Last weekend we released our new free iPhone application, you can find it on iTunes here: iTunes, or read a bit about it here: Apptism.
Initially we made it such that most of the information available on ZiTYZEN also is available on the iPhone version, though users are not able to log in or contribute in any way. If the application is successfull we will expand it, such that users can also uploads pictures, write reviews, etc.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Moving the development to Silicon Valley
As of the end of August, ZiTYZEN.com will move it's development to Sunnyvale in Silicon Valley.
There are a few reasons to this; We believe that if we are located in the midst of the area were most major international websites originate from and where the most innovative work is done. We will also become more innovative and learn much, ultimately making ZiTYZEN.com an even better website.
Furthermore Pia, one of the founders of ZiTYZEN, has received a shortterm job offer in Sunnyvale lasting until May 2010, hence she will be working part-time on ZiTYZEN until then.
There are a few reasons to this; We believe that if we are located in the midst of the area were most major international websites originate from and where the most innovative work is done. We will also become more innovative and learn much, ultimately making ZiTYZEN.com an even better website.
Furthermore Pia, one of the founders of ZiTYZEN, has received a shortterm job offer in Sunnyvale lasting until May 2010, hence she will be working part-time on ZiTYZEN until then.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Updates
It's been a while since the last update, but many things has happened since...
Yesterday we put out our new "home" page. We have felt that we missed a "home" page for a long time, but it's notoriously difficult to make a "home" page, hence it took us a while... We made several iterations and agreed upon the current design. Currently it's only available to Denmark, since we don't have any pictures from Norway yet.
We're still not completely satisfied, but desided that the current design is much better than the previous, hence we put it out. This also implies that a few upgrades will come along in the coming months.
Around a week ago we got the translation to norwegian, hopefully we will get the swedish translation tomorrow :-)
The main reason to why we needed the norwegian translation is that since we operate in Norway it seems appropriate to have ZiTYZEN in the local language, furthermore it's much easier to perform SEO towards google.no if the website is available in norwegian.
Another upgrade we made was to enable history on the searchpage, this is a major problem on ajax pages. Luckily I found a plugin to JQuery, created by Mikage. By using this plugin it was fairly easy to enable history, though it still took a few days to make it work properly.
This upgrade has been suggested by numerous visitors, so a thanks goes out to all of them, for helping us make a better website :-)
Lastly a status update on our expansion to Norway, does it pay?
Since the launch on June the 1st, we've earned 1.5% of our ad earnings in Norway, and so far in July it's 5% of our add earnings we've earned in Norway. We expect (and hope) that this number will rise to around 45%.
Still we have had no affiliate earnings in Norway, affiliate earnings comprise 33% of our total earnings.
Yesterday we put out our new "home" page. We have felt that we missed a "home" page for a long time, but it's notoriously difficult to make a "home" page, hence it took us a while... We made several iterations and agreed upon the current design. Currently it's only available to Denmark, since we don't have any pictures from Norway yet.
We're still not completely satisfied, but desided that the current design is much better than the previous, hence we put it out. This also implies that a few upgrades will come along in the coming months.
Around a week ago we got the translation to norwegian, hopefully we will get the swedish translation tomorrow :-)
The main reason to why we needed the norwegian translation is that since we operate in Norway it seems appropriate to have ZiTYZEN in the local language, furthermore it's much easier to perform SEO towards google.no if the website is available in norwegian.
Another upgrade we made was to enable history on the searchpage, this is a major problem on ajax pages. Luckily I found a plugin to JQuery, created by Mikage. By using this plugin it was fairly easy to enable history, though it still took a few days to make it work properly.
This upgrade has been suggested by numerous visitors, so a thanks goes out to all of them, for helping us make a better website :-)
Lastly a status update on our expansion to Norway, does it pay?
Since the launch on June the 1st, we've earned 1.5% of our ad earnings in Norway, and so far in July it's 5% of our add earnings we've earned in Norway. We expect (and hope) that this number will rise to around 45%.
Still we have had no affiliate earnings in Norway, affiliate earnings comprise 33% of our total earnings.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
The birth of an international company
ZiTYZEN is now officially an international company!!!
Cool stuff...
We expanded to Norway, beginning with 7.403 places.
I must admit that we came across a few surprises in the process: We thought Denmark and Norway were much more similar, than they actually were. (Still they were very similar)
The biggest surprise is that in Denmark every place has it's own address on a street with a streetnumber, this is not the case in Norway! A given place can have only a zipcode and a name, e.g. Jotums Farm, 8056 Saltstraumen. As one can imagine the yields problems when trying to find lat/long coordinates for Google Maps.
We've set Google Adsense, such that we can track which country each click comes from. This is done using channels, we've created ads for each country and put them the channels "Denmark" & "Norway" respectively.
We still need to to a few things in order for this to be fully finished, e.g. translate ZiTYZEN to Norwegian, and creating Norwegian sitemaps for Google. But now Google can start indexing our Norwegian places :-)
Cool stuff...
We expanded to Norway, beginning with 7.403 places.
I must admit that we came across a few surprises in the process: We thought Denmark and Norway were much more similar, than they actually were. (Still they were very similar)
The biggest surprise is that in Denmark every place has it's own address on a street with a streetnumber, this is not the case in Norway! A given place can have only a zipcode and a name, e.g. Jotums Farm, 8056 Saltstraumen. As one can imagine the yields problems when trying to find lat/long coordinates for Google Maps.
We've set Google Adsense, such that we can track which country each click comes from. This is done using channels, we've created ads for each country and put them the channels "Denmark" & "Norway" respectively.
We still need to to a few things in order for this to be fully finished, e.g. translate ZiTYZEN to Norwegian, and creating Norwegian sitemaps for Google. But now Google can start indexing our Norwegian places :-)
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
New pages
Yesterday we added a few new pages to ZiTYZEN; "Links" and "http://www.zityzen.dk/?page=suggest". "Suggest a new place" because we receive numerous e-mails with requests for new places, and we feel it's easier this way. "Links" was created in order to share links with other companies we collaborate with.
In order to get all the new links available on ZiTYZEN we created a sitemap in the bottom of the page, nothing fancy but functional.
A fun usability bug we also found (and corrected) yesterday, was that the language dropdown menu had a link for the language that already was selected. Implying that if your current language was Danish and you clicked on the dropdown menu on the Danish flag, the exact same page would reload with the exact same language. Not a necessary feature!
The bug was discovered by a person that viewed the page while I was accidentially watching. Looking over the shoulder of unsuspecting users is highly valuable :-)
In order to get all the new links available on ZiTYZEN we created a sitemap in the bottom of the page, nothing fancy but functional.
A fun usability bug we also found (and corrected) yesterday, was that the language dropdown menu had a link for the language that already was selected. Implying that if your current language was Danish and you clicked on the dropdown menu on the Danish flag, the exact same page would reload with the exact same language. Not a necessary feature!
The bug was discovered by a person that viewed the page while I was accidentially watching. Looking over the shoulder of unsuspecting users is highly valuable :-)
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