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We’ve pulled out all the stops this week for what is our longest, most in-depth tutorial so far!
A few weeks ago our guest blogger Alison Cross showed you how to get more from the web with RSS. Another great thing about RSS is that you can use it to pull information and content from one website to another.
In this tutorial we show you how to add RSS feeds from other websites onto your own website. Is a great way to add valuable content, looks really professional, and can increase the length of time visitors spend on your site.
We’ve discussed Twitter countless times on this blog, and I’ve just realised that we haven’t covered the basics: How to sign up to Twitter. Here’s some instructions!
1. Go to the Twitter Home page and press the sign up button on the right hand side. This is what it looks like:
2. Next you’ll be on the ‘Create an Account’ page. It looks like this:
For Full Name and Username you’ve got a few choices. You need to decide who you are Tweeting as. Will your account be:
a) Personal (EG ‘Ken Builder’). In this case put your first and last name in and, and for a username write your name straight through. If it looks better seperate your first and last name with an ‘_’ underscore.
b) Business (EG WebEden). In this case put your company name in as full name, and for username write your company name again.
c) ‘On behalf of’ (EG Ken Builder on behalf of WebEden). In this case put your actual first and last name, and add your company name as the username.
Keep the names as short as possible - it will give you more space to Tweet with!
Make sure you include your current email address as this is where your notifications and password reminders will be sent to.
3. Then you get onto a stage where Twitter can search your Gmail, Yahoo or AOL mail accounts to see if any of your contacts are already on Twitter. Here’s what it looks like, but I’d skip this step if I were you!
4. Next up you can look for high profile users of Twitter who you might want to follow. This is what it looks like, but I’d skip this bit too!
5. And that’s it. You’re on Twitter! Time to experiment…
I’m not going to talk here about what to do, what to say, and who to follow, except to explain the links across the top of the page that look like this:
Here’s what these all mean:
Home: This is where all the Tweets of everyone you’re following plus your own will appear.
Profile: This is where all your Tweets will appear
Find People: This is where you can search for other users of Twitter, and follow them. Try searching for webeden!
Settings: This is where you can:
Change your Username and Passwords
Add your website address
Add a 160 character biography about yourself
Change Your Background
Add Your Photo (if its a personal account use your own photo, if its a company one use your logo)
UK website traffic monitoring firm ‘Hitwise’ has just published some up to date information about the ebb and flow of search volumes that include the words ‘discount voucher’ and ’sale’.
2009 has been the year of the discount voucher
This year the recession has meant that more people than ever have been looking for bargains online. And the more people who find discount vouchers and tell others, the more people become aware of the discount voucher system. It’s a positive feedback loop, which has translated to a great year for those specialising in this market.
The latest research shows that UK Internet searches for discount vouchers was up 40% year-on-year during the w/e 03/10/09 .
But what about that high street favourite: the ’sale’?
In contrast to the discount voucher system, sales are usually only short lived, and can provide a huge spike in traffic for those online retailers who have a high street presence.
As such ‘Sale’ traffic is usually very seasonal. There’s a massive peak starting on December the 26th, and other high points coinciding with the end of a particular season.
Traditionally the view is that retailers don’t need to have a sale between October and December. This ‘golden quarter’ is when consumers make purchases anyway, so shop owners can stick to their guns, charge premium prices, and maximise their profits.
Things are a bit different this year
Whilst it is of some debate as to whether the UK is still in recession, there’s no doubt that consumers online are still looking for a bargain. And that includes searching for ’sales’ at a time when there usually aren’t any around.
In 2008, sale searches dropped off a cliff at the end of the summer, and didn’t recover until just before Christmas. This year there has been a drop, but nothing like the scale of previous years. The number of ‘sale’ searches are much higher during this period in 2009 than 2008.
Here’s the graph from Hitwise:
This is a potential opportunity for online retailers to grab some traffic – and sales - from the search engines. Whilst no-one wants to cut their profits just to make sales, there’s no doubt that there are shoppers out there that are looking for a ’sale’ bargain rather then a discount voucher. If you are able to package your products into a ’sale’ then you have a strong chance of both getting more visitors, and then converting those visitors once they’re on your website.
Anyone planning to have an early sale this year? Leave us a comment below.
They must be busy down at Mountain view. Barely a day seems to go by when they don’t launch something new. I feel like the number of times I write ‘here’s a new service from Google’ has gone off the scale. And we haven’t even talked about Google Wave yet!
Well… predictably… here’s a new service from Google…
In its never ending quest to provide ever more relevant search results, Google has launched a ’social search’ service.
In a nutshell, this allows you to search for stuff; the search engine results pages (SERPs) are populated just with information posted by those in your social networks.
This might include information that people in your social networks have posted on Facebook and Twitter. But it might also include any entries they’ve made on blogs, forums, or other services such as Picasa.
At the moment the feature is only available in Google Labs.
Let’s say for example that you’re looking searching for a place to eat in the West End. Wherever a friend or colleague has made a comment or recommendation about a restaurant, their entries will be displayed in the SERPs.
The service is able to identify posts made by those a social network by making use of users’ Google profile. We wrote previously about how to set up your Google profile. The Google profile allows Google to link up services such as Gmail, Twitter, Friendfeed and LinkedIn.
Google are anxious to stress that they will only surface publicly available information, and not data and information from private or secure services.
“All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web - you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant,” said Murali Viswanathan, product manager at Google.
For information about how it all works, here’s a video by the mighty Matt Cutts that describes what’s going on:
As we’ve mentioned before, personal recommendations are the most likely reason to buy a product. Social Search makes it more important than ever to try and get recommendations from your customers, since these recommendations will be more likely to be read and followed by those in their social networks.
Can you see a future of social search? Are you interested to see the search results populated with information provided by those in your social network? Leave us a comment below.
But what has been nagging at the back of every business owners’ mind is how much employees using social networking websites are costing them every day.
A survey from IT service provider Morse has tried to answer this question, by polling 1,460 workers on their use of social media during work hours.
The survey found that a whopping 57% of people spend 40 minutes every week on Facebook and Twitter whilst at work. Whilst we website builders want them to be using their social networks to market the company website, in actual fact its all for personal use. The estimated productivity lost from this has been put at £1.4bn a year.
And what are companies doing to plug this leak? The answer is ‘not a lot’. More than 75% of UK businesses have not issued guidelines on social media use.
Quite apart from the work time lost, unregulated use of social media by employees is also a potential brand accident waiting to happen. We’ve all ready about big company employees ridiculing ‘problem’ customers on Facebook, not realising that others could listen in to their conversation.
“Social media can be good for business, helping to extend ties with customers and employees, but organisations don’t seem to understand that it’s not being used predominantly for business but for personal use. This is a massive productivity black hole,” said Philip Wicks, a Morse consultant.
“Companies need to reinforce a corporate usage policy to ensure that people use their PCs responsibly and predominantly for business purposes.”
Do you think that this is another example of corporate Britain trying to stamp on the personal activities of employees? Have you any experience of social media indiscretions when discussing company issues? Leave us a comment below.
A couple of months ago we talked about the ‘Real time’ battle being played out by Google and Microsoft. The emergence of Twitter has a search engine that can tell you what people are discussing right now, made both Google and Microsoft to develop their own angle on ‘real time’
Whilst Microsoft’s Bing opted to include Tweets from prominent Twitters within their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), Google decided to rapidly index and promote blog posts and other recently added online content.
Both major players have now elected to try and beat each other at the Real Time game by… doing exactly the same thing. A couple of week’s ago they announced that they would feature live Tweets from the full Twitter index.
This is how Paul Yiu from Bing put it: “Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous… Working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with.” The service is currently only available in the US.
And on the same day, this is what Marissa Mayer from Google had to say “We have reached an agreement with Twitter to include its updates in our search results. We believe our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.”
Bing is already starting to include Twitter results in the US. In the UK we have to wait; and everyone has got to wait a while for Google,
Seeing as they have decided to do exactly the same thing, the winner will probably the search engine that chooses the most effective integration. Twitter produces a lot of ‘noise’ – irrelevant or irreverent Tweets that people may well not find useful to see in the SERPs.
As for what it means to website builders and your social media strategy, this means that is going to be more important than ever to make sure you are effectively using Twitter to communicate with your website visitors about your website. If you use Twitter as a customer service and communication tool, more people than ever will witness your customer care. As we discussed previously, the SERPs for your brand searches influence a lot of potential visitors to your website. More than ever they need to see that yours is a website that they want to interact with.
Getting the right logo is an important part of designing a website. And logos aren’t just limited to the web, but can of course be used in printed material too. This week’s guest blog comes from Vicki Willingham who runs VictoriaAnnDesign.com. It’s all about the steps she takes when designing a logo.
6 essential steps to design the perfect logo
I’ve been designing logos for a few years now. It started off as a hobby, and now I’m lucky enough to have turned it into work. Whenever someone asks me to design a new logo for them I always stick to the following steps.
1. The Brief
This bit is about asking the client the right questions. I’ll make sure I have all the details I need from the client including: style; preferred colours; orientation; and the message they want their logo convey.
2. Write it all Down I’m someone who likes to think on paper, so I write down everything that comes to mind about the company and scribble thoughts and ideas around that. For example, if I were designing a logo for a financial company I might write jot down the words money, wealth, success, banking, saving…then continue with further words relating to each.
3. Start Drawing
Once I have my ideas and thoughts down in writing I begin to scribble them out as images. I keep drawing until I find an idea I’m happy with and can develop into a logo. I’ll usually also jot down colour ideas.
4. Get it on the Mac Now I have my logo draft/s I’ll hop onto the laptop and get the idea onto the screen. Depending on what I’m doing, I might also be tracing the draft using a pen tablet. I’ll usually come up with a multitude of styles and variations and I’ll disregard probably 80% of those and work further on the 20% I choose to keep.
It takes time This part of the process can take any time from a few hours to a week. Usually, if I have done the previous part of sketching out ideas properly, this shouldn’t take all that long.
It takes colour
I’ll usually design in black first to check the shapes come together well, before I apply colour. As well as designs looking fab in colour, it’s also important that logos work in black - it can look a mess on a photocopied corporate header otherwise! There are a few exceptions to this, I’m sometimes asked to make a logo that will only be used online for web based companies and that won’t be used on print at all. In that case, things are clearly a bit different and I feel happy to throw colour in from the start.
5. Get feedback from the client
The client is sent a copy of the logo to view. At this point I encourage revisions to ensure we’re all happy when the project is completed. There’s no telling how long this can take, but if we both understand the requirements at the beginning then it really does help.
6. Send the final version
So, when the logo is done, the files are ready and I’ll send them over to the client. Typically, I will provide an ai file; pdf; small jpg; large jpg; transparent png; opaque png; gif and a tiff.
So that’s about it.
The process looks really clear and straight forward, but life isn’t always like that. There are always some unforseen bits and pieces that get thrown into the works. But that’s the basic outline.
If you’re designing a logo for your own website or someone else, stick to these steps and your life should be a bit easier.
I’d be interested to hear from others and how they do things – please leave a comment below.
About Vicki Willingham Vicki is a Macbook Pro aficionado who is expert in logo design and corporate identify. For more information, visit her website.
As we discussed back in our Google the innovator series, Google Squared is where Google attempts to answer your search query with a table of facts, rather than a list of websites that might contain the actual answer.
Google Squared is good when the answer to your question may lie of many different websites. Google tries to extract all the meaningful information and present it in a clear way.
For example, a search for ‘US presidents’ gives you a table where each row represents a president, and each column contains facts about him.
Here’s what it looks like:
The first update is that the square now contains up to 120 facts, whereas previously it had just 30.
The information is better quality too. The table is ranked based on relevance and whether Google squared can find enough high quality facts. For example, previously there would be a column for “First Lady” even if Google could only find 2 or 3 of them. Google now gets rid of a row or column if it can’t find the facts.
Since Google squared allows editing and corrections, it has also improved from the personal input of thousands of individuals amending the information.
You can now also sort the columns, which allows you to rank and compare items.
You can now also export the data to a Google spreadsheet or CSV file.
Google Squared shows where Google wants to go next with search. Rather than trying to answer search queries by listing websites that contain the answer, Google is trying to include and publish all the information itself. As to how they intend to make money out of that remains to be seen!
Have a look a Google squared and let us know what you think.
It’s a while since we talked about click fraud. This is when people or computers click on pay per click adverts without the genuine intention of finding out more information about the product or service advertised.
Click fraud is carried out for two main reasons. The first is to make money. When pay per click adverts are published on a website, most commonly through the Google AdSense program, the owner of that website makes a small amount of money every time a visitor clicks on an advert.
Consequently, there is a huge incentive for website owners to get as many clicks as possible on the adverts on their website. This has led some people to try to obtain these clicks fraudulently.
The second reason for click fraud is to drive up advertising costs for competitors. If you know that your main competitor gets charged £1 every time you click on their adverts, there’s a big incentive to click on them.
Google and other providers of pay per click advertising have got pretty smart systems to weed out these fraudulent clicks. For example, if your computer consistently clicks on the same advert, or on the same website, the chances are that those advertisers will not get charged for those clicks. Google will have detected that you are carrying out click fraud.
This has led to ever increasing levels of sophistication in the techniques of click fraudsters. Last month, click fraud monitoring service Anchor Intelligence discovered a 1,000 member click fraud ring in China. The ring had managed to compromise a network of PCs in order to carry out click fraud on pay per click adverts on the Google search results.
At the time of the discovery, the fraud had affected more than 2,000 advertisers. Members of the ring would build websites, and then sign up with advertising networks like Google Adsense. They would then click on the adverts on each others websites in order to generate pay per click revenue.
What made it harder to discover was the sheer number of members in this click fraud ring.
In just two weeks, Anchor Intelligence estimated that the group generated millions of fraudulent clicks across 200,000 different IP addresses. According to the details reported on TechCrunch, this had generated more than $3m of click fraud.
“We have seen 200 fraud rings and this one by far trumps them all”, said Richard Sim, VP of Anchor Intelligence.
Have you tried placing adverts on your WebEden website through Google Adsense? Have you ever been tempted to click on a competitors’ ad? Do you think that Click fraud is a problem for online advertising? Leave us a comment below.
You make a website. You settle on fonts, colours, images, layout, pages. You test it. You tweak it. You make it perfect. It takes time. It takes effort.
And now you want to make another similar website. Oh no! All that design effort! You’ve got to go through it all again haven’t you?
Not any more you don’t! With the new WebEden control panel you can copy a website, in its entirety, at the click of your mouse button. Design heaven eh? This feature has been a long time coming and we’re so happy its finally ready. Find out how to copy your website using the tutorial below.
The website builder blog from webeden.co.uk contains news, tips and information for any person who wants to build a website using the online sitebuilder tool webeden.co.uk. The blog will include the latest website design tips for the sitemaker system, it will also let users know about product updates and new features on the build your own website mechanism. The create your own website blog will have interesting news from relevant internet stories too. And finally we’ll be including video tutorials on how to make your own website using webeden.co.uk.
