cre8d design

… or New Zealand to be more precise. That’s the thought running over and over in my head as we rapidly weave through the chaotic moving mass of vehicles in Lima, past the mangiest ugliest dogs I’ve ever seen, past homeless people loitering on the streets at night, past buildings older than I can imagine.

Peru is a world away from New Zealand yet here I am sitting at a computer typing away adding a blog entry. On every second street corner it seems that there’s a sign proudly saying ‘internet’ – and for very cheap prices too (although our hotel has it for free).

Lima is a world where our eyes are constantly amazed, fascinated and amused. To come from a country with little history to one steeped in rich layers of history is eye-opening. Artwork from a time I can hardly imagine is beautifully preserved and has a timelessness about it that inspires me.

Soon we leave for our tour around different parts of Peru – can’t wait to see the sights!

New Zealand’s newest and biggest mall opened last week. Americans don’t laugh, but it’s big to us: 24ha in size with 3000 carparks. I went to go there on opening day but they closed the motorway exits due to traffic chaos and on the front page of today’s paper, they were discouraging people from shopping there thanks to massive crowds and general mayhem.

Being the googler that I am, I naturally searched to find a map to the mall and for photos of what it’s like inside and possibly info on the big opening specials. A quick search for Sylvia Park brought up a few local news stories about traffic mayhem. The top result was a link to a boring corporate-investment perspective on the mall (and later I find a tiny hard-to-spot link at the very bottom to the official site), the second result was to Welcome to Sylvia Park – so I clicked on this and found a lovely retirement village which almost choked Firefox. Haven’t seen one of those animated email gifs for a while! The 3rd-5th results were to news releases, council developments. The sixth link took me by surprise:

Sylvia Park – Homepage
Sylvia Park, Auckland – another quality property proudly owned by Kiwi Income Property Trust, Kiwi Income Property Trust.
http://www.sylviapark.org/

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I’m sure that investors are proud to own the mall but in terms of SEO, a far better description for all those shoppers looking for information would have been something like this:

Sylvia Park Mall
Sylvia Park Mall, Mt Wellington Auckland – New Zealand’s newest and biggest shopping centre
http://www.sylviapark.org/

And check out that URL. A .org?! While anyone can register a dot org domain name, “the idea is…that the organization is likely not to be a for-profit commercial endeavour.” Hello? A mall doesn’t quite fit that description.

Sure, sylviapark.co.nz and sylviapark.com are taken but why not sylviaparkmall.co.nz?

If you search for sylvia park mall or sylvia park shopping centre , the site doesn’t feature in the Top 500 sites.

So what about the site itself?

Without going into the nitty gritty code stuff, I’m fascinated by their URL structure. Each page is given a cryptic filename such as n622.htm or n516.htm. There’s nothing on the home page to tell me that it’s a shopping mall/centre – hence the reason why it performs so poorly when I searched for it. (more…)

My weakness isn’t pairs of shoes, gadgets or collecting DVDs. I’m continually tempted to buy new notebooks. (more…)