The Mucklow Blog
Monday, November 26, 2007
Sunday, September 09, 2007
ok... I've been busy.
No time to post. But at least teh Mucklow Store is still up and running!www.mucklow.net
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Marketing Manipulation Gone Awry
NOW I know why nobody's been buying anything at my Mucklow Store! I was starting to think that Mucklows didn't care about their proud family name. :(CafePress, who hosts the store site, has a seriously dysfunctional weighting formula that it applies to keyword searches. The more popular your site, the more it bumps you up to the top. If your store is less popular, it docks you bad. (so the Rich get Richer' philosophy.) I have to admit that there are not that many of us Mucklows out there - relatively few in fact. However, their formula is screwed up in that it weights popularity SO MUCH that it weights MISSPELLINGS over DIRECT HITS. If you go to www.cafepress.com and search on Mucklow, all you get are about 30 hits for some Muckle guy selling Banjo art. My Mucklow Store is not even listed after his stuff, even though it is a direct hit on the search term. So, I asked CafePress if someone came to their site to find Mucklow emblazoned merchandise and do a search, do they REALLY think that they would by stuff with Banjo art on it instead because that’s what came up in their search, or would they just LEAVE? I hope the see the obvious answer.
They told me that they are in the process of converting to a MetaTag based search engine, so that should fix our problem when it changeover occurs (whenever that is.) We'll have to keep trying searches at www.cafepress.com to find out I suppose.
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Make your own coat of arms!

Even though it's not as fancy as the crest in our store, here is a site where you can make your own coat of arms based on the symbolism of the animals, plants, colors, and markings of your shield. Enjoy!