Posts by the boss

All is fixed – seemed to be a delete-this-url record outstanding on webmaster tool for the www. version of the website. Not me! Left over by someone previously. All pages indexed and SEO’d. And relax….

I have recently been updating some SEO on an existing site – rowanguesthousegroup.com. Lots of new content, tweaks behind the scene and WordPress updates to get the site properly set up. Trouble is that Google isn’t listing it yet! First time I have ever come across this so I’m working through all the possibilities… Google Webmaster tools verifies it all okay and site is getting crawled by the google bots. (sounds awful but it is a good thing honest!) No errors from the crawling Appears fine on yahoo, bing, etc. Resubmitted sitemap (pending which might take several days!) Checked robots.txt No horrible duplicate site URL stuff going on. Will see what happens over the next day or two and update this post accordingly! Never seen the same issue on any other WordPress sites or otherwise...

Yes, bcg webdesign is 6 months old and what a 6 months it has been. Work has been a real mix of things Websites created from start to finish SEO on existing/new sites Working with a variety of ‘back-ends’ – WordPress, Joomla, various other CMSs Email template/signature set-up Logo design Shifting servers Dreamweaver lessons dog walking… The other side of work is not always so exciting, but obviously needs attention so I’ve been doing my own booking keeping, filling in lots of HMRC forms, networking with Business Masterminds and 4N, quoting for potential clients, more dog walking, etc. Because I had been doing some of the creative stuff on the side for quite a few years meant it wasn’t a shock to the system starting on January the first (well probably 2nd or 3rd) this year. The business side of it was since I had to do that rather than just fill in a few boxes on the self assessment form. It’s been interesting though and makes you appreciate what all these SMEs do to keep things straight. Keeping me sane throughout it all with sage words of wisdom has been my wife Lorraine who has been running her own businesses for the last 9 years or so. (feel good therapies, calm kids. therapies united). She was the one when I came home with the letter announcing our office closure that cheered! What a great opportunity! It is certainly working out like that 🙂 Jess our 1 year old black lab also deservers some credit for making me/us go out walking several times a day. I do miss the banter with my old work colleagues but we still catch up once in a while and they have all gone on to bigger and better things for sure. Also miss my cycling – even if it was just a brief jaunt to work and the occasional Arthur’s Seat loop. The dog is helping keep me fit of course! Looking forward to the next 6 months and beyond!...

Following a chat with James Shoemark last Thursday I/We came up with my now not so secret identity. Brainstorming about all the things I can do for people in need of help to get themselves a web presence, improve the one they have, getting social media juices going, or some techie-web-related advice we cam up with a name for me. Master of the Geekiverse Time to don my lycra and cape and do some good...

This week I have mostly been doing some WordPress work. Speed issues on one site, a new exciting site for Lorraine’s book on another and some updating tidying on my own network of WordPress sites.

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...

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...

Was at an enjoyable (and I learned things!) course with Business Gateway today. Met some nice folks from all walks of life, some with new businesses, some with no business yet and some with fully fledged, plenty of clients businesses. Will be interesting to meet some more again at the next networking event. Managed to hand out lots of...

Aha, I had forgotten (or rather never used) the other way to embed fonts on to webpages. What I feel is the proper way. The background (in case this and my previous post make no sense) is that you can normally define only a certain limited number of font to use on a website because the person visiting your site needs to have those same fonts installed on their own machine to view them. If they don’t have them then they get a horrible default one like times roman or something. Cufon does it one way, but the nicer way is to embed various formats of the font definition file on the website behind the scenes and that tell the webpage to use those files rather than from you local machine. Hey presto, everything works nicely in all browsers (except really, really old ones) I’ll put up an example when I get a...