Twitter or Litter

Taking a break from web & graphic design I decided to do a comic strip to lighten the atmosphere. A slight take on ‘Twitter’ titled ‘Litter’

Well I know I didn’t spend enough time on a suitable title but with all that twittering going on it just seemed apt for the moment.

Logos & Mistakes made!

Common mistakes when designing a logo

With the power of the Web, and more eyes watching than ever, it’s important for a business to communicate its unique message clearly. The easiest way to recognize a company and distinguish it from others is by its logo.

Designed By An Amateur
A professional business should look professional. New business owners often invest a lot of time and money in property and equipment, but do not often match it by investing suitably in their logo.

Here are the most common reasons why many logos look amateurish:

• The business owner wanted to save money by designing the logo quickly themselves.
• A friend or relative who claims to know a little about graphic design does it as a favor.
• The wrong people are commissioned. (Local printers are not likely proficient in logo design.)
• The business outsourced the job via one of several design competition websites, which are mostly populated by amateur designers.
• The job was given to an online company that offers really cheap logos.
• Remember if your logo looks amateurish, then so will your business. 

Here are the advantages of hiring an established and professional logo designer:

• Your logo will be unique and memorable. 
• You won’t run into any problems down the line with reproducing it.
• Your logo will have a longer lifespan and won’t need to be redesigned in a couple of years.
• Your logo will look professional.

Secure Social Media Success

Get Going
It's easy to decide you want a social media campaign and then get distracted and delayed- social media marketing will rarely be a business essential. But you must not put it off, your competitors won't. Get planning, get prepared, and get going.

Get Prepared
OK, so you're socializing online and suddenly someone launches an attack against your brand, what do you do?

By using platforms such as Twitter, you lay yourself more open to attack through these mediums- it's easier for angry customers to leave negative comments publicly, for example. Of course, they would possibly be doing so anyway, but if you're actively promoting your brand through social media, than you're also probably searching for mentions, so you'll probably see any comments sooner.

So, work out a strategy. If you see a negative mention, will you refute it? Use legal threats to silence it? Ignore it? Respond to it as though it's any other customer complaint? Whatever you decide, have a strategy in place in advance so that you aren't left scrambling when the situation arises.

Get Blogging
There are many ways to socialize online but blogging is definitely my favorite. It's great for SEO because it encourages inbound links and also fills your pages with naturally keyword-rich content.

Get Tweeting
Twitter is an excellent marketing platform, although it admittedly can be hard to do well. However, there are some easy wins to be had on Twitter: it's less time consuming than a blog, but it has the same potential to massively expand brand awareness.
 

Get Some Perspective
Before you start trying to use social media, work out what it is you want to achieve. There's no point spending time and money interacting online if you don't have a clear idea what it is you hope to get out of it?

Get Talking
Social media is just that -- social. It isn't a one-way street. You need to be having conversations online if you want to gain followers, fans, and readers.

So get socializing.

Stay motivated by keeping your goals in sight and monitoring your success.

Optimized for Bing?

Since Microsoft and Yahoo reached an agreement to merge their search services in hopes of finally being able to compete with the grand search overlord, Google. What does all this mean for small business owners? Well, keep an eye on your Yahoo rankings because they have sure changed since Yahoo search engine has been replaced by Bing.

Here are five easy ways to get Bing to notice you:

The older, the better. Bing places a lot of emphasis on the age of a domain, so if you're just starting out, you might consider buying an older domain in order to get your site a higher ranking.

Titles are important. Bing seems to place a lot more emphasis on title tags than Google does, so make sure you use your best keywords in the title tags of every page on your site.

Text is terrific. For Google, the amount of text you have on a web page doesn't play a huge role. Not so with Bing, which seems to place a higher value on pages that have at least 300 words.

Outbound links are OK. Google has always seemed to frown on the number of outbound links you have on a page. But Bing actually seems to like them--at least for now.

Backlinks are even better. If you're frustrated because all of your efforts to get links pointing to your site haven't gotten you anywhere with Google, then good news! When it comes to backlinks, Bing's attitude seems to "the more, the merrier"--as long as the links are coming from relevant sites.

So get out there and don’t leave Bing at the back door. Bear in mind that this is a huge change, and will take months to fully take effect.

Clear Your Cache!

Often referred to as the Cache, the Temporary Internet Files folder contains a kind of travel record of the items you have seen, heard, or downloaded from the Web, including images, sounds, Web pages, even cookies. Typically these items are stored in the Temporary Internet Files folder. Storing these files in your cache can make browsing the Web faster because it usually takes your computer less time to display a Web page when it can call up some of the page's elements or even the entire page from your local Temporary Internet Files folder.

Clearing Your Browser's Cache:

All those files stored in your cache take up space, so from time to time; you may want to clear out the files stored in your cache to free up some space on your computer. This is called clearing the cache.

More Speed or More Room? But at what cost!

If you tend to go online a lot and have ample space on your computer, you might want to increase the size of your Temporary Internet Files folder. Why? Because Internet Explorer 6 will read already-viewed files from the cache first rather than take the time to download the same page from the Web, thus saving you time and money.

However from a web developer’s point of view this sometimes is a bit of a problem. Why? For a simple reason, the client can not view the updated changes.

Hence a simple tip, if at all you’re client is viewing his website for Internet Explorer 6 you may want to illustrate this: 

Keep the 'Ctrl' button on your keyboard pressed while you hit 'Refresh' on your IE bar. This calls the updated page from the server and not the Cache. Well and lets say avoid the miscommunication and those email that can go back and forth as to ‘why aren’t the change done yet’.

Web Statistics! Which one?

I have been proposing Google Analytics to some of my customers and the common question is ‘why’? Ok! There is some sort of discrepancy between the way Google Analytics and AWStats calculate visits. Firstly let me explain what a unique visitor is. I recommend two popular free tools for stats, and recommend to use them in tandem to enable you to look at your web stats from different angles.  AWStats (which is typically installed on a server) and Google Analytics (which is hosted).

The aim of the measure of 'unique visitors' is to help find out how many individuals have visited the site - i.e. how many new visitors the website has attracted.  It might sound easy, but in reality, it is not all that scientific.

What you'll notice about these tools is that they both define "unique visitors" in different ways.  In fact many log analysis tools do differ in the way they approach the situation.

AWStats according to the documentation defines Unique Visitors as:

'Unique Visitor' - These are the total number of visits by a unique IP address. In summary AWStats simply calculates a total for this from the log files. 

Google Analytics on the other hand has two metrics, measuring both by percentage:

'Absolute Unique Visitors' - tracking each user's first visit, and;
'New vs. Returning' - by tracking subsequent visits

Favicon.ico What???

I had received an email from a client subject reading ‘little-thing before my domain name’ 

What is a Favicon?

A Favicon (short for favourites icon), also known as a website icon, shortcut icon, URL, icon, or bookmark icon is a 16×16, 32×32 or 64×64 pixel square icon associated with a particular website or webpage.

Creating a Favicon.
Create an image 16 x 16 pixels in size. Yes, it is really small and you can't really draw much in it. You should also restrict yourself to the standard Windows 16 colours, although I feel that 256 colours work fine.

If you like, you can also create a 32 x 32 pixel icon, which will be scaled to size for the Favourites menu and the location bar. You can even put both 16 x 16 and 32 x 32 pixel icons into the same icon file. Windows will use the former for its menus and the latter when the user opens up a folder that is set to display large icons. It's probably not really necessary to do this if you can't be bothered.

Save the image as an ICO file (named "favicon.ico").

Upload it to your website. You don't need to upload one to every directory of your site if you don't want to waste space, simply put it in your root directory and the web browsers that support Favicons will apparently locate it eventually.