The site will provide a searchable database using names, craft type and areas of the UK. While yet to be officially launched full listings and ads will be free.  You can register using the form in the site to get a listing.

News about crafts and design are also planned. We’re also looking for craft articles. These will be published on the site and allow links and full author accreditation, so please get those coming in.

If you have a craft based website and you want to improve it’s visibility and your search engine ranking then get your application in now.

The site aims to showcase the hard work John and Carole have put in during the last 5 years or so and has information about them, their alpacas and the alpacas for sale.

Once again, it’s been our pleasure to work with this client and we wish them the greatest success with the site, and our continuing partnership to improve it still more.

• The images are straight from their camera so are too big to fit the desired format and/or eat away at their bandwidth.
• The image needs cropping.
• The image needs some other changes.

What is needed is a quick and easy way of making the desired changes without having to go to the extent of buying some software to do the job just for their website.  If it’s just a few images I don’t mind making the changes, but often the owner wants to do it themselves straight away.

So what do I do, recommend they use an online free editor.

I came across a post from http://woork.blogspot.com/ where 5 online photo editors are compared. Of these there are two of my favourites that do most jobs.

1 – Pixlr

Has a very Photoshop like interface, easy to use, most changes are catered for and you can upload and save from and to your computer.

2 – Picnik

Different layout but very easy to use and you don’t have to register! Also allows you to save to your computer or share your photos on Flickr  and  Picasa and most other popular photo sharing web services.

Good luck with them both.

How wrong can you be? Lots of lists, but none of them complete and most out of date. Spent far too long looking and eventually had to make my own. I think it’s pretty complete, though, as ever, you probably know better.

I’ve added a text file with just each County name that you can use as you like.

Please let me know what you think or if there are any missing by adding a comment. I promise I’ll be grateful and will add any missing counties.

Finally if you make use of the list, feel free to link back to this page http://www.imaker.co.uk/blog/list-of-uk-counties/

Domain names:

• It seems that having a domain name with a keyword may have a benefit.

File Names / File Paths / URLs:

• As with Domain name used with keywords may have a benefit.

Header tags:

• Page titles are one of the more influential things to use for SEO and should contain the keywords / phrase for that page. They should be unique for each page – do not use the same Title for multiple pages. Page titles should give a clear idea of what the page is going to be about.
• Descriptions should be unique and Informative and further expand on the page title.
• Keywords should only be relevant to the page they appear on and avoid using as many keywords in the tag as possible.

Content:

• The H1 tag should only be used once per page and should be the most important text on the page.
• H2 / H3 / H4 etc tags can be used to provide sub-headings, breaking up the content, again should be used once only on the page.

Navigation:

• Use meaningful text, preferably keywords, for the link, don’t use “click here”.
• Link title attribute should be used to describe and inform in a short sentence what will be found at the  destination page.

Images:

• Alt attributes should convey the same message as the image.  If a product, for example, describe it as well as including the product title.

Links out:

• Linking out may help get some recognition as an authority with Google based on the sites you link to.
• Only link to relevant/topical/quality/useful sites.

Content:

• Content is very important!  IF you don’t have something that can be read by visitors and bots, then you are basically wasting your time.
• You should have unique, informative and well written content.

Do not:

• keyword stuff any of the above.
• copy other sites.
• use junky or spammy content.
• fill pages up with just images.
• load content using JavaScript.
• load pages in Frames.
• have Flash only based content.

Background to this post:

The list above has come about through observation, testing and experimentation of what currently works best for the main search engines.  Results from forums and other blogs are also included once they have been tested.

If you have any observations you would like to make please comment.

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.

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!

A little while back I wrote a 6 step guide titled “The First 6 Steps Towards Designing A Web Site” which ezinearticles.com published.

Hope it helps anyone facing a similar problem.