There’s More to Web Design than Meets the Eye

Posted on May 4, 2012 by lara.m

The frustration faced by web designers trying to get their businesses off the ground is that many people looking for “cheap web design” expect to pay someone £50 and receive a fully functioning singing and dancing website. This is because there are plenty of platforms for building “free” websites across the web. Some customers find these sites, give it a go and realise they can’t be bothered or become stumped with the technical aspects and start to look for a professional to help them out.

But what many internet users aren’t aware of is that professional web design isn’t just about making things look nice. It’s an intracate, skilled and analytic process. Building a unique website that functions correctly takes time and experience. Professional web designers don’t use off the shelf design packages for one simple reason – they have major limitations. A site built in a “free” design package will not rank properly in search engines, might not keep your customers details secure and will be likely to be slow running and mis-behaving. The design aspect of the site is likely to be pretty limited too. If your site is built on a free platform, you’ll have to put up with this. If your site has been designed by a professional especially for you, your web designer will have installed correct coding that can be easily identified and updated by other designers if something stops working or you fancy a colour change.

The lesson here is, you get what you pay for and if you want a long term stress free solution for your website it’s worth the investment of paying a professional to do the job right first time.

Tips for choosing an SEO Friendly Domain Name

Posted on May 4, 2012 by lara.m

We talked previously about using extra creative domain names and being inventive with country codes. This is a great way to create short, memorable domain names that will help your customers to recognised your brand. However, if your focus for your website is going to be heavily based on search engine marketing and where you sit in the Google results, you’ll want to make sure that the domain name you use is helping with your rankings, not hindering them.

1. Make Your Domain Name Relevant to your Business

A used car salesman with his new business named after himself might call his company Smith & Partners. However, poor old Google, who becomes more intelligent by the minute, is not clever enough to recognise a new site called Smith & Sons will be selling cars until it starts looking at the content of the site in more detail. So, Mr Smith would benefit from choosing a domain name that helps Google work out what he does. “Smithsusedcars”(.com) or “Smithsmotorstore” or “Smithautomotives” or similar patterns will help Google to know that Mr Smith’s site is related to cars.

2. Don’t Give Up on Your First Choice

If your first choice of domain name isn’t available in .com or .co.uk, don’t give up on this domain name. You may well be able to find a variation of the name you wanted. You can add hyphens (-) like “smith-used-cars” although you should check you are not infringing upon any registered trademarks. You may also want to be careful if the company that already owns your first choice of domain is locally to you, as this may confuse the locals about which company is which. Or you might want to consider shortening or lengthening the domain name: “SSonsMotors” or Smithusedcarestores” although condsider whether a long domain name will look good on your stationery and business cards if you try this option.

3. Try to be Original

Although it’s possible to choose domain names similar to those that already exist by restructuring them a little, nothing beats being original with your domain name. It will help you to dominate the search results for the keywords in your domain name. Try brainstorming lots of different words and phrases that could sensibly be related to the business you are in and your industry. You’ll be surprised how many ways there are to cook an egg…(or decribe your business)

4. Be Greedy

When you’ve found your perfect available domain name, make sure you register your domain name in the various options that are for sale to ensure no one else can buy them. If you get a .com, it makes sense to buy the .co.uk and the .net and the .biz and so on. You’ll protect your brand name this way too and pointing all of these domains to your site will help you to drive more traffic and dominate the search results.

Using RSS to Tame the Information Overload

Posted on April 20, 2012 by lara.m

RSS you say? Whaaat? Well actually RSS is quite possibly one of the most underestimated tools on the web but also one of the most useful.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and that’s really it explained literally in a nutshell. Its had several other names including ‘RDF Site Summary’ and laterly, ‘Rich Site Summary’ but WhatIsRSS website have an easy to understand summary:

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually.

So what does that actually mean, in laymans terms? Well, if you’re anything like me you visit a LOT of websites on a daily basis for news, football results, technology updates, shopping, travel bargains, classified ads, anything you can think of. Its time consuming isn’t it?

You don’t want to be having to remember all those URL’s off by heart so you add them as bookmarks, but then you still have to find the bookmark in your browser, click on the link and then scroll thru the latest posts on the website. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

No longer do users have to go find content; now it can come to them automatically. What if you could bookmark all your favourite websites, have something pull in all the new content as it happens and have it arranged all neatly on one page?

That’s RSS for you. See ninety-nine percent of any websites you visit and you’ll see that familiar little orange square. Like the BBC News website for example,

What do I need to do to read an RSS Feed?

Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allows you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use. Probably the most universal of all RSS readers at the moment is Google Reader which is my web-based reader of choice which is complimented by the FeedDemon desktop reader which syncs with Google for offline reading.

Here in the office we can, fire up literally in seconds either reader and catch up with all our niche news feeds on cloud storage, the web hosting industry, web development, social media and cloud technology services, etc without any heavy lifting!

There’s an excellent and easy to follow screencast from Andy Wibbles (click on the image below) that really nails it if you’re a complete Google RSS reader newbie.

More than anything it is a massive time saver and the other thing that an RSS reader enables you to do is to skim the headlines on a website, so you only have to click on the news that is of interest. You can save anything of lesser importance til later.

Creating feed folders allows you to organize by topic, geography or any way that you prefer. For example, when I’m in a hurry I usually go straight to my “Web Hosting” news folder, leaving others unread for a later time. If you’re not using folders and have all the news sources stacked up one after another on the left sidebar, you are wasting a lot of time!

Naturally the RedGalaxy blog feed should be one of the first you add to your reader!

Web Hosting Evolution and the Cloud

Posted on April 4, 2012 by lara.m

At RedGalaxy Ltd, we like to make sure our customers have everything they need for their web presence. From hosting to web development to online marketing, we work to your requirements. Another thing we wanted to do is too demystify the whole process of hosting, domains and cloud data storage, which is one of the reasons we started our blog. We want to point you in the right direction and explain some of the finer points, which, by the very nature of this industry, do tend to get buried in tech speak at times!

So, one of the most recent(ish) web developments is the avalanche of infographics which in recent months have visualised everything from the music industry’s dramatically sliding profits to an explanation of the explosion of Pinterest, the latest social media sharing sensation.

Which is quite apt seeing as Pinterest was where we came across this very excellent infographic form Peer 1, ‘The Evolution of Web Hosting’ which documents the history and development of web hosting over the last 20 years which has come a long way from the days when you needed to purchase and manage your own computer or server to host a website. Today, you can find web hosting services from thousands of web hosting providers for a fraction of the cost.

How big is the web hosting industry? Well, cloud services alone in the UK made up around 7.5% of the £8 billion software market back in 2010. Google searches for ‘web-hosting’ are now in decline, fast being overtaken by searches for ‘cloud-hosting’. The reach of web host services continues to increase in a market that is forecast to expand, worldwide by 2015 to 3 billion users.

Look out too for an increase in buzz words like ‘cloud Iaas’, cloud infrastructure as a service.

Being Extra Creative With Domain Names

Posted on March 28, 2012 by lara.m

If you’ve ever tried to register a .com domain name you’ll soon realise that all of the ones you want have long since been snatched up. Luckily, in recent years there has been a upsurge in the creative use of lesser known top level domain names (TLD’s!)

We now have many known brands like Last.fm (the.fm hails from the Pacific Island of Micronesia) and formally Yahoo owned bookmarking site Delicio.us opting for alternatives to the more ubiquitous .com

There’s an official list of all the worldwide domain name extensions at administrative body IANA. Look through the extensive list of names and you’ll encounter amongst many others,

.IT, ideal for you if you run an IT company perhaps and a unique bit of branding that will make you stand out.Owned by Italy, obviously.

If music is your thing there’s .AM and .FM (for radio stations), .DJ (from East African nation of Djbouti, ideal for, yep you guessed it, DJs) and even .CD (from the Democratic Republic of Congo) if you run a second hand music store and the more widespread .TV, for obvious reasons.

Image via Testking.com "the history of domain names"

Here’s a useful domain name/brand tip for those of you looking for something besides the generic .com and something with a little more originality in the branding.

Scroll through the IANA list and make a note of extensions you might like .LY for instance, which is becoming quite popular with new start ups (a good example is visual.ly a new start up for infographic tools).

Now if I wanted to come up with a snappy name that ended with .ly I’d go over to morewords.com here http://www.morewords.com/ends-with/ly/ and as you can see, you get a list of words ending in LY. You can do the same for any other two letters simply by changing the last two letters of the URL in the browser and you’ll get a bunch of words that may well trigger an idea for your business name. Then you can hunt down that unique domain name that nobody else even dreamed of!

For a quicker way of coming up with domain brand names head over to Domai.nr and have some fun with their suggestion tool.

If you need any help deciphering all of this information and want help with how to register some of the more ‘exotic’ domain names do get in touch with us here at RedGalaxy and we’ll be happy to help.

A Refresher Course in Cloud Storage

Posted on March 23, 2012 by lara.m

Back in the 90s ‘the cloud’ (the trendy new moniker) was simply called online storage and services like the (now defunct) X-Drive offered a whopping 200MB of space. These days the cloud is crowded with free and paid services, some you have heard of, some you haven’t, offering anything from free 2GB accounts to enterprise sized 1TB+ capacity cloud space. If there is one solution they are all selling its security, accessibility and convenience.

One thing we do recommend to everyone, whether they use RedGalaxy online backup services or any one of our many competitors, don’t, under any circumstances use a free service for anything you value and want to keep secure. As much as we love the availability of free storage services, using the free cloud is almost akin to putting your money in a bank and leaving the door open.

If you have data – photos, documents, business files… anything you consider important, it is always a good idea to have at least one backup copy of those files. Ideally, your backup should be kept away from the originals.

Wikipedia sum up ‘cloud computing’ in a concise explanation thus:

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).

After the dot-com bubble, Amazon played a key role in the development of cloud computing by modernising their data centers, which, like most computer networks were only using something like 10% of their capacity.

Image thanks to Wikipedia Commons

Online backup from RedGalaxy works by creating an FTP connection to our backup servers and either manually uploading files using an FTP client such as FileZilla, or automatically connecting and uploading your files using dedicated backup software, capable of connecting to FTP servers, something like Syncback is a popular choice.

The advantages of cloud computing are many, including lower infrastructure costs and easy maintenance. Cloud also helps save the environment. You can define cloud computing as a pay-per-use model for enabling on-demand access to reliable and manageable services. Another way to describe this type of cloud storage service is SaaS (Software as a Service) which put simply is basically a backup service that offers a software to help people back up their data.

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