Category: Web design and development
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Gotta love your website… for profit
Nicola and I were doing a bit of market research for a client the other day, talking to event managers about their process for choosing suppliers. One comment we heard about a major company went like this. “Oh, them, yes I remember them. I visited their website last year but thought it looked old and…
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Adwords shenannigans
I had a fiendish problem to solve today. A client wanted their adwords to link to a page that didn’t actually exist. The page was a search result but he wanted the advert to link to a different search result every day. Sad to say, Google don’t give you that facility, but with a bit…
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Spring cleaning old code
Here is a little tip for cleaning up old code. I was looking at a new client’s website recently and saw they had some horrible old JavaScript to produce a nice fade effect when a visitor’s mouse was rolled over the menu bar. Now for the last 5 years or so this sort of effect has been achievable using…
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Make websites load faster for increased profit
Improving your website load speed is a good idea. Not only does it make for a better user experience (how many times have you left a site which has taken too long to load). But search engines are also using this as a metric for how well a site is built and therefore an indication…
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Changes to Google’s Privacy Policy
Today (1 March) is the day that Google’s new privacy policy becomes effective. The aim of the change is to simplify over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replace them with a shorter, simpler and easier to understand version. As Google says ” Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire…
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No such thing
There is no such thing as a finished website. Itterative growth is the key to success and multivariate testing is the key to deciding what to do next… That and the whim of the MD.
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Google says 60% of smartphone users click on ads once a week
In conversation with a Google representative today I was told that 60% of smartphone users click on ads on their phones at least once a week. The implications for adding smartphone advertising to your rosta of advertising locations will seem, for most of us inescapeably clear. However, it is clearly just as important to consider…
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Embedding Youtube videos in tinymce
NOTICE– TECHNICAL JARGON ALERT Tinymce is the wysiwyg editor of choice on millions of websites. It comes as standard in the Drupal CMS and is often used in bespoke content management systems. However, when you try to embed a youtube video, Tinymce strips the code and stops the youtube videos from displaying. The youtube code…
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Choosing a Domain Name
Rule 1 – Write it down. Many years ago we were choosing good names for a new teacher’s newsletter. We came up with “schools express”, everyone liked it and I went and bought the domain name without writing it down on a bit of paper first. Big mistake! www.schoolsexpress.co.uk could as easily be interpreted as…
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Building a calculator
I have enjoyed building a “solar panel calculator” this week. The client wanted a tool that allows visitors to their website to enter their postcode, be presented with a map of their house, click the four corners of the roof and be given back an estimate of how much money they could make from solar…