Over the past few months, we have been trying to optimise our website and get it ranked in the top pages of google. In doing so, we have gone through tremendous amounts of articles, free and paid and have time and time again been suggested that google loves fast websites.

 

One of the things that we have considered over the past few weeks is to upgrade to a fast dedicated server from our current shared hosting with an American based web hosting company. We found many UK based companies that are claiming that since moving to them, many corporate websites have increaed their traffic by upto 20 folds.

 

We believe that this is nothing but a marketing stunt as our website is now ranked on the first page of google with many keywords and this has been obtained by nothing but SEO and link building while still remaining with our current shared hosting. Of course if one decides to host a website with a very poor connectivity  web server,  they can say good bye to google rankings. However, a good shared host (we cannot name any here) will let your website reach the top pages of google searches if you succeed in good SEO and steady link building.

 

If you would like to have any assistance with search engine optimisation and link building at affordable prices, please feel free to contact us via our contact form or our direct numbers in the UK- 0800 7879 215 or 079044 65650. 

Nextagelab has been recently commissioned to design and develop a new e-commerce website for salonlinesdirect.com. As the client was very keen on accepting payments via Netbanx as their card processing merchant, we were also asked to code a payment module for handling this merchant. We have successfully programmed the module for Oscommerce and the website should be up & running very soon. Keep an eye our ever growing web design portfolio.

So what is a blog? In simple words, it is nothing but a log which is stored on the web. Originally termed as weblog, the word blog came into existence quite recently. Having a blog on your website is always beneficial because search engines consider it as a free resource of information, and a website that is full of information has always got the chance to make it to the top search result pages.

A person who maintains and writes in a blog is called as a blogger.Many times, people confuse a blog for an Internet forum or a board. There is ahuge difference between a form and a blog. A forum is a place where people can register and interact with other people, share their experience & knowledge, request for help etc. However, a blog is like a dairy where a person or a company can write facts.

These days, there is no need for developing the whole software for a blog as there are many off the shelf softwares available, most of which are free. However, the tricky part is the blog design integration. Unless one has specialist knowledge about web programming languages, it can be a mammoth job to make the blog look like a part of the original website. This is where a web design company like us can help. We have years of experience and our skilled employees all hold internation certificates like Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, Microsoft Certified Solution Developers & Microsoft Certified Professional.

You can have a blog for a variety of website and if you wish to have free traffic coming through google, we highly recommend having a blog designed.

E.g.

A cook can have a blog for his recipes & cooking secrets
A music band can have one for providing information about their new sound tracks and any live events they will be doing
An atrist can show off his paintings and art in a blog and so on...

So, what are you waiting for? Call us today start blogging.

We are quite often asked whether we provide a visitor tracking software and a website analytics software for analysing the performance of a website. Whislt it is surely possible to develop a custom built website with a tracking system, it is now not so sensible to do so.

Google as opened it's doors to the ordinary world and is letting us use their highly advanced software in order to track the trends of visitors on our websites. Google of course has it's own ulterior motive of being able to collect more and more data for it's search engine. However, it is worth considering this software because it is totally free apart from the administrative cost that may be involved in setting up the system on your website.

The analytics provide you with in depth information for example:

1. Daily visitors, unique & repeat
2. Daily page views
3. Top landing pages
4. Top exit pages
5. Bounce rate (where the visitor left the website after viewing only one page)
6. The search queries that were used in reaching your website
7. The queries that may have been paid for through CPC e.g. adwords or yahoo cpc.
8. The countries these visitors came from
9. Which links on your website were clicked when visitors browsed it
10. and tons more of information.

For the while at least, analytics are free to use. Experts truly believe that google will start charging for this service in the near future.

Nextagelab can help you implement google analytics into your website and can also provide you training on how to improve the rank of your website with very little tweaks to it. If you may be interested, please get in touch via the contact us form.

Let's face it. Computer technology has evolved so fast since the early years of this century that many people find it hard to understand some of the terms related to web designing. No wonder that more than 50% of our potential clients have never even heard the word flash. Well, they can explain that they want animations and music, but they do not know what it is.

Flash is a software that was originally developed by a company called Macromedia in the mid 1990s. It's sole intention was to be able to animate websites and web content. Recently, the software giant Adobe acquired this company and it is now a part of the Adobe's Creative Suite. In short known as Flash CS4, which is the latest version.

Many websites that you may have seen have a little animation that allows you to either play it or skip it before you enter the actual website. This animation is called as a flash intro. It isn't normally a very good idea to implement a flash intro unless your website is specifically requiring a flash intro. Examples of such websites may be a theme park, a movie, a theatre show, a music album, an escort club, a dating website etc.

Look out for our new flash advertisement which will be coming to our website very soon.

This was the little question that was popped to us by one of our recent clients which held quite a big answer. So let's find out how a web site can feature videos and what the basic requirements are for a project like this.

First and foremost, you need a webserver to host a website as mentioned in my post earlier. However, when you are considering featuring videos on your website, you need to think about leasing a web server that can stream videos. The reason being that when you start a video in the end user's browser, it should start playing immediately while it is still downloading. This is exactly what happens when you view a video on youtube. All in all, the process of making a video play while it is still downloading is called video streaming. If a web server does not support this particular feature, then the video will not start playing in the browser until the complete file has been downloaded to the end user's computer.

There is however a very effective alternative to this. When featuring streaming videos companies normally use video formats like mp4 or quick time. When recently contacted by a client who expressed that he wanted to stream videos but did not wish to invest in an expensive server that could stream we offered this method to him. We used a video format called as flv which stands for flash video.

What we did was we generated a flash video player and embedded it into the page where these videos were to be featured and then instructed the flash player to download the flv files from the server. The result was amazing and flv files streamed without using a video streaming web server thus saving money for our client.

Here's how we have been able to achieve this: You2CanCook.com. Do not forget to see the fantastic visual effects we have been able to generate courtesy of an application called multibox here: You2CanCook.com/products.asp.

It is also possible however to call youtube videos on your own website and we can certainly achieve the same effect as the recipes online page as on the website above using the multibox application.

Today's topic is website hosting. When clients call us for a web design quote, they often are unaware that once a website has been designed, it needs to be hosted. So let's take a look at how it works.

When a web site has been designed, it needs to be kept on a computer which is connected to the Internet 24 hours and that too via a super fast connectivity. Such computers are called Web Servers which are strongly built up and connected to speeds like 100 Mbps to the back bone of a country. I will discuss a backbone at some other time, but let's just say that it is super speed Internet ring road that connects cities electronically.

In order for a website to be available to the world 24/7, we need to upload it to a web server and then make it's relevant domain name point to it's own folder. Once uploaded to the server it can then freely be browser by users all over the world.

Website hosting plans are generally monthly and annual and you need to pay a hosting company in order for a website to be hosted. Let's be honest, they are giving you the setup of 24/7 Internet connectivity and high configuration server and all the service, they should get paid for their services.

But of course, they are loads of free web hosting companies as well. But then, you will expect them to advertise their companies services on your website. Unfortunately, I cannot provide any names here, but if you google up free website hosting, you are bound to find many companies.

Domain names are provided by domain registrar companies. The first ever company that had a monopoly over domain names is called Network Solutions Inc, based in the USA. You can check the availability of a domain name at their website which is http://www.netsol.com

A website template is a collection of files mainly .html, .css and image files which make up the general basics of a website.

The html or the hyper text markup language file is the container file of the source code and tells all browsers how a web page should be displayed.

The css or cascading style sheet file contains styles for displaying all or certain components in the html file. Styles can be applied for various tags which will be explained in a separate article very soon.

We will soon be posting some free website template to this section, which you can download and use royalty free as long as our legal notice inside the html page stays intact.

When you put up a website online, it should have a name so that thegeneral public can recognise it. It's just like a person having anindividual name or a house having it's own address. For example, ourcompany's domain name is nextagelab.com.

The first part (nextagelab) is called as the actual name while theremaining part (.com) is called as a top level domain or TLD for short.

There are many TLD's available these days for example .co.uk, .org,.mobi, .info, .org.uk, .net and so on. You can select any TLD relevantto the website you want. For example, a company that only providesservices in the uk may call have a tld as .co.uk while a company operating world wide like John Lewis has its TLD as .com. Hence they have a domain name called johnlewis.com.

An organisation like the RSPCA is local to the UK and has it's domain name as www.rspca.org.uk.

TLD's are not limited and there is a new TLD coming up almost every other six odd months.

If you would like to have more information on how to launch your own TLD, please get in touch with me.

I am often asked this question when new clients first call up. And my answer always is that the cost of new website is totally in your hands. As a company based in the London, UK, we provide web design solutions from as little as £99. However as your requirements keep stacking up, so does the final price on your invoice. It's as simple as saying that you can purchase a C Class Mercedes Benz for as little as £20,000 or as much as £50,000. All you need to decide is whether you want the lovely topups like a Sat Nav, hi tech sound system, a sun roof, climate control etc.

The answer to this question is pretty much the same as buying a car. I guess I should stress that before you start hunting quotes for a new website, you must have clarity in your mind about the website you want. You are better off asking questions to yourself like the ones below:

1. How many pages do I want on my new website?
2. Whether I should get a static website or a flash website?
3. How frequently will I need to modify my website?
4. If I need to modify my website frequently, is it worth investing in a content management system website?
5. Will I be selling products on my website?
6. Do I need a bespoke website designed?
7. Do I need a logo for my website and my business?
8. Should I find a company that will also design my business stationary?

Once you have asked yourself these questions and any other possible questions you could think of, and once you have answered all of them, I would say that you have then given the answer to the actual cost of designing a new web site.

I hope this topic has helped.
Mala