I was having a discussion today about the format of copyright notices and one thing sprung to mind, the need to keep them up to date.

Say for example you have the following copyright notice “Copyright 2002 - 2007 Thinksynergy Design”. As soon as it gets to 2008 that notice is out of date.

Who cares, I hear you ask?!

Yes, it is fine if you maintain just the one site, but if you have a lot of sites it is one more task for you to manage when entering the new year.

A better option (providing you use PHP) is the following script:

//the year today
$thisyear = date('Y');
//
//the year your copyright was established
$established = "2002";
//
//name of copyright owner
$copyright_owner = "Blair Millen";
//
//display correct copyright notice
if($thisyear==$established) $copyright = "© $copyright_owner $established";
else $copyright = "© $copyright_owner $established–$thisyear";


This script takes care of it all for you, and even correctly formats the notice taking into account the first year (this not having 2002 - 2002). It’s a great script, for which thanks go to Blair Millen (click for his original article)

As anyone who has ever visited Harrogate knows, Betty’s tea rooms is by far and away the most famous landmark in this historic town. If you ever get lost in Harrogate you can be sure that the directions someone gives you will navigate you via Betty’s.

I came accross this article (Link to BBC News) explaining that Betty’s are to expand into the opticians next door, and develop into a 4 storey super-cafe! Mmm, I hope they have elevators in there as the average age of their customers is heading for triple figures!

Some of you may remember Dave Gormon. He is a journalist who made famous “The Googlewhack”.

Basically the googlewhack is where you type any two words into the Google search engine (that google recognises) and get only 1 result. It is harder than it seems, try it!

Anyway, I found my first googlewhack tonight:

pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism hounded

The result is this page… perhaps I should tell them they are a googlewhack?!

Yes, after 3 hours of randomly typing words into google I finally found this combination, and thus I got my name in the googlewhack hall of fame… now I can go to sleep!

Goodnight!

I recently installed a new telephone line courtesy of Vonage.

Vonage provide phone lines via VOIP, which to the every day person means “over the Internet”. They provide you with a little box that you plug into your broadband router, and your normal phone plugs into the back of it. From then on you have a normal working telephone, with a few extras…

Firstly I need to point out, this phone line costs £7.99 per month, but allows you free unlimited calls to UK, USA, Canada and several countries in Europe. As I have a very high telephone usage (in excess of £90 per month) I thought I would give it a try.

Wow! One month on and I have had my first bill… under £10 (I called a mobile, which are not included). The quality I must say is excellent too, it’s just like a normal phone. The only down side I guess is having to get a new phone number (in my case with a Harrogate prefix, 01423). Read the rest of this entry »

With the release of Outlook 2007 Microsoft are swithing their HTML rendering engine to Microsoft Word instead of Internet Explorer.

What does this mean in English? Well for the average end user probably not a lot, but if you develop newsletters (or have someone develop them for you) there is a fair chance they won’t work.

For the technical among you, here are the details:

• No background images
• No Flash
• Pretty much no CSS

Click here to read the full article

A problem we are seeing on an increasing basis is ISP’s forcing you to use their SMTP server. Freeserve, Wanadoo (now Orange), BT and many other broadband providers force you to use their outgoing mail server. This isn’t a problem until you buy your own domain name.

Allow me to explain…

When you send an email it starts it’s life in Outlook (or another email program). When you hit “send” it makes it’s way over to the outgoing mail server. All ISP’s provide you with a mail server to connect to (usually mail.wanadoo.co.uk, or smtp.wanadoo.co.uk or similar).

Once the mail is there the server does a check to see if you are who you say you are and whether you are sending a legitimate email. One check that a lot of ISP’s use is to check the “from address”, and there lies the problem!

When you signed up to wanadoo (or BT) you will have been given an address similar to firstname@surname.wanadoo.co.uk and this would be your “from address”. The server checks this and sends your mail to the intended recipient.

If you purchase a domain name then of course you want to send your mail from that address, so you change the “from address” to read firstname@yourdomain.com. When you come to send an email the server doesnt recognise this address and refuses to pass on the mail.

So… you decide to circumvent this problem by connecting to the smtp server of the people who host your domain… think again, wanadoo, BT and others have actually blocked the outgoing route for you to do this (called a port, in this case number 25). So, you are stuck, you have a domain name that you can’t send email with!

SOLUTION:

At ThinkSynergy we have set up our servers to accept outgoing mail on port 2525. If you go into your email account settings (under advanced > connection) you can specify to send mail on an alternative port (see below). If you do this then you will be able to send mail without problem, no matter if you are with BT, wanadoo or whoever.

If you are experiencing the problems above and would like to host your email on our servers please get in touch.

Way back when the Internet was in it’s infancy it was commonplace to see the “last modified date” posted on web pages. In recent years this has become less common, as it instantly ages the page, and unless you update on a daily basis do you really want people to read that your site was last updated when Mrs Thatcher was in power?

That said, sometimes there is a need to see when a page was last updated, and there is a quick and easy way to find out.

Simply paste the following line into the address bar, hit enter, and voila up pops a message telling you when the page was last updated:

javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

So there you go…. you can even create a bookmark with the code in it, so you have instant access to the last modified date of any site!

So you have spent weeks working on your new website, your pride and joy, submitted it to the search engines and are now waiting for the phone to ring, for the orders to come in and for the good times to roll.

You will have a long wait! A well thought out website is a very good start but that is just what it is, a start.

Think of it as a Formula 1 car. A Formula 1 team could spend millions on producing the fastest car in the world, but lets face it, if you put a British driver in there it’s not going to go anywhere (sorry, cheap dig at the state of British F1 there!). My point is that if you have a brilliant website you still need to get it seen, get it known, and most importantly get it re-visited. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick post to announce that the migration to the new servers went very smoothly indeed. Now that the dust has settled (that’s just a metaphor, dust is a very bad thing for servers and we don’t allow it!) we are starting to focus on the new features we have to offer.

How many times have you been to a site where you want to buy something and there is no “buy now” button? I don’t know about you but 9 times out of 10 I just move on. If that business has just taken the time to invest in a small shopping cart (one of our pro features)  then I’m sure I would have been more interested. Please contact us if you would like any details of the products we have to offer.

As web design company in Harrogate it is apparent how few businesses in this region have a web site. In fact a large proportion of our web work has come from outside the Harrogate and Yorkshire area.

I don’t know if this is due to the perceived client base in Harrogate, or simply the fact that there don’t seem to be many progressive media and web based companies in the region. We would love to hear from companies looking to start a web presence and would like to work with local web designers rather than gamble on the bigger organisations. Remember, we never take any money until you are completely satisfied so why not give us a try? It’s not as expensive as you might think!

So, drop us an email or give us a call for a FREE no-obligation quote. Let’s see if we can improve the quality of web design in Harrogate and the surrounding area!