It has become almost indispensable to make a prominent presence on the World Wide Web, irrespective of the type of business you are into. It would help you in getting recognition not only in the local market, but also globally. If you have ventured into e-business, creating a well-designed website is essential to get an edge over your competitors. In order to make an effective website, it is advisable to hire the services of a well-known and reputed website design company in Hampshire. Choose a web design company in Hampshire that has the expertise to develop a website design that goes right with the theme of your business and is user-friendly at the same time.

You could make an online search of different website design companies in Hampshire to choose the best amongst them. It is advisable to be very particular before making any contract agreement. Try to check for the authenticity of the company, because once the contract has been signed, you would not be able to go back. Select a website design company in Hampshire that has a history of offering expert web design services with full client support and also follows highest ethical standards.

If you are looking for one of the best and most reliable website designers in Hampshire, you may visit www.adira.co.uk

Once online, you could easily find many web development companies offering budget-friendly web design and web development services in Hampshire as a complete package for website creation. However, it is advisable to choose a reputed web development company in Hampshire that has the expertise to elevate the performance of your site and proves beneficial for the success of your online business.

As a client of any website development company in Hampshire, you would expect it to understand your business, products, services, and offer development solutions that would be functional enough to promote the products and services your site is selling. 

There are certain pre-requisites for the web development process in Hampshire to make sure your website looks professional and user-friendly. The website should ideally have adequate quality content that must be appealing. In case your site provides links for downloading, the procedure must be simple and time taken for downloading should be small.

It is advisable to ensure that the links on your website is functioning properly. The web development in Hampshire should be done in a manner that ensures clear graphics and easy navigation. Most of the efficient and reliable web development and web design firms in Hampshire take care of the aforementioned points. One such firm is www.adira.co.uk, please visit the site for more details.

This is an amazing piece of guerilla marketing using social media to promote continued awareness of HIV with a shoestring budget – absolutely incredible!

Please be aware that this clip deals with an adult theme and contains some explicit language.

Although this article deals primarily with Adira’s blog of choice, Wordpress, the principles here can apply to pretty much any blog and indeed any web page!

1. Keywords/ Keyphrases

Before writing an article or blog post for your website you should consider your keywords carefully. Generally you will be writing about something to do with your business  so consider keywords or keyphrases that people might use to search for an article of this type.

e.g. Our business is primarily Website Design, therefore they keywords Website Design or Website Designer may be appropriate to our posts.

Once you’ve identified the primary keywords or phrases, ensure that they appear regularly throughout the article. If you find it easier, do this retrospectively.

2. The Title

The title of your blog post plays a significant role in determining how Google will treat the article in the search engine results. Try to get a key word or phase into your title at least once, twice if you can. Feel free to use dashes or full stops to help achieve this:-

e.g. Website Design – Common Mistakes Made in Website Design

Google will see these keywords in this important area and take note.

3. The Text

The most important thing for Google to understand what your article is about (and therefore what keywords to rank you under) is the text.

Make sure your keywords feature regularly in the headings and the text. As an indication, keywords found in a ‘Heading 1′ or main heading will be worth more that keywords in a ‘Heading 2′.

Generally the first 2 paragraphs are the most important  so consider this when including keywords in your text.

Having said this, don’t just stuff keywords all over the place, it’s far more important that your text reads well.

4. Permalinks

This is a geeky term for how the web address shows. For example, if you have an article call ‘Website Design For Beginners’ the web site address would be:-

 http://www.adira.co.uk/web-design-for-beginners/ 

If your blog was put together by Adira then you can ignore this step as this would be set up correctly, however if your web address looks something like this:-

http://www.adira.co.uk/?p=299

Then you need to update the permalink setting on your wordpress settings. To do this:-

1. Log in to your Wordpress admin panel adn select Settings
2. Click ‘Permalink
3. Copy and paste this:-  /%category%/%postname%/ into the Custom field.

Follow this and your Category name and Post name will appear in the web address.

NOTE: If you do this you may have to change your .htaccess file.

5. Blog Tags

Tags are are 1 or 2 word description of the post. They help people find the article when using your blog search but also help search engines and bookmarking sites determine what your post is about. The correct form for a tag is:-

website-design, website-designer

Do not exceed 3 words in a tag.

If you follow these 5 steps, you’re sure sure to see a marked improvement in your search engine results without too much additional work.

This will blow you away! Sixthsense technology…worth 8 mins of your life http://on.ted.com/739J

Keeping Your Website Up-to-date

There’s nothing worse than a website that looks out of date. Sites whose last news entry or blog post is dated 2008 really make a site look unloved and somewhat dilapidated.   Conversely, a website whose information is bang up to date gives the impression that the site is alive, vibrant and valued. When you consider that many people will gain their first impression of your company from your website this is a very serious issue.

I was moved to write this article by 2 clients that I’ve recently been dealing with. Both were using our fantastic, cutting edge content management system (sorry about the shameless plug!), one wanted the news function activated and one wanted a blog installed.

On discussing the issue of relevancy and keeping these areas up-to-date, both clients were sat here committing to between 1 and 2 hours per week to keep their site up to date. This is great in principle but realistically we’re all very busy and that kind of commitment would soon wain leaving their stunning, cutting edge, content managed website (there I go again!) to quickly become out of date.

In my professional option it’s far better to put aside 30 minutes a month and approach this task strategically than trying to dedicate time you don’t have to updating the world in respect of your business. Unless you have the resource to do it, there’s no real need to update more than once a month, after all it’s not like we’re running the BBC news website!

So, here are my tips to strategically updating your website using only 30 minutes per month.

1. Diarise your time: It’s a pretty common phenomenon to commit to things that you never get round to. By booking 30 minutes per month in your diary for the next 12 months, you’re far more likely to achieve your goal.

2. Don’t be too precious about your material. Obviously it needs to be well written and interesting but you can write blog articles and news about pretty much anything – here are some ideas

- Something that recently happened in your company
- A new client that’s recently come on board (like a case study)
- A story about something that has happened to a client
-  Something that’s recently happened in your industry
- A comment on a news story that is relevant to your industry (search BBC News for such an article)

3. Focus your article on your audience, so if you’re writing for the benefit of business owners, keep this in mind when writing the articles, write professionally and remember what drives them. If you’re writing for the general public then a more chatty tone of voice may be appropriate.

4. Feel free to use someone else’s material! So long as you reference it correctly and fairly this should be fine. There are many sources where you can pick up free content for your website (see our Free Website Content article).

5. Finally, fresh content has a search engine pay off, in general the more words on your site the better your chances of getting listed in the search engines so bear this in mind when writing an article. If you like pick a key phrase that relates to your business and the article and see how many times you can repeat it without making the article sound like it’s just been written for keywords.

NB This is a critical point, your primary focus is on people that read it – search engines are important but if your website text gives the impression that you are illiterate then your website will give a negative impression of your company.

6. Get yourself a guest writer. As business people we’re all looking for publicity so to be listed on someone else’s website (especially if you’re offering a link to their own website) is beneficial to them and to you as it gives you a free and easy article – a win win!

So there you have it – follow these steps and you will be writing focussed, search engine friendly, customer centric articles quickly and easily using just 30 minutes per month. As a great meerkat once said…”Simples”.

Quick Website Tips

Why not set up a series of quick tips and email them to everyone on your email contact list and put them on your blog – if they’re short enough they’ll probably be read and they won’t take more than a couple of minutes to put together. They will also help to promote you as an expert in your field and help you to be remembered when the recipient is in need of your product or service.

One of the biggest issues we, as website owners, have is finding or creating fresh content for our websites. Fresh website content achieves a couple of things. First it keeps your website looking fresh, interesting and cared for encouraging people to visit regularly. Second, fresh website content for search engines is like a honey pot for bee’s. Not to mention all of the extra keywords you’ll be able to get in.

I thought I’d share with you a great source of free website content – WikiHow. This is how they describe themselves:-

wikiHow is a collaborative writing project to build the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. With your contributions, we can create a free resource that helps millions of people by offering solutions to the problems of everyday life. wikiHow currently contains 56,164 articles — written, edited, and maintained primarily by volunteers.

wikiHow allow you to reprint their articles at the price of a few embedded links and a direct backlink! They feature articles covering a massive range of subjects so there should really be something to suit everyone.

Free text – nice and easy. You can find wikiHow here:- http://www.wikihow.com.

Enjoy!!!

Having recently read the 1 minute manager, I recently had a look around at other stuff by the same author. Interestingly I came across a book that I’ve heard mentioned  all over the place, “Who Moved My Cheese”.

Having looked around the internet I then discovered that they’ve made a cartoon! it appears below – a great parable about change management:-

I recently put together a presentation for a group of business people in Winchester.  This led me to research some internet statistics which I thought I would share.

• 108 million searches each day in the uk
• In 2008, 16 million households in Great Britain (65 per cent) had Internet access.
• 56% of UK households had broadband in 2008.
• 88% of businesses have broadband or access to broadband
• During this recession high street sales have suffered but internet sales continue to soar:- This is from the office of National Statistics – Average weekly value of internet retail sales in January 2009 was approximately £178 Million, an increase of 17% on last year.

If you want to see a breakdown of internet statistics check it out here:- http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/irs0209.pdf