september 2005 newsletter

It is usually from a made-up address such as zxwd@yourwebsite.com. These are coming from people who think it is a bit of hoot to write software programs that will wander around the internet, finding the contact page on websites and sending them bogus emails.

It's all a little annoying. So much so, that from now on all the sites we design will have an anti- spam facility that requires the visitor to manually confirm a sequence of random characters. The software spammers won't be able to guess this sequence and therefore won't be able to send an email via the contact form.

If you've already got a site and would like this facility, get in touch with us to see if it's possible.

We recently saw the results of a UK survey where almost 70% of the businesses surveyed hadn't taken any steps to get their websites registered on search engines!

As a marketing oriented design company we're still astonished when we hear these kind of stories. It's naive or almost negligent to think that a web site will be successful without some conscious attempt to bring visitors to the site. Yet, we still keep hearing of designers telling customers that the search engines will just 'find them'. Not true.

Another myth is that there are 'black magic' techniques associated with site promotion. Yes, the pages have to be constructed properly and there are some fundamental things that must be done on the page but the biggest impact comes from obvious things such as :

• Good content
• Good page design
• Good links to your site from other sites
• Registration on the right search engines and directories
• Appropriate online advertising

First there was Netscape, then Microsoft Internet Explorer became the most popular browser (the software we use to view the internet).

IE still dominates, but there's a new face around - Firefox. Fans say it's faster, safer and 90million people have already downloaded it. We can see from our web server logs that a lot of people are using it - 15-20% of visitors.

It's worth having a look at the optional extensions - software written by the Firefox public community. There's all sorts of things available and you can install them for free. Have a look at the Firefox extension page and see things like:

• a Google customiser
• a To-do reminder list
• news feed readers
• a bookmark handler

We are members of BNI, the most successful business networking group in the world.

Each month we showcase member companies that might be of interest to you.

This month we'd like to introduce you to Solas Computer Services

Solas aims to provide an unbiased IT consultancy and support service to small businesses in Edinburgh.

This means finding the best solutions to suit your IT business problems. Solas can offer a single point of contact for computer and network :

• Purchase
• Installation
• Support
• Consultancy