21 May, 2006
by imaker
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Are there any?
Every day I look through my emails and there they are. Pharmacies, stocks to follow, bank accounts that I need to validate, ebay, PayPal, diplomats and on and on. They arrive and two clicks later depart unopened, unread and unloved. Continue Reading →
13 April, 2006
by imaker
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One of the most interesting bits of news I’ve heard in a while was that Microsoft is to discontinue FrontPage. The details can be found here. I never felt comfortable with this particular piece of software, rather that it is overblown, long winded, is difficult to use and produces poor results. In some ways I found that this announcement has left me with feelings of disappointment. Continue Reading →
24 February, 2006
by imaker
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I’ve been asked a lot of times by friends and acquaintances just why don’t they get the interest they thought their website would generate. It has never been an easy question to answer because there can be as many different reasons as there are aims.
We have decided that this can be a frustrating problem for many website owners and so have introduced this offer to have your website checked over to see if there are problems that are affecting your visitor numbers. Things like can visitors find your site? If they find it can they get the information they want? What might be stopping them from visiting, staying or buying?
26 January, 2006
by imaker
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It’s something I’ve been working on for a while now and finally got some breathing space to launch the new look website and overall I’m very pleased with the changes.
All the hard work with css has been worthwhile. Apart from the ‘forms’ pages which use tables, the rest of the site is entirely css based and rates highly in the accessibility stakes. I would have liked to have added rounded corners to the floats but that will be for another day. If I kept trying to incorporate everything I wanted to I would never get it uploaded.
So a bit of fiddling left to do, but very nearly there. Have a look at the site at Web design Bristol
24 January, 2006
by imaker
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Just a quick note to say that I have just upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.0 and very pleased with the new back-end. This all went very smoothly and as the upgrade instructions said it would.
I’m still always pleasantly surprised when instructions work.
24 January, 2006
by imaker
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There is apparently no official confirmation from Yahoo but the forums are buzzing with news that an update is in progress. It seems that the communities are unsure whether it has finished or indeed, if the results we are seeing are going to be permanent.
Looking at the latest Yahoo search results it would seem unlikely that it is over. There are several top listed pages that look far too dubious to be realistically placed. For one set of keywords this site has disappeared completely, while for others the links pages are appearing.
These updates seem to take longer and longer now. We’ll have to wait and see what the end results are.
9 January, 2006
by imaker
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Having given up waiting I just noticed that a site I registered with DMOZ in April 2005 has been listed in December 2005. It’s not a particularly heavy category, but there, recorded for posterity.
30 November, 2005
by imaker
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I’ve no idea how reliable some of the news around is but it is being said that £5 billion is set to be spent in online stores in the UK by 24 million people. Further that 12th December is the deadline for your onliine purchase to be sure of receiving it before Christmas day.
While I am prepared to believe the latter, the former surely means the vast majority of the adult population of the UK will spend over £200 each online?
21 November, 2005
by imaker
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If you hunt around our site enough you should find a link that says it has passed the W3C guidelines on accessibility. However Jacob Nielsen, who is one of the leading usability experts, has just published an article with the title of ‘Accessibility Is Not Enough‘. It raises some worthwhile points and is well worth the read, summarised as “A strict focus on accessibility as a scorecard item doesn’t help users with disabilities. To help these users accomplish critical tasks, you must adopt a usability perspective”. You can find the article by following the title link.
18 November, 2005
by imaker
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Unfortunately this site and many others were hit when our hosting provider’s servers were badly mangled by an attack, apparently by someone with a grudge against the host.
Most of the sites have now been recovered and business carries on. However it re-emphasises the issues of ‘disaster recovery’ and plain old fashioned ‘backup policies’. When your turn comes it’s never a good time, but if there is a backup available you will be glad you spent the time necessary to create it.