I have 2 clients at the moment who both have .com domains registered with budget - and in one instance, extremely well known - hosting companies / domain registrars. All each of them need is that .com redirected to their website that is running on the .co.uk.

I do not believe how difficult that is proving to be!

The first company don’t respond to emails, and if you ring either say a) they’ll call you back in 10 minutes, never to be heard from again, or b) they’ll do it right away and 2 days later still haven’t.
The 2nd - and well known, search-engine-topping - company are sending my client (and myself) round and round in circles by a) telling her she can access her domain control panel through her old account but then not having the domain listed there, and b) telling her via a support ticket she will be emailed the correct login details, just to be emailed a message saying ‘please log in here… we look forward to your business!’ without a username or password in sight. And when I just rang them I was informed ‘we are a budget hosting company and so we don’t offer telephone support’. Well if you don’t, you should make up for it in other ways!

We always urge our clients to come to us when we have a problem or a query, and not be embarrassed or self-conscious to pick up the phone and just have something explained/looked into.

2 weeks ago I lost hours and hours trying to get a .co.nz redirected, with the New Zealand registrars eventually claiming it couldn’t be done because my client didn’t have a dedicated IP address! Each response though had a different answer, addressing different issues! If companies would just read support questions properly they’d probably half their work load and double their customer satisfaction!

So - don’t go with a company who don’t offer customer support, and don’t think that the cheapest option is always the best! In the case of hosting it’s often cheaper for a reason - that reason being no one to help you when you hit a problem.

Probably the most commonly requested requirement for a website is the ability for the client to add and edit pages. It sounds such a simple requirement, but in reality it’s really tricky to get the balance right between functionality, flexibility and the level of technical skills required.

There are literally hundreds, probably thousands of CMS platforms out there. Some are very generic such as Drupal and Joomla, and can be molded into practically any kind of site.

Both Drupal and Joomla are open source applications, built by an army of mostly unpaid contributors who continuously update the codebase, adding new features and extra functionality. These applications are great in many ways, but personally, from a coding point of view I find them far too generic and bloated for most situations. While they do provide pretty much everything under the sun in terms of functionality, they include this at the sacrifice of usability. In some ways they are almost too clever for their own good and can be taken straight out of the box and setup by anyone with enough patience to learn how everything works.

There are other content management systems out there which are more job specific, and in some ways I think this approach makes them actually more usable. We’ve created several websites based around the Wordpress blogging platform. I love Wordpress, it’s a highly supported package and you can have a new blog up in a matter of minutes. This blog you are reading right now is powered by Wordpress. Plugins are freely available and themes applied quickly and easily giving you a brand new website in no time at all. I actually prefer using Wordpress as a platform for certain types of websites as it just about gets the balance right between functionality and usability, but even then I don’t think it’s perfect.

As a web developer who builds websites for a living it’s very difficult to put myself in the place of the average small business owner. Unlike us they live and work in the ‘real world’. Logging into and updating a website is something that needs to be so simple, quick and intuitive that forgetting how to do it just isn’t a question, because it’s so obvious.

My hunt for the perfect CMS has led me down many paths over the years, but perhaps inevitably it’s my love of coding and building applications that has resulted in the development of our own solution, SimpleCMS.

SimpleCMS Unique Selling Points (USPs)

• Admin can view the website they want to update rather than having to use a separate admin interface.
• Updating pages is as easy as clicking an ‘edit’ button whilst viewing the page in question.
• Add pages is as easy as selecting ‘add page’, selecting if it’s a top level or sub page, giving it a title and entering the content.
• No restriction on the page type or content. Your page can be anything you like, it’s up to you. You aren’t restricted by any particular format or content type. Although all default styles are controlled by the globally defined style sheet.
• Pages instantly appear in the menu for the rest of the world to see. There’s nothing complicated or confusing to worry about.

SimpleCMS Is Ideal for

• Small business brochure or content websites that follow a basic page/sub page format, and need to be quick and easy to update.

SimpleCMS Isn’t

• In any way confusing or complicated to use
• Going to be the perfect solution for more complicated websites, ecommerce stores or social networking websites.

I think if you try to make a piece of software all things to all people it will inevitably end up being overly complicated and confusing and there’s just no need. If you keep it simple, quick and easy you can take the pain out of updating a website.

If you’re interested in having a play with SimpleCMS take a look at the demo website and have a play. I’m sure you’ll find it really quick and easy to update the pages. Don’t worry if you mess up the site by editing and deleting pages. It will reset itself every hour on the hour, so go for it, just don’t write anything rude please! Anyone found spamming will be hunted down, so play nice please.

If you have any suggestions send them this way.

Axminster based salon BOLTS hair and body came to us for a website to match their new image. The company, formerly BOLTS hair design, added a beauty salon to pamper the senses, with holistic treatments such as Hot Stones Therapy, Indian Head Massage and Reflexology, along side more traditional body treatments such as massage, waxing and tanning. There’s also a special something for men who fancy a bit of TLC!

And now, celebrity client Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, is set to feature the salon in his TV show River Cottage Spring next week. Salon regular Hugh, visits the salon in the episode being aired next Wednesday, to have his hair cut, before taking Mandy Bolt and her team fishing!

My roots are in South Somerset, close to the Devon/Somerset border and my Mum lives very near River Cottage, so I’ll be tuning in to catch a glimpse of home! See the show on Wednesday 18th at 9pm on Channel 4.

That’s where everyone wants their site to be. Some people, incredibly naively, think that as soon as they make a website, their site will magically appear above the millions of other existing pages in the search results. I’ve often heard stories from other developers of clients calling them up in a rage, accusing them of not doing their job properly because their site only appears at number 8, rather than 1 in Google! Completely ignoring the fact that their site is already appearing above millions of other pages and is infact in the top 99.9% of pages on the subject; which is an incredibly impressive feat in itself!

Unfortunately it’s a lack of understanding in this area that can lead to confusion and misunderstandings between client and designer, and ill feeling where there really shouldn’t be any.

So I thought it would be worthwhile outlining a few basic points about ranking in Google.

1. A basic search result page in Google shows 2 kinds of ads:

i) Paid listings - Which anyone can appear in, but you have to pay for each and every visitor you receive.
ii) Organic listings - Which are the pages that Google considers to be the most relevant to your search.

Obviously it’s far better to not pay for visitors to your site, so appearing in the organic results is the primary objective of every website.

What a lot of people don’t realise, is that there’s a HUGE industry based about Search Engine Optimisation or SEO as it’s often known. Getting a number 1 ranking in Google for a term such as ‘mortgages’ for example could be incredibly profitable as your site will receive lots of traffic from people wanting to take out mortgages. You could then send these people on to mortgage providers via their affiliate program and make sometimes more than £100 for each mortgage taken out. If you site is receiving 1000s of visitors each day this could easily make you a millionaire very quickly.

So as you can imagine the most popular search terms are incredibly competitive!

The more niche and small your chosen audience, the more likely you are to appear in the search results. For example if you are a plumber in Bristol you might want to target people searching for “plumbers”, but if you search for “plumbers” you’ll see it results in 18,300,000 web pages on the subject. Now that’s an awful lot of competition! If however you search for “plumbers bristol” you’ll see it returns just 355,000 returns. This might still seem a lot, but your chances of appearing on the first page are considerably better.

Here are my top SEO tips for small businesses.

1. Target your audience and try and think what they will be searching for.

2. Build pages targeted to specific topics.

3. Get as many pages of your website as possible listed in Google. The more pages you have indexed, the more possible entry points there are to your website. Say for example you’ve written a ‘how to’ article about changing lightbulbs and someone somewhere searches for ‘how to change a lightbulb’ you might appear in the search results for that search. Then if the user gets stuck and decides that they need ‘professional’ help, your site is right under their nose. This is obviously a slightly silly example, but I’m sure you get the point.

To see how many pages of your site are included in the Google index just type ’site:www.mysite.com (www)’ in the search box. This will return a list of pages and you can see how many of your pages are included in the index.

4. Don’t try and trick Google. - Some people over optimise their websites and try and trick the search engines into thinking their page is more relevant than it in fact is. This is a very risky business and could see your website dropped from the search engines completely.

5. Finally - Don’t believe anyone who says they can get you to number 1 in Google for any search term you like. Just remember if they were that good why aren’t they a millionaire already.

If you’d like more specific SEO advice, including on-page optimisation tips, help building a sitemap, or anything else there’s a vast array of places online to get help. Sitepoint.com for example is a great site. Or just drop us a line and we’ll do what we can to point you in the right direction. We’re also always happy to swap links with related sites or sites that we just think are cool. So please get in touch or leave us a comment.

It’s an increasingly crowded online marketplace, with everyone competing for the top spots on the search engines, beating each other up with adwords and fighting for all the traffic they can get. You might have the best products in the world, but if nobody knows you exist then it’s hard to get noticed.

That’s why we’ve just released some rather cool little widgets for online shops that bridge the gap between you the merchant and the user, giving you tonnes of free exposure for your coolest products. All in a simple bit of Javascript that brings all your best products to the naturalbornshopper.com community. Just add a couple of lines of code to your product details pages and you’ll get a lovely little badge showing how popular your products are. Complete with a link that lets our users vote you up the homepage of NaturalBornShopper.com and the associated shopping guides.

For more information take a look at the widgets page on NBS.
http://www.naturalbornshopper.com/widgets

Or contact us with your specific requirements and we’ll be happy to discuss how we can bring the NaturalBornShopper community to your site.

We often have clients asking us to check out their site and see if there are any bits we’d suggest improving or changing, so I thought I’d just list my quick top things to check out for and make sure your site has. This is far from exhaustive so please feel free to add more at the bottom.

1. Do you have title tags on your pages? - Missing these out is a classic mistake and they’re definitely worth including. Make them relevant and on topic and unique for each page.
2. Do you have loads of JavaScript or CSS code at the top of your page? - It’s best to split your CSS and JavaScript out into separate .js and .css files. This might sound a bit technical but having this stuff bulking up the top of your code doesn’t help with your SEO.
3. Add alt tags to your images - This is vital if you want to get your site passed the HTML validators, but also very handy for ranking in image searches, for example Google images.
4. Are you *still* using tables? - That’s very 2005 It’s all CSS layouts these days. If you want to employ someone to code you a new site make sure they are using CSS based layouts.
5. Have you got an XML sitemap? - There are loads of tools out there for creating XML sitemaps and it may be worth creating one.

Nothing too strenuous there If you think of anything then please let me know and I’ll add it to a revised list.

So many people these days claim to be able to make websites, long gone are the days where it was seen as some kind of clever, voodoo, dark magic. Programs like Dreamweaver and Frontpage have brought web design to the masses. No longer do small companies have to pay thousands to create great looking and effective websites… They can just get their mate’s kid to knock them something together for a couple of hundred quid!

It really bugs me when I hear people talking like this.
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Everyone wants a website these days, infact you could say that everyone ‘needs’ a website these days. It’s become just about as important as business cards and a yellow pages listing were 15 years ago. But there are quite a few things to consider before thinking that a website will solve all your business problems. It takes more than just flashy graphics to make a good website.

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