August 6th, 2010
It’s the summer holidays for many, and things typically slow down.
Not for us I’m glad to say, as the internet gets busier and busier with more online business being done than ever before.
A key part of making any business work is being to measure its performance and make effective decisions on your findings.
The internet is no different.
Using tools such as Google Analytics, it’s possible to see what’s working and more importantly not working with your website.
We continue to get asked more questions about Google Analytics than any other subject, that’s why we’re offering a free training session throughout this August.
Drop us a line or follow this link if you’d like to know more.
Posted in FL1, General, Marketing, Search Engines, Technology | No Comments »
August 2nd, 2010
It’s been an interesting past few weeks at FL1 Group.
As well as building blogs, shops and content managed websites, we’ve been involved with securing a company’s website that wasn’t PCI/DSS compliant. The website stored credit card details in a database that was hacked into and the credit card details were retrieved. Two of them were used fraudulently, and that’s where the story began. The banks got involved with fines and costs to recover the costs of the fraud. Added to this the company has been forced to go through a programme of becoming fully compliant. To-date, adding the costs of consultants, website changes, fines, costs to re-issue cards, and significant amount of off-line processing changes and new equipment, the cost to the business at this current time runs in excess of £170,000!
This particular business is lucky enough to be owned by a much larger parent company that could absorb these costs, but these sorts of costs would easily put most small companies out of business.
It’s been an eye opening project that’s for sure, and based on what we’re learning from it, we’ll certainly be putting together a seminar to help more business understand what PCI/DSS is all about and how to stay on the right side of the banks.
It’s not all been about “the dark side” of the internet though…honest!
Ali’s been settling back in and taking to his new role as designer and project manager like a duck to water.
We’ve also teamed up with some a partner that will help our online stores excel using the shopping and affiliate portals, which has to be a good thing in these challenging times.
More on that next month!
As Google’s superb Analytics package gets better and better, we’re proud to announce some free workshops we’re running throughout the summer holidays. We install it on every single website we build, so if you’d like to know how to see how your website is really working, let us know.
The most important thing to consider, is tools like Google Analytics allow you to discover what’s working, but more importantly what’s not!
If you’d like to book a Google Analytics workshop or want to know more about PCI/DSS, drop us a line or call 01727 739812.
See you next month!
Posted in E-commerce, FL1, General, Search Engines, Seminars, Technology | No Comments »
May 25th, 2010
One school of thought could be, so long as it works and achieves your business’ objective, no.
This thinking is perfectly fine, until you need to develop your website further or more importantly find a developer and platform that can take your website to the next level.
A little history?
To generalise you could put website development technologies in to two categories: Microsoft, or non-Microsoft (Betamax or VHS if you will!).
Circa 1996 onwards, Microsoft introduced their well developed Visual Basic technology (VB) to website development in the form of Active Server Pages (ASP).
ASP was quick to learn, and powerful in that it was easy to create a database driven website with very little programming experience. It became popular with entry-level web developers and experienced programmers looking to move to the web. Running on a Microsoft Windows server platform, it also suited most businesses that used Microsoft products as a core part of their business.
For non-Microsoft developers, technologies such as Perl and CGI were also popular however not so widely adopted and in some case more specialist. These technologies require the long serving and well established UNIX/Linux platform.
As things moved on, PHP started to become popular with those not wishing to jump on the Microsoft band-wagon as a well documented, easy to learn, and flexible language, however in the early stages wasn’t as powerful and well developed as many comparable languages.
Fast-track to 2002 and Microsoft announced its new .NET programming platform. This replaced the popular ASP technology, and offered a far more powerful toolset, aimed in part at enabling existing Windows developers to develop for the web with a minimal learning curve.
This was a significant step forward in one sense; however the complexity and power of ASP.NET came at a price. Compared to its predecessor, it was complex and a steep learning curve.
ASP.NET to some became a daunting learning curve, and to many developers new and old, PHP become a better adopted alternative and FREE. At this point, the shift began!
So today?
PHP as a language is well adopted and without question the most popular language for most small to medium scale websites. Microsoft’s ASP.NET is also a strong contender and continues to hold its own.
Why does all this matter?
In our opinion some 70% of most web development agencies will use PHP as their language of choice for small to medium scale websites. It is a language that is productive and easy to learn and well suited too many websites.
For more complex websites with high volumes of transactions or users, consider Microsoft .NET or Java. If you need integration with third party systems, Microsoft products (such as Microsoft Office) or external web services, Microsoft .NET is a good route to consider.
For us at FL1, we’ve got an equally strong footing in ASP, ASP.NET and PHP and dare we say; we’re different for that simple fact. That said; each technology is quite different in its own way and better suited to different types of website.
For more information drop us a line at client@fl1group.com or call us on 01727 739812.
Posted in FL1, Technology | No Comments »
May 4th, 2010
Google and all the main search engines work on reading text and following links.
The contents of an image can be described to Google using what’s called an ALT or TITLE tag.
You can see these tags in action when you move your mouse over some images on a website. When you do this a small tooltip style message comes up with descriptive text.
With some images, it’s important to add meaningful text to describe the image, if the image is of something meaningful to the user.
For example, a product image in a shop would be a good example, where text along the lines of “Picture of a Dell Latitude E6400 Laptop Computer” might be used. This adds a little more context to the page, and helps Google include the image in its Google Images database.
Avoid putting key messages and words that you’d like Google to find in to the image itself. Often there are ways to display an image beneath text that achieves the same thing.
Finally, Flash is a great animation technology that can bring your website alive and provide a compelling interactive experience. BUT….Google cannot read flash content. If you have any words or links built in to Flash Technology, Google will never find them.
Many companies work around this by providing both a Flash and conventional website without Flash. The Flash driven website is the standard offering when the user visits the website, however the non-Flash version is purely to allow Google to discover it.
Magnet Kitchens are an excellent of this: www.magnet.co.uk
Having two websites can get you nicely round this issue, however that’s double the site, so double the effort and double the cost!
Want to know more?
Give us a call on 01727 739812
Posted in FL1, General, Search Engines | No Comments »
February 9th, 2010
It sounds obvious, but so often we speak to people who assume they’re going to build the biggest website possible, they’re going to rank number 1 in Google the next day and it’s going to magically transform their business. The reality is often a different thing unless this question is thought through and applied carefully.
Some reasons you may want to consider are:
• To generate sales leads
• To boost my business’ credibility
• To allow people to find my business online
• To sell my products and service to generate additional revenue
• To provide an up to date information source for existing contacts and customers
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in FL1, General | 9 Comments »