Every once in a while I get to work with some absolutely delightful people and this is one of those occasions. Panthers are a long established Bristol kickboxing club who wanted a website to promote their club and communicate with their members via the internet. They approached several designers, received some mixed reactions and were given some very bad advice in my opinion about registering their domain name and hosting. Fortunately I was able to resolve the problems and get them back on the right track.

There were many pictures that Panthers wanted to use and these have been displayed using a “hoverbox” effect and also incorporated some FlickR slideshows into the training pages. The new website has been launched and is going through some final tweaks, and the club are very pleased with our efforts to provide what they wanted. Panthers are now working on getting themselves some good rankings for searches.

Without much effort this page should reach the number one slot on google for crowdedalliances. So the question is how did that happen. Easy really, there are no other listings for crowdedalliances!

The point is that if there is no competition and, more importantly, no-one searches for crowdedalliances therefore it is simple to rank for the term. Yet many website owners will go for such words.

What should be of concern is what searches are made that your website could fulfill, what those keywords are, and how your content reflects that. Otherwise you too could rank highly for crowdedalliances that returns no searches.

How does it work?
The following is a little simplistic but in essence shows how hosting works. Your website will be held on a machine with a fast connection to the internet. That machine is identified through it’s ip address. When you type in to your browser www.yourdomain.com the protocol used will look up the domain name to find the ip address of the machine where it is held. That machine will then present a page to your browser for display.

What does it give me?
At the least your web hosting will provide your site pages to anyone that requests them, however most hosting provides a whole lot more. It will maintain a log of all the requests and show these as a statistical analysis of where the requests came from, what was requested as well as information about the browser and computer. The stats will even tell you which search engines were used and what was searched for.

As well as hosting the site it will also provide email facilities, with possible a webmail service so you can access your email anywhere, a number of addresses in the format of name@yourdomain.com, you should also expect antivirus and spam filters for your email.

Depending on the level of your hosting you may also have access to one or more databases that can be useful if you have a “dynamic” website or a content management system.

There is a whole lot more that hosting is capable of, but this post hopefully has given you an overview.

It’s a confusing business this, when you’re thinking of having a website for the first time. There are so many things you’ve never heard of and a Domain Name is just one of them. In this post I’ll try to explain what it is, what it does and how, what it will give you and finally how you register a domain name. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time of year again when I can get at the imaker site and give it a bit of a wash and brush-up. This time however I thought it needed a complete makeover as since it had been live it had become too busy, had many additions and deletions and, I thought, it had a rather tired look.

The new look design is very clean and simple, not too many colours and has very simple navigation. All the content is still there, in one form or another, though has been rearranged logically (I hope) to keep it as simple as possible.

The old logo and background has gone as well, and a new logo has been produced. I’ve used a ‘folks’ text which was in the header of the old site and so keeps some semblance of continuity and I’m pleased with it. It’s sad to see the Clifton Suspension Bridge go, but you never know, I may bring it back at some time.

Meanwhile I’m leaving comments open on this post, so if anyone would care to pass judgment on the new design I’d be pleased to hear from you.

We are delighted to offer a new service, an extremely cost effective and affordable web design service utilising Wordpress as a cms.

Our new dedicated website www.webdesignfirst.co.uk will offer the service with an introductory offer of a site + .co.uk domain name + a years hosting.

This new service will provide a “cheaper” way of getting on the web for the smaller business while still maintaining our principles of good design with accessibility.

Content management with joomla is a bit of a new venture for iMaker but we have completed a web site using this for a Psychology tutor in Bristol.

Though the layout of the site is pretty familiar the client is very happy with the finished result and it was a low cost venture for all concerned.

I must have had my head in the sand to have missed a great post on this subject from Megan McDermott.

For a while I’ve been looking at my blog title tags and thinking there must be a better way. Then Megan’s post just explained it all simply and elegantly.

Thanks very much!

Just a quick heads up that we now have a web jargon buster / glossary of web design terms page now on the main site. Inevitably it’ll be added to, these things are never finished. Hope it proves useful.

Voip has interested me from both a technical and cost saving perspective. I have tinkered with it but have not been overly impressed with the quality or ease of use until recently.

I tried a few providers using a “soft phone” and headset both paid and unpaid through my desktop but really didn’t think it was that good and was on the verge of giving up. However over the last month or so I noticed on a business forum a lot of discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of voip itself and then some further discussion on hardware. This led me to look again at the possibilities and providers. Read the rest of this entry »