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Social Payment – Pay With A Tweet

Doug — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 19:51:35 +0000

Social media’s commercial importance is being more and more recognised by big companies and small businesses alike; with a growing value being placed on an individual’s social network, techniques to leverage this value are becoming increasingly relevant.

‘Pay with a Tweet‘ is being classed as the first ‘social payment system’, allowing users to purchase a single product by tweeting about the brand.

This is an extremely versatile tool and can be used to engage with your target audience through one of their primary mediums. The theory is that everytime someone tweets out about your product, company or brand, that tweet reaches their entire social network. If your product is of a real-world value or has an inherent appeal, it will lead more people to follow the thread and convert using the same method. This would potentially allow you to reach a considerable number of people via social networking, with a percentage of those people turning into website traffic.

Potential uses for the system include:

-Giving away a small product for free
-Giving discount or promotional codes
-Downloading an ebook
-Downloading a new single release for a band
-Download a music video or latest viral advert
-Access to a free article
-Access to a special page on your website

There are numerous potential applications for the system, making it suitable for practically any type of business.

The ‘pay with a tweet’ system is free to use and you can get it on your website very quickly and easily. The website contains customisation steps, where you can edit the button, exit landing page, tweet to be sent out and required information. The site will then generate a html code for you to copy and paste into your website / content management system.

I can imagine this to be the beginning of a wave of ‘social payment’ options, with Twitter and Facebook being a primary focus for the forseeable future.

SEO – 10 Top Tips for Search Engine Friendly Web Builds

Doug — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:48:42 +0000

“Ground-Up” SEO – 10 Top Considerations for Search Engine Friendly Web Builds

Implementing SEO recommendations shouldn’t be an after-thought; it should be at the forefront of every web developer or webmaster’s mind. Here guest author PackNet examines some of the most important SEO considerations to make when developing a new website.

Due to unawareness, ignorance or perhaps just lack of consideration when developing new websites, a lot of companies seem to be missing the fundamental basics in terms of search engine optimisation. Implementing search engine friendly ‘best practice’ guidelines is much easier in the initial stages of a project, and even better if they can be done during the development phase.

Features such as page/URL structure shouldn’t be governed by guess work, but should be the result of an in-depth analysis of the opportunities available within a sector. If all new websites took the ‘right’ approach to ensuring the development was done in a search engine friendly manner, then there would be a lot more higher ranking pages for authoritative websites than there currently are.

Below are 10 top SEO considerations to make when developing a new website.

1.Page Structure/Hierarchy – As mentioned above, the structure of a website should not be guess work. Keyword, competitor and industry research should be carried out at the planning stage to understand how users are searching for the data they require, and whether there are any uniformed approaches that you should be taking. Visualise the page structure on paper and then portray this on to the website from the beginning. Having a well-thought out and logical page hierarchy allows the search engines to crawl your content much more efficiently.

2.URL Structure – As with the page structure, considerations have to be given to the structure of the page URLs within a website. For example, a bad URL structure could be:
www.example.com/page/index.php?2312312312

Whereas a much better URL structure would be:

www.example.com/service-type/service
A logical and hierarchical page URL (reflecting the structure) provides both users and search engines with a clear indication of what the content is about. It is also beneficial to include keywords within the URL structure wherever possible.

3.Content Strategy – If you are rebuilding a website, or building it for the first time, then there is a great opportunity to attract a number of users through targeted content which is centred on key phrases (derived from keyword research). Through a content strategy you can understand which pages would benefit most from quality (and quantity) of written content, and can also give you ideas of how to best-cater for visiting users.

4.Internal Linking – A large challenge in optimising a website can be getting all of the content found – especially within larger websites. Links to a website are essentially like ‘votes’, which help to increase the visibility and authority of a specific page – and internal linking works in a similar way. Through the use of internal linking between pages with specific and relevant anchor text, you can boost search engine visibility for each of the core pages on a website.

5.Sitemaps – Sitemaps on websites are a useful way for both search engines and users to see a complete list of all of the pages on a website, especially if there are a lot of them. An XML sitemap should be created and submitted to Google, Yahoo and Bing Webmaster Tools. The XML sitemap doesn’t necessarily have to be linked to from your actual website (except for the in robots.txt file… which we will cover shortly). Along with an XML sitemap, a HTML (or ‘static’) sitemap should be created and linked to from your website (usually in the website footer). This HTML copy of the website is something that should be styled to fit in with the rest of the website theme, and is a place where users can visit to see a complete list of pages.

To be continued…

Yes, this is the point where we leave you all hanging. Part two in our series of ‘ground-up’ SEO will be available very shortly, including more considerations to make when developing a new website with ‘search engine friendliness’ in mind. In part two, we will be looking deeper into the more specific recommendations for on-page optimisation, to improve search engine rankings and visitor retention.

Author: PackNet – A leading provider of VoIP phone systems and VoIP reseller solutions, and have recently redeveloped their existing website with search engine optimisation fundamentals in mind.

Image: graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Vuvuzelas – Noooooo

Doug — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:17:05 +0000

So I’m watching the first game of the 2010 World Cup only to be greeted with what sounded like a bee on steroids trying to get out of my TV, after a good 5 minutes of repeatedly banging the TV, I find out its all down to a 2 foot horn called a Vuvuzela…..

I must admit my ears have managed to block it out after 18 games so it’s not too bad… However whilst trawling through the web I stumbled across this website…. ‘vuvuzela-time’.

It turns any website into a vuvuzela frenzied football arena! Check out our vuvuzela’d website, or try it for yourself at – vuvuzela-time.co.uk

No related posts.

How to Track Your Site Visitors

Doug — Mon, 10 May 2010 08:40:13 +0000

Website tracking has existed in many forms and allows users to learn more about visitors to their sites. In the early days stat counters were used. These were often inaccurate and gave very little detail. Since then things have progressed significantly and we are now able to learn a great deal about the visitors through packages such as Google Analytics. In this article we will tell you how to setup Google Analytics tracking.

Sign up for an account

The first thing you will need to do is head over to the Google Analytics home page and sign up for an account. During this process you will be asked to enter the URL in which you want to track and a relevant time zone. Note: you will need an existing Google Account to do this.

Installing the Tracking
Once you have entered in your details you will be presented with some tracking code. This needs to be added to every page of your website. If you are using a template then you can simply paste the code into your footer file and it will be recorded on every page. If you are using a static site with individually designed pages then you will need to go through each page manually. There are a couple of other ways you could do it but they can be quite complex. You can see the Google help page for further information.

http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=10976

The method described above will allow you to install basic tracking however there are ways to capture a greater level of detail. For example if you own an ecommerce store then you can use some advanced tracking to record specific order information.
Once you have your tracking in place you can view a range of data about your site visitors.

Setting up Goals
Google Analytics can be customised to track certain things. This is important as something bits of information will be more important to you than others. For example if you run a plumbing service then you might want to track the number of enquiries through goal tracking. To set this up you will need to login to your Analytics account and click on the edit actions link. You will then be presented with a page which lets you add goals. In most cases you just have to enter the final page which people land on once they complete a specific action. There are many ways to do this and further information can be found on the Google help site.

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-setup-goals-in-google-analytics.html

Google Analytics can be setup to be as basic or as complex as you like. The advantage is that you can actually do this as many previous setups wouldn’t allow you to do this. Tracking is something that should be installed on every site as it lets you know what works on your site and what doesn’t. This is important as you have already invested significant amounts in good hosting and a web design.

Guest Author: PushON – A Manchester based SEO Company

Image: djcodrin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

8 Great Jquery Plugins For Your Next Project

Doug — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:31:04 +0000

jQuery, released in January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig, it’s a lightweight cross-browser JavaScript library emphasising the interaction between JavaScript and HTML. It’s now used by millions and is used at about 20% of the 10,000 biggest websites. jQuery is the most popular JavaScript library in use today!

Its popularity has been greatly because of its flexibility, and because it is fast and easy to use. Over this past year, there has been tremendous growth in the jQuery community with 100′s of existing plugins available to choose from, all enhancing the users online experience.

We’ve gathered 10 of our favourite jQuery plugins for your enjoyment!

jQuery Cycle

The jQuery Cycle Plugin is a slideshow plugin that supports many different types of transition effects. It supports pause-on-hover, auto-stop, auto-fit, before/after callbacks, click triggers and much more.

jParallax

jParallax turns a selected element into a ‘window’, or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way.

JQZoom

JQZoom is a javascript image magnifier built at the top of the popular jQuery javascript framework. JQzoom is a great and a really easy to use script to magnify what you want.

prettyPhoto

prettyPhoto is a jQuery based lightbox clone. Not only does it support images, it also add support for videos, flash, YouTube, iFrames. It’s a full blown media lightbox. The setup is easy and quick, plus the script is compatible in every major browser.

jQuiry Countdown

(with Background and Overlay)

AnythingSlider

AnythingSlider is an attempt at bringing brings together the functionality of all of those previous sliders and adding new features.

Ajax Fancy Capcha

Ajax Fancy Captcha is a jQuery plugin that helps you protect your web pages from bots and spammers.

JQuery Modal

jqModal is a plugin for jQuery to help you display notices, dialogs, and modal windows in a web browser. It is flexible and tiny, akin to a “Swiss Army Knife”, and makes a great base as a general purpose windowing framework.

Image By: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

5 Top Free Colour Combination Tools

Doug — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:19:57 +0000

Choosing the right colour combination for your website is key when communicating with your users and ensuring they perceive your design in the correct way.

So today we have listed 10 of what we consider to be the best, free colour tools that will help you choose the right colour palettes for your designs.

Toucan Color Palettes

Used alone or in conjunction with our other creation tools, Toucan gives you the features you need to inject colour into your creative process.

Pictaculous

Ever wonder what colours to use with an image? Upload your image – get a colour palette.

ColorExplorer

A brand new way of working with digital colours! With the colourful toolbox at ColorExplorer you can easily create, manage, and explore colour palettes for use in web designs, desktop publishing, or any other graphic design process.

Color Scheme Designer

Color Scheme Designer is a brand new interface, as well as the engine, all rewritten from the scratch. Rapidly increased precision and colour space conversions, better preview, enhanced scheme creation system, unique scheme IDs and permanent URL of the scheme.

Kuler

The web-hosted application for generating colour themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with colour variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.

Manage Your Hosting From Your iPhone

Doug — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:05:20 +0000

Control your web hosting on the move with the all-new Pixel Internet mobile phone control panel!

Available for both the iPhone and all Android powered phones, Pixel Internet is proud to announce the launch of our Customer Control Panel and Host Control Panel for the iPhone and Android phone.

To access the new control panel from your phone, simply login as normal via our website and the new mobile control panel will automatically be displayed.

Manage Features:

* Manage your domain names
* Manage all your web hosting accounts
* Log in to your webmail
* View the system status updates
* View your Webalizer analytics statistics
* One click installs such as WordPress
* View your invoices
* Backup & restore your website
* Set up scheduled tasks
* Manage all Host Control Panel features
* …and much more!

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Static and Shared IP Web Hosting

Doug — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:46:15 +0000

IP address is an important term associated with web hosting. Two types of IP addresses are shared and static IP addresses.You have a better understanding of these terms only after you have appreciated the actual meaning of IP addresses.

Basically, IP address is used to address all the sites of the internet.Instead of typing the url, typing the IP address will lead you to different sites.Four discreet block of numbers which are separated by periods constitute an IP address.A few examples of IP addresses are 64.191.62.74 and 192.168.0.1.

However specific IP addresses are not allotted to all websites.There is a chance of there being no IP addresses to be used for websites in the future if all sites were to be allocated different IP addresses today.You can thus find many sites on servers using a single IP address for numerous sites.

When two websites share the same IP addresses, we have a shared IP address.A person looking for the first website of the IP address reaches the server wherein the server sends the required page to the person on realizing which website the person is looking for.

Sites that have its own IP address, and do not share it with anyone else, have a static IP address in the web hosting world.To reach a website with a static IP address, all you require is its IP address.

On the contrary, sites that have a shared IP address cannot be reached by just typing in the IP address.You need to mention the domain name of the website you are looking for so that the server can direct you to the website you want.It is however better to use web hosts offering static IP addresses if you require more security for your website.

Domain Names – Help & Tips

Doug — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:24:25 +0000

Choosing the right domain name for your website is extremely important. One mistake you absolutely do not want to make is to name your domain something completely different from what your site is relative to. Sometimes people use names that have absolutely nothing to do with their site or the name of their business. They figure that once you arrive on site then you will see the actual name of the website or the content. That logic is flawed and more often than not will just make people angry. It is like tricking people into finding your site.

So when choosing the right domain name your first tip is to try and get a URL that is directly relative to the site. If the name of your company is Tail Warmers for Aardvarks, then try to get that phraseology as your URL. Or, if you are setting up a personal site try to get your name as the URL. As often happens, you may not be able to get the exact words you are looking for in your URL. Then you have to get a little creative. One thing you can do if you are absolutely intent on getting your name is see if it is available under a different extension other than .co.uk or .com.

Speaking of extensions, when choosing the right domain name you really should try and get a .com because of how common it is. People just automatically type in .com after a domain name. However, there are so many that a lot of URL’s are already taken as aforementioned. But, don’t despair because there are other ways to get a good domain name. For instance why not try an acronym. In the case of Tail Warmers for Aardvarks you could use the domain name TWFA.com. Acronyms are good because they are relative to the site.

The most important tip for choosing the right domain name is to try and pick one that is easy to remember and flows right off the tongue. Also, try to keep it down to less than 15 letters is possible. People’s memories can be fickle and you want your domain name to pop into someone’s mind quickly and easily. With so many domain names to remember these days you want yours to be on the top of someone’s mind for easy recall.

Why not see if your chosen domain name is available to purchase today with Pixel Internet?

Search for a domain >

How to Fix “Internet Explorer Cannot Open the Internet Site- Operation Aborted” Error

Doug — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:07:54 +0000

‘Internet Explorer Cannot Open the Internet Site- Operation Aborted‘

The nature of error is that it shows up when the page loads (or tries to load). The above image is what you see when the error occurs, if you click ok, you get a 404 Page cannot be found.

We experiences this error first hand and did some digging on Google. We found an interesting article written by Nirmal at www.nirmaltv.com (so really we credit this article to him…).

There are many scenarios that can cause this error which occurs on in IE. Microsoft has even issues a patch for solving it.

For us, the error was being caused by calling a piece of Javascript within a page (after the tag). What puzzled us it we have done this on many occasions in the past and never experienced the error, anyway that’s IE for you. Adding the defer=”defer” tag to the script quickly resolved the issue.

Another fix would be to move the script calling into the header of the page (in the tag) although this is not always possible depending on the way your website is build.

Another example of this error is when Google Map API code is being used. If you are getting this error because of Google Map API, then the fix for the problem is available here.

Hope that helps someone!