Not really breaking news but logging into webmasters tools I discovered that favicons are now displayed on the left hand side of each domain.

It’s ideal when you have quite a few accounts in webmasters tools. It’s quite surprising how faster it makes locating the account you need. The most important thing is when Google implements something it’s usually for a reason.  Could we soon see favicons displayed in search engine results?

If favicons do make it into the search engine results this could have a serious negative affect with brand hijacking. If people start to trust the small logos rather than the domain then this will become a serious problem.

Duplicate content is one of the simplest ways to prevent any website from ranking, the problem is it can also get you banned or removed in extreme cases. It’s that important that Google has provided a full page explaining “what is” and “how to prevent”.

Many tools are available to help locate duplicate content one of the best ways is Google itself.  Copy a string of text from a web page or word document and past it into the search bar. You will see any websites using the same copy.

Other tools are available to help with duplicate content

http://www.copyscape.com/

http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/

http://www.plagiarismdetect.com/

http://www.plagium.com/

You can’t stop all duplicate content because usually it’s beyond us, submitting a press release will often see your article being published on many websites. This doesn’t mean you will get punished just some of it will be filtered from the search engines. When writing content for a website it’s always better to start from scratch this way you can be sure to avoid all duplicate content.

A website is one of the most important tools for any business, as the Internet has now become a way of life for many. To succeed in most markets, you need a reliable, effective and professional presence online. With so many web design companies out there and everyone of them offering such varied packages, how do you know what to look for and what do you need to consider when designing a website?

First of all do your market research, ask to see some examples of a web design companies work, generally speaking they will have a portfolio of what they have done. Next thing is get at least 3 quotes in and to make sure you get the best price. You need to be looking to get good quality for a good price. Remember just because it is the most expensive doesn’t mean that it is the best quality – they might just be over charging. In the same breathe don’t just go for the cheapest option either.

The next point is to be aware of what you are looking  for your website to do. Do you want to buy online? Or are you looking for a simple brochure website? If you are looking to sell online you will also need to consider SEO or Search Engine Optimisation for your website and  this really needs to be done each month. SEO is when somebody searches for a search term, for example web design lancashire and Google will then rank thousands of websites based on their SEO authority and content. What SEO will do is get your business ideally to the first page of Google as this is where the majority of potential customers will click and give their business too.

The top ten things any company needs to ask themselves when they set out on a web design project are the following:

1. What do you want to achieve from this web site. Do you want to sell online?

2. What is your budget to build the web site? How many pages do you want?

3. Do you want to have SEO included in your budget? What can you afford to spend each month promoting your website?

4. What is your competition doing? Can you get any ideas from them?

5. Do you have any other marketing material such as brochures already done as you will want them to match the design of your website.

6. Do you want to generate business? Do you want to just have a presence?

7. Do you want to run a Pay Per Click Campaign?

8. What search terms are popular within my market?

9. How competitive is the online market for your product or service?

10. What time scales do you want to see a return on your investment?

If you can get the answers to these questions then it will help you significantly to pick out the best web site designer and SEO engineer out there. One of the main things you need to understand is that when starting a new web project, there are so many different avenues to go down, you need to know what you want to your website to achieve before you set out.

Wordpress is quickly becoming the new choice in CMS, as a web design company we actually use wordpress. With a few tweaks and a little bit of customising you can turn the most popular blogging platform into an ideal backend for your brochure or business website. During our daily browsing, we often have a sneak peak at the source code of more popular websites. Below you can see we’ve listed 10 websites which use the platform one way or another.

Number10.gov.uk – http://www.number10.gov.uk

Now Playing Nokia – http://nowplaying.nokia.com

Stephen Fry – http://www.stephenfry.com/blog

Livestrong – http://www.livestrongblog.org

Spotify – http://www.spotify.com/en/

Ben & Jerry’s – http://www.benjerry.fr/blog

MTV Newsroom – http://newsroom.mtv.com

Leeds City College – http://www.leedscitycollege.ac.uk

Smashing Magazine – http://www.smashingmagazine.com

Designed2Perform – http://www.designed2perform.co.uk

Wordpress is great for businesses as its simple interface allows clients to update their own website in terms of SEO wordpress is the ideal platform.

If you’re familiar with SEO then you’ll be familiar with using Yahoo! Site Explorer and Linkdomain to find a websites backlinks. Unfortunately the end is near for this service; the reason being why Yahoo! is pulling this service is the expense of maintaining such a web index.

Currently no other service offers such a competitive link intelligence which could possibly hinder SEO for the foreseeable future. Hopefully the functionality offered by Bing Webmasters Tools will be a solution to this problem.

If you’re familiar with web design then you will have heard about W3C if you’re not familiar then you might have a seen a few websites displaying a badge showing something along the lines of W3C. As long as I can remember, the website always seems very 1999 with strong bold colours and a very regimental design.

The new design features plenty of web 2.0 influences and gradients which is often associated with today’s modern web design.

The website itself contains no validation errors; which I think is amazing every page I have checked validates 100%.

Check it out… http://www.w3.org/

As the end of the year is approaching and just a couple of days to guarantee delivery before Christmas, what have been the hottest searches and products of Christmas 2009?

By far visits to consumer electronics increased by 16.5% between October 2009 and November 2009. Searches for toys and hobbies reached their peak during the week ending December 5^th when they accounted for 13.6% of all online searches for the UK.

This year visits to consumer electronics retail websites increased in the run-up, but this year peaked a week later compared to the last couple of years.

Below is the most searched for products week ending December 5^th.

Below are the most searched for product type’s week ending December 5^th

Recently a lot of talk on the internet is about page load speed. Just today we were going through the Google webmasters tools; a new link was available within the labs tab called site performance.

Basically the tool provides information regarding on site performance and gives a comparison to other websites regarding page load speed. We all know how frustrating it can be when you reach a website and it takes over a couple of seconds to load, something which we didn’t mind in back in 1995.

With the average speed of internet connection in the UK being at least 3.6 megabits per second (Mbit/s) is there any excuses?

Below is a taken from our own website, the two high point are related to us changing the overall site and design during this we did have some downtime (but nothing to worry about). You can see that Google says our website loads 56% faster than other websites. With this amount of information being provided by Google, surely it must carry weight in terms of SEO.

Yes it’s true, recently we’ve been swapping and changing our design and finally decided to stick with something we like. Usually we are the ones telling companies and clients that branding is important the reason being people search the internet for either a products or services and first impressions count.
During our identify crisis three new clients did ask if we were the same company as people remember the look and logo of a website rather than the domain name.
The same factors need to be considered all branding needs to flow throughout from business cards to leaflet printing.

How much money is wasted when your server or hosting company becomes unavailable? Most people think when a website becomes unavailable or offline the money lost is limited to this time or period of which the downtime occurs. This assumption couldn’t further from the truth, a website may not see the effects of server downtime for up to two month or may not recover fully for two months. This prediction all depends upon the length of downtime.

What money is lost during server or hosting downtime?

Revenue
When a website is becomes unavailable the revenue stops.

PPC
Depending on the budget utilised on PPC, each visitor sent from the PPC is wasted money.

Loyal Customers
It’s no surprise that your next competitor is just two clicks away, if your competitors dispatch times, response times or general customer service is better. This is lost repeat business.

Repeat Business
You lost the conversation or sale initially could have seen your competitor benefitting from your downtime and gaining a new customer and repeat business.

SEO
Depending if you use an SEO Company to promote your website, you might be wasting your money; every time the website is unavailable this could prove as setbacks on progression in the SERPs.
Below is a simple diagram of natural traffic Vs. time with downtime.

SEO Vs Downtime

Web hosting is the most important unseen part of a website and its success. The best way to think of web hosting is relating it to a physical property or structure. If the foundations of a property or house are poor then expect problems in the future.