How long is your ‘to do’ list? We’re a busy bunch here at WDL and all of us usually have more than one project on the go at any one time. Then there’s the things on the list that have been there a while… generally speaking, it’s something that has been hindered for some reason, maybe a question needs to be answered to complete what needs to be done. Perhaps the task needs a little extra thought and there just hasn’t been the time. There’s always a reason to put some things off.

My job naturally involves some things that could be viewed as a little tricky. If a client has forgotten about an invoice, it’s part of my job to give them a nudge. Putting this off helps no-one. There might be a problem, perhaps – and I hope not – a client who is late paying has a genuine issue that needs to be resolved before they can pay. I can help sort that out, but only if I know about it. Or maybe their ‘to do’ list has started to resemble The Complete Works of Shakespeare and I just need to remind them that our invoice should be in the next act.

Putting things off can be dis-conducive to a healthy state of mind. I always find it easier to complete the tasks that need extra thinking time if I clear the deck of the smaller but lower-priority tasks as often as I can. I’m setting aside half an hour a day this week to tidy up my to do list – will you join me?

We now have four employees whose full time job is to write code; Sam, Tom, George and myself. We’re split evenly across back-end and front-end development, but there are big overlaps in the work that we produce. I’ll sometimes dabble into some PHP to get something working for the front-end that I’m building, or Sam might write some JQuery interactions to try out some back-end stuff that he is developing.

It is sound advice (almost gospel even) to ‘always code like you are in a team’. This means having clean, clear, well documented code that another developer can look at and quickly get an idea of what it is, what it does and how they can work with it.

As the development team has grown it has become more and more apparent that we needed a smarter and more central way of managing the code that we write. Recently, we addressed one small part of this problem.

When you work on a large number of projects, patterns in your code are bound to emerge from time to time: the same piece of functionality, similar layout or styling. What is the point in wasting time writing out the same piece of code time and time again when there are a million other things to get done on the project. Sometimes you just want a quick and simple way of inserting something that you, or another member of the team has already written.

Up until a little while ago I had a code library (of sorts) stored in a simple set of files on one of the resources drives in the office. It served a purpose, but it wasn’t very clever. It was only accessible from within the office, it was slow to find what you wanted and slow to get the relevant code into the document that you’re working on.

So, the solution. We needed a central, online storage facility, and a lightning fast way of interacting with it.

We found this provided by GitHub, or more specifically by GitHub Gists. Where GitHub is a repository for full projects, GitHub Gists allows you to store and manage a library of smaller snippets of code. Because Gists run on Git, they are also open to versioning, meaning that we can update our snippets over time, but roll back and access an older version at any point.

The latter is made possible by our new text editor of choice, Sublime Text 2. Words cannot describe how much of a difference this amazing little app has made to productivity. It is a world away from slow, hand holding editors like Dreamweaver. I don’t want my hand held, and definitely do not want slow! I want a fast text editor with a minimal interface and tonne of power under the hood that’s ready to hulk out when I need it. That is what ST2 is, and it integrates with GitHub and (more importantly for this issue) Gists.

The combination of these two tools allow us to quickly create, search for and insert a specific snippet of code at the drop of a hat. Everything is organised and aptly named, is accessible from anywhere, easily updatable and did I mention it’s quick?!

This is just one small step towards a bigger goal of working with code in the most accessible and efficient way, but it is already having a big impact on our work.

To clear up some of the haze of uncertainty, we’ve picked  a short list of things to look out for when choosing or deciding to continue with a web hosting provider.

1. Uptime.

The bottom line. If your site isn’t available, your customers can’t interact with it. Most reputable providers will maintain server uptime percentages in the very high nineties, normally 98% plus. Some downtime is inevitable, all servers need updates and upgrades over time which might involve some out-of-hours interruptions. However, if your site disappears every other day for hours on end, it’s time to look for a new home.

2. Backups.

Normally, most hosting providers have Terms & Conditions that specifically put the responsibility of maintaining regular backups firmly in the customer’s lap. However, as a general rule, a genuinely business-friendly provider will be backing up their servers regularly, and will include your sites, databases, supporting files (etc.) in their backups. WDL uses a top-of-the-line drive imaging backup system to protect our servers, but we still like our customers to keep their own backups, for their own piece of mind and an extra layer of protection.

3. Databases.

Any business-grade hosting package should include access to at least one database these days. Nearly all of the common website features we’re accustomed to now require a database to function: blogs, e-commerce systems, content management systems, forums (etc.); the only time a database should be an extra-cost option is if it’s a licensed platform, like Microsoft SQL Server. If your current provider wants to double the cost of your hosting just to add a database (and then take a week to turn it on), you should start shopping around (or just come to us).

4. Shared Server vs Overloaded Hulk.

The most common type of hosting is provided on a shared server – this means you’re renting space on a larger single machine, much like renting a flat in a high-rise block. From a provider’s perspective, running this kind of server is a balancing act between getting a good profit from running a server (lots of sites on one machine) and providing a good service for the hosted sites (fewer sites on one machine). Some providers swing right out to the extremes on numbers of hosted sites per server; we’ve seen as many as 700 sites served by one machine! At this kind of scale, your site would be stuffed in like a tinned sardine, with very little real-time access to bandwidth and resources. This kind of approach leads to slow sites, bounced emails, and a poor visitor experience. There are a number of tools to check this online  - these will show you how many domains are sharing your site’s IP address, giving you a rough idea of the number of sites on your server. If it’s around 200+, you should be paying bottom-end prices, and are probably getting a service to match. Just out of interest, WDL limit the number of sites on our shared servers to 100, and carefully manage the types of sites to prevent resource hogging.

5. Support.

Let’s be honest, when things go horribly wrong what you really really need is to talk to someone who can fix it. A proper, real person, not a ticket system or a livechat window; nothing gets things fixed quicker than bending someone’s ear. Now, that doesn’t mean calling and shouting at people every time some small error or fault appears (see this guy). What we mean is that a decent hosting company will always have an “I have to speak to someone” option as a last resort. It might be at the end of the normal support ticket process, or through a form on the site that pages/texts someone, but the end result will be someone directly helping you with your problem. If you’ve ever spent an hour or so trawling your hosting provider’s website, searching in vain for a phone number that doesn’t make you talk (slowly) to a computer then you’ll know where we’re coming from. In short, if you can’t talk to them, ditch them.

Doubts?

If you’re ever in any doubt as to whether your current provider is up to spec for a new project, give us a nudge. We’ll happily have a look for you and contact the provider on your behalf to talk specs and acronyms with them. We’ll be impartial and honest when we let you know what we think, and our hosting services will always be offered as an option, not a requirement. We like our clients to come to us because they know we’re the best option, and stay with us because we treat them right.

Google has been cracking down on the addresses shown in Google Places listings, in some cases removing listings that don’t meet the Google Places Quality Guidelines.

The long and short of the issue is that if you don’t receive customers at the business address in your Google Places listing, for example if you are a self-employed plumber whose business is home-based, then you need to select the “Do not show my business address on my maps listing” option in your Google Places ‘edit listing’ page.

Failure to do so could result in Google removing your listing until the address has been hidden.

If your business is based at your home and you serve some customers there and some at other locations then you can still show your address, but it is also recommended that you use the ‘Service Radius’ feature in Google Places to show your customers the area in which your business operates (your ‘Service Area’).

Of course, if you own a brick-and-mortar business and all of your customers are served at the address shown in Google Places, then you are allowed to (and indeed should) show your business address.

While this may not be an ideal situation for some businesses (e.g. plumbers who like to show their address because it enables customers to find nearby plumbers) and there has been previous concern about the negative impact that the ‘Hide Address’ feature may bring (the general consensus now is that choosing to hide your address won’t negatively impact local-based rankings), it is surely better to have an address-free Places listing appear in Google searches – getting your business visibility among your competitors and showing customers your phone number – than nothing at all.

If you believe that your Google Places listing is in breach of the Google guidelines, please Contact Us for details on how to get your listing fixed.

I know, right?

The main question that has been on my mind, as a Digital Marketer, is what does 2012 have in store for SEO, along with the general field of Online Marketing?

Content

What’s the score?

First things first, I know that content will remain King, although a lot more emphasis will be placed on the ‘freshness’ (thanks to the ‘Freshness Update’ Google applied to its algorithms on 2nd November 2011, which affected approximately 35% of searches) and quality (thanks to the ongoing iterations of Google’s ‘Panda Update’, originally launched in February 2011) of the content.

What can be done?

Make sure you update your site regularly with high quality, insightful, UNIQUE content which contains original analysis. Readers don’t want to see re-hashed articles on your site when they could read the original article in more depth on someone else’s site.  Remove or improve shorter articles because it is better to have one longer, in-depth piece on a topic than two pieces of shorter content virtually saying the same things but in a slightly different way.

Make sure you talk about timely topics as soon as they are relevant, to capture users who want information from your site’s point of view about a trending topic. However, there will be times that you just can’t generate enough original comment about a topic to put out a full article on it – in this case, write a tweet/Facebook post/Google+ post to acknowledge the event and here you will be able to at least express some sort of feeling about the event and what it means to your business. These social media posts may well be pulled by the search engines when someone searches for the topic.

However, bear in mind that search engines will also want to display general or historical information about a topic when it develops and pops up in the news again. Therefore, you need to make sure that your site contains ‘evergreen’ content about all relevant topics for which you want to have ‘expert’ status. ‘Evergreen’ content isn’t as time specific so can be read all year round. An example of this might be a ‘how to’ article on a bank’s website, for example ‘How to open a bank account’.

Authority and Trust

What’s the score?

Search engines want to rank authoritative and trustworthy sites well. This is all part of trying to provide the best user experience to searchers when suggesting potential pages to them in search rankings.

If users click through to your site from the search engine rankings, the search engine would rather the user enjoy the experience (website design is also important here) and stay on the site because it is a huge indication that your site is relevant for the search term that made your site appear.

Authority and trust play huge roles in user experience – who hasn’t gone to a website, seen the first page, screamed in horror in fear that just being on the site is going to end up in the theft of their identity and/or credit card details and clicked the back/close button faster than The Flash? I figured the number would be small.

Users are also looking for indicators that the information they are reading is accurate and that the person who wrote it is somewhat of an expert in their field. Are you more likely to click on an article about interviewing celebrities by ‘Parkinson’ or ‘Joe Bloggs’?

Remember that if a user (is logged into Google) visits your site from the search listings, is horrified by what they see and exits quickly back to the search results, Google registers this ‘speedy exit’ and then displays a ‘block this site from the search results’ link for the user to click on. If the user clicks this link, they won’t see results from your site when they next search using the same term (and it won’t reflect well on your site in Google’s eyes). You will have lost a potential customer and will lose traction with Google, who will likely reduce your rankings as a result.

What can be done?

Make sure that your site is designed well and contains accurate content by people who know what they are talking about. Proof read your content to check for factual and spelling/grammatical errors (I will NEVER buy stuff from sites that have spelling and grammatical errors – if they can’t be bothered to proof their text, how careful are they going to be with my credit card details?).

Give your authors an online presence by using authorship markup to enable Google to list your article along with the author’s name and a picture of him/her. Your readers will start to recognize the author (it’s easier to remember a face than a name) and want to click on their other articles when they see them, especially if they had a great read from the first piece?

If you are an ecommerce site taking payments online, register for industry standard security protocols (e.g. an SSL certificate) and display a badge, on your homepage, to show your users that the credit card information they enter will be safe.

Make sure that your site users can contact you and display contact information prominently. This will help because users will be able to see that they can contact someone who runs the site if they have an issue (and that it’s run by a real person/company and not a fraudster who is going to rip them off) rather than clicking back to the search engine results after 10 seconds.

Social Media

What’s the score?

Social media equals lots of user-generated content (blogs, images, videos). Firstly, search engines love new, fresh, unique content. Secondly, because people are looking for this type of content, search engines want to keep the users happy and want to present this type of content in search listings.

Social media is a great way to raise awareness of your brand because search engines will display items like Tweets, blogs and YouTube videos in the search listings. If you don’t have a presence in these areas, you won’t be there for search engines to list when the time comes.

Also, if you can get your users to talk about your brand and share content related to it, more people will hear about you and link to you which should increase the likelihood of being listed in relevant search listings.

What can be done?

Engage with your users via social media platforms, especially Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Do this by posting regularly and frequently. Share great deals on social media sites, tell users about your new blogs/other content.

Encourage your readers to follow your social media pages by adding buttons from sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to key pages on your site.

Also, encourage your readers to share your content with their friends/followers by adding Facebook ‘Like’, Google ‘+1’ and Twitter ‘Tweet’ buttons to your content.

Finally, make it easy for readers to share your content on social bookmarking sites by adding buttons for sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and reddit to your content.
What are your thoughts for how to keep up with Digital Marketing in 2012?

apple.com 1997

apple.com 2012

Looks aren’t everything I hear you cry, but having a website that is modern and professional in design can help maintain user attention for longer which, will help push your site up the search engine highway.

Ask yourself this when you next visit a website that you may be making a purchase from. Do you trust that company with your credit card details? What worked 10 years ago may not be working for your site today. Modern browsers are smarter and include features which are waiting to be used. Below is a list of some of the latest trends which will be making a big impact in 2012.

Bright and Colourful is Key:

Neutral colours are great for subtle design elements but bright hues of color can really grab a user attention and make a call to action stand out on your site. It can be difficult when selecting the right colours for a website but the general rule of thumb is to keep with no more than three main colours. It is also important that the colours on your website match your current branding otherwise it can make a logo stick out like a sore thumb.

Typography:

Font style is a vital ingredient with any design. They can help to change the meaning and tone of a sentence. It can be a struggle for any web designer when selecting fonts to use on a new design. Generally we are limited to web safe fonts which can be very generic and lacking in character (pardon the pun!). Luckily there are some ways to get around this. There are many free font archives available which offer a wide range of free font styles. Google offers its own version of web fonts which you can download and use in your new design http://www.google.com/webfonts.

Bigger text is better and if you want to get a message across it is always good to increase the font size. There are many good reasons why increasing your font size can make a big impact on the usability of your website. For example at the age of 40, only half the light gets through to the retina as it did at the age of 20.  The following article has put forward a good argument for increasing the size of the body text on a website which I hope will have a big impact in the New Year http://tiny.cc/4f4kh

CSS3 + HTML5

These two have been around for a couple of years now but with the legacy that is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 still on its death rattle it’s been hard for these new features to be used during the building stage of a website. It is said that CSS3 and HTML5 will be big this year and there is plenty of reason why it will be great move in the right direction.

There are many options available including box shadows, animated buttons, multiple backgrounds, rounded corners and transparent images. All these can help to create amazing new website layouts.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design refers to the development of a website which changes the contents layout depending upon the size of the screen the user is viewing the site on. Why would this be important to me you may ask yourself. Have you recently viewed a website on a mobile device or tablet? Some sites which are not designed for mobile devices can offer a poor user experience and in some cases will not work at all.  Mobile devices currently hold around a 7 percent share of web traffic, which is set to increase by 17 percent in 2012. This, in turn, will only further increase as we enter faster mobile broadband territory. These are potential users which may not be getting the experience you wish them to have from your current site.

For more information:

http://inspirationfeed.com/articles/design-articles/web-graphic-design-trends-in-2012/

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

http://designmodo.com/responsive-design-examples/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20118380-94/mobile-devices-driving-nearly-7-percent-of-web-traffic/

You’ve gone to the trouble of setting up your business on various social networks because you know you need to. You’re still not quite sure why it’s important, and you find it hard to measure it’s success, but you regularly post updates because you know you should. And you tell yourself, “What’s the point in having it if I don’t do anything with it?” and you get on and do it.

Now, if you are still struggling to work out the benefits of social media, below are some useful ideas and tools which will help you measure and monitor your social media presence.

Firstly, and most importantly it needn’t be a chore. It doesn’t need to take hours worth of man power or have huge resources devoted to it. During the course of a few minutes a day you can check your online activity in 5 easy steps. Each of the following will only take 2 or 3 minutes, so give it try. You’ve not really got any excuses!

1) Twitter Conversation

You can use tools like TweetDeck or Twitter Search to monitor conversations about your company in real-time by searching for #(insert your Twitter name), or keywords related to your business.

2) Facebook Stats

Visit your Company Page’s Facebook Insights. This can be found under the page’s main photo if you are an admin for your page. Look at the active users and interaction stats. Monitor wall posts or new discussions and respond accordingly.

3) Google Alerts

Check Google Alerts for your company name, products, directors or brand keywords. It’s easy to set this up, enter your search terms in a Google Alert and select to receive updates as they happen or just once a day. When it’s set up you will be alerted as people blog about your business, products and services – an alert will be sent to your inbox. You can then read the articles and respond/comment as and when appropriate.

4) LinkedIn Questions

Search for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your company can answer. When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website or a relevant blog post that might be helpful to theaudience.

5) Google Reader

Set up RSS feeds for searches on your company name and industry terms in other social media sites.

Once set up, these will help you to see what’s being said about your business, your products and your services. It will allow you to respond quickly and easily and add comments, and to share your expert opinion and knowledge to other conversations. And perhaps above all, all this activity will move your ‘name’ around the internet, which at the end of the day can only be good for business.

These little square blocks are QR codes and are a ways to embed information. QR codes are now used for any number of reasons by businesses and individuals alike. Dan Smigrod has a comprehensive list in his post ‘101 Uses For Quick Response (QR) Codes‘, which includes business cards with imbedded contact information, websites with secret/extra areas, discount codes for products and to release more content on dvd’s.

Wikipedia states “A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) first designed for the automotive industry. More recently, the system has become popular outside of the industry due to its fast readability and comparatively large storage capacity. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be made up of any kind of data (e.g., binary, alphanumeric, or Kanji symbols).The beauty of these codes lies in the fact that they are completely unobtrusive but can provide direct, location specific information when requested.”

A traditional barcode is scanned and directly turned into a series of binary values read from left to right. Examples of these can be found on any product you find any any shop. QR codes allow the information to be read both left and right, but also vertically. This means it can store far more information.

The four squares in each corner (see image above) provide information to the QR reader (you can download an app on any smart phone – for an Android version try QR Reader for Android , for IPhone try QR Reader for iPhone. They give the camera “anchors” in the image so that it can determine its orientation, alignment, and other features.

Many businesses are developing their own QR codes as smartphones become increasingly more popular and people want faster and more direct lines of communication between the products and services that they they’re interested in.

QR codes provide a quick and easy way for consumers and individuals to interact with the world around them and will no doubt continue to grow as medium of conveying information. WDL recognises the importance of new ways to promote your business and can create a unique QR Code for your business or product and add it to your website, your printed materials, or indeed anywhere you want it!

Contact us for more information about QR Codes.

If you are a business that has a web presence the key thing to remember is the best customer service and most incredible content means nothing if no one can find you.

If you don’t know where to start here’s three ideas to get you going.

1. Site Structure

Search engines need to ‘spider’ your site to rank it and display it in their results. The idea is to make it as easy as possible for them to work out what your site is about and find it’s way around. To help them, make sure that your navigation is not just flash animation and images, it needs readable text, well structured menus and relevant content. Link between pages and use ‘anchor text.’ (use the actual text to link not just phrases like ‘Click Here’ and ‘Read More’.) These little fixes will sometimes have a big effect on your site. Remember this is just the beginning and will need to be reviewed regularly.

2. Get Inlinks

In an ideal world getting the content right and optimising your site and it’s structure would push it up the search rankings and put you in first position for the search terms that you have optimised your site for. But, it It doesn’t work like that and there are many factors involved in raising your sites profile in search engines. We’re only touching the surface of the complicated algorithms that they use to rank your site. Google and the other big search engines like to rank sites for their popularity as well.

The most popular sites are the ones that have the most votes (inlinks). This is the most time-consuming area of SEO and it needs to be ongoing. You have to contribute to blogs, forums, and message boards relating to your website, write and submit articles, become an expert in your field and actively use social media. In essence you need to contribute something of worth to the internet. If you can do this you will generate inlinks to your site and this in turn will help you rank higher.

As an online business it’s not an option to ignore this, you need to work out if you have the time to do it, or get someone else to do it for you. Doing nothing about it is business suicide.

3. Research Your Competitors

Chances are that you know who your competiotrs are. If you don’t know, then work it out! Study their websites, think about how they are ranking higher than you for certain keywords and phrases, or indeed why they are not ranking as high as you. Check how many links they have to their site (use a backlink checker – there are some resources here www.seorankings.com.) Are they using video? Are they on Facebook? etc.

Keep up the research, or you will never know how to leapfrog your more succesfully placed competitors in the search rankings.

Take some time, give it some thought, use the ideas above to gain a little more insight and act on it.

SEO is complex and relentless, but if you decide to implement and organise your own SEO campaign make sure you do it properly, plan it carefully and stick to the plan. If you don’t have the time or the resources contact us and see how we can help.

 
To see SEO in action type ‘website design colchester’ into Google and see where we appear (no.1 just under the ads…).

Internet scammers are becoming smarter, ever more complex ways to steal your information are commonplace and making safety and security online is paramount. Last week Facebook launched a new security guide for parents, teens and teachers – the “Guide to Facebook Security”.

The downloadable handbook written by internet security experts Linda McCarthy, Keith Watson and Denise Weldon-Siviy and covers topics such as choosing the best password to make your Facebook account secure; taking back control of a hacked account and avoiding phishing (a way of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication).

The team at Facebook say “If you’re not using one-time passwords, secure browsing, or even tracking your account activity, this guide shows you how. It even explains why account thieves and malware pushers want your account.”

Top Tips for Staying Secure on Facebook;

• Only Friend people you know.
• Create a good password and use it only for Facebook.
• Don’t share your password.
• Change your password on a regular basis.
• Share your personal information only with people and companies that need it.
• Log into Facebook only ONCE each session. If it looks like Facebook is asking you to log in a second time, skip the links and  directly type www.facebook.com into your browser address bar.
• Use a one-time password when using someone else’s computer. •  Log out of Facebook after using someone else’s computer. •  Use secure browsing whenever possible.  •  Only download Apps from sites you trust.
• Keep your anti-virus software updated.
• Keep your browser and other applications up to date.
• Don’t paste script (code) in your browser address bar.
• Use browser add-ons like Web of Trust and Firefox’s NoScript to keep your account from being hijacked.
• Beware of “goofy” posts from anyone—even Friends. If it looks like something your Friend wouldn’t post, don’t click  on it.
• Scammers might hack your Friends’ accounts and send links from their accounts. Beware of enticing links coming from  your Friends.

You can download your copy from the Facebook Security Page.