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/

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Passwords and codes are a part of everyday life now. There is no escaping it. However, is 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.
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We are looking to recruit a Technical Support Advisor to work for 123-reg, one of the largest domain and hosting brands in the UK, in our new offices in Stockley Park, Uxbridge. This is an important role in a business with exciting plans to grow. We pride ourselves on our team spirit, great products and excellent customer service.

You will need to have basic IT skills, excellent customer service skills, and a desire to solve problems for our customers. You will also need to be a strong team player. Ideally, you will have knowledge of domain names, DNS and hosting and customer service experience in a contact centre environment.

This role will cover a combination of shift and standard office hours (opening hours 9am until 9pm) and includes some weekend and bank holiday working.

Your daily responsibilities will include:

• Dealing with telephone calls from a mixture of end users, solving problems where possible
• Managing the understanding, processing and resolution of customer requests, using all available / appropriate tools to ensure delivery of world class customer service
• Actively liaising with customers to ensure that they are kept up to date, providing both verbal and written responses where required, while ensuring documentation of any investigation
• Working productively while maintaining exceptional call / data quality standards, in line with individual targets

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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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This one’s important for anyone who owns a domain ending in .web.com which they control through a 123-reg account. (The information below only applies to domains ending in .web.com - all other .com domains are completely unaffected.)

As of later today (March 31), .web.com domains will cease to resolve. This means any website located at an address ending in .web.com will be unreachable at that address. We’re really sorry about this: unfortunately the issue is out of our control.

Why this is happening

All web.com domains purchased through 123-reg are administrated by an organisation called CentralNic. CentralNic does not actually own .web.com but agreed to operate the registry for domains ending in .web.com in good faith, based on the fact that the owners of web.com had managed it themselves for the preceding 6 years. Read the rest of this entry »

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We’ve been chatting about an interesting story in the office this morning: the Scottish National Party wants to establish a top level domain (TLD) for Scotland. The story has been covered by the Times and over on Circle ID.

The proposal is being driven by dotSCO (surely they’ve missed a trick by not going for the snappier ‘dotSCOT’?), an organisation which seems to have been around since at least 2005, judging by this news story. They hit the headlines over the weekend because the Scottish National Party, led by Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, has lent its support to the campaign.

According to the report in the Times, Alex Salmond is set to ”lodge a formal request with the American-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is responsible for allocating all internet domain names.” Read the rest of this entry »

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