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Facebook favicon as it appears on IE browser

A  good favicon is one that is obvious to the eye, will be readily recognisable as being related to your site. Bear in mind the small size you have to work with. You won’t fit many letters in and colour is key. A design or logo works best. It will add a professional look to your site by carrying through your branding.

The favicon appears in a number of places, including:

• the browser address bar
• the Favourites or Bookmarks -  making you a little easier to find (if your logo is strong)
• a desktop shortcut
• RSS feed
• Google Toolbar

A favicon can be created and added to a WordPress site quite easily using the following steps:

1. create, or use an existing, logo or image and make it square
2. use an online favicon creator, such as   www.favicon.cc  to shrink your image to a 16 pixel square image and then save it in  .ico format.
3. call the image favicon.ico
4. upload a copy of the file to your sites main directory of your site (public_html) using a FTP client.
5. upload another copy of the file to your sites main Theme folder
6. in your WordPress Admin, edit your header file, header.php by finding the line that begins with <link rel="shortcut icon" and ends with /favicon.ico" /> and overwrite with:                                   <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?/favicon.ico” />                                                      (note no spaces between ’bloginfo’ and(‘template                                                          
7. Clear your browser cache. This is simply clearing out your temporary   internet files. Do this in Internet Explorer by selecting Tools, then Internet Options, then General by selecting  Delete Browsing History and tick the box for deleting ‘Temporary Internet Files’.
8. You’re done!

When you write a post to your blog, it has a permalink assigned to it, so that it can be found – a permanent link. This is the URL which links directly to the blog post. The unchanging nature of the link means that your blog post can be referenced by other blogs, articles and shared, at any time.

However, the way these permalinks are constructed is critical if you want your posts to be found by search engines.

Many blog posts will have a default structure which lists the URL as something like this:

     www.productsgalore.com/?p=99

and this will be your 99th blog post.

This is entirely uninteresting for search engines – and not many people want to know more about the number ’99!

So, customising your permalink is critical if you want to be found. The most useful format for most people will probably involve using the Category, and perhaps, Tag, with the post name. The category will give the search engines something relevant to use to index the post. The tag can further refine it.

If your blog is news oriented, then a date and post name based permalink might be more appropriate.

However, if your post belongs to more than one category, then it is the catetory which was created first that will be used. This is the one with the lowest Category Id no. If the post belongs to a parent and child category, then both will be displayed, parent first, then child.

To increase your SEO, have relevant keywords in your post title. This gives the search engines more to index.

If you have a long descriptive title, which will look too long and clumsy for a URL, then use a post slug. WordPress offers this means of shortening the post name to a name you want to appear in the URL. For instance, the title of this post has been shortened to ‘enhance-blog-searchability’.

For WordPress blogs, this customising can easily be done on the Settings panel, as part of the Admin functions, using variables. See the WordPress Codex for a list of the possible variables.

Once, the format is set, try not to change as you wil lose those that have linked to you and search engines are then not indexing you correctly.

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One of the biggest questions in news media is the whether to charge for online content, or more exactly, how to make revenue for providing online content. The obvious way is through advertising, Google Adwords being the most established .

The choices are offer the content for free and sell advertising space or place the content behind a ‘paywall‘ and charge the viewer a subscription.

The third model, and probably most likely to become most successful, is ‘freemium’.

                      Free + Premium = ‘Freemium’

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has introduced a ‘paywall’ for one of it’s smaller publications, Standard Times, published in Massachusetts. The subsribers can access a certain amount for free, thereafter they have to pay, by subsription. Perhaps he’s testing out how suitable the model is for a publication with a low readership.

When the Irish Times first published content online, it used subscription model, before deciding to allow viewers the content for free. Online advertising is used to bring in revenue.

And now, the New York Times has announced it is to charge for content from 2011. It is to allow free access to a certain number of articles and charging for more content.

But which model works best?

‘Freemium’ certainly appears to be the model that’s getting most traction. Yet another new web world word for the dictionary, freemium describes the the business model which allows a certain amount of content to viewers for free, with advertising, and then offers a premium service, with no advertising ‘noise’, that the viewer has to pay for. The US Sports network ESPN uses this model effectively, also science journals such as Nature and Science. 

It’s a model that works across the web, and is used by social networking site LinkedIn.

The model allows you to offer content, and gain access, to large amounts of viewers for free, with advertising. And for higher-end viewers, there is extra for them, without the intrusion of adverts.

One of the obstacles to paying for news content is the means of payment. News is so disposable and digested in small chunks that viewers do not want to enter into a payment scenario to read a couple of pages, or articles. According to The Guardian, the answer may lie with Apple’s  iTunes. iTunes already has over 100 million accounts with credit card details, and has sold over 8.5 billion songs to date . In the process, it has transformed itself from a music player to an online wallet. Perhaps selling news content, or at least magazines, via a store will be the way forward…

In response to the current water shortages, Dun laoghaire Rathdown County Council are using a Blog to inform residents and businesses about the status of water supply interruptions. The blog, called dlremergencyupdates, is being used to convey up to the minute information about where water has been cut off, and when it is anticipated to be back on.

The council have been quick to see the usefulness of a blog as a means of letting people know what’s happening to their water (well they can probably tell the water’s off when they turn the tap on!). Regular updates are being posted. The blog is hosted on Blogspot, one of the most popular blogging platform and there’s a link to the blog from the Council’s main web site.

Blogging

A blog can be set up on a site like Blogspot in a matter of minutes. The advantage is that it can be updated easily, the posts are immediate (in real-time), no technical knowledge is required and the cost is zero!

Well done DLRCoCo!

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There’s a saying which has great resonance in the IT industry – ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it!’

In many cases, this is the best approach to developing and maintaining computer software. If the system is working, performing it’s required functions correctly, and  there is no business requirement to make corrections, then the cost-benefit equation definitely falls down on the side of leaving well enough alone. Changing a computer system, even slightly, can be costly, requires testing, and always runs the risk of causing unforeseen impacts. All developers know that a misplaced full stop can cause a program to run riot, causing  untold chaos, before coming to it’s ‘logical’ end in a crash! 

However, let’s take a look again at the business requirement. If your business has a web site and one of your requirements is to attract traffic, that is, you want to be found by search engines, and ranked highly in their results, then your web site must be build with underlying technology that the search engines can ’crawl’ effectively and index the content of.

Many older websites were built using ‘frames’, this is now an out-dated technology, as search engines cannot access the data, therefore they cannot index it, and your business will not be returned in results. Your site can also run into problems if the underlying code with which it’s written is not completely valid. It may appear to look alright, but if the code is not up to current standards, then the search engines may not read it correctly – and you lose out.

To see if your code meets current standards of XHTML, you can run your code through a validator. All you have to do is go to Validator.W3.org and type in your URL (web site address). It will then read through to see how ‘clean’ your code is.

If you see lots of errors, so will Google’s bots!

Note:    a ‘bot‘, while it sounds like a new strain of bacteria, is actually a piece  of software that fulfils a task, over and over again, a bit like a robot.

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Google has launched it’s iPhone competitor and it’s called the Nexus One. This Smartphone runs with Google’s own Android operating system and has a touch screen display – of course.

However, it differs to the iPhone in that it has an open platform which will allow developers create applications and bring them to the consumer far, far quicker than new apps can make it onto Apple’s iPhone (Apple has a something of a ‘jumping through hoops’ process for developers to go through).

It also differs to the iPhone, and this is good news for consumers, in that Google are also opening an online store where the shiny new object can be purchased with, or without, mobile operator contract. Although this is in the US only so far, but a deal is to be struck with Vodafone for European consumers.

For those doing business on the web, or who are still to join their online brethren, this launch further illustrates the growth of the mobile web. The Telephone is long since a talking matter. They are now a multi-functional device connecting in a multitude of ways, and growing all the time. The young folk no longer wear watches. People tweet from their phone, they email, facebook, shop, find themselves (geographically anyway) and so forth and so on.

According to Google, the number of mobile internet searches grew by 30% in the third qtr of 2009, over the previous 3 mths (Sunday Times, 3/1/2010). The challenge for web marketeers is to ensure that their marketing strategies are viewable on the small screen size.

Obviously, the main drawback is the small screen, but also developers should bear in mind download times, as these can be expensive for the consumer. Also, the design needs to avoid the requirement for a mouse, as a stylus is more likely to be used. One column layouts work best and the amount of text reduced.

Nexus comes from the Latin and means ‘connected group’  or ‘centre of something’. And that is just where Google is.

Have you seen something like this on a website and wondered why the font size was different?

The font size reflects the importance (or population size in this example) of the various tags. 

Web Design today differs to the earlier, somewhat static sites. Web site development since Web 2.0 (circa 2004) uses additional functionality to increase the interaction with the user, thereby enhancing the user experience. Such interaction, at it’s simplest may take the form of a search facility, right across the spectrum to allowing RSS feeds from blogs as they are updated. Information  is now often given a number of labels or keywords in order to increase the searchability, for example of a document or a blog post ie. the data is indexed. This is known as tagging. Your photo can even be tagged on Facebook!

To take tagging a stage further, the image above is referred to as a Tag Cloud. A Tag Cloud is just a visual representation of content, generated by how the information has been tagged.

So, how is this useful for you?

For example, this post has 4 tags, which you can see below. Tagging makes it easier for users to find what they want on your site. And that makes them happy. Happy users come back and stay longer.

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