Archive for February 2011

Last month we let you know how to explain the Internet to your, well, less interested friends. And here’s another way you can help with their computers.

Do you – as someone who takes an interest in computers, the web, building websites and all that stuff – get asked tech questions by your friends and family all the time? Do they always want to know why ‘it won’t print’ or ‘where is that file’ and ‘how do find that website’?

Well here comes Google to the rescue with a website designed to help people (well, kids) teach others (erm, parents) about computer basics.

It’s called TeachParentsTech.org, and it lets you choose from over 50 how-to videos to send to people who don’t know how to do stuff. It’s all the way from basic copy and pasting onto other things like how to share a big file. You can customise an email and thend send the video off to the person who needs help.

Here’s a video with a bit more detail:

So no longer will you spend half your evening and weekend helping others with their computer problems!

Some Good News

In a couple of weeks time we’re updating the specifications on most of the WebEden packages. We’re applying higher Webspace and Bandwidth allowances to every account. And for all current customers we’re not changing the prices of your account.

We’re also simplifying things so that resellers can resell on any of the new products, though there will be lower site limits on some packs. Existing customers will retain existing site limits, and existing Resellers can move to new packs if they want to or stay on their existing plans.

Yeah!

Some… less good news

From the same time we’re putting up the price of all packages. The price change will not affect current customers. If you already subscribe to WebEden the amount we charge you will not change. This price change applies to new customers and upgrades only.

Booo! Why?

We haven’t change the price since we launched at the start of 2005, and this means that we can increase the amount we invest in our development team to improve the products and services.

So if you’re planning to buy or upgrade, make sure you do that in the next couple of weeks.

We’ll let you know the details of the changes once they’ve been finalised.

Thank you for your ongoing support. And feel free to leave a comment below.

Last week we told you about our new release which means that your WebEden website now has a mobile version suitable for smartphones and other mobile devices.

Mobile phone, smartphone or tablet?

One of the most complicated parts of this was making sure we built a version for all screen sizes – including tablets and mobile phones – and which detected whether the device was running Flash.

Broadly speaking, mobile phones will see the mobile HTML version, other devices without Flash (including the iPad) will see the desktop HTML, and any device with Flash installed will see the Flash version.

The Destop version of a WebEden website:

And the mobile version of the same site:

Mobile HTML Version

This is the first time we have built a mobile HTML version, so we’ve called it, erm, version 1.0! Its set up for small screen mobiles so all the content of your website is in a single column. Images are resized, links are larger to make them easier to press, and navigation uses a roll out menu. This makes the whole website easier to read and navigate.

This is definitely a work in progress. There are lots of things we’d like to do to improve it, and we’d like you to tell us how you want it changed too.

How the mobile version works

One of the reasons why people love WebEden is because you can use it to design in any way you like. We don’t restrict where you put your content and images, but allow you to drag them round the page and resize them until you’re happy.

That’s great from a design perspective, but because there’s often no formal architecture it make it challenging for us to write logical code that turns this unordered design into a formal structure for a mobile.

So for the mobile version we had to write an algorithm that analyses your free form design, makes sense of the order, and then lays it out in a single column. The code needs to make assumptions about what’s important and what’s not.

Columns and groups

In order to create a structure for each page we try to group objects which lie over the top of or near to each other (on the X and Y axis) into rows and columns.

Here’s a tip: Keep related content lined up, either in a line or on the Y axis, so it helps us group them correctly.

We assume the widest column on your website is the most important and display that highest on the page, with the other grouped content falling in a single column beneath.

Another Tip: Make sure your most important content is in the widest column.

Headers and footers

We then identify the header as content at appears above the site menu. As for the footer we use the placement of widgets such as the login button or the social media links as an indication of footer content. If you don’t have these then we assume the last row is the footer.

Tip number 3: Try testing the position of objects to help us correctly work out what goes in the header and footer.

Ignored items

There are some parts of your design that are there for pure aesthetics, and we ignore these for the mobile version. These include some images, empty text boxes, or items covered by other objects. Let’s say for example you place a coloured square behind some text. We make a decision that the text itself is the most important part of the design and render that in HTML, whilst leaving out the coloured square.

Tip 4: If you definitely want an image to show up in the mobile version then make sure it’s not covered by anything else.

We realise this isn’t perfect so are working to improve it for the next release.

HTML Design

The mobile HTML version of your website is fairly generic. For example, we use the HTML background colour and use that. We don’t apply additional styling to text or menu colour. Again, this is something we’ll improve next time around.

Mobile Menu

On the mobile HTML version the ‘menu’ button at the top will always display, even if you have hidden the menu from the page on your desktop site. This is important to make sure that users can always navigate the site.

Headlines for SEO (H1, H2 and H3)

At the moment the first ‘title’ text box on each page is set as the H1. Other ‘title’ text boxes are given H2. In the body text a bold line less than 120 characters is given H3.

That’s it

That’s the basic intro to the mobile version of your website, how we make decisions about what goes where, and some guidance on how to change how it looks.

We really want to find out what you think of the mobile version, or if you are having any problems, so please leave a comment and let us know what you think.

To celebrate the launch of our latest release – which turns your website into a mobile version for mobile phones -we’ve launched a competition in association with Computer Active Magazine that gives you the chance to win a Samsung Galaxy Tab!

The 5 runners up will get a free subscription to our Website Builder Standard Package, worth £50 each!

You can enter the competition on ComputerActive’s website here.

Good luck!

A study by the Boston Consulting group has revealed that the Internet is more than £100bn to the UK economy. Commissioned by Google, the research indicates that the Internet accounts for around 7.2% of the UK’s GDP.

As a sector that makes the Internet the 5th largest in the UK, bigger than construction, transport and utilities.

Around 60% of this £100bn value comes from online shopping, and the price we all pay to connect ourselves – and our websites – to the Internet. The remainder is attributed to spending on IT by the Government, and net exports too.

Not only is this contribution huge, the reports indicate that it is set to grow too, forecast to increase by 10% annually for the next 5 years. The study also showed that the UK is world’s leading nation for e-commerce.

Other top Internet nations include:

• Denmark
• Republic of Korea
• Japan
• Sweden
• Netherlands
• United Kingdom
• Norway
• Finland
• Germany
• Iceland

This economic contribution also involves the generation of around 250,000 jobs.

And what does this show for small business?

Well the good news for WebEden website builders is that those small businesses that actively use the Internet show sales growth that outstrips their reclusive competitors by around four times.

Here’s the comment:

Paul Zwillenberg, partner with BCG commented: “The internet is pervasive in the UK economy today, more so than in most advanced countries.”

“Several industries – including media, travel, insurance and fashion – are being transformed by it.”

Matt Brittin, of Google UK added: “The internet is a central pillar of the UK’s economy.

“The sector has come of age, and with great prospects for further growth the UK internet economy will be vital to the UK’s future prosperity”.

Well then WebEdeners

Give yourself a pat on the back. In part due to your efforts in building and running a website, you’re helping to add to the UK economy and transform it into one that leads the way in online.

Have you seen the benefit from turning to online? What ways has having a website helped your business? Leave us a comment below.

Well we thought we’d have this out last year, and then we tried to do it a couple of weeks ago. Now we’re finally live with a WebEden release to get really excited about.

The developers have been working flat out on this release since early last year – we let them out in the sun for half and hour in September but they’ve been locked back in their windowless room ever since. Because this is a big project. We’ve had to rewrite some of the central parts of the WebEden system in order to integrate the mobile HTML roadmap (released now), the new Blog (released shortly) and e-commerce features (after that, not long).

Mobile HTML version of your website

We’ve now created the technology that will simultaneously publish a full Flash version of your website (for desktops and laptops), a desktop HTML version (for those people who haven’t installed Flash), and a mobile HTML version optimised for the small screen.

Here’s a desktop version of a site:

And the same site on a mobile phone:

The mobile optimised version your website is rendered in a single column of HTML. This means that all your content appears as a long vertical column which is easy to read and allows the user to scroll down the page. The website navigation is by a roll out menu, which means that most of the screen is devoted to your content.

This is just the first version of the mobile HTML – we’re going to be improving and upgrading it over the next few months. If yours is a website where you think the mobile version isn’t placing your content in the right order, please let us know and we’ll add it to our test cases.

In future, we’ll be adding styling options for the mobile version that will allow you to customise it.

TAKE NOTE: If you’re looking at the HTML version on your mobile and find a page with no content on it, just press refresh and it will display the content correctly. The ‘empty page’ will only occur the first time a page is visited following the release. It will happen only once. It will not happen for all users.

New Shapes Widget

The exciting new shapes widgets lets you apply fills, gradients and effects to lots of different shape objects, usefully allowing you to customise the basic design of your website. Shapes is a project that’s going to be added in the next few months – we’ll be letting you apply these effects to text boxes, the blog, and images.

Option to turn off background to give a very cool design

There’ now a feature which lets you turn off the Flash background of the site. In its place you get the HTML background. Doing this makes it possible to do the full screen image / fluid web design style that is so in vogue right now, with big headers and footers.

That’s it for now.

As we keep banging on, we’re shortly going to be releasing the blog and e-commerce. We’re just sorry they can’t all come at the same time.

We really want to know what you think of the new release, and would love to see the new designs that you can come up with using shapes and backgrounds. Please leave us a comment below and let us know what you think.

It’s now twenty years since a chap called Tim Berners-Lee first published his concept of the World Wide Web.

And where are we now? 47 bn web pages, 350 million different websites 500m domain names; a place where one company alone (Google) adds more than 20,000 servers a month to their data centers. We’ve got websites, blogs, photo sites, video, apps, email, Facebook, browsers, clouds, collaboration, open source, cookies… the list goes on. How can you explain all of that to someone who – up to now – has turned their back to the web?

Google have tried to do just that as easy chapter sized chunks in their new guidebook ’20 things I learned’ about browsers and the web, in collaboration with illustrator Christoph Niemann. It’s not just for beginners, but for anyone who wants to ‘better understand the technologies we use every day’.

Google wanted to give the guide the same feel as reading an actual book – holding the cover, flipping a page – and have used some very smart HTML5 programming to come up with it.

Once downloaded the book can be read offline too.

So next time one of your friends says to you “so, I hear you make those web wotsits” you know where to refer them to!

Take a look and let us know what you think.