You search and you search and still you can’t find a domain name that is easy to remember, sounds cool, and is related to your website’s subject. Has every word and variation on a theme been taken? It can certainly feel that way sometimes, and it can be tempting to go for a web 2.0 style domain name like gufful.com or boblr.com (feel free to have them, I just made them up), but help is at hand (que trumpets and gospel chants) with the 123-reg domain name suggestion tool.

Search for your domain name as normal and if you find the extension you want has been taken, simply click on the link “Can’t find the domain you’re looking for? Try our domain suggestions tool.” and thanks to some fancy semantic software you will be given a list of related alternatives to choose from.

Even if you decide to search again it can be a great source for ideas on alternative words to try and different combinations to play with.

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If you own Microsoft Excel 2007 and you have a Microsoft adCenter advertising account, a no brainer download has to be their adCenter add-in (Beta) for Excel 2007.

I have Excel 2007 on my personal lap top and I downloaded this keyword research add-in recently and I have been really impressed. I haven’t come across another free tool that gives you this amount of actionable data for free. I’ll be amazed if Google don’t offer somnething similar with their spreadsheet software some time this this year.

If anyone has used this already or is in fact aware of another tool that does all this for free, let us know!

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The office celebrated St George’s day yesterday and the majority of people showed up in costumes or red and white clothing. With dragons, horses and knights around the office we thought there would be some dragon slaying at some point but the day was celebrated peacefully and with lots of cake served by fair maidens.

For those that are not sure what St. George’s day is all about, take a look here

On the right is an example of a shiny knight (guarding some cake) who was one of the winners of the costume competition.

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Custom search on your site
If you have a content heavy site with lots of pages and regularly updated content, keeping it all easily accessible to site visitors is tricky. Rather than having to code your own site tool, simply copy and paste Google’s custom search code in to your site and you will magically have a site search tool.
http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

HTML editor
If you are ready to upgrade from WYSIWYG template software and you are frustrated with notepad, a great free HTML editor with built in FTP is coffeecup.com’s HTML editor 9.http://www.coffeecup.com/free-editor/.

Free images
Creating an interesting site with no pictures can be a pain, but it is not always worth shelling out for the license to use a picture. A great source of free pictures can be found through Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources

CSS templates
Just because I know how to use a paint brush doesn’t mean I can paint, and that’s true of graphical web design tools. Rather than hacking away for hours to make your website look presentable, leave it to the pro’s and download a free template that is ready to go.
http://www.opendesigns.org/
http://www.freecsstemplates.org/

Click on “Read the rest of this entry »” for links to:

Read the rest of this entry »

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Passwords and codes are a part of everyday life now. There is no escaping it. However, are you choosing ones which are strong enough to defeat the new bread of password hacking cyber criminals?

When you have to put a password into multiple systems many times a day, it can be tempting to choose a really simple one, then never change it. Worse, you might write it down on a piece of paper. I’ll put my hands up - I used to be guilty of this.

However, when these passwords can be all that’s protecting your email or your bank account, it’s worth taking the effort to make them hard to break. I’ve learnt there are a few tips that will help you make your passwords stronger and foil those pesky password hacking criminals.

It can be very tempting to use a word or number that’s easy to remember as your password. However, these are very easy to crack, putting your private information at risk from. Here are some tips on how to make a strong, hacking-resistant password that will help improve your security on the internet. Read the rest of this entry »

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Have you heard the story of the Hungarian farmer who electrocuted himself with a homemade stun gun while trying to kill a pig? Or the chap who strapped a rocket engine to his car and crashed into a mountainside?

Actually, the second one is an urban myth, as Wendy Northcutt will tell you. She’s behind the Darwin Awards website, which celebrates individuals who have removed themselves from the human gene pool (generally by dying) in extraordinarily idiotic ways.

This internet phenomenon has spawned a string of books and even a movie. As part of our series of interviews for this blog, I caught up with Wendy to talk about the awards.

The beginning

The Darwin Awards started on Wendy’s personal website, back in 1996: “I put some things on my website - I was working in a laboratory in Stanford, doing this on the side. It started as a joke, but I had a section called ‘pet porn’.”

“I’d taken pictures of my father wrestling with his dog on the floor,” she explains. “The dog slipped his tongue into my dad’s mouth - I took a picture of it accidentally. So there’s my dad, French kissing his dog.”

“People,” she continues, “thought it really was porn, so it became very popular. I was so embarrassed when I realised it was getting all of these hits that I took it down.”

Another section of her site contained some of the first Darwin Awards stories. She discovered these after her cousin mentioned the rocket car story to her. With the pet porn gone, these became the most popular pages on the site.

Wendy clearly considers herself a possible Darwin candidate. “I am going to take myself out in some stupid way,” she reckons, ”and I love hearing stories about other people who are just as stupid.” Read the rest of this entry »

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With 25 characters in the title and 35 characters per line in the body, getting across your marketing message in a search engine pay per click advert is a challenge, especially if you take in to account you will be competing with 10 organic results and 9 other paid results for the searcher’s attention.

Below is a dummy advert for an online sports store bidding on the keyword “trainers”

Trainers sale ends soon
Trainers up to 40% off top brands
Hurry ends soon. Free delivery
www.super-sport-shop.com/trainers

1. Use of the keyword in the advert
When a keyword appears in a PPC advert it is highlighted bold which makes your advert stand out and confirms to the searcher your advert is relevant to their search.

2. The keyword at the start of the title and body
When you look at a search engine results page you don’t read each entry and then make a considered decision. Rather you skim the page looking for visual cues as to which result answers your query best. Research is showing that if they don’t get a cue within the first few characters they will look elsewhere.

3. Stand out from the crowd
What are you marketing that makes people want it? Here we have a sale, so we lead with the biggest percentage discount we have. If you have a low cost product lead with the price, if you have a new product; emphasise that and so on.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Calling all website owners!

We are planning on running a series of profiles on websites our customers have created to demonstrate what is possible with a bit of time, effort and imagination.

If you have a website you are really proud of and you would like to be included drop us an email and we will get in touch. It doesn’t matter what kind of site it is, just that you are one of our customers.

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Just a quick post for those of you grappling with coding a website

I have some basic HTML knowledge from one of my modules at university, for example I can start a new paragraph with p, I can make a font bold with strong, I can add different sized headings with h1, h2 etc, but I struggle if I want a hand coded page to look like anything other than it just came out of the mid 90’s.

Over the years this has really frustrated me but I have never done anything about it, until now. A couple of weeks ago I finally started to look for a guide to HTML for beginners and after reading a lot of good reviews for one in particular took the plunge with Build Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS by Ian Lloyd.

If you are in the same boat as me or you are just starting out, I would definitely recommed you read this book and follow the excercises. It presumes no prior knowledge but also doesn’t treat you like an idiot and delves right in to teaching you HTML and using CSS

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“Your business needs a website.”

In the past, perhaps this statement wasn’t true for every new company. But these days, virtually all start-ups should have an online presence from day one. There are plenty of things your business can do with a website: advertise your services, sell products online or communicate with existing customers. You can even send people there for more information and use it to gather sales leads.

No grand plans for your site? It’s worth creating one anyway, just so something meaningful appears when a prospective customer types your company name into Google.

Where to start?

As tempting as it may be, don’t rush in headlong and start building your site. You’ll end up wasting time and money. Instead, plan carefully, thinking about:

• What your site is for
  Come up with some clear objectives. Do you want to sell your products and services online? Will the site provide help for existing customers? Is it going to be a simple ‘shop window’ to provide you with warm sales leads? Read the rest of this entry »

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