November 1, 2011
Your most loved blogs in the internet?
O.K, this ones for you, the readers of my blog. I want you to help me compile your list of the best blogs on the internet.
Any ideas??? please let me know…
October 24, 2011
Cloud Computing – my take on it.
You are probably using some form of cloud computing already, where there are servers hosting peoples websites there are also database servers holding data, these servers form the cloud which you connect to, not only do they store your data but they run the applications for you. ‘I can use my iPad, no need for the PC anymore…?’ well don’t throw it out of the window quite just yet even though you have been itching to for years!. It’s important to stay in control of your own data.
I’m going to make a prediction now.
‘Within the next 4 years (2012 – 2016) a big corporate company is going to loose or have stolen a large section of public information. Be it public photo’s, contact’s, spreadsheets, or whatever it is, there will be masses of very upset people that may not have backups or will have their own personal security invaded.’
My point being Cloud is a new technology and always keep your data safe on your own backups on your own hardware.
Let me spell this out clearer, don’t let Facebook be the only place you put your important photo’s.
COST
Please when signing up for free trials read the small print. You may have to cancel your subscription or they will take your money on a slow monthly flow out of your account that may last for years, the equivalent thing happens when you have left a small water leak and it mounts up to a huge bill when it goes un-noticed.
My advice to you on Cloud Computing is simply never give out your credit card details and live without it if it’s on a monthly fee.
October 11, 2011
Keeping your business broadband up and running.
Small / medium size businesses can experience major problems when their broadband decides to either stop because phone engineers are making changes or your data traffic gets bogged down because someone sending a huge file. I usualy suggest to have a back up broadband supply and router to cover for this, but switching over from one to the other can be difficult especially if you have services in place that require reconfiguring. But now at last an affordable router seems to have hit the market, The Draytek Vigor2820N ADSL2/2+ router which has whats known as a WAN port. You can connect a secondary ADSL router to this and configure it to either load share the two ADSL lines or use the lines independtly and auto switch if there is a broadband issue.
Well done Draytek, business life may be a little less stressful from now on.
September 22, 2011
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- 3 Page SEO dedicated web design
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- Domain name registration
- Dedicted webspace with online statistics
- Email address.
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September 8, 2011
How well constructed is your website?
First question. Is your website working for you?
(take some time on this question, it’s huge!)
Does your website portray your business in an appropriate professional manor?
Does it guide potential customers to you?
Is your phone ringing?
Do you get regular website form enquiries?
What else could it do for you?
Is your website written correctly with good Search Engine Optimisation?
Let’s check…
Here are a list of websites that offer good website checking reports:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
http://validator.w3.org/
http://www.onlinewebcheck.com/
http://www.craigcecil.com/checkyoursite.htm
Do you have online web statistics? It’s important to keep a regular eye on these.
I have found that looking at the monthly visit rate gives you an obvious instant website health monitor.
Website visitors for non promoted websites should get:
A single person / sole trader – between 1-10 visitors a day (100 visitors a month).
A small company with lets say 5 people should get appox. 5-15 visitors a day (250 visitors a month).
A medium size company of lets say up t0 50 people should be visited by at least 20 visitors a day (600 visitors a month).
These figures are based upon non promoted websites (that I monitor), marketing your website correctly should make these figures jump ten fold and when I mention marketing, I am not talking about expensive adverts in glossy magazines, the positive affects that communicating with your clients in the form of blogs and social media formats should not be overlooked.
Note:
It’s important to know the difference between an actual visitor to your website and it’s hit rate. These are two very different things. A hit is an actual hit count on the server, the server gets hit everytime a picture is viewed for example, a page with ten pictures will be hit ten times as the single visitor views the webpage. Hit rate monitors are often used to mislead website owners on how busy their websites actually are.
August 24, 2011
Which Blog’s and how to posts blogs by email
I have been asked how to do Blog post’s via email using Blogger, WordPress, Posterous or Dupral, technical links to this listed below, but for those of you thinking, I want to do a blog, your be asking yourself theses questions… Why, What, Which and How?. The Why? and What? parts I can’t help with, but the Which and How parts I can…
Which Blog?
If cost is an issue then i would look at a blog that isn’t hosted by yourself, this would be Google’s Blogger or Posterous, I had a quick dabble with Posterous and found it very quick to get up and running. The only initial thoughts I have on these two formats is that as they are hosted elsewhere in the cyber clouds, they are not bringing traffic to your website, which in my personal requirement and hence, rules them out. Leaving Dupral and WordPress, both of which connect to a database at your ISP and connect to your dedicated webspace (and with that brings costs). WordPress i would say is more dedicated to blogging whereas Dupral expands out to do complete websites.
I just can’t wait for your comments on this subject and please correct me if you feel I have missed something here
How…
Email to Blog Links…
WordPress
http://en.support.wordpress.com/post-by-email/
Blogger
http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?answer=41452
August 18, 2011
The well constructed website checklist / wishlist:
- A clean search engine friendly, domain name.
- Good design conveying a modern if not appropriate feel, that convey’s the relevant information in an effective manner and simple to use.
- Content – If your not interested in what your talking about then your clients probably won’t be either.
- Strong Search Engine Optimisation throughout (see what I did there). Well written text with keywords embedded with sub links displayed. The site should be well thought out and have good read flow.
- Well shot video clips embedded neatly, with good compression so the videos run smoothly.
- Clear and appropriate photography throughout with some ‘Flash’ – moving pictures will add some interest to the pages.
- A simple contact form with a drop down for users to select which part of the team they would like to reach. This is much better from a privacy standpoint. – Never put your personal email address directly onto websites because you will be spammed.
- The website should be clean with no “Validation errors”, i.e pages that lie redundant and old pages should rerouted correctly using the 301 redirect method.- Well written Meta Tags – good effecive / relavent keywords and descriptions for each page embracing SEO techniques.
- If you require to change the text yourselves then you require a Content Management System, which can be added to your website using database driven CMS software.
- Dynamic content – Adding a blog, or regularly updated news feed frequently is ranked more favourably by Google.
- Create a site map which will allow google to index a site properly
- Use a language called javascript to create a nice overlay effect for the display of the email, etc.
- Add a Google map with well written directions.
- Make sure your website is properly backed up
- Don’t leave important company data on the website that could help competitors, client lists for example, i never mention my top customers on my website for this very reason.
- Website width – Every year it’s seems that the screen resolution on monitors gets wider and wider, try to keep up with this, i think a good width at the moment is approx. 1200 pixels wide. Really well coded websites expand and decrease with the different screen sizes.
- Website Statistics – It’s important to have some form of website statistics so you can monitor how your website, it’s pages, searchwords and all its traffic movements need to be monitored and analised by someone who know what to to do with them. (I’m never to far away btw*). *that’s by the way in geek btw!.
- Sound – Subtle use of sound can really add to a website, be carefull not to over do this one as it easy to go OTT on it, Here’s an example of what I did for Audrey Douglas
- Compatabilty – Allways check your website for use on all browsers, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera… What does it look like on an iPad? or Smartphone?. I will also look into the disability recomendations on this and update later.
- Search Engines – Make sure you are listed in all the major search engines… These are in current popularity order
August 13, 2011
Business Logo Design
I quite often get asked to design company logo’s, I was asked this week so I thought I would share this one with you. The brief was to design a logo for Swanston Properties Ltd (a building project management company based in the UK), they requestesd that the ‘S’ was a swan and the colouring and font was to be quite bold.
Swanston Properties new company logo designed by: Richard Gould
August 4, 2011
Backing up your data.
It’s so important to back up your data but often overlooked, there are lots of options here, so i will go over a few of my recommendations:
Windows PC users:
Use Norton 360 as your Anti Virus option, this includes very good backup software which is easy to setup and automate. Some simple options to click to activate email backup are very useful as many people overlook this as Outlook files are embedded deep into directories making them troublesome to find.
Backup your data to external hard drives and if you have a business, rotate these disks to suite, keep a weekly backup disk offsite (the glove compartments of cars very useful this) ;o). This means that in case of fire or theft you will always have your data*.
*If your worried that someone may burn down your house/office and then steal your car then you may want to think about additional backup procedures.
Business Backups (NT Server)
There is no need for me to say how important getting a good policy sorted out is for this, so here’s what to do.
Just backing up the data alone is not enough for these complex-ed beasts. I recommend using Acronis software to take an image backup of the operating system itself, this way you can do a rebuild in a few hours and the years of endless tweaks/settings for all user policies will all be restored safely.
Second Copy software can cheaply copy the data onto daily external disks overnight (label these with days of the week). Also, if you have Exchange, use the Microsoft Backup software to backup the Information Store over the weekend (this can take a while to do). This will dismount and store the Exchange’s database to a .bkf file. This in turn should be backed up onto the daily backup disks.
Other options for data protection on Servers that involve disk mirroring and RAID should be looked into for more data sensitive scenarios.
Smartphones
It’s easy to overlook this one, but so often important photos and contacts are lost. Back these devices up to your PC’S that are backed up hopefully by steps similar to the steps mentioned above.
Apple Macs.
O.K, hands up, I don’t have a recommendation for these, but I’m sure someone will post a response to this blog.
August 4, 2011
Google, Bing, Yahoo and getting websites to the top of them.
I’ve been looking into various ways into getting websites high up in the Google rankings. There seems so much to this that i thought you might be interested in my findings. The first thing that seems to be coming up is well written code, Robots like to read through the website and pickup any words or links they can, so an image with a correct mouse over name and a correct link to the full hyperlink address will work wonders.
Meta Tags / keywords with well written appropriate descriptions on each page is a must, and some good external links will help to. Google rates higher .edu websites so a collabrative link from one of these will pull you up those ratings some more, infact the more good external links coming into your site the higher you go.
Google doesn’t like words hidden in Flash, etc, so try to keep your text open on the screen where it can be read by the Robots / Web Crawlers
Google Adwords are a fast instant traffic booster pay may prove very expensive if you don’t get an expert to do them for you, there are many tricks here that need to be applied to stop wastage payed clicks. For Example: If your trying to get local business in the UK there is no point having your adds on in America and what time of day do your adds work most effectively?, etc, etc…
Google is not the only answer though, Yahoo, Bing and others are also extremely important and work in the same way as Google (with reference to web crawlers). There’s so much to cover on this subject that I welcome others to join in on this huge subject.
Website Boosters:
Twitter feed: Adding this feed to your homepage will give your homepage the changing text that Search Engines crave for and also gives your readers something to keep an on and a reason to come back, good restraint required on business feeds to keep your Tweets appropriate!
Blog: Adding a blog to your website will greatly increase traffic to your site, rules to good website design apply here, good well layed out content is key.
Facebook: Adding a dedicated Facebook page for yourself /business is a great way to communicate with the people that are interested in you and will certainly gain you a higher visit rate.
Backlinks: An important strategy for getting up the rankings is to create as many good backlinks. A backlink is an external link to your website that you may of left in a blog, or on a banner ad. for example. There are many ways to skin a cat here so keep your mind open.
THANKS FOR READING!
If you run a business and want me to take a look at your website and offer my advice email richard@ghost.uk.com
Getting involved…