bikes on business card
• Magazine display ads
• Domain Purchase and association
• Guerrilla marketing
• Art Directed photo shoot on false creek.
• Photos of every part of Tree Life
• Event promotion and coverage
• Video
• Own Flickr group
• Interview of all staff

And we’re not even into month two of the contract. . .

So unlike the intrepid tree planters of the Canadian wilderness I have been a firmly planted urbanist this summer, promoting one of the coolest projects I have worked on since becoming a web designer.

Jenelle models the Tree on False Creek

The shop managers and owners have been amazing to work with. I have presented ideas and concepts and 9 times out of 10 I hear, “Yes, sure, lets try that!” To be given almost cart blanche to market a product without a laundry list of restrictions has been a dream of a job to work on.

But I could not do this without friends like: Jenelle Schneider who was an awesome model for the photo shoot. Jacob Hopkins who did the photography of the tree on False Creek. My programer Kevin Ganapathy who is a great web developer but also speaks fluent Robert, which means he know what I am talking about most of the time. . .

Will keep you posted on how things are progressing this summer it certainly has been a wild ride this spring.

Powered by WordPress

But I took the writing for the web course in stride and had to sign up for a WordPress.com account. I decided to write on coffee as it was close to home, easy to write about and a popular topic. My class only required me to write 12 posts, but after those 12 posts I saw the power of blogging and had 1,200 unique page views and a number of comments about the blog.

So I really started to take the WordPress blog seriously about that time and got a domain name and style that fit and the readership continued to grow. WordPress was growing right along with my own blog, the two seem to feed off each other (no pun intended).

When I started to see other blogs link to mine in some authority I knew I was on to something. So what to do? Well the first thing was to make the blog self hosted and, well, that was the hardest part. But, it was also important to keep the blog looking the same. I picked the Freshy theme by Julien De Luca as it was one of the 16 different themes available to WordPress.com users at the time. While I could make a change when I moved the blog why change? As it works for me and the readers seem to like it. (p.s. the theme I am using here is a highly customized Orange Coffee)

Change is a good thing…I think…

While WordPress had designed a way to take your content with you when I moved it wasn’t that easy. I had three issues with my content moving:

• I wanted to keep my old Freshy theme and while it was still available for download it wasn’t optimized for WordPress 2.7
• My old content from WordPress 2.1 didn’t format that well into WordPress 2.7 So if I wanted to edit any of my old content I essentially had to re-align the entire post.
• All of media, pictures and video had to be manually copied from the wordpress.com site and uploaded to the new server while persevering the perma-links.

Yeah this totally wasn’t that easy and I would never suggest trying to do this and I am sure there are easier ways to go about this but just not to me and not at this time.

When moving call friends

But with any move you need to enlist the help of some good friends and I really couldn’t have done this without the help of:

• CSS guru Jeff Hifner.
• My service provider Site 5.
• Developer Kevin Ganapathy of Second Sites Communications • WordPress Plugin Developer Dylan Kuhn at the Cyber Hobo• And of course my awesome, awesome editor Stefania Seccia

So what is new?

Better Cafe Reviews

Lattes and Laptops

The whole essence of this blog is to pass on the most accurate information I can. I’ve done some minor editing of archived posts but only to keep information current as some of those old posts are damn popular.

Interactive Map

I always liked maps especially when they are interactive so now you can find a visual representation of the great cafes (in my humble opinion) via this map. Just click on the cafe review icon to bring up the review of that café.

Our Mantra

I really like to show people where I am coming from when I write a review or give my opinion. This page is after two years of coffee knowledge, what we at the Indy Coffee Scene and what I rate on. Also a code of ethics for users to see where we’re coming from and what we look for, and once advertising appears on the site, what type will be allowed.

Coffee Terms

Well I decided to stake my claim on this lexicon and collect over 100 coffee terms that are currently used in Vancouver.

Social Media

We have also joined twitter so you can follow us at coffeevancouver. We have a flickr group called (Vancouver Indy Coffee) where we’re posting some awesome coffee photos.

Clarkfoto.ca

Blast through the next 7 years and I am having coffee with Andy, outside Reuters’ Vancouver office.  We chatted about my new career of web design, the internet and Andy mentioned that he never really had a website to call his own.

I had mentioned a content management system called Pixelpost, which was an open source and developed mainly by Europeans (how very haute couture) and wasn’t all that known in these parts.  I loved the slick user interface and I showed it to Andy and within moments I was contracted to do his website. Wow I thought, I am actually making Andy Clark’s website. This is the stuff dreams are made of. Or at least the direction I wanted to take my web design, knowing what most news photographers want in one.

And now the hard work

It took some recoding of the original source code and some help from Piotr Galas, one of the developers of Pixelpost, but six months after we had developed the concept, Andy had a categorized portfolio site he could update at his leisure. After a few tweaks and reviews from a few other sage photographers we launched the site on January 12th and the next day we had Rob Galbraith.com linking to the site.

The Result

Clarkfoto.ca had 2,000 visitors in just one day and blew through 10 gigs of bandwidth in a week.  This is a great start for a veteran photographer of the Canadian news industry, and visits have been steady 300 to 400 a week since, which makes Andy one pretty happy fellow.

“I was very pleased with how Robert took my somewhat hazy idea of what the website should look like and transformed it into to exactly what I was looking for….very nice job indeed”

Andy Clark

Andy also has a blog, which I bet he will muse about shooting cricket, leica lexicon, curling, etc. . .  but don’t listen to my bias opinion read it for yourself.