What do you think creates a better impression?

1. A well designed website with a minimal amount of high quality content or
2. A well designed website with lots of poorly thought out content.

When clients go from having practically no web presence at all to being presented with the “keys to the golden palace” via our extremely easy to use UBICMS content management system, they can suddenly feel that they need to make up for all of that lost time and add as much content as possible in the shortest possible timeframe.

We always advise clients to take a considered approach to their content.  In an ideal situation, they will have spent their web-wilderness years collating decent images, text and other media but often the reality is different.  They panic.

This panic often leads to patchy, inconsistent content that can lead to a focus on the wrong elements of your site and what your business is about.  Furthermore, the panic can be so blind that clients will often forget who their intended audience is and if you do that, how can you expect to impress them?

In this instance, the adage of ‘less is more’ definitely applies.  Whilst it may be impressive to show off that you’ve had over 50 different design clients for instance, there isn’t any need to go into great detail with each and every one.  Think about selecting a project from each specific sector or type of project and then focus heavily on it.  I believe potential clients would much rather read well constructed content about a few projects rather than feel he’s finding out nothing much about any of them over 50.

What do you think?

Google HQ must be a fantastic place to work.  Practically limitless resources to chuck at doing more and more amazingly technical things with the internet whilst silently shaping the way we use the internet and what we can find on there.  That’s pretty much what we’re about here, but our pockets aren’t as deep.

I’ve just discovered via The Register that their Google Street View service has finally launched in the UK with amazingly detailed images of a number of major cities, including my hometown of Glasgow.

Like any business, Google is all about generating online revenue and I had an interesting chat at the weekend with a friend who works out of their London office in the advertising division and they’re always looking at new ways to squeeze more money out of advertisers.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a future development of Streetmap let you click on actual business shopfronts and then access related information.  They’ve already started on this in a sense via Google Local Business centre and that is something we actively involve ourselves with via our website optimisation service.

In the meantime, Google Street View is a pretty tidy app that gives us  an added feature that we can chuck into the mix  for any web design project we may be working on. We’ve done some pretty nifty things with the Google Maps API thus far, so it will be interesting to see how this new element gets used, abused and customised!

When I visited the Rodel Hotel on the Isle of Harris last summer, I immediately fell in love with the place.

It’s so tranquil, surrounded by amazing scenery and I just loved the fresh seafood and local produce.  Quality places where the owners take real pride in what they do deserve to be cherished and promoted.

When I looked at their existing website and saw how poorly it reflected the quality of the hotel and beauty of the surrounding area, well, I just had to step in.

Their new site features a wealth of information about the hotel, the local area and a multitude of things to see and do.  The website is powered by UbiCMS, our own fully-featured content management system and over the next 12 months, the Rodel plan to roll out online booking and multilingual options.

I’m going back there in August for my summer holidays!

There’s a story I always churn out whenever a client asks me about the importance of having a sound linking strategy for their website.  It’s based on personal experience but the names have been changed to protect the client.  I don’t think they’d mind me mentioning them like this, but hey, it doesn’t matter.

All you need to know is it’s true….

So,  this client gets in touch with me and they are called (this is the only made-up bit) River Clyde Helicopter Tours (RCHT).  They are the first and only business in Scotland providing helicopter tours on the River Clyde and they’ve got a problem.  Even though they are the only suppliers and they have a website at www.riverclydehelicoptertours.com, they aren’t number one in Google when someone types in ‘river clyde helicopter’.  They’re number three!  Obviously that isn’t good enough.

To make matters worse, numbers one and two on Google were holiday experience companies selling tickets for flights on RCHT at a 20% markup!  We had a look and straight away, the reason was obvious.  The holiday experience companies had hundreds of other holiday and leisure industry providers, hotels and associations all linking to them – RCHT had a small proportion of sites linking to them by comparison.  Google had looked at the relevance of these sites primarily on the quantity of the links, felt the providers were more relevant and then that was why RCHT were struggling.

How it changed

I’d love to take credit for reversing this one but I can’t.  It happened pretty soon after the phone call though.  RCHT announced that they would be taking off from a city centre location and as this got them quite a bit of press (people were objecting to the noise pollution) there was a feature on the BBC News website and they included a link to the RCHT website.  From that point, RCHT moved to number one on Google and have stayed there ever since.

Why it changed

The BBC website is one of the most popular websites in the country and viewed as highly authoratitive.  There are almost 24,000,000 links to the BBC site and as so many sources feel the BBC site is worth linking to, Google reflects this by giving websites that the BBC decide to link to a better page ranking.

A link to your website from the BBC is like gold dust.  Just don’t break the law trying to get one!

We’ve got a couple of projects on the go at the moment that use Flash.  I’m a huge fan of Flash…when it’s used in the correct context.  There’s an excellent post from last summer on The Official Google Webmaster Blog that covers their perspective nicely.  Here’s a snippet for starters…

As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.

To that end, here’s a brief list of what I think are the good and bad uses…

Five things that Flash is good for…

1. Fancy image galleries. There are some belters out there – my particular favourite at the moment is DFGallery.  I like the way you can tie it in to Flickr accounts or use your own sets of images.
2. Playing video.  It’s not taken that long for the .flv format to become a standard.  If you’ve ever used Youtube, you’ll have seen this use in full flight.
3. Playing audio.  Compared to other medium, it’s a pretty safe format to play audio on your site.  MP3 still rules, but if you want to protect against piracy, placing your MP3 within a nice Flash mp3 player will do the job.
4. Whistles and bells.   If you are using a flexible CMS , then it should be easy to drop little Flash elements into your site templates.  This is great for ‘lifting’ the look of a site.  Horses for courses though.  We’ve worked on a few corporate sites where it has to be fairly staid, but if you are working on a site that leans more to the creative side, then a nice flash interface embedded into the page may be the way to go.
5. Making the impossible possible.  We’re doing some pretty amazing things with Flash just now – the social story tool being just one of them.

Five things that Flash is good for nothing for…

1. Annoying intro screens. I hate waiting ages (well, 30 seconds can seem like ages!) for an intro screen to complete just so I can find some contact details.  Unless it’s for a very specific and worthwhile purpose, splash intro screens can often end up being a work of pure conceit on the part of the client.  They’re often looked upon fondly by people that don’t use the web very much and think they look ‘cool’.  They aren’t.  They not only place your relevant and important content one click further away, but with your homepage being the most important page in terms of Google indexing, you’ll doing yourself out of some positioning.
2. Navigation. Yes and no actually.  The problem with Flash navigation is that it needs re-authored every time there’s a change.  If you know your menu bar is hardly ever going to change then Flash should be fine (provided it is backed up with a decent HTML alternative) but if you think your site may be expanding at some point soon, spend your money on some decent CSS styling.
3. Content.  As our friends at Google point out, Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links.
   What I’ve found quite worrying lately is the number of websites that are designed in Flash but look like they are created using HTML and CSS.  This shouldn’t happen but it does.  Why?
4. Spreading the word. It is pretty difficult to provide links to individual pages within a Flash-authored site as the site itself is just one big movie.
5. Keeping it updated. Flash-based content management systems just don’t offer the flexibility that a properly structured HTML-based content management system can offer.