5 Things to Consider When Starting a Website or Web Project

There are many ways to fail when launching a new website. Just as anything else in life, the Internet is a massive place and you are just a tiny speck on one of billions of radars.
The trouble starts when you, being so close to your own project, see your website as much more than it [...]

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Website Theft – Pitfalls and Opportunities

Are you concerned that competitors can steal your website?
What are the pitfalls for an offender, what are the legal comebacks and can you turn the situation to your favour?
Maybe, take the real world example below…
A case of website and web copyright theft
MintTwist and N.I.D-lab both create websites. N.I.D-lab stole MintTwist’s website with a cut-and-paste [...]

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Is a second wave of world Browser Wars heading our way?…

… Maybe. Although this time it will be more complex.
IE and FireFox are the dominant incumbents and Google’s Chrome is the rising super-power. However, dig a little deeper and you’ll see there are more potential players in the battle for world domination.
“The issue that lies ahead is whether browsers will remain a relatively simple window [...]

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Twitter sets to roost in London

London is becoming the Twitter capital of the world, in terms of number of users and number of businesses developing add-on tools for the communications network.
While Twitter is the toast of its native Silicon Valley in California, London boasts more users than any other city in the world.
Even though Twitter itself is yet to generate [...]

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A bad website harms your business

If you are going to have a bad website, you are probably better off having no website at all. It’s true. While a bad website at least gets your name in the search engines, it can also ruin your credibility. A hard to use website, for example, may push your potential customers over to [...]

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Internet users quick to judge

Internet users can take just one-twentieth of a second to decide whether they like the look of a website, researchers say.
Dr Gitte Lindgaard and colleagues from Carleton University in Ottawa flashed up websites for 50 milliseconds and asked participants to rate them for visual appeal.
When they repeated the exercise after a longer viewing period, the [...]

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What is the value of trust and friendship in business?

Has the recession changed the way you approach business?
Many of the business people in my network have answered an emphatic YES to this question…
Jurga Zilinskiene who runs established language translation services company Today Translations said, “During the recession we realised the value of our local suppliers. Trust and pulling together has been the key [...]

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WPP chief: Industry rebound will focus on web marketing

The world economy is improving, but that has not translated into increased demand for expensive, elaborate advertising campaigns, according to WPP Group chief Martin Sorrell. However, the industry has the potential to rebound, and when it does, it will focus on digital, Sorrell said.
Sorrell told reporters Wednesday that the ad industry will look very different [...]

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Online PR and Web Marketing

Remember all that time and effort you spent coming up with the right name for your business? You wanted the right name because your name is a large part of your brand. You want to create a brand that will conjur positive images about your business and stick in people’s minds; you wanted something that [...]

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Copywriting with a nod to SEO

Copywriting and SEO are getting closer and closer. Here are some key points to note when writing copy (that is SEO friendly) for a website …
1. Keywords are cool when it comes to writing copy for search
Many websites that guess their keywords and are spreading themselves too thinly (this included us at one stage). [...]

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What kind of ‘Twit’ are you?

This article was first posted a few months ago. Since then, amongst others, we’ve had one or two politicians start to follow our tweets. Whilst they might not be allowed to talk about their tweeting motives in public, we thought they may find this an interesting (and educational) read …
What kind of Twit are you?
1. [...]

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SEO – Linking Strategies

Links to your site from other sites drive additional traffic. But since Google and other major search engines consider the number of incoming links to your website (“link popularity”) as an important indicator of relevance, more links will help you rank higher in the search engines. Google has a measure called PageRank that reflects the [...]

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SEO – Harness Traditional Strategies

Just because “old media” strategies aren’t on the Internet doesn’t mean they aren’t effective. A mixed media approach can be very effective.
Include Your URL on Stationery, Cards, and Literature. Make sure that all business cards, stationery, brochures, and literature contain your company’s URL and see that your printer gets the URL syntax correct! In print, [...]

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Web Marketing – E-Mail Strategies

Don’t neglect e-mail as an important way to bring people to your website. Just don’t spam, that is, don’t send bulk unsolicited e-mails without permission to people with whom you have no relationship. Many countries have anti-spam laws.
Install a “Signature” in your E-Mail Program to help potential customers get in touch [...]

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URL Rewriting – Worth doing or not?

Dynamic websites are becoming more and more common as companies and individuals are realising that the internet is the best way to do business these days, and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is becoming more of a widely used term by people who have joined the internet revolution are looking for ways to get the correct [...]

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Learn how to read and write “twitter”

At Reply, or “@reply”: A direct tweet sent to another Twitter user.
Hash Tag: The “#” sign. Allows Twitter users to group tweets by topic, making it easier to search particular conversations using Twitter Search.
ReTweet (RT @USERNAME): To repost something that’s already in the Twitter stream.
SnapTweet: A tweet that includes a photo taken with a phone.
Twittcrastination: [...]

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Basic SEO Strategies

Perhaps the most important — and inexpensive — strategy is to rank high for your preferred keywords on the main search engines in “organic” or “natural” searches (as opposed to paid ads). Search engines send robot “spiders” to index the content of your webpage, so let’s begin with steps to prepare your web pages for [...]

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Making your website work for you

Times have changed. The information age is fully upon us.  Customers now have the ability to instantly compare prices, services, and products, and shop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week 365 days a year. Not to mention the ability carry around a high-speed wireless connection to the entire world in their pocket or purse!
Although [...]

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SEO – Social Media

A new form of website promotion comes from the mushrooming field of social media, in which people are encouraged to interact and respond to each other’s blog postings and comments. You should be aware of four types of social media: (1) blogs, (2) social networking sites, (3) social bookmarking sites, and [...]

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30 Examples of Attractive Navigation

Web designers always have to strike a balance between usability and visual appeal when designing a website. Without this balance, a website might be nice to look at or difficult to navigate. Or, it might be easy to navigate, but not easy on the eyes. With this in mind, balancing attractive navigation with usability does [...]

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Tweet crimes that don’t pay

By Tim Bradshaw, FT
KFC, the fast food chain, learnt a thing or two about the power of Twitter , the messaging site that allows members to post 140-character updates for all to see, when it launched grilled chicken earlier this year.
Something of a departure for the fried-chicken specialist, the company’s move into grilled chicken was [...]

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SEO – Research is key.

When it comes to SEO (search engine optimisation), we can all feel overwhelmed with the amount of information out there on how to go aout it correctly.  Whichever way suits you when building your web pages, getting your research right should be at the forefront of your quest to stay, and remain, on top of [...]

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Step by Step guide on uploading a website via FTP

One thing web designers can never avoid is having to use FTP software to upload a website; there is practically no other way to get a website onto the hosting server short of going to the actual server and uploading it physically with a USB stick.
How to Upload
In this step by step guide we will [...]

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Do Corporate Businesses Understand Web Technology?

By Peter Whitehead , Extract from the Financial Times
I don’t read many books, but one I did get through last year was about how a manufacturer was transforming itself into a provider of expertise and services.
The book* used a fictional company that made power generators to illustrate how high-speed connectivity and collaboration enabled it to [...]

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Website accessibility is good for business

If 10% of a businesses potential customers have difficulty finding it’s products or services, should that business address the problem or just carry on losing that money?
Nowadays, website accessibility is crucial for maximising revenue.
If you have not considered accessibility as part of your website design, you are excluding the 8% of the population with a [...]

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