Well what can I say?
WebHostingSearch.com, a leading webhosting guide, has recommended us as a top pick for web site building solutions!!!
And here it is the award…
We were up against some pretty big names in this market so we’re chuffed, pleased, excited, and honoured - thanks WebHostingSearch.
Well who’d have thought it? That tiny crying baby is no longer – YouTube is now fully grown up. Well, 6 years old at any rate.
And do you know the quite scary facts?
Fact 1: There are over 48 hours of video uploaded onto YouTube every minute.
Fact 2: There are 3billion views every day on the site.
Here’s a nice infographic from YouTube to sum it all up.
A fan? Or had enough of the big ‘Y’? Leave us a comment below.
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 news if you sell online: Christmas present shopping over the web has gone up 25% this year.
That means that a whopping 45% of us are shopping online for Xmas.
Revenue is set to hit £12.4bn, according to research carried out by retail body IMRG.
Apparently this year the cold weather is an added factor, forcing people inside and in front of their PCs.
The biggest beneficiary of online shopping is the gravy train that is Amazon.co.uk. UK MD Brian McBride commented that last year at this time they “received orders for 2m items at a rate of around 23 orders a second.”
Nice work if you can get it….
Have you seen a boost in traffic and sales this year? Leave us a comment below.
We get all sorts of people building websites with WebEden.
Some have a hobby or an interest they want to share with the world. We have lots of clubs who want somewhere to show off team photos and results. Others are small businesses using the web to service customers and find new ones.
Last but not least are charities. Because the WebEden website builder is so easy to use (and so low cost), WebEden is a popular way for people in charities to build their own website.
We’re really happy to be able to serve this sector so well – so much so that we’re going to give away 100 Free Websites to charities.
We will pay for a year subscription to either WebEden Lite or Standard for any UK charity. This includes a free website, free website building tools, free hosting, a free domain name and up to 5 free email addresses. Free for a whole year.
All you need to be is a UK Charity registered with the Charity Commission. You need to use your free website for your charity. All we ask is that you add a link to your website indicating that this is a website provided by Website Builder WebEden.
To apply add the following details to the comments box below:
Your Name
Your Charity Name
Your Charity Number
What your Charity Does
Your Email Address
Your Phone Number
The first 100 genuine applicants will receive a free website for their charity.
Depending on how fast we receive applications, we hope to start notifying lucky recipients at the end of January.
We look forward to receiving your applications!
According to United Nations statistics, almost a third of the world’s population will be online by the end of 2010. The number connected to the Internet has doubled in the last 5 years alone.
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) said that 226m new users have come online this year alone, bringing the total number up to 2 billion. Of those new connections, as much as 70% are from developing countries.
(Here’s a picture of the Internet, by the way)
Of course there are more people connected to the web in the developed countries. Latest figures indicate that 71% of westerners are connected to the Internet, compared to just 21% in developing ones.
Hamadoun Toure, Secretary-General of the ITU said that broadband was a ”transformational technology” to be used to catalyse development.
“It can generate jobs, drive growth and productivity and underpin long-term economic competitiveness”.
Broadband prices in developing countries remain high compared to low average incomes there. In the Central African Republic for example, it costs 40 times the average monthly income.
The cheapest place for broadband is Macao in China where it costs just 0.3% of average monthly income.
Broadband use is of course outstripped by mobile connections. 90% of the world’s population has access to a mobile network.
By the end of 2010 the ITU estimate that there will be 5.3 billion mobile subscriptions of which 3.8 billion will be in the developing world.
So as a website builder do you feel like you have an audience big enough for your website?! Where does your traffic come from – is it mostly UK or do you get visitors from other countries too? You can find out that kind of information from Google analytics – let us know if you need a hand setting up Google Analytics.
The results are in, the numbers have been counted and verified. And the news? Well don’t hold your breath: according to online measurement firm ComScore, Facebook is where we all hang out. It racks up more time-spent than any other site, including all Google’s sites.
In August we spent 41.1m minutes on Facebook. which is 9.9% of total time online. That compares to 39.8m minutes on Google sites (which of course include YouTube).
Yahoo sites got up to 37.7m minutes of dwell time, which is down 12% on August 2009.
Both Facebook and Google are up massively -the pair received just 5% each in Auust 2009.
Both Google and Facebook have made a big effort to boost user time in the last year. Lots of businesses now use Facebook pages as a key way to interact with customers. It’s also a lot easier to share content on Facebook than a year ago.
Google for its part has broker deals with film studios, record labels, sporting bodies and broadcasters to show more long-form content on YouTube.
So is this a victory for great, engaging websites? Or a poor sign for the diversity of our interests in the web? are you using Facebook and YouTube more than you were a year ago? Leave us a comment below.
A couple of months ago we told you about Rupert Murdoch’s plan to charge access to The Times websites. With the newspaper group losing more money each day than most of us earn in a lifetime, he needed to make a big and bold change.
Traffic plunge
Following the change, the inevitable happened: Traffic to The Times plummeted. Although Murdoch himself claims the service is doing alright, the fact of the matter is that visitor numbers are just a fraction of what they used to be.
Content should be free!
The problem of course is that in the Internet age most people think that content – information – should be free. Newspapers have lost their paid gateway to what’s going on in the world. Much of the traffic to the Times came from Google, as it indexed The Times news stories and reproduced them in the Search Results.
But with a paywall blocking their access, Google can no longer see that content, so they can’t list The Times in the search results. So not only is no-one willing to subscribe to the content, none of us knows what they’re writing about anyway!
Here comes ‘Newspass’
Now it’s time for a drumroll. Google are riding to the rescue of The Times – and other newspapers who want to charge users for access to content – with a new micropayment platform called Newspass.
Based on Google checkout, this would allow users to make small payments to websites in order to access specific stories or content. The really great feature of Newspass is that it would allow Google to continue to index all of the newspapers content that would normally sit behind the paywall. This means they could continue to show up in the Search Results, and would therefore continue to get traffic. Google would indicate that the content would be paid-for with a small paywall icon beside the snippet in the search results.
Google say that they are “uniquely positioned to help publishers create a scalable ecommerce system via our Checkout product and also enable users to find this content via search, even if it’s behind a paywall”.
So Google is the Newspaper Saviour
So might Google rescue The Times in the end? Would you be willing to pay to access news stories? Is this also good news for website builders, who might be able to charg in future for access to their content?
Leave us a comment below.
Last year we excitedly brought you news of the latest Google product, Wave. Google aficionados and industry experts agreed: Google wave was set to revolutionise the way we communicated online.
Email is Outmoded
The basic idea – according to Google – was that email was outmoded. It was inefficient, Google said, to send emails from person to person and to cc other interested parties.
Ride the Wave
Far better – they reckoned – to have an opening, rolling real-time conversation which anyone could contribute to: a stream of thoughts that ran down a web page in a never ending… Wave?
Use was initially by invitation only – and people were desperate to make it in. But less than a year into the project, Google has decided to put the stoppers on Wave, with it likely to disappear next year.
No Adoption
Google is knocking it on the head because it has “not seen the user adoption we would have liked”. On the blog they expanded with “We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through to the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”
With typical Google-like stoicism, they’re saying that the project hasn’t been wasted effort, and are making much of the source code available to external developers.
It may be that Google are clearing the way for their latest social experiment ‘Google me‘.
I for one quite liked wave, but never really found a reason to use it, and certainly never made use of the range of apps developed to enhance each wave.
Did you try Wave as a website builder? Like it? No? Leave us a comment below.
A Twitter user experienced Twitter meltdown last month as a result of being followed by rap star Kanye West.
Kanye only decided to join Twitter last month, and has already amassed over a million followers. Getting to grips with the service, he posted a Twitpic of his diamond tooth. In response, Coventry Based Steven Holmes – who tweets as ste_101 – asked him whether he used Colgate or polish to clean them.
Kanye immediately followed Steven back – the only person at that point that Kanye decided to follow.
From that point, Mr Holmes has been swamped with messages to such an extent that his Twitter account went into ‘melt down’.
Commenting on how he had managed to catch the attention of Kanye, Mr Holmes tweeted
“I just told a joke. Humour is the key” and “I guess a witty joke was all it took”.
Apparently Holmes has had a lot of abuse from others, which he has then tweeted about. Kanye urged him to “Tweet strong young man, tweet strong”.
For his part Kanye described Holmes as “the chosen one”.
And what is Kanye up to on Twitter? Well here’s something he posted last Saturday: “Being nice is the s**t … working on being a doper person #ITSAPROCESS”.
Pearls of wisdom there.
So now you. Forget all the advice we give you about marketing your site online. All you need to do to boost your follower numbers is to catch the attention of a celebrity…
Had any success hob-nobbing with the stars? Leave us a comment below.
