Naturally, you click through only to feel duped because now there’s all sorts of ‘offers’ you have to complete. In my opinion, you shouldn’t feel duped–you should probably feel a little naive for thinking that you were really going to get a $200-2000 item for doing nothing. After reading a blog post on Technologizer.com, I was amazed to see how many people think these offers are outright scams.

Are they scams?

Ok, so you clicked an ad and now you want to know if you’re about to be scammed, right? Perfect, I’m here to set the record straight for anyone who’s still cloudy on this topic.

Before I get into the specifics, let’s define a couple of related terms:

• scam (noun) – a device (website, contract, etc) used to cheat or defraud
• scam (verb) – to cheat or defraud
• scammed (past tense) – having been defrauded or cheated
• mislead – to lead astray, deceive or guide wrongly

Now that we know what the difference between a scam (or to be scammed) and something that’s misleading, we can continue.

The reason I put misleading in there is because once I prove to you that these offers are not scams, the next thing you’re going to say is that they are misleading and if that’s what you believe, then ok. I, on the other hand do not feel that these ads are scams or are misleading and here’s why.

To me, an ad that is misleading would be this:

Sign up today and get a FREE iPad! Simply enter your email address and we’ll ship your new gift directly to your house!!

An ad that is not misleading would be this:

Sign up today and get a FREE iPad! *Participation in promotional offers required. (The last part will likely be in fine print.)

How do these offers work?

Each company has a different approach to the same end result, but in general, the company has a sponsorship deal with the advertising company in which the advertiser pays the promoter an affiliate bonus for every customer they send them. This bonus is what the promoter uses to pay for your free gift. So how can they afford really expensive gifts and still make money? That’s where simple math comes into play.

I run a website and I have a few sponsored ads throughout my website, so I know how much can be made on deals like these, but for this example I’m going to use simple (yet realistic) numbers to illustrate how this is all possible.

Let’s take a standard “FREE iPad” offer. The promoter tells you to get your gift you have 180 days to complete a total of 13 offers from 3 tiers. There are three key facts in that one sentence. First, you have 6 months to complete the offers. Second, you have to do 13 offers and third is that the offers are broken into tiers.

1. Time limit: The promotion company is banking that you don’t have what it takes to comply with all these rules and this is where they make the real money. Imagine if 100 people completed 11 offers, but ran out of time before they could do two more. The promoter just made affiliate bonuses on 1100 offers and didn’t have to ship 1 iPad! If each offer earned them about $50, they just walked away with $55,000! Hopefully this clarifies how it’s possible to afford such expensive gifts.
2. 13 Total Offers: That’s a lot of offers and it’s easy to get confused and lost in all the signups you’re about to get involved with. Again, the promoter hopes that you stay confused so you either a) don’t get all 13 or b) stay a subscribed member so they can continue making affiliate bonuses off you.
3. 3 Tiers: One such offer site mentions you have to pick 2 offers from tier 1, 2 offers from tier 2 and 9 offers from tier 3. The reason they do this is because the offers range so dramatically from things like subscribing to a magazine for 3 months to applying for a car loan. It would be unfair to make you apply for 13 car loans, so they break them down into manageable groups.

As you can see if you apply some basic math, even if every single person did every single requirement and they shipped out an iPad for every person, they are still not losing money depending on which model they ship. Plus, $50 is an average amount. I’ve heard of affiliate payouts being much higher.

My two cents

To call this a scam, you would be implying that these companies are promising you one thing and backing out at the last minute thus robbing you of your free gift. Aside from these offers consuming loads of time and aside from you perhaps making a mistake of not completing one of the required terms, there is no way you will not get your free gift. It would also be a scam if these companies were asking for money and not following through on their promises.

So, for all those that still think these offers are scams, listen up. It’s natural to feel “scammed” after seeing an ad for an offer claiming you can get some really expensive gadget for free (iPad, laptops, big screen tvs, etc) only to discover that there’s a “catch”. But just because this upsets you, does that mean it’s really a scam? Of course not! That’s like saying you signed up for a credit card with a 0% intro rate and then 6 months later, you’re surprised to be hit with a 19% APR. You should only be surprised if you didn’t read the fine print and only be mad at yourself that you didn’t. Offers like these and others like home loans, car leases, hotel rentals or anything you sign a contract for should not be obtained without having read the fine print first! That’s just common sense.

Hopefully now we can all agree that they are not scamming anyone. Just read the details clearly if you’re interested and follow all the rules. It’s not that difficult if you’re paying attention and you will certainly get a free gift at the end. By the way, if you still think this process is a scam, you probably also believe that Quibids is a scam too.

A little history

So where did all these offers start?? As far back as I can remember, it all happend around the time when the 3rd gen iPod came out when a company called FreeiPods.com started offering free iPods to anyone who signed up for 1 offer, but then you had to get 5 friends to sign up under you and they each had to complete 1 offer themselves. After all this happened, you were sent a free 20GB iPod. I was able to score two during this time. The problem with this setup (if you haven’t noticed already) was that it was a pyramid scheme. What this meant was only the people who started first were getting the free iPod because at some point, there was nobody left to sign up (to get your five friends) because everyone was out trying to get 5 more people! Make sense?

That’s when the complaints started…people weren’t getting their iPods, so they felt cheated. Well, since they never paid any money up front, then what were they exactly cheated out of? Perhaps they were cheated out of the chance of getting a free iPod, but this hardly equals a monetary value.

Anyway, the business model was changed to allow people to bypass getting referrals and instead, just complete more offers. Eventually, the whole “referral getting” model was scrapped and now we have the current business model which is simply completing multiple offers. They even added a twist–you only have 6 months to complete everything! See, the ones offering the free gifts are hoping you can’t complete everything in 6 months.

Send it on to twitter

Naturally, for an act as big as Lady Gaga, Metallica or (hate to say) Justin Bieber, you probably wouldn’t bat an eye after shelling out $70+ for a basic seat somewhere in the back of the building or arena. Of course, if you want to get much closer, you’re probably looking at the $200-300+ range and if you want to sit so close that you can actually touch Justin’s bowl-of-a-haircut, you’re looking in the $700-1000 range. Have these artists become so popular that the prices keep going up or is there something else at play? That question is hard to answer because there are so many factors involved. You have to consider the popularity of the artist, the location where they’re playing and their touring frequency. One fact that can determine your purchase price is who/where are you buying your tickets from.

Purchasing Concert Tickets

Let’s explore a current event. I went to Ticketmaster.com and searched for one ticket in the best available section for the Lady Gaga concert at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. By the way, it’s August 24th and the concert is on March 28th, 2011–that’s still 7 months away! The fact that I can’t get a better seat than this right now proves the next argument I’m about to make. Anyway, here’s my ticket:

From this, you can clearly see that I have a mid-level seat and a low-level row. This actually puts me in a fairly good seat as far as the view is concerned. But let’s look at the price. We have a ticket face value of $181.50 and a convenience charge of $19.65. I haven’t even selected how I want it delivered to me and I’m already out $201.15. Speaking of delivery, I wonder if I can just print it on my computer for free…

I guess not. Believe it or not, I can have a printed ticket mailed to my house via standard United States mail at no charge, but to PRINT the ticket on my OWN printer using my OWN ink and paper, it costs me $2.50! For this example, I won’t count the expedited shipping charges because these prices come from the shippers and have no bearing on the cost of the ticket unless you’re impatient and you want them faster. But I will mention that if you wanted to pick the tickets up at any local Ticketmaster location, it will cost you $3.00.

Let’s recap. Aside from choosing faster shipping, you have three basic options:

1. Use TicketFast: NOW — Print your tickets in the “convenience” of your own home. The cost: $2.50
2. Pick it up at a Ticketmaster location — Any Ticketmaster outlet can print your ticket on demand and hand it to you. The cost: $3.00
3. Have it mailed to your house — Ticketmaster will print your ticket on demand, put it in an envelope, stamp it and mail it to your house. The cost: FREE

Is it just me or does all that sound a little backward?! Wouldn’t it be more convenient to be able to print your ticket for free using your own supplies? And why does Ticketmaster feel they need to charge $3.00 to say hi and hand a ticket to someone at a ticket counter? (Actually I’m told that if you want them to say hi, it’s another 25 cents.) And why do they not charge to print and mail a ticket via the Post Office?

Anyway, moving on. I haven’t bought my ticket yet and I still have to consider a few more (optional) costs. Let’s take a look:

If I choose to, I can buy an exclusive t-shirt for $30 and parking in one of two Staples Center lots at $25 or $20–that is if I don’t want to try and find a cheaper (and likely less secure) parking lot further away from the building. Since this article is simply based on ticket prices alone, we’ll skip past these charges and continue to the purchase page.

Even though I included parking on the shopping cart, you can still get the overall idea of total cost. The last fee to be added is an order processing fee for: $5.90. What is this for?! I thought the earlier convenience charge of $19.65 would cover the entire ordering process?? Nonetheless, it’s a fee that can’t be avoided.

Our total for one Lady Gaga concert that will probably last 2-3 hours on a Monday night is:

Remember, this is for just one ticket without parking, no souvenirs and no alcohol! And don’t get me wrong–I’m not inferring that Lady Gaga isn’t worth it (I wouldn’t know as I’ve never been to her concert.)–I’m just making a point here!

I just wanted to throw this in here because it can potentially add to your overall cost. It’s ticket insurance and it’ll let you recover your purchase price if you can’t attend the concert for whatever reason–all for the low cost of $7 per ticket. Take a look at the terms:

The Aftermarket

There is a huge aftermarket for concert/event tickets on sites like StubHub, TicketsNow.com, TickCo.com, TicketsWizard.com and many more. Just go to any one of these sites and you’ll see the difference in prices!

This is where the real mark-ups begin! As a quick example, I went to StubHub and looked for a ticket in the same section as my ticket and would you believe it? The concert is 7 months away and still not sold out, yet they are already selling same-section tickets for $237. As you can imagine, these prices will only go up the closer the concert date comes.

The only real advantage with these aftermarket sites is that you can generally pick your own seats whereas with Ticketmaster, you are stuck with what you get.

Ethical Dilemma

Buying something for one price and selling it for another when demand is higher is not illegal and is generally considered a good business decision. But what about companies that buy up very large amounts of tickets just to sell them at a 50%+ markup? Do you think it’s fair that you don’t even have a fighting chance to get a ticket at face value?

Personally, I think buying tickets online is a great convenience and certainly worth the “fees” to not have to stand in a line for hours to buy a ticket at the door, but I am completely against ticket hoarders much like I’m also against domain hoarders. These people make it almost impossible to get tickets because they buy so many so fast. Plus, the venues, the artists, Ticketmaster and everyone else involved don’t want unsold tickets, so they will sell them to anyone with money.

Alternatives

Every artist could do what Bob Dylan is doing and that is not allow any concert tickets to be purchased before the event. He decided that tickets for his next concert in San Francisco will only be available if you stand in line starting midday and purchase your ticket at the door. In addition, fans can only buy one ticket each which means your friends are standing in line with you. Oh and I almost forgot to mention, ticket sales are cash only!

By doing this, Bob Dylan is single-handedly eliminating the over-inflated ticket prices found online, the ticket resellers on eBay (people who buy out-of-state event tickets just for resell), the “convenience” charges from Ticketmaster, the handling and order processing charges and the printing charges. Good job, Bob!!

Of course doing it this way will most certainly cause many more problems–having that many people in lines all day holding cash, but I think it’s the only fair thing to do to ensure everyone has a fighting chance. Obviously this doesn’t stop people from scalping them, but because the tickets don’t go on sale until the day of the event, there will be no time for proper marketing and inflation.

If every artist did this, maybe the tickets wouldn’t be so high and regular people can actually afford to go to high profile events. If it continues going down this road, eventually we’ll be accepting higher and higher ticket prices and before we know it, we’ll all be financing our next concert.

Send it on to twitter

Also, for those who didn’t notice or as a memo to my new visitors, the site has been completely revamped for the first time since I launched it!! I’m using a whole new backend system and I feel the new layout will make everything just a bit more organized and easier to find.

New layout

In light of the new layout and in the spirit of not having the site closed for too long, I have opened the site now. What this means is simply that there might some things out of place (like the menus) and things that don’t match too well due to the site being solely formatted for the previous layout.

With that said, please bear with me as I work out the kinks. I can promise you that the new site will allow for much more flexibility (for me and you), plus add some new enhancements and features that are sure to up the user experience around here.

Some new features

• Submit your writings – I am now opening the site for the first time to guest bloggers and freelance writers! You can submit your own articles for review and I will post them with all due credit. In time, you may be granted full publishing rights to the site.
• Improved newsletter – I am throwing out the old and bringing in the new. I will be offering an updated newsletter for anyone wishing to get free information from me that’s not available on the site.

I think that’s it for now. I hope you enjoy the new site!

Brandon

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Why are URLs so long?

In the old days, URLs varied in length based on a number of different factors, but the most common was folder depth. As websites became larger, more directories needed to be used. As a quick example, take a URL such as this one:

http://www.ledfrog.com/2010/07/apple-issues-free-bumper-cases-to-iphone-4-owners/

If ledfrog.com is the root, then that means that this blog post is sitting in a folder for July (07) which is sitting in a folder for this year (2010) which is sitting in the root folder (.COM). It’s easy!

Fast forward to today’s Internet and you’re probably used to seeing URLs like the one above or maybe some super long ones like the one below:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FApple-MacBook-MC371LL-15-4-Inch-Laptop%2Fdp%2FB003G2ZJTG%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Delectronics%26qid%3D1281132300%26sr%3D8-5&tag=ledfrog-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325

Not only are they long, but they’re ugly and confusing. Most blogs today use longer formats to apply keyword phrases to their links to help in search engine rankings, so you’ll often see long, wordy URLs leading to blog posts. My site is no different.

The problem

Naturally, the problem with a long URL is that they are hard to remember and are even harder to share verbally. If you were trying to tell your friend face to face for example about that sweet MacBook Pro deal that Amazon.com has, you’d have to explain to them that they should go to Amazon.com and search for bla bla blah…I’m already getting bored writing this…

The other problem is that as the Internet becomes more mobile, things like character limitations in text messages can become an issue when sending URLs to someone. Speaking of character limitations, Twitter is the king on the hill. Their entire service revolves around the idea that you only get to post a message under 140 characters. Obviously you can’t post links like the examples above without either hitting this max or reducing it so much that you can’t even add a message.

Even Facebook can pose problems. They don’t have a character limit on your status or wall posts, but putting in a really long link can scare people away. They might not want to click on something that has so many special characters in it.

The solution – xi.io

Shrink those URLs into something more manageable! Of course there are probably hundreds of services out there (if not, thousands), so you can literally choose any one you’d like. However, since I’m writing about this topic on my own site, I’m only going to offer you one!

I present xi.io! It’s pronounced: zahy-oh

My new service is 100% free and can offer shorter URLs than 99% of the other services out there. Actually, since my service is so new, hardly any of the shortest links have even been used so it can beat out all the others right now! Get them while they last!!

All of xi.io‘s short links start with 2 random characters and as those combinations run out, it will go to 3 and then 4 and so on.

How xi.io works

Go to xi.io, enter your really long URL and click the little arrow. Your new short URL is displayed and can be used anywhere you want. It will be completely functional forever.

I shortened this Apple store link just now and here was the results:
Original Link: http://store.apple.com/us-hed/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook_pro?aid=AIC-WWW-NAUS-K2-BUYNOW-MACBOOKPRO-INDEX&cp=BUYNOW-MACBOOKPRO-INDEX
New Link: http://xi.io/vR

I was able to take a 140-character (including http://) link and turn it into one that is only 15! Aside from that, I was also able to make a link that is very easy to tell somebody over the phone or face to face.

So feel free to use it when shortening your links!! Post them all over Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, wherever!! There’s no limit to how many you can create and there’s no limit to where you can use your new links!!

I hope you enjoy the service.

However, it’s very important to try and optimize your site as much as possible to avoid reaching those limits. Just because your host gives you 2GB of bandwidth each month doesn’t mean you shouldn’t optimize your site to use less than that.

Reducing Bandwidth

There are many ways you can reduce your bandwidth and fortunately they are all in your control. Obviously you can’t control how many visitors load your site, how many downloads they take and you certainly can’t control who leeches your links and content onto their own site, so don’t waste your time trying.

Instead, focus on all the ways you can trim your site’s overall size while not losing any of that quality work you’ve put into it. Besides making your site load in a much smaller footprint, you’ll also be speeding it up for your users and they’ll love that.

Here are some areas of interest when it comes to reducing bandwidth:

• Graphics – This might be the most important area of your site because it is most likely made up of many different graphics. Unlike images, graphics are used to fullfil your website’s appearance. This is good because these graphics can be reduced to lower quality files without compromising much quality. A great way to do this is to convert your web graphics in to .GIF or .PNG files.
• Images – Unlike graphics, images are generally used to display a product or service by way of sending a .JPG or other higher quality image format to the user. You don’t want to compress these files too much or use .GIF technology because you will seriously downgrade the overall experience and look of these images. However, you can use .JPG to compress the image without losing too much quality and you can also reduce the overall size help save bandwidth. Also, when showcasing a series of images, always use thumbnail pictures. This allows a smaller version of each image to be shown to the user and they can select which ones they want to see larger. This way, only the desired images are loaded at full size.
• Video – Thanks to YouTube and some other copy-cats out there, you no longer have to store and stream video from your own server. You can now upload your video to your YouTube account and embed that same video on your own site. It plays just as easily as it would if someone had gone to YouTube and found it. Also, you get the added benefit of having your video be found on YouTube and then any site promotion you have on your account (or the video itself) will lead people back to your site! Alternatively, you don’t have to have the video available on YouTube as you can just mark the video as unlisted–this way nobody can find it in the searches.
• Sound – As of yet, I don’t think there’s a service like YouTube that simply allows the upload of your own music compositions, but that’s ok. Music doesn’t take up a lot of space if you compress it right. If you streamed a 192kbps song from your site, each user would have to download all 3-7MB every time they want to hear it. All you need to do is downgrade the bitrate into to something more manageable like 60kbps. This allows the track to be heard somewhat clear, but not enough to drag your bandwidth down or allow people to copy your music. Also, consider using short clips instead of full tracks.
• Downloads – Consider using file sharing services like MediaFire that work similar to YouTube to store your downloads. By keeping the files off of your own server, you not only save bandwidth, but also hard drive space! If you must have files on your server, try to keep them compressed by allowing the download of .ZIP files only.

This is certainly not a complete (or detailed) list of things you can do to reduce bandwidth, but I just wanted to get you pointed in the right direction. Above all, you want to ensure your site is user friendly, lightweight and accessible to everyone. To find this happy medium, you need the perfect balance of a fast webhost, compressed graphics and images and a network on off-site media storage locations.

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Antennagate?!

That’s right folks, we live in a world where every social issue (and even certain celebrity couples) require the use of fancy name so we can distinguish one pile of crap from another. Antennagate is certainly no exception to this rule. When there’s time to make up stupid headlines, the kids will come out and play.

However, this particular case seems to hold some merit despite its stupid name blazingly ripped off the 1970′s Watergate scandal. It appears as though Apple’s new iPhone 4 isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, the supposed revolutionary antenna design that was billed to give better reception amongst all of AT&T’s shortcomings actually has one major flaw…you can’t cup it with your left hand.

I don’t need to go into the details on iPhone 4′s antenna problems here because it’s clearly been discussed elsewhere including at an Apple press conference on July 16th where Steve Jobs goes on to explain how and why the iPhone 4 isn’t the only smartphone to suffer this problem.

iPhone 4 Antenna Fix

The first fix for the antenna problem was a simple quote by Mr. Jobs himself in response to an email sent to him by a concerned user: “Just avoid holding it in this way.”

The second fix was updating the phone to iOS 4.0.1 in which Steve Jobs claimed that the real reason people were upset about the antenna problem was because they were watching 5 signal bars decrease to 1 or 2 when in reality, the phone was only getting about 3 and then got decreased to 1 or 2. The solution? Change the algorithm in the phone to reflect a more accurate signal strength. What I get from this is two things: either Apple purposely increased the algorithm to make it appear at though AT&T’s service was better than it was or AT&T’s service is still crappy and now the iPhone 4 makes it worse when you put the phone in your left hand.

The third and final fix is to get a Bumper case. Again, according to Steve Jobs, he says that all smartphones have antenna weak spots when you touch or hold them in certain ways (including all previous iPhones). The reason why we noticed so many more complaints this time around is because when people bought the previous iPhones, they usually bought a case to go along with it (upwards of about 80% of the sales), so they never saw the problem. Whereas the iPhone 4 was so top secret (except when the prototype was found in a bar) that no case manufacturers could make a case in time for the launch date.

However, amid speculation that Apple knew about the antenna problem, blocked manufacturers from knowing the phone’s specifications ahead of time and the fact that Apple was really pushing the cool new Bumper case at $29 a pop, they have decided to offer these cases to iPhone 4 users free of charge. I guess they didn’t want people to think this was all setup as an ingenius marketing ploy!

How to get a free Bumper case from Apple

I don’t know if you can process a free case order in an Apple store, but why would you want to when you can do it right online? All you have to do is visit Apple’s Bumper case program on their website and download the iPhone app that allows you to process the order. I’m assuming that using an app was the best way to track an order for your phone’s serial number so you can’t order more than one!

Already bought a bumper? Good! Now you don’t have to wait for one to be shipped. You’re even more lucky if you paid for it with your credit/debit card because Apple is automatically refunding the $29 (plus tax) without you having to lift a finger! Now that’s service! By the way, you can check the status of your Bumper case refund online too.

I only feel sorry for you folks that bought your cases on eBay because you’re not going to be able to get a refund and what’s worse is that the person who sold it to you will probably be able to get another free case or refund so they just made an extra $30! Oh well…such is life.

What about the white iPhone?

Sorry! No more white iPhone…at least anytime soon. Steve Jobs keeps saying that this phone is “proving much more difficult to produce” (white paint is rare you know), but now since all this antennagate stuff, they might just be pushing it back to the end of the year or sometime in 2011 while they try and figure out a “real” fix to this problem.

My guess? iPhone 5 will be white and the phone won’t even be completely wireless–you’ll have to plug in an external antenna anytime you want to use it. The instructions will then tell you to place this antenna more than 5 feet away so you won’t be tempted to touch it while on the phone.

Send it on to twitter

Enter the world of cross-promotion. I talk about this all over my site as a means to help pollinate your image/brand in as many places as you can (without being obtrusive). I say “obtrusive” because you don’t want to come off as spamming. If you have a general passion for your topic of interest, you’re going to love spreading the word about your knowledge. For me, I love helping people out with their computer problems or website questions.

What is Yahoo! Answers

So as not to override the point of this post, I’ll be quick. Yahoo! Answers allows anyone with a Yahoo! login to go to the site, submit a question they want answered and then other people viewing the site who might know the answer can post their opinions. As a member, you can also ask questions as well.

As an answerer, you earn points for every answer you submit and even more points if the asker selects your answer as the best choice. Other members can also vote your answer up to the best choice too. After certain levels of these points are acquired, you can do more things on the site like answer more questions, ask more questions, receive more ratings, etc. More about how Yahoo! Answers works.

Yahoo! Answers as a promotional tool

Just like any other member site, you can create a profile. In this profile you have your standard avatar, email address, website link, etc. All these are quite obvious as promotional tools, but Yahoo! Answers inherently goes a step further. Since you’re answering people’s questions about any topic imaginable, you get to answer freely. This means, you can reference external websites, cite sources, talk about how well you know a particular topic, etc.

So here’s what I do. We all know that I blog about marketing online and building websites and such. Every now and then, I toss in a few posts about computer repairs and fix-it utilities.

Naturally, I go over to Yahoo! Answers and look for questions related to my blog and begin answering them. In some cases, I have already written a detailed blog post that better illustrates my answer and I’m able to insert a link directly into it. This allows the asker (and everyone else reading) to access my link and see my blog post!

What not to do

As time goes on, your answers (with your links) are all floating around Yahoo! and other major search engines which will generate more traffic for your site. However, this can be abused just like every other traffic-technique so you want to make sure you not only follow Yahoo!’s guidelines, but also some search engine one’s as well.

Here are some things not to do:

• Don’t submit just a link for your answer
• Don’t add more than 2 links in one answer
• Don’t give half-assed answers–put some thought into your responses
• Don’t link to webpages that don’t contribute to your answer

My two cents

The main point of Yahoo! Answers is to help people answer their questions. Make sure that you are actually contributing to the cause. The more help you provide, the better your reputation will be. If people start viewing you as a credible source of information, then they are more likely to view your site and if they run sites of their own, they might link back to you. You can see how the dominoes fall from here.

Send it on to twitter

Gizmodo broke the story about the iPhone 4 to the world, thus causing Apple to sue for theft and have the editor who wrote the article turn over his property to the cops for evidence.

Once the phone was finally claimed by Apple and then officially announced, all we wanted to know was “how much?” and “when can we buy?”. Not only did the phone itself cause the demand to be exceptionally high, but the announcement of AT&T allowing early upgrades for basically any contract that would be expiring in 2010 opened to flood gates to just about every single previous iPhone owner.

Black Tuesday

June 15th was the day selected for the pre-ordering of iPhone 4 and boy what a day it was! Here are a few of the things that went down (pun intended) that day:

• iPhone 4 Pre-order system shuts down – The pre-order system was opened at about 1am on June 15th and right from the start, people were complaining about not being able to get in the system to place an order.
• AT&T account security breaches – Many AT&T users (including me) experienced a wide-spread security breach within AT&T after logging into their wireless accounts online. Instead of seeing their own information, they were presented with the information of someone completely different.
• AT&T stores took iPhone pre-orders on paper – Many customers (including me) were forced to have a pre-order written down on paper only to be processed later.
• iPhone 4 orders were being randomly cancelled – It almost seemed completely random, but iPhone 4 orders were getting cancelled left and right with no apparent reasoning behind it. I think it had to do with people placing multiple orders on single accounts or the old rule about upgrading your account where you actually couldn’t upgrade if you had a balance due. I made sure I paid my bill before I started this process!!
• Shipping date for iPhone pre-orders pushed to July – It appears like July 14th is the earliest date you can expect your iPhone to ship. The demand was just too much for AT&T and Apple to handle.
• Best Buy was pre-ordering white iPhone 4s – Somehow, a few people were able to successfully order a white iPhone 4 from Best Buy even though it was clearly stated that the white iPhone 4 would not be available at launch date. We’ll see about the “successfulness” on June 24th!

The Aftermath

After all this, AT&T and Apple have both formally apologized. Apple released this statement:

CUPERTINO, Calif., June 16 — Yesterday Apple and its carrier partners took pre-orders for more than 600,000 of Apple’s new iPhone 4. It was the largest number of pre-orders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions. Many customers were turned away or abandoned the process in frustration. We apologize to everyone who encountered difficulties, and hope that they will try again or visit an Apple or carrier store once the iPhone 4 is in stock.

And AT&T had this to say:

DALLAS, June 16 — AT&T issued the following statement today:

IPhone 4 pre-order sales yesterday were 10-times higher than the first day of pre-ordering for the iPhone 3G S last year. Consumers are clearly excited about iPhone 4, AT&T’s more affordable data plans and our early upgrade pricing.

Given this unprecedented demand and our current expectations for our iPhone 4 inventory levels when the device is available June 24, we’re suspending pre-ordering today in order to fulfill the orders we’ve already received.

The availability of additional inventory will determine if we can resume taking pre-orders.

In addition to unprecedented pre-order sales, yesterday there were more than 13 million visits to AT&T’s website where customers can check to see if they are eligible to upgrade to a new phone; that number is about 3-times higher than the previous record for eligibility upgrade checks in one day.

We are working hard to bring iPhone 4 to as many of our customers as soon as possible.

After the aftermath

The dust appears to be settling and the lucky people who got orders in on the 15th or manual orders on the 16th (taken on the 15th) are starting to see shipping information in their AT&T accounts. The blogs are on fire with people talking about their own personal experiences and of course griping from people who aren’t getting theirs on day one.

I had my own streak of good luck turned bad and then turned good again. I started off with two orders for the same account and then I thought I was getting none. I was thinking I’d see my phone in mid-July, but then I got the good news that mine had shipped! You can read my whole story on my blog. The story is called ‘How I Almost Got Two iPhone 4s on Release Day‘.

UPDATE 6-23-10

I just wanted to share that I received my new iPhone 4 today and from what I’m hearing, I’m one of few that actually received the device today and even fewer received it yesterday. Here are my last pictures from my iPhone 3GS (which is now on sale on eBay) and the first ones of my new iPhone 4.

©2010 Brandon.me and Ledfrog.com

©2010 Brandon.me and Ledfrog.com

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Today, this practice is less about saving bandwidth and more about page layout. For example, it’s possible to slice an image that is positioned horizontally and vertically in order to make it appear correctly on a page that is broken into different sections (header, footer, sidebar, etc.)

Saving Bandwidth

As stated earlier, the saving of bandwidth is actually an illusion. If you had a large 1MB image and sliced it into to 6 much smaller images, the loading of the whole set still requires the server to deliver 1MB to the visitor. No matter how you slice it (pun intended), you still have the same image size.

Slicing just makes you think the webpage is loading faster because you see parts of the smaller images loading simultaneous. Others might disagree and say that slicing actually makes a webpage load slower because of the multiple requests being sent to the server at the same time.

Either way you look at it, it’s irrelevant. Image slicing should no longer be a way to try and load webpages/images faster than normal.

How to do it

I use Adobe PhotoShop to do all my image work and Adobe Illustrator for all my graphics. Either way, slicing an image is the same process. Here’s a screenshot of the tool selection in most Adobe products:

Other imaging software programs most likely have image slicing tools, but there’s no need to create a whole how-to guide here. I simply wanted to import some knowledge about what it is.

My two cents

I wouldn’t focus too much on using image slicing techniques unless you’re trying to organize a webpage layout by re-positioning logos and background images across various sections of your site. Rather than slicing images, you should focus your attention on optimizing images–which I cover in the next section.

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If you’re just starting out a business, choosing the color scheme is much easier because you can essentially start from scratch. You may even begin by choosing the desired website design and then using it as a starting ground for your branding.

What colors do you use?

Surprisingly, not a lot of thought goes into this question for most web designers. The problem is that most people simply start with a cut and paste approach to website design and copy elements off a template. For example, lets say you downloaded a fresh new template that was all black and red. You got it because you liked it and it was cool. Rather than come up with your own color scheme or layout options, you forced yourself to use the ones in the template.

Now this isn’t such a bad idea if you just want to whip a fast site together, but if you’re in it for the long haul, you are missing out on future opportunities to market and brand your site better.

Think about a big name company’s image. Is their logo one of those logos that you can take a half-second glance at and still know what it was you saw? You have to remember that when you’re starting a business, your choice of colors and theming is the most important thing for your image and/or brand.

How do colors benefit readers?

Besides the overall look and feel of your site, your visitors are going to benefit greatly from your choice of layout. That’s because colors play a large role in visual response. Ever wonder why most of your local big-chain restaurants use the color red in their logos and marketing materials? This is because some scientist did a study a while back and determined that the color red is closely associated with the feeling of hunger and generally speaking, a red sign pointing out a flashy restaurant is supposed to make you more hungry.

The same can go for your website. The proper use of white space, the choice of colors and even the style of font and logo design can all keep your users browsing or drive them away. Of course, a lot of web users don’t care what your site looks like as long as you have the information they were looking for, but as you get more and more into the Internet, you deal with more and more competition. This means that any edge you can obtain is something worth considering.

My two cents

This post was more of an eye-opener rather than actual help, but that’s because nobody can tell you how to design your site. Only you (and others with similar sites) can know what your visitors like or don’t like. If you really want to find out, look at other sites in your field or start polling your own visitors to see what they think.

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