Monthly Archives: October 2009

Windows 7 Officially Released Today

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Well today is the day that Vista gets replaced by something better: Windows 7.windows7

The interest for the new OS from Microsoft has been huge, making Windows 7 the biggest pre-order item in the history of Amazon UK and a perpetual trending topic on Twitter. The reactions from users and reviewers have been mostly positive, but after the lukewarm it’s-ok-but-why-should-I-switch-from-WinXP attempt that was Vista, the fact that people can’t wait to get their hands on Windows 7 is hardly a surprise.

And, for the most part, it’s true. Annoying security features such as UAC have been fixed in Windows 7 (you can now manually set its annoyance level), its reported that the system feels speedier and more responsive (although it really isn’t that much faster when you actually measure it, for example, boot time on both systems is pretty much the same), but it feels that way, and that’s all that matters, compatibility issues have been fixed. In short, it’s more of a really, really good service pack for Vista than a new OS, but it’s definitely enough to switch from the eight year old Windows XP.

If you’re interested in making the switch, the price is £159.99 for Windows 7 Ultimate, and $147.99 for the Professional version. Windows 7 Home Premium will set you back £99.99, and an upgrade from either Vista or XP will cost you £58.95.

We haven’t managed to get our hands on a copy yet to play with it, but the moment we do we’ll post a review.

Have you experienced Windows 7 yet? Let us know what you made of it and if you’d recommend it?

Is your graphic design helping or hurting your business?

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Take a look at your website and ask yourself the question “Do I want to continue navigating through this site? If not, why am I leaving this website?”

More often than not, the answer will be:

“The site seemed kind of amateurish. There was a feeling that the company did not take the website seriously.”

“In general, I think the home page needs a refresh to make it more attractive – it is now more like a virtual storefront rather than a dynamic organisation.”

“It was unprofessional and amateur looking and hard to find the correct link to use.”

Regardless of what size company you may be, a website can make you look as though you are the largest company in the UK…in any industry.”

Comments like the above are surprisingly common—we see them regularly.

In response to similar feedback, we have carried out a very simple page re-design for several of our clients. We did not change a word of copy, but just redesigned a few of the critical visual aesthetics, to give the page a more consistent design.

So the questions remains, is your graphic design helping or hurting your business?

And our message is simple, “If your visitors are concerned about the appearance or professionalism of your site, you should be concerned about the effect this has on your business. You could get a serious measurable improvement by simply redesigning it.”

The BIGGEST URL shortening service is…..Bit.ly

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A week ago we reported the end of the url shortening service cli.gs and asked what would happen to all the cli.gs urls and who would step up to take over all their traffic? Well it seems with a little help from Twitter a url shortening King has emerged. Since Twitter made Bit.ly its default shortener its traffic has sky-rocketed.

The numbers taken from Compete showing the change in U.S traffic for the major url shortening services can be found below:

- Bit.ly: 6.43 million U.S. visitors, +12.65% growth from August to September

- TinyURL:5.55 million U.S. visitors, -1.47% growth from August to September

- is.gd: 631,000 U.S. visitors, -13.66% growth from August to September

- Tr.im: 416,000 U.S. visitors, -39.87% growth from August to September

- Ow.ly: 1.41 million U.S. visitors, +9.45% growth from August to September

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With such large numbers and an impressive growth it seems as though Bit.ly is now positioned to dominate the url shortening service.

We’re already using it and it seems most of you are too.

Google Admits Keywords don't count!

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Once upon a time, one could often attain high search engine rankings simply by filling the meta “keywords” tag of their website with targeted (or untargeted) terms, the later being a black hat method.

We don't use keywords!

We don't use keywords!

Of course, search engines became aware of the fact web developers and spammers were trying to cheat the system and largely started to ignore or at least de-emphasize the importance of the keywords tag in their algorithms.

Now, Google has stated that currently the tag has no influence, at least in their search results, though they haven’t ruled out using it in the future.

According to a post on their webmaster blog today:

When asked how Google uses the keyword meta tag, Matt Cutts (Google Software Engineer) answered;
“At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is not at all. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking.”

So does this mean we should ditch the meta Keyword? well in a word, No. The reason being,other search engines use the keyword tag and Google hasn’t ruled out the possibility of using it in future, so as one comment on the post wrote “Let’s call it Meta insurance. In case a service decides to use the keyword tag someday, your site is prepared.”

For more SEO related post please click here

10 years of change – broadband change!

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Well a lot has happened in 10 years, some of us are a little taller, wider and have a little more grey hair, while some of us (me) have aged like a fine wine, but this post is about the Internet or Broadband to be more precise. It is 10 years since broadband was first made available to the public in the UK, when 0.5Mbps cost £39.99 a month! And a lot of the World Wide Web as we know it didn’t exist, no Facebook (not that surprising) but not iTunes or LinkedIn! How our life has changed.

To celebrate a website has been launched with loads of information on the last decade of broadband, to view it click here

It's the end of Cligs as we know it

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Cligs URL shortener to shut down!

Cligs-logoUnfortunately news has been released that another URL shortening service is due to come to an end. These services are becoming a major part of the Internet, especially with social media sites such as Twitter, but as the owner of Cligs testifies;

“Short URLs are a feature, and are definitely not a business on their own.”

A post on the Cligs Blog yesterday (October 4th, 2009) read;

“It is with great sadness that I have to shut down Cligs. On Sunday, 25 Oct 2009 at 12:00:00 GMT, the service will stop accepting new short URLs and will stop logging analytics.

The forwarding data will be retained so that forwarding can continue for at least till the end of November; after that, there are no guarantees as to how long the service will continue to forward the short URLs to their destinations.

Shortly (in a few days), I’ll be deploying a mechanism to export your data. It is almost done and just needs a bit more testing before I’m comfortable releasing it.”

(to read the full blog post click here)

So what does this mean for the users of Cligs? Another shortening URL service will soon receive a large number of subscribers and traffic, are they ready? Can anyone make a business out of shortening URL’s?

We’re not sure what the answers are, but one things for certain, we’re sad to see the end of Cligs and now have to choose another URL shortening service.