Alan Culpitt Web Design

What is an FTP Server

noreply@blogger.com (culpitt) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 08:55:00 +0000

Your web site is made up of a series of files; pictures, video, text and formatting information. In order to get these 'on the Internet' we have to transfer them from our computers to a computer that is permanently connected to the Internet. That computer is called a server.

To do this we have to connect the two computers together. Because the server is permanently connected to the Internet it has an address. Generally that address is ftp.yourdomainname.co.uk but that's not always the case. We need this address. Once we try to connect to this computer it will ask us for a username and a password. Your hosting provider will have that username and password and will pass them on to you if you don't have a copy. If we have those three bits of information we can connect to a computer anywhere in the world!

Once we have a connection we can transfer the various files to and from the server. To do this we use "file transfer protocol" or FTP.

Difference between 'hits' and 'visits'

noreply@blogger.com (Jan B) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:50:00 +0000

An important question I was asked recently from a client was about his website log: "What is the difference between hits and visits?" There is a specific technical difference. Here goes...

The technical definition of a hit is each file sent to a browser by a web server. And the technical definition of a visit is each time a visitor views a webpage on your site, irrespective of how many hits are generated. This is not a visit to a site but a visit to an individual page within the site.

Pages are comprised of files. Every image in a page is a separate file. When a visitor looks at a page (i.e. a page view), they may see numerous images, graphics, pictures etc. and generate multiple hits. For example, if you have a page with 10 pictures, then a request to a server to view that page generates 11 hits (10 for the pictures, and one for the html file). A page view can contain hundreds of hits. This is the reason to check the page views and not hits.

Additionally, there is a high potential for confusion here, because there are two types of 'hits'. These are the hits recorded by log files, and interpreted by log analysis. A second type of 'hits' are counted and displayed by a simple hit counter. Hit counters record one hit for every time a webpage is viewed, also problematic because it does not distinguish unique visitors.

So this is why hits are not a reliable way to measure website traffic, the number of visits is what you are interested in.

So hits include all elements that make up your page: animation, images and the html itself. Whereas visits are the page as a whole.

I hope this helps.

The Disability Discrimination Act AA standard

noreply@blogger.com (Jan B) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:01:00 +0000

As I understand it if a web site complies with the Web Content Accessibility Initiative Guidelines (WAI) as laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium then it’s generally regarded as being also compliant with the DDA legislation, this is however not defined in the legislation. The WAI does have an AA standard. Also compliance with the guidelines is not something that can be definitively tested. Our stance here is as follows :-

1. We test sites using the Cynthia Says online tool.

2. We generally work to get compliance to the WAI A standard , which is slightly lower, rather than the AA standard. Our advice to customers is that the A standard means that the site will work fine for the majority of disabled people and that unless a fairly large proportion of their potential clients are disabled or their site is specifically aimed at disabled people, then the extra compliance levels aren’t really necessary.

3. We can build a site to the AA standard.

Embedded Video

noreply@blogger.com (Jan B) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:04:00 +0000

Embedding video into a web site these days is very easy. Lots of people have broadband so we don't need to worry nearly as much about potential problems with slow donwload times. We aren't videographers but we do have tools for taking someones video and turning it into a format that works well on web sites. You can embed controls for the video like volume, fast forward, play, stop and pause and match them into the colour scheme and look for the site.

Have a look at the site for North Jesmond Garage, they are one of our customers and wanted the video to play automatically once the site is loaded

Images on your website

noreply@blogger.com (Jan B) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:48:00 +0000

Firstly I think I should introduce myself. My name is Jan Broderick and I am Alan’s partner in our web design business. I work mostly on the design and page creation side of things.

To this end I thought I’d say a bit about images and the effective use of these on your website.

We all know the adage: “a picture paints a thousand words” (although only some of us will remember the Telly Savalas version of the song) and it is very true. You can capture in a single well-chosen image what would take pages to explain. Pages that most website visitors would not read. If you are trying to capture the attention of a casual visitor to your site or persuade someone to part with their cash for your products, then please think carefully about the images you use. We have all seen sites with badly composed, out-of-focus images – many sellers on eBay seem incapable of taking a decent photo – and don’t they detract from the experience?

I won’t try to teach you how to take a picture – there are plenty of experts who will explain the workings of your camera to you. Nor will I explain how you can improve on your picture using software. And yes you can make an indifferent picture better, but you cannot make a bad picture into a good one. And yes I am more than happy to work on the images you provide to make the best of them.

What I will do here is point out that for a small fee you can buy well-structured images that will do the job for you beautifully. I am not here to advertise a particular provider, there are many, but a good search around within their stock will give you all kinds of images you can incorporate within your design. These can be specifically of your type of product or service, or they can be a more general image that is pleasing to the eye. There are literally millions of images in the likes of iStockPhoto.

These providers also have a facility on their sites to set up a ‘lightbox’ this is a collection of images that can be viewed all at once. A link to the lightbox can be emailed to anyone for their comment and a selection purchased. This is the method I use for clients who wish to source images without paying a professional photographer.

Google Adwords

noreply@blogger.com (Jan B) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:21:00 +0000

Google Adwords is their online advertising program and the source of the sponsored links that you generally see on the right hand side and across the top of a Google search results page.

The beauty of Adwords is that they are targeted and that you pay per click.

When you set up your advert with Google you decide on a geographic target area. This can be a country, a region of a country, a town, or a specific distance from an address. That way if you are a very locally based business like a builder or a plumber you don't waste your money advertising to the other end of the country.

The next stage is the wording of your advert. You have

A Headline
2 Description Lines
A URL (web address)

Finally you have to decide on target keywords. These are short words or phrases that are

relevant to your business
popular search terms
not too competitive (i.e. there are lots of other web sites all using the same target keywords)

Google can help you with this and provide you with hints and suggestions that you may not have thought of.

The final stage is to do with money. You need to.

Choose a currency
Set a maximum cost per click for the ad (CPC)
Set your daily budget for the ad (This is not as expensive as you might think. If you set up a budget of £1.00 you will never pay more than £30 a month for advertising to the whole English speaking world!)

You also need to set up a Google Account and give them details of your credit card to pay for your advert.

More Information on Google Adwords

Search Engine Optimization

noreply@blogger.com (Jan B) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:43:00 +0000

Search engine optimization (optimisation if you prefer the UK spelling or SEO for short) is a tricky, big and constantly changing area in web design. Part of the problem is that there are very few people who know exactly how they work. Whilst the people who run the search engines are prepared to say a bit, they are generally pretty cagey with this details as anyone who knows how the likes of Google work could make millions.

Wikipedia defines S.E.O. as

the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.

Generally the process takes 4 Steps

Step 1 Ensure the Site Works Properly

Web browsers are very forgiving things. Web sites that look fine to a user can be riddled with errors some of them pretty serious. These errors can sometimes throw the search engine spider off the scent and prevent the site from being properly indexed by the search engines.

Step 2 Find Popular Search Phrases

When people search on a specific topic they will go into a search engine and enter a word or phrase in the search box for that engine. The critical question is

"what phrase are they using?"
There are a couple of ways of finding out. You can use online services like wordtracker, or Google's Keywords Tool

The important thing is to go with popular search phrases that relate to the web site or the business, search engines can sometimes exclude sites if they believe the search phrases aren't relevant and may be trying to mislead them in some way.

Step 3 Build Those Phrases into The Site

Web sites and search engines work best when web pages are specific and information rich. If for example a company makes widgets (don't they always?) and two popular search phrases are "blue widgets" and "widget sizes" then the company's web site needs to have one page about blue widgets and one about widget sizes rather than trying to cram all the information onto one page.

There are critical bits of the page that need to include the phrase "blue widgets" These include

The page title
The page desciption
Titles on the page
The main text of the page, at the beginning
Links
The ALT text for the pictures

Too much and the search engine thinks you are keyword stuffing or spamdexing, too little and it thinks you are irrelevant.

Step 4 Submit The Site

Each search engine has it's own page for submitting a site and it's details. Each needs to be approached to submit a site individually, and it needs to be done in that apallingly old-fashioned way, by a human being! Seriously there are automatic services that claim to submit your site to hundreds of search engines that most of the big search engines will ignore. There's no short cut you have to sit down and go through the motions for each web page.

Google have a technology called site maps. These are a file in a particular format that tells Google all about your site, how your site fits together, how often and when your site was last updated and the relative importance of the different pages. If you create one of these, place it on the site and tell Google all about it it can help smooth the whole indexing process and ensure that Google sees your site the way you want it.

Further Information

Find out More about Our Services

How Search Engines Work

noreply@blogger.com (Jan B) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:55:00 +0000

There are four big search engines. Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask. They cover just about all searches ever done online.

Search engines actually have a series of parts or functions.

Firstly they have to find web sites, and they can do this in 2 different ways. There are crawler or spider based search engines and human powered search engines. Crawler based search engines have automatic programs that crawl the web looking at web pages and following links to other web pages. Human powered search engines rely on an army of people reading submissions of web sites from people like me, looking at the web site and deciding on a category for that web site.

Once the search engine knows that the site exists it adds it to its index. The index is simply a huge database of information about every single web site it has ever found, billions of the things.

The final job of the search engine is to take searches and present results, something that they do literally billions of times every day.

All quite simple so far?

The critical bit as far as any web site owner is concerned is the third bit, presenting the results. Why? Because the Internet is huge, even for the simplest results you get millions of responses. Because you get millions of responses you have to rank the results in some kind of order. Ranking the results is complicated... very complicated.

The search engine looks at where in your website certain keywords specified in the search occur. They will look near the top of the body text, in headings, page titles, descriptions of pictures and links. The frequency and positioning of the words all makes a difference.

Each search engine also adds it's own different factors to the ranking process, a lot of them are a closely and carefully guarded secret. One of these is Google's page rank technology. This is can be summed up by saying "the more web sites that link to yours the better" This is something you can organise for free, but makes a huge difference to your web site's page ranking.

Contact Me Forms, Spam and Email.

noreply@blogger.com (Jan B) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 10:17:00 +0000

Obviously, really really obviously, you want your customers to contact you from your web site.

This does however has it's pitfalls.

It's possible to post a thing called a mailto link. This looks like a normal web page link, in blue and underlined, but, when you click the link, your computer fires up it's email program and puts the email address in the 'to' field for the message. All clever stuff, and nice and simple for the browsing public.

Unfortunately this method has fallen prey to spammers. Spam is unwanted junk email. Why it is called Spam is beyond me. Spammers have automatic programs called spiders that sift through millions upon millions of web sites looking for the email address that's written into the web sites. When they find them the email is added to their list of addresses to recieve their unwanted email junk about investment opportunities and viagra, how welcome all that rubbish is every morning.

There are a couple of ways around this.

One is to use a 'contact me' form. This is a form that you can put on your web site for your interested prospective customer to fill in. You can customise the form to ensure that your customer gives their email address and can tick boxes related to the type of service they want, or anything really. Once filled in we write a small program that collates all the details, puts them in an email and sends it to your email address. The email address is however hidden from the dreaded spammers. This is by far the most satisfactory way to deal with customer contact. It does have it's disadvantages. Whilst browsing the Internet people (myself included) have a very short attention span, literally seconds. When confronted with a form people often can't be bothered to fill it in and so you loose your customer's contact.

Another workaround, the one we use, is to keep your email on site and just deal with the spam as it comes in. You need to get a program called a spam filter, we use zone alarm and it only lets through a few of the hundreds of spam messages you may get in a single day.

Another is to write a small file called a .htaccess file that blocks access to the spammers. This is a good hi tech method of dealing with spammers, but only works in certain areas.

Another simple method is to put your email address in a picture like this.

It all comes down to personal preference in the end.

Search Engine Optimisation

noreply@blogger.com (Jan B) — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:37:00 +0000

This was an interesting programme on the BBC. 'Click' is their technology show and I watch whenever I can (yes I know...what a geek). Watch the first 8 minutes of this programme for some very useful information about Search Engine Optimisation from some people who are far more expert in this area than me.

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Text Version of the article

Internet use in the UK

noreply@blogger.com (Jan B) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 13:53:00 +0000

This is a very interesting (well at least to me) article on the BBC Website.

It's the results of the Oxford Internet Survey of Internet Use in the UK. Here's some of the salient points

67% of the overall population use the Internet
31% of retired people use the Internet
97 % of students use the Internet
5% fewer women than men use the Internet

75% of people who use the Internet have bought online
66% of people who use the Internet collect information about local events
'virtually all' Internet users use it to track email
85% of users have a high-speed connection
21% of users access using a mobile phone or PDA

Interesting stuff

Googlebase

noreply@blogger.com (Jan B) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:37:00 +0000

Do you want to get your products into Google in a nice uncluttered, straightforward and inexpensive way?

Googlebase allows you to add details of your products or services to Google, independent of your web site. Google then make the details search-able and adds them to their index. All clever stuff.

What's the benefit?

Well it short-circuits the process of getting your products and services into Google. Normally Google would go through your site starting with the home page and working its way through the various pages on the site. Eventually it will work down to individual products and it will index the products and product details. You then have the whole process of ranking your product pages alongside all the other pages that might come up in a person's search. Also if your product details are stored in a database and fed into your web site then this can upset the whole process and mean that Google only has the sketchiest of details of your products.

With Googlebase you cut straight through all of that and go straight to the product, details, price and pictures of the product. Your products could appear in Google, Google product search or Google Maps. In Google Product Search they are ranked alongside any other supplier that sells a similar product and has their products in Googlebase.

It's still early days but it looks to be an excellent web application with a lot of potential.

How do you get your products into Googlebase?

At the simplest level you have a form to fill in with the details of your product. It's easy, quick and doesn't take long and you can do it yourself. They recommend this if you have 10 items or fewer. If you have more then they recommend bulk uploading options. This is where we come in. We create a bulk upload file of all your relevant product detail , that is in a format that Googlebase recognises. We then upload that file to Googlebase and they process all of the information and create a series of products. If all of your product details are stored in a database we can write a small program that will link the database to Googlebase and so your products and their details will keep in sync.

Just Contact Us for details.