Displaying company information is only necessary on one page, such as about us or contact us.  We recommend the about us page.  The following information is required:

• Full Registered name of Company
• Country of Registration
• Full Registered office address of Company
• VAT Registration No.

Detailed information is available from www.gov.uk here:

Page Speed and Page Ranking

With Google placing a more and more higher emphasis on page load speed in it’s ranking algorithms, it’s time to start thinking about how you can speed up your site. Install the Page Speed add-on for firebug/firefox to see how your site performs.

We’ve put together a top 5 list

Ultra fast connection speeds

Get a web server that’s located on an ultra-fast connection to the internet, something like a 150+ Meg uplink to the network infrastructure is best.

Use the right image at the right time

This is something that often gets overlooked, but if you’re looking to optimise your site to dramatically decrease the page load time, it might be a good idea to choose the format carefully, and check the compression (i.e. the quality) of the image before saving it. Will anyone really notice if the image is slightly not so high quality? Google certainly prefers smaller images.

JPG/JPEG is a great format for photos

PNG is another good format for high colour photos & has transparency capablities

GIF is good for small icons, but only supports a maximum of 256 colours. Also supports transparency.

Dynamic Drive has a good online image optimiser.

Check your CSS

Remove or compress your CSS files. Most websites have stylesheets with out of date or unused styles, so by removing them you reduce the amount of data your web server’s having to push out onto the internet every time someone requests a page. If you don’t want to rifle through your CSS files, consider compressing them or minifying them.

Configure your server to use HTTP Compression

Whether you’re using IIS, Apache or JoeShmoe’s Web Server, make sure it is configured to compress your content (files etc) that get served to the visitor. It’s a quick fix and should make things noticeably different. If your website is capable of Gzip compression, enable that too.

Cache Your Site’s Web Pages

Most of the time the content on your site doesn’t change, so what’s the point of your web server compiling a server page every time someone requests it? If you configure caching on your server, those pages will be held in memory instead of being compiled at ever request. If you use WordPress, there’s tools like WP-Cache. If you’re an IIS user, just configure the website’s dynamic & static caching. Here’s a good tutorial

Try out Page Speed for Firefox

Here’s the link to Page Speed.

It’s common knowledge that Google knows what you’re up to. One of the things it knows about is what you’ve searched for – a history of everything you’ve looked for on your browser – well, maybe not everything, maybe just the things you search for a lot.

So, for example you might be an SEO who likes to check that he’s top of the pile of all the SEO’s in Anytown. What’s he going to search for? Something like SEO Consultant Anytown, perhaps? The thing is, he’s going to do that search probably every month, maybe every week, maybe even every day. Google knows he frequently visits his site, www.seoconsultantanytown.co.uk, and so Google shows his site pretty high up the SERPS for his frequently entered search term.

All that can be got around by going “In Private” (activated in Internet Explorer and Firefox by the keystrokes Ctrl + Shift + P). This hides any history that Google, or any other search engine may have left lying around on your PC in the form of a cookie. Great. Now our SEO guy can do his search without fear of Google favouritising (I don’t know if that’s a word!) his site. He then finds he’s not ranking at position 1, he’s on page 2. Back to the on page and link building drawing board then…

In a few months time our SEO maestro has now achieved position 1 in Google (using In Private mode) for his favourite search term. At least he thinks he is. Over at SEO Chaps Ltd, they’re ranking number 1 for SEO Consultant Anytown too. And they’re using In Private, so no danger of cookies. What’s going on?

Our SEO maestro is now at an SEO convention in Anytown. He’s so confident when he’s doing his presentation that he shows the audience how good he is at SEO. He uses his favourite search phrase… and he’s number 5. Not number 1. Devastated, he heads to the local pub for a beer and accesses his site on his iPhone, via the pub’s wifi. Number 5 again. Back at his office he’s number 1.

Could Google be doing this? It certainly is possible – and makes a lot of sense too.

By the way, this story isn’t based on a true story, but it might just happen one day very soon….

Free State Stars General Manager Rantsi Mokoena has welcomed the launch of the new club website www.freestatestars.co.za as a much-needed breath of fresh air for his football club.

“In this day and age the team cannot only rely only on traditional media such as television and print media to communicate with supporters and broader public, it is important that we stay abreast of trends in the communication arena,” Mokoena explained. “For a team such as Free State Stars there isn’t as much access to media compared to other team in the bigger cities.”

He further elaborated on the need to stay in touch with fans that are based outside the Free State. “Our support base is not only in the Free State, but everywhere else in the country, and even in other countries, so it is great that we can utilise social networking tools which are integrated on our website – to keep in touch with them.”

Mokoena emphasised that the team known as ‘Ea Lla Koto’ was also looking to keeping other stakeholders abreast of developments at the club via the website. “We have sponsors, suppliers, national and international bodies, and clients that interact with on a daily basis – having a frequently updated website means they will will now simply access whatever information they need via the site. Besides the brand exposure gained via the site makes commercial sense.

Read more about Free State Stars at www.freestatestars.co.za

Eat The Rich wanted a grungey site with a CMS that allows them to put music samples, a gig guide, gallery, booking form as they do a lot of weddings and other functions. It was great fun building it for them – we’re really pleased with it and so are they – take a look at www.eattherich.info

Lee, the owner of a local bricklaying company, wanted a portfolio site that could demonstrate the versatility of the team and some of the range of projects that they worked on.

LSF pride themselves on the finish of the work and the way they treat every customer,  giving them the best advice and service.

The site showcases their work via a lightbox gallery and allows potential customers to get in contact with Lee via a online email form routed to his Blackberry.

How to remove the background image from google – a few options:

Install Greasemonkey for FireFox (Chrome has it built in) and add the following script:

//—————————————————-

// ==UserScript==

// @name           Kill g backgound image

// @namespace      solvd

// @include        http://www.google.*/

// ==/UserScript==

window.addEventListener(

‘load’,

function()

{     var pic = document.getElementById(‘fpdi’);

if (pic) {

pic.parentNode.removeChild(pic); }

},

true);

//—————————————————–

It seems there is a problem with non en-US installation of the Telerik RadEditor on DNN.

There is a problem that has been lodged but an official fix is not yet out I shall explain how I managed to get it working for my cusotmers DNN5.4.2 UK English website:

• Login to the back end server
• Navigate to ~ProvidersHtmlEditorProvidersTelerikApp_LocalResources
• Take a copy of all the .resx file in this directory
• Rename all the “Copy of XYZ.resx” files to be “XYZ.en-gb.resx”
• Navigate to ~ProvidersHtmlEditorProvidersTelerikDialogsApp_LocalResources
• Take a copy of “SaveTemplate.resx” and rename it to SaveTemplate.resx”
• Restart the site from the Host menu

Now to fix the problems with the Telerik file manager….

You’ve probably already done a fair bit of work for Google.  If you’ve used reCaptcha (on sites like Twitter, Facebook and CheckMyRoute then you have worked for Google already.  reCaptcha is a device used by websites to prove you’re human, and not a ‘bot’ (a program which goes around the internet signing up for things or accessing websites and doing evil things).  reCaptcha gives you two words to read.  One that it knows the answer to, the other it doesn’t, or it’s a bit confused with.  The word it knows the answer to proves yourself to be human to reCaptcha.  The other is a ‘vote’ – a word that’s been given to several internet users to cast their opinion over.  If you and a few other users give the same answer, you’ve helped Google by finally getting that word recognised.  Google needs humans to read these words that computers can’t, so instead of employing someone in California, it uses you.

It’s not a bad thing.  After all, Google is scanning and making searchable millions of books.  And you’re doing your bit by inadvertantly working for Google getting them published on the web.

If you’ve just upgraded to Windows 7 and you’re missing the Image Resizer Powertoy, we found a 32 or 64 bit version here:

http://imageresizer.codeplex.com/releases/view/30247