So, after a lot of rumours and behind the scenes testing, Google has come out and made it official – the speed of your website is now one of the (over 200) factors taken into account when ranking your site in the search results.
Cue widespread panic and a lot of shark-like activity on the part [...]
It’s official – speed is a factor in google ranking, but don’t panic
Marketing Pullman’s ‘The good man Jesus, the scoundrel Christ’ online – some lessons
There’s a interesting, though flawed, marketing campaign going on for Philip Pullman’s latest book, The Good Man Jesus, The Scoundrel Christ. It takes full advantage of social networking and technology to promote the book, and is worth looking at a little more in detail for other novelists promoting their books online – with or without [...]
Free Content isn’t the problem – free advertising is the model killing online media
March 24th, 2010Following on from the earlier post about Smashing Magazine’s cash crisis, and the extraordinary measures they’re taking to raise funds, and in response to a comment made there, it struck me that while there’s plenty of talk about how free content is an outdated and unworkable model, hardly anyone talks about the real elephant in [...]
Crisis in the free content model over @ Smashing Magazine
March 23rd, 2010One of the most popular free content magazines for the web design community, the German run Smashing Magazine, appeared to go slightly crazy yesterday, redirecting all of its pages to an urgent plea asking readers to buy a special ebook ” for 9.90 to help keep the magazine afloat. The move to redirect all of [...]
The SEO Benefits of Video on your site
March 22nd, 2010I recently participated on a discussion (on LinkedIn http://bit.ly/cgHG8R) about the advantages/disadvantages of having a video on your home page.
The discussion was an interesting one, bringing up various aspects including accessibility, brain-mapping, and general layout pros and cons, but one thing struck me forcefully – the ‘received wisdom’ that video has no seo benefits for [...]
Getting your pages indexed in google’s local search – a google.co.uk case study
March 7th, 2010There has always been plenty of debate about the importance of choosing an appropriate tld (top level domain, like .com, .ie, .co.uk etc), and choosing a hosting service based in your main target market.
Until recently the common wisdom was that, if you wanted to rank well in a specific local search engine index, like for [...]
Fixing that ‘Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.’ problem with wordpress plugins
December 10th, 2009The huge range of useful plug-ins for Wordpress are a contributing factor to its huge popularity both as a blogging platform and as a content management system. The great thing about the plugin system is that – in theory at least – it’s dead simple to setup. You upload the plugin to your plugins directory, [...]
Shortening the_excerpt in wordpress with substr
November 30th, 2009Things have been very busy here for the last couple of months, so sorry for the lack of posts. We hope to resume normal posting shortly.
In the meantime, here’s a quick and simple wordpress tip that’s come in handy for us so we thought it would be good to share.
One common problem you can run [...]