Take a look at your bookmarks!

You will no doubt see that some of them have a little icon, usually the logo of the site, next to the listing. (see below)

This little icon increases your brand image before the customer has even clicked the link. In the past it was quite difficult to make these little images, not any more, check out the Dynamic Drive favicon generator (click to visit site directly)

This is a fantastic service, upload your logo (is best if it is square) and it auto-generates the logo for you. Look up at the address bar, our favicon was created with this service.

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 As soon as it gets to 2008 that notice is out of date.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)

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.

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 »

How many web design and hosting sites have you seen that offer “search engine submission” (usually to 1001 different search engines)? I took a quick look around and believe me there are thousands.

I’ll let you into a secret, actually it’s all a load of nonsense!

I’ll elaborate a little. First off the biggest player in the search engine game is… go on, guess… yes, that’s right, google. So, you would imagine most of these web design companies would submit you to this search engine, right? Well yes, but what people don’t know is it’s a free service, and you can just add your own site here. Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t stress enough the importance of a domain name.

We have many customers who came to us from having a http://jimmyspage.freeserve.co.uk type web address. What people often don’t realise in the early days of creating their web presence is that they are tied in forever to that provider.

Domain names are not expensive, in face we believe in this cause so much that we give one away free with every hosting package! Once you have your own domain name you control your site 100%. You can choose where to host it and you can move your site whenever you want, while maintaining your web address and thus keeping your customers.

So, if you are one of these folks with a Freeserve, Virgin, or (heaven forbid) AOL web address please change it today, or even better still go for one of our hosting packages and get control of your name, web site, and email in one go!

Today I would like to talk about the importance of return visitors. People often talk about the amount of “hits” their website gets, but in marketing terms this is not nearly as important as return visitors, folks who invest time to come back and read what you have to say and look to see if there is anything new. In my experience people will do this once or twice after finding nothing has changed, then they will forget about your site. Don’t let this happen!

One very good way of producing a site that will get people coming back for more is to use a weblog (blog for short) to post latest news, links or comments on a regular basis. If you speak to people who have been using the Internet for a long time they will usually tell you they have a handful of sites they visit every day or two. If you can get people coming back to your site before you know it you will have a community on your site, this is where your special offers or latest product announcements really pay off!

At ThinkSynergy we provide a pro hosting account which includes the installation of an addon script, which could be a weblog. For an example of one of these running you need look no further than this page. You could have a weblog just like this if you sign up for our pro hosting package.

This is probably the biggest rookie mistake on the web. When people start designing websites be it in Frontpage, Dreamweaver or Notepad, they usually design based on how the page looks in Internet Explorer. Most people think that it doesn’t matter, but the following statistics may surprise you:

IE7=13%

IE6=42%

Firefox=31%

So, nearly a third of your potential customers don’t use IE! Read the rest of this entry »

The question I get asked time and time again is “how do I get my site ranked #1 in Google?”. The answer to this can be as simple or as complex as you like. The simple answer is set your sights low! For example, if you are an Audi dealership in Leeds you could aim to be searchable in Google by any of the following phrases:

“Audi dealer Leeds”

“Car dealer Leeds”

“Car dealer Yorkshire”

“Car dealer UK”

Now, to be number one for “Audi dealer Leeds” would be a lot easier to manage than “Car dealer UK” (or even “Audi dealer UK”), as you are competing with Audi dealers just within the Leeds area. As soon as you open up the scope to include the whole of the UK you are competing with the whole of the UK. Read the rest of this entry »