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SEO. What, Why and How

Categories: design, development, seo, The web
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Published on: April 4, 2012

Search engine optimization (SEO) is trying to improve the visibility of your website in search engines like Google without paying the search engine, also know as “organic” search results. Generally the higher your site appears on search results lists, the more visitors you will get, and hopefully the conversions you will achieve.

As an Online marketing strategy, SEO is a game of two halves, and both are important. The first task involves editing your sites content to increase its relevance to specific keywords. Next comes the second part, promoting your site to increase the number of backlinks, in other words the number of links to your site from other sites.

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design (White hat), and those techniques of which search engines do not approve (black hat). Search engines will de-index any site it finds using black hat methods, whereas White hats tend to produce results that last a long time.

At Elephant Computers Solutions we only ever use white hat SEO

An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and is honest. Basically it is all about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, rather than attempting to trick the search engine.

SEO may generate an adequate return on investment. However it is considered wise business practice for websites to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic. It should not be your only means of letting visitors know about you. The reason for this is that some large websites have reported that most of their traffic comes from referrals on other sites. In fact 43% of this sites traffic comes from referrals compared to 25% from search engines. This believe it or not will also help boost your rankings. How? Google believes that a website is more important if relevant sites with a good ranking link to your website. It also tries to measure how many times your site is visited, the more visitors click on your link the more important you are and the higher you will be in the rankings. So by producing quality content visitors will start talking about your site and linking to it.

We can help you create a quality design with quality content

Why Your Business Needs A Website!

Categories: design, development, The web
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Published on: March 15, 2012

You may think that your business is too small to need a website. You may even feel that your products or services can’t be sold online. So should you get your own web space? Yes, if you have a business, you should have a website. Period. No question. Without a doubt.

Firstly with more than 20 million shoppers are buying all sorts of products online, some of those people will want to buy your product! That doesn’t mean you should put all your efforts into selling your wares through a web portal, but at the very least you should make sure you have a presence on the web so that customers, potential employees, business partners and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you supply. The first thing I do when I want to buy something is Google it for more information. If your product has been around for a year or two then the chances are that someone out there has talked about it. However this is usually for two reasons: a) they loved it a lot or, b) they hated it just a little bit.

Don’t let the only voice out here be someone who hates your product!

But it’s not enough that you just have a website. You must have a well designed, professional looking site if you want to be taken seriously. Your site may well be the first chance you have at making a good impression on a potential buyer. I can not tell you how many times I’ve closed a webpage of a shop before even seeing the price because the design was off-putting, it’s actually better to have no website at all than to have one that makes your business look bad. With a well-designed site, your little operation can exude professionalism out of every pore. This is why the internet is such an amazing place, it has leveled the playing field so equality is king.

A well build bespoke website is not as expensive as you think and when done properly can give you more return on your investment than almost any other form of advertising and promotion you can find.

The second reason why a website is a good idea is you are able to communicate your address, phone numbers, fax numbers, hours of operation and announce special offers at any time, 24/7. How much time and money would it cost to give out all of this information on the phone? You would have to run a round the clock call centre at huge cost. You’d be surprised how much a website will take off your shoulders while simultaneously driving business to you.

How do you know what your customers are thinking? With a good web presence you are able to ask for feedback in a non-confrontational way and receive information instantly without extra cost, while giving the customer the anonymity they want and the information and feedback crucial to your businesses success.

A good website can bring your business hundreds more benefits too for a small investment. Contact us using the form for a free quote!

Web Building Environment

Categories: design, development, The web
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Published on: February 21, 2012

How do you get the best web design and development environment to work with? Well this very much depends on you. Having tried many different combinations, and still trying more, I come to the concussion that the best system for me is to use a Linux Ubuntu based system with LAMP installed. Ubuntu is far more reliable than windows will ever be, thus I have peace of mind that my laptop won’t crash just after I’ve programmed my way through I problem and just before I click save, or because I click save!

There are then so many more choices to make, which text editor to use, or image editor, or do you plump for a full on IDE.

I have found the ideal editor for myself is Bluefish. From their own website “Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdevelopers, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages. Bluefish is an open source development project, released under the GNU GPL licence. Bluefish is a multi-platform application that runs on most desktop operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS-X, Windows, OpenBSD and Solaris.”
I find it has all the features i need;

  • Code block folding
  • Highlighting matching block start and end markers (both brackets and tags)
  • Auto-completion and auto-tag-closing for many programming languages, with reference information, and even for nested languages (e.g. css and javascript inside html code that is inside a php document)
    with included language definition files for all the languages I use:

    • CSS
    • HTML, XHTML and HTML5
    • JavaScript and jQuery
    • PHP
    • SQL
    • WordPress
    • XML

Yes this is a very useful tool.

Next we need something to create the images we need. This is were I cheat a bit, I get my wife to do most of the graphic design I require. She uses Coral Draw 12 to do all her work, and she is very anti photoshop (sorry fans). However when I do need to do any image work I use GIMP, but recently I have discovered Xara Xtreme which looks promising.

The last tool I need is a good, reliable web browser. I HATE IE. There I’ve said it, and it feels good to get that off my chest. So I use Google Chrome mostly and also Firefox a bit for testing, both far more reliable and faster and uncluttered than anything Microsoft could produce.

So my top tips for the best web design and development environment are;
Use Ubuntu and LAMP, Bluefish and Xara Xtreme. And they are all FREE FREE FREE

Hello world!

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Published on: January 20, 2012

Welcome to the ECS Blog. My name is Warrick and I am the founder of Elephant Computer Solutions, based in Bridport, West Dorset. This is my first blog so please bear with me. Why did I start Elephant Computer Solutions? I’ve often wondered that myself. I guess it was bound to happen, it’s in my genes, my dad and his brothers are developers and I love programming too, it’s my passion and hobby. My dad started to teach me when I was 5, on GW Basic (remember that?), and would have carried on if he hadn’t passed away. If you were to be a fly on the wall in my house then most nights you would witness my lovely wife Lauren reading and me messing about on my laptop making websites and stuff.

ECS only came to life one winter, a very cold winter. At the time I was a window cleaner and with all the ice and snow about I couldn’t really work so I had to find another way to put food on the table. A lot has changed since I first started, I’ve leant PHP, and CSS and lots of other useful skills that excite me but bore to death everyone else I know, except my uncles. My poor wife has to put up with a lot being married me; I’m a bit obsessive about computers. Every now and again she makes me talk to one of my uncles to get it out of my system so I can be normal for a while.

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Welcome , today is Sunday, May 20, 2012