Research recently carried our for Cisco jointly by Oxford University’s Said Business School and Spain’s University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics has placed the UK 25th out of 66 countries in terms of the quality and reach of its networks.
Out of the 4 classifications, ranked in quality order from ready for tomorrow, comfortable for today, meeting needs for today and below needs for today the UK only managed to be ranked as “meeting needs for today”. South Korea and Japan are leading the way with the former promising 1Gigabit per second speeds by 2012. Read More »
The smaller images are on your webpages, the faster your site will load which will provide your users with a much better experience, especially those on slower connections and even dial-up access. This will also benefit you as you will be using less disk space to store the images, as well as less bandwidth to transmit them each time a user requests them, so it is beneficial all round!
If you have not optimised your images before or are not sure about this, I’ll give a quick example to show the benefits.
Lately there has been a lot going on in the search engine world, there are some new big players in town, namely Cuil and Wolfram|Alpha, Microsoft’s high profile rebrand and update of Live Search to Bing! as well as old staples Google and Yahoo!. There are even more that you might not have heard of yet in DuckDuckGO (I’m not entirely sure what they were thinking with their choice of name) and Worio all vying for the search spotlight.
Each one seems to have something going for it, Read More »
Building on my last post about SEO Friendly 301 Redirects I’d like to explain a bit more about when these should be used, and how you can use them to overhaul a poor site structure without losing your pagerank or link strength.
The basic explanation to these is that a 301 redirect is known as a permanent redirect, this means that the 301 code is served in the http headers to your browser by the web server, letting it know that the page that was previously at this address has moved permanently to a new address. Read More »
These days many sites are secured by an SSL Certificate, I’m going to explain the reasons for this, when you need an SSL Certificate and when you do not, and also explain how to get one.
Online security is vitally important, in a world of credit card fraud and identity theft people need to be more and more vigilant when divulging their private details. Having the padlock symbol at the bottom of a page gives people a feeling of some security at least, this means the site is using an SSL Certificate so communication between the user and the website should not be able to be viewed by anyone else. Read More »
Recently I was asked for my opinion on how effective it is to place keywords in your domain URL to improve search engine rankings. This means for instance purchasing www.uk-paintballing-trips.co.uk for a company targetting the “uk paintball trips” search term. First of all I had seen a recent video created by Matt Cutts of Google fame on this subject, you can view it below:
Making sure your web site is search engine friendly seems to be more and more important these days with the markets so competitive, it’s worth considering what the search engines will think if you redirect a page, because for example you want to give it a more search engine friendly URI.
The best way to do this is using a 301 redirect, this tells any spiders that your page has moved permanently to a new address, and this should pass all PageRank and other benefits from the links you may have to your current page to your new page. Read More »
These days almost any business you can think of has a website, be it the local pub or a multinational corporation, and the reason is that this can be a great source of advertisement and raise awareness of your business. For business that sell products or services to consumers, having a website is even more vital, and can enable you to extend your customer base much wider than for instance a single retail shop. A website costs a tiny fraction compared to the rent and other factors that would be necessary for a physical presence also, another clear advantage. Read More »
If you are building a new website from scratch, you may want to consider using a Content Management System (CMS) as the base for this. A CMS is a web application that is used for managing various types of content including images, videos, audio files, electronic documents and other forms of web content and digital media. These are often used for publishing web content on new websites as they allow for rapid website development and maintenance, generally offering powerful back-ends for administration, some even allowing drag and drop site creation. Most of the popular web CMS are open source, meaning that it won’t cost you a penny to use these, and they are very actively developed often with more collaborators working on a CMS than a commercial web app. Many of these have active communities offering helpful support around the clock for free also, and due to these points some very prolific sites make use of these CMS’s. Some examples of this are Ford (WordPress), The United Nations (Joomla) and MTV (Drupal) to name but a few. Read More »
During website development you may need to access a site without making changes to the DNS, for example if you wish to start developing a site on a new uk web hosting server without changing the live site. Often you will be able to access the site through a temporary address, but with the way that many of the current Content Management Systems work such as b2evolution, Wordpress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, PHP-Nuke, etc. then access through this temporary address may result in the site displaying incorrectly. There are a few ways around this Read More »
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