So Ormskirk’s getting a new nightclub. Some of the residents of Ormskirk aren’t impressed that it’s applied for a 3am licence. I’m glad that the Arriba of old is gone – it’s years since I’d been in because the sticky floors put me off so much!
But as I passed by on my lunch break today, one thing instantly struck me – they are advertising an email address – alpineormskirk@googlemail.com – on the side of the building with no mention of a website. This is a badly missed opportunity, poorly executed. Who is seriously just going to email a nightclub, and why would they? A domain name costs ten quid for two years so why advertise a Gmail address? Even if it’s just a holding page with dates of upcoming club nights it would offer something to those searching for more information online. Heck it could even redirect to a Facebook fan page!
If by any chance this happens to rank higher on Google than anything else about the Alpine Club, you can hire me for online marketing advice – my rates are reasonable 
Update: it took about an hour for this post to get top Google ranking for “Alpine Club Ormskirk”.
For quite some time I’ve had "Vanity" Alerts set up with Google. To attempt to cut out some of the irrelevant results, I’ve had a a couple of negative filters to remove Mike Nolan, former head coach of the San Francisco 49ers. Now that I’m going to SF, I might have to remove some of these filters!
This summer, brother Alex and I are heading West to the New World for a bit of a road trip around the USA (with a detour into Canada to see some relatives). 18 days to travel from San Francisco to New York via lots of hopefully cool places.
With both Alex and I being IT professionals, it seems appropriate to use the interwebs to help us out and decide what to do along the way.
Here’s the initial route we came up with:
So: San Francisco, CA; LA, CA; Las Vegas, NV; Grand Canyon, AZ; Denver, CO; Chicago, IL; Toronto, ON; Boston, MA; New York, NY.
If you’ve been to any of these places, or have heard of good things to see and do, let us know in one of the following ways:
During the trip, I’m hoping to keep track of what’s going on. Of course I’ll be tweeting, I might be able to blog occasionally, I’ll upload photos to Flickr but I’d also like to try some more unusual things. I’ll try to plot the route on mapme.at – hoping that John McKerrell can advise on the best way to do this!
Welcome to Alex and Michael’s trip across the USA! Here’s some things you can do to find out more: