Is Your Homepage Too Big?

It's good to keep a homepage small for a variety of reasons.

1. Google likes fast-loading homepages. Say no more.

2. The homepage is just a shop window for the information on your website, so you shouldn't worry about there being too much actual content on it.

3. People don't like to scroll. I know it sounds bizarre, but it's true. So you should try to keep most, if not all, of your homepage content "above the fold". Above the fold is an old newspaper publishing expression – the theory goes that when I newspaper is on the rack, the most important elements (ie. the masthead and headline) should be visible at a glance even if it's folded over or partially obscured by competing publications. The same rule applies with a website homepage, except that with a website you're trying to avoid forcing visitors to scroll down to find what they want.

Of course, there are examples of good website designs where you do have to scroll down to see the whole homepage, but generally speaking you will find that (a) they have a lot of content on their site and (b) they use above-the-fold space to state their intent and to proffer their most important products and services.

See How The Big Guys Do It
In my opinion, the size of the homepage should be in keeping with the size of the website as a whole. If you've got 40,000 pages in your site, then by all means have 100 links on your homepage. The current version of the microsoft.com homepage, for instance, has 294 things you can click on. (Yes, amazing, I have a thing that counts them, would you believe? I never knew that would ever come in useful). But I think you'll agree they have stuck pretty firmly to the above-the-fold rule.



Homepage Dos
Do use your homepage to do the following things:

• Make an impact


• Capture the imagination of the reader


• Make yourself look good


• Make it completely clear what you do


• Highlight a particular product/service or range of products


• Tell people why you're better than or different to the competition


• Boast about your awards, credentials, testimonials, guarantees or any other evidence of your expertise/value for money

Homepage Don'ts
You should avoid the following things on your homepage:

• Showing exactly the same thing 365 days of the year


• Saying "Welcome to [insert company name]" - it's a waste of valuable space


• A 'News' item that is weeks or months out-of-date


• A detailed explanation of products or services


• A Flash-y "splash page"


• Audio or video that starts playing without the visitor having clicked a Play button


• Corny, royalty-free images of people in suits shaking hands or pretty receptionists wearing telephone headsets

Say What You Do
Finally, just a note to emphasise a point from the above list of "dos": make sure your homepage makes it clear what your website is about. Again, I know it sounds crazy, but I've lost count of the number of websites I've seen for companies that offer "business solutions" and "enterprise solutions" but you'd be hard pressed to decide whether they're an IT consultancy or a cleaning firm.

Further Reading:
Is My Web Page Too Wide - Or Not Wide Enough?

Does Your Site Have a Call to Action?

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I'm from inframes.com ltd in Reading, a website design and development company from Reading established more than ten years ago.

"You should refer people to me because I help people make more money from their website.

"This week I'm going to be doing some work for David from Blue Sky Independent Financial Advisers and one of the things we're going to be looking at is a Call to Action.

"A Call to Action is very important on a website. It's all very well getting someone to come to your site, but what if they just browse and leave – even if they intend to come back one day, they might not. They might forget or go elsewhere. So you need something on your site to convince them to move ahead with their purchase there and then.

"A Call to Action might be a limited-time discount on a product or a free gift, but for a company of financial advisers from Reading, that's less practical. In a case like that, you're hoping to get a lead rather than a sale. You want a name, an email address and a telephone number. And members of the public won't give that to you freely – they expect something in return. Maybe it's a voucher for a free telephone consultation or a free ebook they can download.

So this week I'd like you to go away and look at your own website and ask yourself if it has a Call to Action. And if it doesn't, give me a call, and maybe we can work on one together.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am part of a growing new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

Free Online Marketing Techniques

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am a website designer from Reading.

"You should refer people to me because I can help them to use the internet to get more business and enhance their reputation.

"This morning I've been having a look at some of the online techniques the election campaigners in my constituency are using.

"The Conservative Party's Alok Sharma is trailing behind - he doesn't appear to be using Twitter and his Facebook page has only got 137 supporters so far.

"Labour's Naz Sarkar is Tweeting about his campaign and has 125 followers. His group Naz Sarkar for Reading West currently has 185 members.

"But screaming into the lead is the Lib Dem candidate, Daisy Benson, who is active on Twitter with 1,382 followers, has a regularly-updated campaign blog, and has a Facebook page with 499 members.

"So what can we glean from all this?

"Simply that these people feel there may be something to gain – possibly a seat in the Houses of Commons – from making use of these free tools provided for marketing themselves and their ideas. So this week my ideal referral would be a company that wants to be doing the same and doesn't know where to start.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am part of a growing new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

Protecting Your Site From Hackers

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design company from Reading.

"One of the reasons my customers stick with me is that they know I'll be there for them in a crisis.

"A lot of my customers rely solely on their website for their income, so you can imagine how horrified they might have been one morning last week to come into the office and find their homepage had been replaced by this:



"Now I take the security of my sites very seriously, but there are limits to what one can do. In a shared hosting environment, your website can be one of maybe a hundred occupying the same server. In this instance it appears the security of all the sites was compromised by a single piece of script uploaded to one of the neighbouring sites.

"But thanks to the speedy reaction of the hosting company – to whom I have been referring business for ten years now – this malicious code was erased completely within minutes and the security breach permanently purged.

"So this week I'd like you to refer me to anyone who has ever had their website hacked and wants to talk about how to ensure it never happens again.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

More on this Subject - What Can You Do?

Protect Against SQL Injection

One of the most common methods of hacking a site is via its database using a "SQL Injection". This technique can give hackers complete control over your database. It can be avoided by careful programming and there's a useful free Firefox add-on called SQL Inject Me from Security Compass which allows you to test any page for common vulnerabilities.

Protect Your Passwords

Keep your passwords secret and don't use the same one for everything. You know it makes sense.

Host Your Site on a Dedicated Server

If you're currently paying twenty or thirty quid a month for your web hosting, this is a relatively costly solution that you will have to think hard over, but if your site is in a shared hosting environment (see above), you run the risk of it being scuppered by one of your neighbours. If your business depends on your website, you should seriously consider a dedicated server or Virtual Private Server (where multiple operating systems effectively run side-by-side on the same machine).

What's BNI?

I am part of a growing new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

Another Testimonial

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design company from Reading.

"You should refer business to me because I can give you pretty much anything you see on someone else's website.

"Last week I had a call asking me to do exactly that. I look after the website for the actor and entertainer Allan Stewart and he told me to go and look at a banner ad for Littlewoods he'd seen on the AOL homepage.

"In the ad, there was a little carousel showing photos of models and you could place your cursor over one of the photos to slow down the animation, find out more about the outfit and of course click to make a purchase. Allan asked if I could replicate this effect to create a moving menu for his video page. I did and he was delighted with the results.

"In fact he emailed me to say 'I love it. You're very clever' and told me he'd be sending me a DVD of even more video to include on the site just to make the most of his new toy.

"So this week I'd like you to refer me to anyone who'd like to add a video or animation to their website and doesn't know where to begin.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am part of a growing new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

Vehicle Tracking Made Easy

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design company from Reading.

"You should refer business to me because I do far more than just design websites – I build applications that are a vital part of my clients' businesses.

"This week I've been working with the Sherpa Van Project, which has a fleet of vans based in Yorkshire. Using software from a company called gtrack and maps supplied by Google, we operate a website that allows the coordinator to pinpoint the location of vans on the road at any given time and thus predict the likely arrival time at their next stop.

"To track a vehicle in this way you need a hard-wired box costing around £200 or a mobile 'phone that never leaves the vehicle. And you'll need a data-only SIM card for each box which should set you back less than a tenner a month. Setting up the website and configuring the SIM cards is less than a day's work and after that you can log in to check on your vehicles from any web browser.

"So the referral I'd like this week is from anyone with a fleet of vehicles who would like to know where they are at any time and for that matter precisely where they have been at any given minute on any given day.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am part of a growing new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

A Shortcut to Page One of Google

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design company from Reading.

You should refer business to me because I will give a free telephone consultation to anyone looking for advice on their website.

This week I've been talking to a young lady called Sascha who was referred to me by Dean Weller at Personal Career Management. Sascha has started up a business as a mobile massage therapist and wants some advice on getting more business from the web.

"And actually, one thing she had already done is so very effective that I thought I'd mention it today. It's something that takes five minutes, doesn't cost anything, and may - if you're very lucky - put your website straight the top of Google's listings.

"I'm talking about signing up to Google's own version of Yellow Pages, the Local Business Center.

"You can find add your business at google.com/local/add/ and if you take a look at this screengrab, you'll see that Sascha's listing for NaturalHaven.co.uk has been catapulted right to the top of the listings when I search for 'mobile massage therapist reading'. And she didn't pay a penny for it.



"So this week I'd like to request once again that you refer companies who already have a website and want to talk about ways to get more business from it without spending a fortune.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am part of a growing new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

Turn Bad Luck into Good Customer Service

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design company from Reading.

"You should refer business to me not only for prompt and personal service, but because I also endeavour to bring my clients good luck.

"Let me explain.

"One of my clients is The Audience Club, a members-only website for very low priced London theatre and concert tickets.

"On Monday I was informed that a new member, a Chinese lady, was unhappy with her membership number.

"That's because the Chinese word for 'four' sounds exactly like the word for 'death'. Worse still is a number containing a four and a two, because that sounds exactly like the Chinese words for 'dead body'.

"I immediately delved into the data and manually changed all her records and issued her with the new number 888888. In Chinese, the word for 'eight' is lucky because it sounds like the word for 'prosperity'.

"So this week I'd like you to refer me to anyone who has a customer database and wants to integrate it with their website so that customers can check their accounts online.

"With any luck, I'll be able to help.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am part of a growing new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

Google Streetview comes to Reading

Reading Town Hall:


View Larger Map

Madejski Stadium:


View Larger Map

Cemetery Junction:


View Larger Map

Jackson's Corner:


View Larger Map

Oxford Road:


View Larger Map

Websites for Working Mums

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design and development company from Reading established more than ten years ago.

"You should refer business to me because when BNI's assistant director Nick Forgham took up my references to be a member of BNI, he said they were two of the best he'd ever been given.

"It's Mother's Day this Sunday, so I thought it timely to mention that working mums are amongst my best clients.

"I look after the website for my wife, who runs a company specialising in training public relations professionals.

"One of my clients is a lady in London who runs a business called The Audience Club providing very, very low priced tickets for theatre, comedy and concerts.

"Another is a working mum from Braintree who runs a travel business with her father, renting holiday villas in Tenerife and the Canary Islands.

"So this week I'd like you to refer me to a working mum who is starting up her own company and needs a website or just some advice on how to do business on the internet.

"And at this point I wanted to say that if you need me to provide a reference, I can give you a whole list of ladies who would be prepared to give me one... but then I thought that might not sound quite right.

"Instead I'll just say: to find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am one of half-a-dozen people who have started a new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

BNI 60 Seconds - More Testimonials

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design and development company from Reading established more than ten years ago.

"You should refer business to me because in the past week, all modesty aside, I have received emails from two separate clients saying, and I quote 'What a star you are' and 'You are the king!'

"The reason for this praise is my ability to bail people out when their website is giving them trouble. This happened yesterday when Sarah from the Flowers and Plants Association gave me a call. It wasn't very profitable because I was able to fix her problem in ten minutes. In fact, I didn't even bother to bill her for it. It turned out someone had overwritten a file I had written last year with an older version, so all I had to do was upload the proper one and soak up the glory.

"So this week I'd like you refer someone who would like to add a 'star' to their team who can be relied on to pick up the pieces when their website goes wrong and charges a measly £35 an hour – or sometimes, if I'm feeling in a good mood, nothing at all.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am one of half-a-dozen people who have started a new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

BNI 60 Seconds - A Testimonial

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design and development company from Reading established more than ten years ago.

"You should refer business to me because we don't sell packaged websites at a fixed cost – just bespoke solutions tailored to the needs of your business, either for an agreed fee or at an hourly rate of £35.

"Yesterday I got a call from a chap called David who I've worked for many times but has recently got a new job at a recruitment agency. He was having big trouble with their website. There was a problem with the software for updating the vacancies and the company that made it told him they couldn't fix it because it was too old and offered to design him a new site instead.

"When he told me about the problem, I guessed immediately what was wrong and I was able to fix it in five minutes. Five minutes later, he emailed to tell me that everyone there was very impressed by my service and they want to talk to me about doing a complete redesign.

"So this week I'd like you refer someone to me whose current design agency is as incompetent and unhelpful as David's, because they really make me look very good.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am one of half-a-dozen people who have started a new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

Taking Control of Your Website

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design and development company from Reading established more than ten years ago.

"You should refer business to me because we don't sell packaged websites at a fixed cost – just bespoke solutions tailored to the needs of your business, either for an agreed fee or at an hourly rate of £35.

"This week I spent an hour with one of the new employees at the offices of one of our long-term clients giving him an initiation into using the content management system we built for them about five years ago.

"For those that don't know, a content management system allows people within an organisation to publish pages of text, pictures and so on to their website, often without any technical knowledge other than the ability to use a web browser. We designed the system precisely to the client's needs and it took about a week to develop and deploy, costing around £1,200. Since then I've lost count of the number of employees who have used this software week-in-week out to keep the site up-to-date over the years.

"So this week I'd like you refer someone to me who wants to take control of their website away from their web design agency so that they can expand and update their website themselves every day.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am one of half-a-dozen people who have started a new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

How Keep Off Hotmail's Greylist

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design and development company from Reading established more than ten years ago.

"You should refer business to me because I offer a reliable, friendly and personal service at the competitive rate of just £35 per hour.

"This week we've been working with a client on data purification.

"In a nutshell this means making sure that you're not sending emails to addresses that have been defunct for years or never existed to begin with. And while you might think this isn't necessary – email being ostensibly free to send – it's becoming more and more important because services like Hotmail and Google Mail and well as ISPs and corporate network administrators are increasingly greylisting (which is to say banning) senders who persistently send email to non-existent addresses. Which means that you might find yourself cut off from all of your Hotmail customers just because you sent a mailout to a handful of out-of-date Hotmail accounts.

"So this week I'd like you refer someone to me who has been building an email database for two years or more but doesn't have a policy to remove old data and avoid greylisting.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

More on This Subject

1. Read This
To find out what greylisting really means, visit www.greylisting.org

2. Create an SPF Record
Depending on how much control you've got over your domain's DNS settings, you may be able to create an SPF Record or, if you use Micorosft Exchange, a Sender ID. These help to legitimise your email. How? Well, spammers very often spoof the originating address of their email messages to make it seem like you've got mail from HSBC or eBay or Facebook, for example. But if your mail server checks the SPF record for every email that arrives, you will stand a much better chance of weeding out malicious spam from authentic email. The email's header contains details of the server where it originated and the SPF record will tell your mail server whether that server really does belong to the domain in purports to come from. And if all of that sounds too technical, don't worry. The important thing is that creating an SPF Record or Sender ID will help keep you out of Hotmail's bad books.

3. Join the Junk Mail Reporting Programme
If you have your own mail server, you may be able to join Hotmail's junk mail reporting programme. If you meet Hotmail's criteria, they will begin notifying you whenever an email from you is marked as junk so that you can delete that address from your database. Read more about the junk mail reporting programme here.

4. Remove Hard Boucebacks
It should go without saying that you must have a method for allowing people on your database to unsubscribe themselves. In addition, it's important to have a process for removing email messages that result in a "hard bounce", which is to say the email address does not exist, as opposed to a "soft bounce", which might result from a full mailbox. If your mailing list is small enough, you can do this manually, by checking bounce-backs. To an extent this can be partially-automated by using something like Mail Grab, which strips addresses out of email messages or other files. But if you are getting more bounce-backs than you can manage manually, you'll need software that can check your email as it comes in and unsubscribe the recipients automatically. Precisely what that software is will depend on your other systems (ie. mail server, customer database etc) so give us a ring or send us an email and we can talk about your options.

5. Use a Double-Opt-in Subscription Model
In some cases, you might be sending email to addresses that never existed in the first place, simply because the subscriber made a typo when he or she entered the email address. To get around this - and if you have ever opted into mailing lists yourself, you've doubtless encountered this yourself - there should be two stages to your sign-up process:
(a) the initial sign-up, which generates a single, unique email message and
(b) the click-through from that unique email to activate the subscription
Using this method, you ensure from the beginning that the address is real. And it has the positive side-effect of stopping malicious or mischievous people from signing up other people without their knowledge.

What's BNI?

I am one of half-a-dozen people who have started a new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

BNI 60 Seconds - Changes to Blogger

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design and development company from Reading established more than ten years ago.

"You should refer business to me because I offer a reliable, friendly and personal service at the competitive rate of just £35 per hour.

"Last week I talked about setting up a blog for one of my clients and since then I've heard about a change to the running of the free, Google-owned Blogger system that is going to affect the way some of my clients run their websites starting at the end of March. So I've been taking steps to pre-empt any problems and make sure the transition is as smooth as possible.

"So this week I'd like you to refer someone to me who has a website and doesn't have anyone looking after it full time but might find it useful to have a member of the team they can call on at any time who knows their website inside out and can spot potential problems long before they start to cost them money.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

More on this topic

For years, Blogger has allowed you to store your website's FTP hostname, username and password as part of your account so that you could write your blog page on blogger.com and then click "Publish" to copy that page to your own site. As a consequence, you could create blog pages for your own website without any technical know-how.

But from the end of March, you won't be able to do that any more.

It seems that Blogger's owners, Google, are fed up with providing technical support for this free service and rather than making it a premium subscription service, they've decided to scrap it altogether. Instead, Blogger blogs will have to move to a Blogger-hosted service, where the pages appear on Blogger's server instead of yours.

The good news is that you can carry on using Blogger and still make your blog pages seem much the same as always, plus you can still keep your usual domain name, as long as you know your way around your domain's DNS management.

The best way to do this, assuming your domain registrar provides you with a DNS management console, is to create a subdomain (aka vanity domain).

We've done this with www.allanstewart.com to create the new subdomain blog.allanstewart.com.

You do this by creating a CNAME.

It's pretty simple. You don't need to know any IP addresses or anything, just create a new CNAME in the format "whatever.yourdomain.com" and associate that domain with "ghs.google.com."

It might take anything from a few minutes to 48 hours for the new DNS record to filter through and the Blogger publishing settings page will tell you if your domain is or isn't ready yet.

IMPORTANT NOTE: There's a full stop (dot) at the end of "ghs.google.com." - it's important, so don't leave it out. Do leave out the double quotes, though - they're not part of it!

ANOTHER IMPORTANT NOTE: Google suggests it is "important" to "create a 'A' NAME records for your naked domain". No it isn't! In fact if you're using a subdomain, you absolutely must not do this.

Allan Stewart's news page used to be www.allanstewart.com/news.asp but now that he can't publish his blog to his own webserver, that page is now found at blog.allanstewart.com

What's BNI?

I am one of half-a-dozen people who have started a new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

BNI 60 Seconds - Start Blogging!

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design and development company from Reading established more than ten years ago.

"You should refer business to me because I offer a reliable, friendly and personal service at the competitive rate of just £35 per hour.

"This week we've been redesigning a website for a hotel. The owner is keen to keep his customers informed about special events, boost his search engine ranking and generally keep his site fresh by writing a weekly blog. So we've seamlessly integrated his blog into the design of his own website, so he can update his site without needing to understand about writing HTML or uploading files. In fact, he writes his blog using Blogger, the Google-owned, free blogging service, which powers the inframes.com blog, too.

"So this week I'd like you to refer someone to me who has a website but doesn't know how to update it and I'll show them how they can add professional-looking new pages to it every day of the week.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am one of half-a-dozen people who have started a new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

BNI 60 Seconds - Moving Your Website Made Easy

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design and development company from Reading established more than ten years ago.

"You should refer business to me because I offer a reliable, friendly and personal service at the competitive rate of just £35 per hour.

"This week we've been moving one of our longstanding client's websites to a new server. This can be quite a headache which is why a lot of companies never bother to review their website hosting. But by using our best practice checklist we ensure the minimum possible downtime during the transfer process, which in this case was nil. And our client is now able to take advantage of much more advanced server technology for less than the price he's been paying for eight years.

"So this week I'd like you to refer someone to me who hasn't reviewed their website hosting for five years or more. We can offer a state-of-the-art email and web hosting package, based in one of our partner server farms in London or the US or even both, for between £30 and £50 per month.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am one of half-a-dozen people who have started a new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

Getting The Title Right

Part three in a new guide to search engine optimisation

For those who don't know, the title of a web page is hidden in the page "head" and it should be present in every page you create. It doesn't appear on the page as part of the layout, but users will see it in the title bar, which is the bit across the top of their browser.

There are a few rigid rules to follow when coming up with a title for your page. The ideal length of a page title is 60 to 65 characters, including spaces. Any more than that and...

• it may not fit in the title bar of the web browser and more importantly


• it may be truncated in Google's search results with an ellipsis...

Include your chosen keywords where appropriate. Don't repeat keywords gratuitously, but don't be afraid to reuse variations on a word where you think it's legitimate. For instance: "Divorcing your partner: Divorce and separation advice for women".

The most important thing to consider when writing titles isn't to get the perfect number of characters, nor is it to shoe-horn your top keywords into every one. And for heaven's sake don't make your company name the first word of every title unless your company name is your top priority keyword. No, the most important thing is much harder and more time-consuming: good copywriting. Your page title should be snappy, factually specific and intriguing. It must be brief and where appropriate it should be witty, smart, clever and original. Why? Because the people who you want to get noticed by are just like you: discerning and sceptical experienced Googlers.

We are All Google Experts...

Yes, it's true. We're experts at Googling. We do it all the time. I use Google so often every day that I take it completely for granted. It's near impossible to recall a time when I had to go to the library to look things up in a book. The very idea has become anathema for all but the most studious academic research. And as a result of using Google so often, I know a good search result when I see it.
Search results usually divide into three categories:
1. Perfect match: exactly what I wanted. Thank you Google, you came up trumps again.
2. Worth a look: this page quite possibly won't answer my question, but I'll chance my arm
3. Way off: I'm only going to click on this if I'm really desperate
So what we're trying to achieve with search engine optimisation is not so much putting your site at the top of the list, but putting your website into that first category. Or is it?

...But We're Not Experts in Everything Else

Sometimes when we're searching for information, we don't quite know where to begin. Looking in my recent search history, the queries range from the very specific ("download vista widget measure IP traffic" or "Enfocus Instant PDF 08") to the desperately hopeful ("what do I do when Outlook tells me there is insufficient space to store my rules?"). The latter type of query can introduce a sort of randomness into your search results which it may be possible for us to capitalise on. If your search results contain nothing but category-three pages, then despite the lack of apparently useful links, you'll probably still click on one or two of them, starting with the one that comes closest to what you wanted. And so the page title will be vitally important to your decision - you'll be looking for something that's brief and to the point and promises a page that is useful and informative.

So, one might argue that the best page title is not necessarily one that puts your site at the top of the search results for your chosen keywords. Obviously that's an important factor, but surely it's equally important that your page title stands out from the listings when someone searches for other keywords - ones you haven't prioritised, but which may be equally likely to lead to a sale.

Contents
Part One: Google Is Your Friend
Part Two: The Cream Will Always Rise to the Top
Part Three: Getting The Title Right

The Cream Will Always Rise to the Top

Part two in a new guide to search engine optimisation

In part one I concluded by remarking that Google rewards the more prolific and up-to-date webmaster.Which leads me to my second point and the most important factor in search engine optimisation: content is king. So if you've got 150,000 pages of detailed information about Lambretta parts, you shouldn't need to worry too much about a rival upstart with a six-page website, no matter how well optimised it might be.

Which is not to say there aren't tricks to improving what you've already got. Of course there are. But Google will be most impressed by a wealth of relevant information - that's how it recognises true quality.

Lycos RIP: a Note On Other Search Engines

Incidentally, before I go any further, and as they like to glibly say on the BBC, other search engines are available. There's Yahoo! But Yahoo! never strictly speaking had its own search engine anyway. And there's Microsoft's Live Search. It's not a complete monopoly. But the plain truth is that search engine optimisation is all about getting the highest possible ranking on Google, isn't it? That's how your customers are going to find you, so let's not beat around the bush.

If you've been in this business a while, you'll remember when the names Infospace, Altavista, Excite, Hotbot and Webcrawler were all movers and shakers in the internet portal industry. Back in 1998 I paid a visit to Excite's massive headquarters in Silicon vallery, not far from San Francisco, and at that time they were second only to Yahoo! in the internet biz. Little did they know that just up the road a little company called Google Inc would ultimately witness Excite being bankrupted, broken up and largely forgotten (although the brand still persists to this day in both the USA and Europe). Lycos.co.uk - which not so long ago was being advertised on prime-time television such was the investment in its branding - closed down its UK portal operation in February 2009 and its website now offers nothing more than pointlessly rebranded Google search results. One day Google itself just might end up the same way. Nothing lasts forever. But for the sake of argument, let's just say that when I talk about Google I'm talking about search engines everywhere and you can draw your own conclusions about how important those supporting roles might be compared to the protagonist in this story.

Contents
Part One: Google Is Your Friend
Part Two: The Cream Will Always Rise to the Top
Part Three: Getting The Title Right

Google Is Your Friend

Part one in a new guide to search engine optimisation

The first thing I usually say to people who want to improve their Google ranking is that Google is not your enemy.

What I mean is, Google wants you to get the ranking you deserve. It's in their interest.

Unfortunately, search engines have learned over the years to treat your claim to higher ranking with a healthy dose of scepticism.

Years ago, it was easy to cheat the system. For instance, webmasters who were either unscrupulous or enterprising, depending on your point of view, discovered that if you put a block of white text on a white background at the bottom of your homepage, you could fill it with hundreds of key words that would be ignored by visitors but indexed by search engines.

That's where the battle began and why perhaps you, in common with many web publishers, might have the attitude that Google is not on your side. Search engines began to penalise tricksters. Which naturally has led those tricksters to start new websites in which they would devise more devious measures to hoodwink the search engines, causing the search engines to penalise them further still - and so it goes on.

But let's look at it another way. Let's assume you are a legitimate company. You have a substantial web presence that is at the core of your business, either as a method of communicating with or selling to your customers, or both.

Let's say your website is the world's best source of information on the topic of vintage Lambretta spares. The brains behind Google don't want it to be on page five when someone searches for the words "vintage Lambretta spares". Of course they don't. It belongs at the top of the list and they didn't get where they are today by allowing jumped-up amateurs to muscle in on your business.

So, Google is the friend of the web publisher - so long as he's hard-working, up-to-date and prolific, that is.

Contents
Part One: Google Is Your Friend
Part Two: The Cream Will Always Rise to the Top
Part Three: Getting The Title Right