Posts made in November, 2011


iPhone telephone links


Posted By on Nov 15, 2011

Did you know that without anything special going on, telephone numbers on websites are picked up by the iPhone (and iPad and probably all the other mobiles) web browser so they can be clicked. This brings up a call/cancel option. I know there are proper ways to link to phone numbers (iPhone telephone hyperlinking for instance) but it just works anyway! The reason I came across this was because an eagle-eyed client spotted an invisible telephone number (eh?) when browsing his site on an iPhone. Techie bit coming which you can skip past if you aren’t that way inclined. The phone number was dark grey on a white background on ‘normal’ browsers but all the website’s links were set to be white when untouched or visited. Thus the iPhone magic of making a phone number into a link, using the styling from the website made the link white on a white background. I simply gave the phone number a different class and some appropriate style for links in that class et voila – links that are visible on the iPhone and not links on ‘normal’ devices. Well I thought it was interesting...

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What the heck is SEO?


Posted By on Nov 10, 2011

SEO – if you don’t even know what it stands for then we had better start from the basics! Search Engine Optimization is just a fancy term for the work we can do to make sure your site is found for all the right reasons by the search engines such as Google, Bing, etc. There are no guarantees that it will put you top of the search on page one, but if done properly it will at least get you moving in the right direction. Search Engines use various techniques to see what your site is all about and what SEO does is make sure these are consistent with the ‘message’ you want to get across on each page of your site. Some things need to be visible and keywords about your ‘message’ should be readable by human visitors to the site. Many other things are just in there on the page but only visible when the search engine automatically crawls over your site. Both of these visible and invisible elements need to be tweaked by your web designer to optimize your searchability. But it doesn’t end there. Technical things need to be considered like. How fast or slow does your page load? Are there errors in the code that creates the page? Do the links all work? Are the links relevant? Even if all of this is in place from the word go, it takes time for the search engines to find a new site without a bit of effort on our behalf. Once found, things need tweaked, as a non-changing (static) site will generally start to lose it’s place in the search results unless kept up to date – with both content and SEO adjustments. One of the best tools out there for doing this is Google Analytics which can be a bit daunting at first but can eventually give you a huge amount of insight into what people do on your site, how they get there, what they searched for to get there, and that’s just for starters! Please get in touch via the contact page if you are interested in working with us on your...

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