TV and the web are converging. More than ever before, people are using the Internet to watch video. As a website maker, you need to take advantage of this. Our Sitemaker platform makes this really easy. Watch the tutorial to find out how to add video to your site.
How did you get on? Leave a comment and let us know – we might even showcase your work!
Young and old have embraced website making with great enthusiasm over the last 10 years. Many of us have only just started down this road – our webmaster careers are in their infancy. So spare a thought for your humble mouse!
Back in December we passed a birthday that’s slightly traumatic for most of us: The computer mouse – our best friend when it comes to computers – turned 40 on the 9th of December. Yet it looks so young, doesn’t it?
A chap called Douglas Engelbart first demoed the mouse back on the 9th December 1968. But it was another 20 years before computers started to make use of the mouse, thanks to the development of the graphical user interface (GUI) we now know as Windows. Unfortunately for Engelhart, his patent ran out in 1987, so he wasn’t able to earn any money from this fantastic invention.
And what riches would have been his, if only that patent lasted for another 30 years: Logitech recently sold its billionth mouse. ‘If I had a penny every time…’
Whilst the mouse has transformed the interaction between people and PCs, and enabled us to easily learn and use complex software, how much longer will the mouse be around? Whilst its difficult to see it being completely replaced, gadgets such as Apple’s iPhone and the Nintendo Wii have certainly proved that there are now viable alternatives.
On the scrap heap at 40? Not (quite) yet!
Whilst you’re busy building websites, have you ever wondered how big the Internet is? How many websites, domains and how many pages? The reality is that it’s quite difficult to measure, so all figures are an estimate.
What’s for certain is that it’s growing – if you look at domain sales alone, the number of Top Level Domains went up by 16% in 2008 to 177,000,000.
One of the best assessments come from a company called Netcraft, who produce (amongst lots of other interesting research) a monthly ‘Web Server Survey’.
Each month Netcraft send out ‘requests’ to every website and server on the Internet, asking for a small bit of information to be returned to them.
In February they had responses from a 215,675,903 websites. ‘Woah, that’s a lot of Internet then’ you might say! True, but what’s really amazing is how many more sites that is from the previous month. There were more than 30 million more than January, a growth of more than 16%.
Lots of this growth can be pinpointed to China, thanks to a service called ‘Qzone’. This is the Chinese equivalent of MSN Messenger. Qzone have added a blogging service to their messenger client, and the 20 million sites that they serve mean that they are now the biggest single provider of blog sites, eclipsing Blogger and Windows Live spaces.
Here’s a graph showing the growth of active websites from August 1995 to February 2009, from Netcraft.
So is the Internet growing? Too right!
There’s been quite a lot of coverage recently about UK companies who choose to save money by outsourcing their support function offshore. In many ways it makes lots of financial sense: as we’re constantly being told on the news, these are ‘hard times’, so all organisations are looking for quick and easy ways to save costs.
Of course there are drawbacks too. One of the biggest will be whether an offshore support service will be there when you need them. And for the company concerned, it’s obviously going to be whether they can feel in control when their support people might be sitting in another country, or even another continent.
At WebEden we have considered the idea of offshore support, but to be honest it was quite easy to reject it quite early on. Here’s why:
First of all, quite simply we’re nuts about WebEden. We eat, breathe, live, and sleep WebEden from dawn until dusk, and we can’t imagine that passion outside of this room.
Second, we speak your language. This isn’t about our command of English – you only have to read this blog to see that ain’t perfect – but its about the language of website building. When you say ‘I pressed on that “thingumy”, now I can’t see it’, we know just what you mean, and how to find that thingumy again!
Third, we’ve got a reputation to protect! That sounds a bit arrogant doesn’t it? But we’ve dealt with tens of thousands of support and help questions over the years, and the feedback we’ve had is that you’re very happy with our answers. You trust us, and we don’t want to jeopardize that.
Fourth, we keep your hours. We’re here when you’re building your website, so you don’t need to wait hours and hours and hours for someone to get back to you.
Fifth we built it, so we know how it works. The Sitemaker system has been in development for the best part of a decade, and we can’t possibly pass all that knowledge onto someone else. I mean, where would we start?! Its one thing being able to follow a support script, but that would be scratching the service. When you’re building websites with the WebEden website creator day in day out, you know it like no other.
And finally – and here’s the shameless plug – if you get completely stuck we can finish off your website for you, thanks to our affordable web design service.
I never miss an opportunity to sell, do I!
Fow a few months now we’ve been producing website builder video tutorials that highlight a feature with the Webeden website making system. These tutorials are in response to requests for help we get here at Webeden, and are designed to enable you to get more out of WebEden.co.uk.
Every time we finish a tutorial we upload it into YouTube, and then embed it into the video tutorials page.
But have you ever wanted to see all the tutorials together? Now you can, thanks to the WebEden YouTube channel. In this we’ve brought together all our tutorials. You can navigate to the one which addresses the issue that you’re facing, and quickly watch it before moving onto the next.
You can subscribe to the WebEden YouTube channel, or leave comments and ratings of the Video tutorials you watch. Want to see something else explained in a video tutorial? Just leave us a comment and let us know!
We’ve also added the YouTube logo onto the left hand side of every page in the blog, so you can easily find your way back there. Check out our YouTube channel – and if you like (or loathe!) it, leave a comment or a rating!
27.1.09 Update. If you want to find out how to add YouTube videos to your own website, then watch our how to add YouTube Video tutorial now!
Don’t forget when you’re creating a website, the experience doesn’t have to be purely visual. With the Webeden.co.uk Sitemaker system you can easily add audio to your website. Music isn’t right for everyone, but for some websites it can make all the difference.
Leave a post and let us know how you got on.
As we’ve spoken about before, it seems like the issue of privacy is constantly in the news: whether its online privacy, and the issue of keeping your identity a secret; or real world issues such as CCTV in town centres, meaning that we are being constantly photographed. (With over 4m surveillance cameras in the UK, more per head than any other nation, we’re right to be concerned about these things.)
Now it appears that the online and offline privacy issues are about to come together with the arrival in the UK of Google Street View.
Google Street View is an attempt by Google to make maps more interactive. With Street View when you identify a place using a map, you can then zoom down and see what that location really looks like, using a photographic image. You can effectively see 3D views of a place from the ground. It’s a bit like when you switch from map view to aerial view on Google Maps – you can see what the place really looks like using a real image. Except this time it’s a ground level.
How do they do Street View? Well there really is no shortcut with this one. They have placed a 360 degree camera on the top of a car, and are driving round every street in the country, capturing a panoramic image from every single place.
That sounds like a long time spent in the car for someone! But I also think the final result sounds pretty cool too. If you look at a location on Google Maps in the USA, you will see that they have already completed a lot of the process over there.
However, the issue that’s creating trouble with privacy groups is that people are going to be caught on Google’s cameras, as the car drives past. Publishing a photo of someone (which putting it on the Internet equates to) without their permission is fraught with legal complications. In the US this has already enabled some towns to opt out of the Street View entirely – try and find street view for North Oaks, north east of Minneapolis, and there’s nothing there. There’s also a quite amusing case of a Pennsylvanian couple who took Google to court last year, for taking pictures of their house. Mr and Mrs Boring (brilliant, isn’t it!) had their case thrown out. Since then, Google have deployed a service called ‘deleted-on-request’. Last month they even tried out some face blurring techniques on images in New York.
Laura Scott of Google UK said “We know that privacy concerns are a big thing in the UK, but we feel that we’ve been open and honest. The service has been approved by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office”.
As Google maps is fully integrated, with WebEden, this is an issue that faces you too, when you’re using our Website creator system. If people use a map on your site to navigate, and then choose to include Street View, you as a publisher are endorsing Google’s system.
Do you think that privacy issues are important here? Or are privacy campaigners making a mountain out of a molehill? Leave us a comment below.
And that, as they say, is that!
How have you found the process? Did it work for you? Are you now an experienced SEO expert as well a website making pro?
Like we said at the beginning, this is not meant to be the ‘be all and end all’ of SEO guides, but it does provide some useful, practical tips in a confusing world. Please (please!) remember, that this is not an instant process. It will take some time before your new site starts appearing in the search results. But follow the steps above, be patient and you can bet that your site will eventually turn up, and a hell of a lot quicker than if you did nothing.
So, all that is left to say is, good luck with optimising your site.
But did it work?
We’ve checked our results a few times. The first time was July 31st 2008, with results unchanged from December 12th 2007. The rankings were:
“West London Taxi” – number 1, “Joes London Taxis” – number 1 (Google.com)
“West London Taxi” – number 1, “Joes London Taxis” – number 1 (Yahoo.com)
“West London Taxi” – number 6, “Joes London Taxis” – number 1 (msn.com)
Then we tried again on December 12th 2008. How was Joe’s West London Taxis doing in the Search Engine rankings now?
December 12
• “West London Taxi” – number 1, “Joes London Taxis” – number 1 (Google.com)
• “West London Taxi” – number 1, “Joes London Taxis” – number 1 (Yahoo.com)
• “West London Taxi” – number 6, “Joes London Taxis” – number 1 (msn.com)
What further work did we do on the SEO? Absolutely nothing! It shows that if you lay the groundwork, you can boost your website very high in the SERPs, very early on. To bolster that, it’s important to resubmit your domain name, keep updating your content to keep it fresh, and of course there’s the all important incoming links from popular sites. By doing this you can ensure your site has a much better chance of achieving and maintaining a top ranking.
A reminder
Lets recap on all the steps taken to SEO the site. You must remember: search engines look for consistency and relevancy in a number of different areas of your on-page content and referral links.
These include:
1. The URL (or address) of your site (or specific pages on your site), e.g. www.joeslondontaxis.com, or www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking, etc.
2. Your site name or title (and page titles) being published in the HTML, e.g. “London taxi company”, or “London taxi bookings page”
3. Your site and page keywords meta data published in the HTML, e.g. “London taxis, London taxi, Joes taxis, West London taxi, etc.”
4. Your site and page description meta data published in the HTML, e.g. “London taxi company provides taxi services…”
5. Your page content, e.g. the text that is on your page and relevant to your site name, keywords and description
6. Links on your page, including the anchor text, e.g. the text on which the link is set, e.g. “Book a west London taxi” links to http://www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking
7. Images on your page, including the name of the image file (or Alt text)
8. Referral links to your site or specific pages on your site, e.g. a link on another site (incoming links) referring to your site
You, of course, can easily control all points from 1 to 7, since they’re all related to whats on your website, and can all be managed from your SiteMaker control panel. Point 8 is all about other websites linking to your own: its harder, requires a bit of luck and a bit of elbow grease, although there are quite a few ways of doing this.
Come on now SEO pros! How high have you got your site? Leave us a comment below.
OK, here’s one for the number lovers out there.
When you’re setting up a website, it feels like a really big deal doesn’t it? You’re putting effort, time and money into creating a highly personal bit of the web. All of a sudden, the Internet goes from something that is ‘out there’, built by other people; to something that is ‘in here’ – for you and by you.
Whilst this means that the web is now partly made by you, have you thought about how small that bit actually is? I don’t want to take the wind out of your sails too much, but let me tell you, it’s staggeringly small!
It all depends what you count as the actual beginning, but the Internet – in the sense of being more than one computer networked together – is nearly 40 years old. And it sure is developing a middle age spread! It now consumes an amazing 5% of the entire world’s electricity. We, the users, send 2 million emails every second!
I sometimes wonder whether the office worker of the future will consist of a wasted, withered form with large eyes – perfect for reading all the print on the screen – and one hand transformed into a huge muscle bound three fingered claw, suited solely for the job of operating a mouse. And if you look at the stats we might be headed that way. We click 100 billion times per day on over 55 trillion links…
Where will it end? The web is now growing faster than it ever has, at a rate of one zettabyte a year. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. What’s fueling this growth is now video (onto sites like YouTube), photos, and peer-to-peer file sharing.
And when the Internet really is that big, it means that you have to work as hard as possible to drive visitors to your website. Follow our Search Engine Optimisation tips to boost your position in Google.
So the Internet – it can make you feel pretty small, can’t it?!
For a little while now, you might have noticed that on the lower left hand side of this blog a a big logo of ‘Twitter’.
This logo links to the WebEden page on Twitter.com.
What is Twitter?
Twitter is a ‘micro-blogging’ service. There is space for just 140 characters per post, so you can only say the briefest of things. As a consequence, people tend to make a post based solely on what they’re doing right now. Its similar to the status update on Facebook or Messenger. You can choose to ‘follow’ people on Twitter, to find out what they’re doing and talking about right now.
There are some really high profile users of Twitter, including Barack Obama, Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross. WebEden is following all three of those, although they’re not following WebEden! This means that we get updates from them, but they don’t get updates from us.
Are you using Twitter? If so, why not follow WebEden so you can get the latest updates and website building tips from us. And we can follow you too, so you can lets us know what you’re up to online. You can reply to our posts, and vice versa. Just like a real conversation!
If you’re new to Twitter, try having a look at our Twitter page. If you like what you see, then join up and start following people. Including us!
