Category Archives: SEO

Just Ignore Pagerank


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I used to be obsessed with Google Pagerank – constantly checking my sites to see if they’ve been upgraded, using SEO tools to analyse predicted future Pageranks and researching how long it had been since the last update and when we were due for the next. But how reliable is Pagerank really? Please excuse my language but I find it to be f**king useless. The reason I’m just mentioning this is because, after months, Google seems to have thrown out some page rank around the web. But it’s so inconclusive. Some of my websites that are attracting ten times the amount of traffic as others are getting half the page rank credit and some sites that I’ve done no SEO on are getting an initial rating of 3 or 4. How is that a useful guide to Google’s measure of your site’s importance? A lot of professional SEOs (which I far from claim myself to be) will probably mention that…

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How Do You Judge a Website?


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Many people will disagree with me I’m sure, but I’ve always thought that web design is an art. Seriously, apart from the aesthetic design side – I also feel that the technical coding and functionality of websites, and the process of combining and integrating this into the design is an artistic process in itself. Oh how the traditionalists scream! I do however see art in a lot of things – music, interior design, architecture, fashion etc. Whether you agree or not – the fact is that people do disagree on what makes a good website. So how do you judge a website? There’s a lot to take in – the design, functionality, content, usability, accessibility, marketing and traffic, what services the site provides and how it caters for it’s target audience. Although these factors all feature in my assumptions and perceptions of websites, I also often make simple snap judgements.

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Interview on UK2.net


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A few weeks back I was approached by a representative for UK-based hosting and domains company UK2 to do a short interview to appear on their blog. The idea was to create a series of interviews with UK web ‘professionals’ (I’ve used inverted commas because I don’t consider myself to be a web ‘professional’) that could help and pursuade small business to see the importance of a well designed and built website. The interview covers aspects of accessibility and usability, SEO, changes I’ve seen in the internet and business’ approaches to the web market since I started designing and what inspires me, among much more. Well as any reader of this blog surely knows, I like to waffle on so I happily agreed to do the interview, which you can now see on UK2′s blog at www.uk2.net/blog. So far my interview has been accompanied by 2 others from other web designers – Matthew Browne from MB Web Design and Chris…

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Why I hate Flash sites


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When Flash came along… Millions and millions of years ago, man created an invisible entity, a power to which the world would kneel down and worship and would change the lives of everyone forever. Some called it the ‘World Wide Web’, but by some it was known only as ‘The Internet’. In it’s early days of life, the Internet was slow and ugly and rarely reared it’s head in public. But over time it began to grow and flourish. It adopted HTML to promote it’s power and ideas, picked up CSS to fashion it’s wardrobe and used directories and Search Engines for PR. Soon, the Internet had a whole team behind it – a list of acronyms only a madman could contemplate. But something was missing. There was no movie producer, no director to push the Internet to the big screen. Until Flash came along. Hailed as the saviour, the messiah – the chosen one!

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Is valid code really neccessary?


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I’m a big believer in semantic, valid mark-up. Both XHTML and CSS. And it’s fairly safe to say that every website I build now contains valid code, unless in the case of integrating a complex script which makes it extremely difficult to obtain the coveted W3C valid link at the bottom of the site. There is a huge hype among forward-thinking, standards-driven developers regarding the importance of valid mark-up. This point is made from different angles.

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Microsoft Bidding for Yahoo


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News on the grapevine – Microsoft have officially entered a bid to purchase Yahoo for $44.6 billion. Firstly, that is a sickening amount of money. Secondly, this seems another attempt to monopolise another market. I understand the computer world was Microsoft’s upbringing – it’s home territory. Over the past few years it’s managed to wrestle it’s way in to the console market and is currently doing very well. While Sony are on their feet with the PS3 (and don’t argue with me because they are), the only capable opponents to Microsoft’s XBOX 360 are Nintendo – age old veterans of the video-game market. I do like the Wii.

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