With the UK release date of Apple’s iPad finally behind us, could the slow rise in popular screen resolutions be about to reverse course?

According to W3C, in the year 2000 the most popular screen resolution was 800×600. This means that the user could view 800 pixels from left to right on their computer monitor, and 600 from top to bottom. Back in 2000 this made sense as monitor sizes were still fairly small and square, which suited the almost square resolution, however it has become more and more common for people to have access to varying monitor sizes, big and bulky CRT monitors are rarely seen in today’s stylish and modern offices, giving way to slimmer LCD screens.

Since then, 800×600 users have slowly declined to the point that only 1% of reported users still browse the internet using that resolution. Larger resolutions have taken its place; 1024×768 took over as number 1 in 2004 and remained the leading resolution for 4 years before being replaced. It’s now reported that over 75% of users browse in a resolution higher than 1024×768, which is the native resolution of the iPad.

Because of the slow rise in resolutions, web designers have to be extremely careful when laying out a webpage design. Designing for the most common resolution runs the risk of excluding users who may not be able to view pages this high, such as people browsing on their mobile phone, while designing for a lower resolution can leave a lot of empty space towards the edges of larger monitors. To try and satisfy both sets of users, it’s common to create a design which displays perfectly at lower resolutions and extends the design further to the edges of the screen on larger monitors.

A perfect example of this is the design SplitPixel did for Halifax Agricultural Society last year. Users with lower resolutions can see all of the information and still have a pleasant visual experience, while users with higher screen resolutions haven’t been shunned and get a little bit extra aesthetical pleasure.

This type of design method will be extremely useful when the iPad becomes as popular as it is expected to, with over a million sales in the United States already that’s looking quite likely!

Apart from the fact that we are nice !

Firstly, we listen to what our clients want from their website…but then do our research and identify the solution we recommend is best for them – and this honestly doesn’t mean more…sometimes it’s less than they think!

Bespoke Web Solutions

We start with a blank canvas and design a website completely bespoke for client…to fit their identity, their strengths and their client base. We don’t use any templates for web design and we don’t stop until the customer is 100% happy.

Hand Coded Websites

We ensure easy categorisation by the search engines and any areas our clients need to update regularly are developed bespoke to their needs; meaning they can update their site quickly and easily whenever they want.

Be Happy Online.

We have invested in our very own dedicated hosting server which is managed entirely in‐house. To date, we have had 100% up‐time (no loss of service) and excellent page load speed which the search engines love.

Yours to Keep!

Also, the client owns the website. Which sounds simple really but not something every web design company allows.

Splitpixel are proud to be…

Business Link Approved Advisors
An Approved Supplier on the Yorkshire & Humber Suppliers Register

Who do we work with?

Our customer’s industry sectors vary, but the main areas we operate in are Retail, Leisure, Property, Finance and Manufacturing. We also work very well with other creative companies, such as branding, marketing, pr agencies…as we allow them to expand their services to their clients, because we ONLY specialise in website design and development and online marketing.

First there’s a simple website with 5 pages or so, just to get a business online so they have a presence. These start from only £325 (view online at www.splitpixel.co.uk/microwebsite)

But what we are really specialists in, are the larger, more interactive sites. These feature updatable areas for our clients. Such as Latest News, Case Studies, Videos… and these usually take the form of a client’s second website, when they have outgrown their initial site. They may be rebranding or growing, or expanding their services. Examples of extra functionality are integration to existing software, like with a property sales/lettings agent, a downloadable secure document area, searchable articles, galleries, blogs and even 3D animation/walkthroughs.

We call this our

Website Innovation Service

as sites like these are designed to do more than simply get their presence online. They enable our clients to reduce some business admin by incorporating it within the site, and are an effective sales tool as well as being exciting to navigate by the online users.

The final types of site we specialise in are

e‐commerce websites

, which provide clients with everything they need for an online shop business. They are designed for people who are serious about selling online, and we work closely with clients to achieve success.

These websites feature voucher codes, wishlists, quantity discounts, as well as an easy to use admin area with invoicing, stock control, and they can also be integrated into sage stock software and other CRM databases.

There is also the important element of online marketing.

Full Search Engine Optimisation

is a project in itself and the result of this is a site that ranks well for given search terms. An SEO project includes keyword research, competitor analysis, on‐page optimisation, and off‐page optimisation.

The time needed to get a site ranking on page number 1 of Google for a competitive search term could take between 6 and 12 months. We provide our clients with full information on how the search engines work to allow them to get the most out of their online presence.

With all of our websites on‐page search engine optimisation is provided as a minimum – this is where we ensure effective search terms are used throughout the build and we also submit the website to all search engines and add tracking code so that our client can see how many hits they’ve had, how people found them and which pages they like best.

Social media marketing is about creating a BUZZ…get people interested in you, get interested in them, get talking about current topics!

Some ideas for posts and information sharing: new clients, office moves, big team nights out, business developments, inspirational and motivational comments, questions and ideas, linking to articles and blogs and photos, posting opportunities and asking for help – even just letting people know you’ve been to a great place or would recommend someone else’s product or service.

Balance between business and personal information, it needs to be friendly and approachable – speak in your own language. These sites offer the chance for people to see the personality behind the company. There are no rules, no set amount of times you need to update these; it’s all about fitting it in with your business.

How to get followers and fans! You get people to follow you on twitter, read your blog, become a fan on facebook by advertising your presence within these areas. Put the logos on your website, add them to business cards (maybe just to the 1 you use the most), make people aware you are there and they’ll join you.

You can use these social media sites for a variety of things too – like testing out opinions of a new product/service or asking for answers to a question (i.e.  How do I build this tricky element on a website!).

Will this take up all of my time? No! You don’t have to be on all of them but as with any marketing activity it’s all about being visible and as with any networking it’s about making connections; so embracing just a few of them will increase your network, open your business to new opportunities and provide a useful resource of information. You may even enjoy it! To save time and bother you can sync all platforms together so that by updating just one status, twitter for example, this will automatically update other medias such as LinkedIn and facebook.

But one BIGGIE not to forget is that you will increase traffic to your website, you will generate new connections, you will gain more knowledge and your online presence will increase because of this! A by product of these things just happens to be more business. Have fun!

There are so many different websites and web applications available it can be quite tricky to know just where to start. A tweet, a poke, a post… these can all be quite unnerving for newcomers and in some cases can put people off using a service altogether.

Here’s a quick guide to some of the more popular social networking tools and how you can best use them to market your business.

Twitter

What’s this?

Send and receive messages called tweets! Text posts of up to 140 characters – it’s like text messaging online. You follow people and they follow you to receive your updates via twitter feeds. See what people are talking about, gather information, let others know what you’re up to. It’s instant.

How can I use it?

Sign-up, start looking for interesting people and topics to follow. Search on your industry sector for people tweeting about this, search on hobbies you enjoy and magazines you read, people you like. You get more involvement, the more people you follow. It’s a great resource for information – people tweet about new developments, interesting blog articles or just for fun (and re-tweeting what people say is common place…highlighting to your followers ‘this is interesting, read it’).

Facebook

What’s this?

It’s just for kids eh? No! This is a social networking site where you let people know what you are doing, add photos, events, have conversations, see what others are doing. They also allow businesses to create profiles and people become ‘fans’ of these.

How can I use it?

Useful for businesses, especially if they don’t have a web presence as you can create whole pages dedicated to what you are doing, invite comments, add images and keep ‘fans’ up to date with upcoming events or offers etc…you can send messages to your whole fan base…’look I have a new chocolate flavour!’ ‘come to our launch day!’.

LinkedIn

What’s this?

This is the facebook equivalent for business. Allows you to maintain a list of contacts you know and trust in business. These are ‘connections’. You update your company information, gather and give testimonials, tell people what you are up to and take part in discussions.

How can I use it?

To connect with businesses you know and those you don’t. It can be used to gain introductions, find and advertise jobs, opportunities. Join and start groups relevant to your industry and connect to new people through this method.

YouTube

What’s this?

It’s a video sharing website…so careful what you do on camera!

How can I use it?

If you do have any show-reels, marketing presentations, video how-to’s created, then post these on YouTube and spread the word ideally via other social networking posts on twitter, LinkedIn etc. Embed the YouTube video on your own website and this will help increase rankings online (Google loves YouTube, it owns it!).

Blogs

What’s this?

A web log / online journal. It can be used internally to create interaction and share information within a business and also externally to do the same thing. Interesting articles and topics generate comments and provide a tool to share knowledge also using other social networking sites.

How can I use it?

Write about things related to your industry. Answering and posing questions which will create a response from people. Many blogs are linked to on small posts via twitter feeds and LinkedIn etc. They also have a ‘Retweet’ button meaning anyone using twitter can instantly share this. Blogging allows you to position yourself as an expert in your field and heightens your credibility…all important for business! Start rambling on about what you know and think (in a positive way…remember we’re all judging your business)!

It’s no secret that Google are constantly focused on speed. They’ve created their own mobile; their own web browser;  they even went so far as to create their own application to assist web developers identify and fix performance problems in websites, presumably because the existing option didn’t have the word “speed” in its name, all in search of a faster user experience.

Knowing this, it should come as no surprise that speed can have an effect on how well your page is ranked. People will tell you that keywords, content and inbound links are the major things to concentrate on when trying to improve your website’s position in search engine results. However a quick glance at Google’s own Corporate Philosophy illustrates the fact that their number one priority is offering the best user experience possible, a promise that would not be kept by encouraging users to visit websites which take their time to load.

The speed of the site can be affected by a number of things, having large images or huge chunks of code on your page can slow down a lot of older machines as well as mobile users or those on slower internet connections.

The server that your site is hosted on can also have a detrimental effect on the load times of your site and, in turn, the ranking of your site with search engines.

The most common way that this can happen is that your web host is hosting a large number of sites on the same server, sharing the server’s resources amongst the sites equally. If your site is sharing the same server as a larger site, or a site with higher bandwidth requirements, your business may suffer as a result.

Another aspect to be wary of is the physical location of your server. When Google looks at your website, it takes note of the region or country where the server is.

Notice when you search using Google, you get a couple of options:

Those who choose to search within pages from the UK will, more often than not, only see results from websites Google believes to be in the UK. While it might be cheaper to host your site with an overseas company, you may be risking the loss of visitors!

Charlie and Greg popped to Bolton last week and attended a delightful BNI members day. For the occasion we commissioned our good friends over at Viewpoint Digital to create us a little showreel, enabling some of our best web design work to be displayed in a fantastic little video clip.

We’ve uploaded the video to YouTube and you can check it out by reading the rest of this article…

Microsoft has been forced to offer users of Windows operating systems a choice in which web browser they use as a result of a European Competition committee investigation. This change will soon appear to all users who make use of Windows Updates and is definitely not an update to be ignored. Read on to find out why.

Background

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 was released in August of 2001 and was the default web browser offered to users of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. This was followed by Internet Explorer 7 in 2006 and Internet Explorer 8 in early 2009. Over the past 9 years we’ve seen a large number of changes to the browser including improved security, tabbed browsing and better standards compliance.

The browser is installed alongside Microsoft Windows as the default web browser for all users, whether they required it or not. There is no option to skip the installation of the browser and there is also no way of removing it from your system, should you require. In today’s fast moving, modern world there exist a large number of competitors to Internet Explorer who claim that Microsoft has an unfair advantage over them in terms of getting their product noticed by an end user.

As of March 1st 2010, Microsoft will begin to offer a choice of alternative browsers to its users in Europe after a legal agreement between Microsoft and Europe’s Competition Committee. The committee were concerned that competition rules may have been broken by the software company by including their own browser with the popular Operating System.

What does this mean for you?

With Internet Explorer no longer the default browser and with Microsoft openly advertising the availability of other web browsers it’s now the perfect time for you, as an internet user, to explore the possibilities and the options available as alternatives to Internet Explorer.

A lot of people may dismiss the idea of switching browsers as something that they don’t need to do, the browser they use now works fine so why change? Well why not change?

The web browser is your gateway to the wonderful world of the internet. Before you view any website, update your social networking profile, check your web based emails or even look at the latest football scores; you have to open a browser. We change our minds about things all the time, be it our cars or our brand of toothpaste. We don’t always settle for what we have and so we experiment with other possibilities, the browser should be seen in exactly the same way.

There are plenty out there to choose from, many of which may carry out tasks you weren’t aware could be carried out. IE6 has no native support for RSS feeds or bookmark tabs, switch to Google Chome and you’re instantly presented with popular RSS feed options as well as a variety of popular sites already bookmarked for you, from CNN to FaceBook. Here’s a very brief rundown of the more popular browsers and a quick glance at some of their features.

Mozilla Firefox
The Mozilla Foundation was formally registered in 2003 and the first official release of Firefox 1.0 was made in 2004. Today Firefox 3.7 is in testing and due to be released imminently, possibly in time for the March 1st Windows Update.

Internet Explorer users may find the interface of Firefox more familiar and easier to get to grips with although web searches use Google as default, rather than the Microsoft owned Bing and the browser also includes tabbed browsing, which will be new to any IE6 users.

Tabbed browsing allows the user to open multiple websites in the same application, instead of stacking up multiple browser windows on the taskbar. Firefox offers the user the choice of storing passwords of websites to speed up logging in and authenticating when returning to certain sites.

Google Chrome
You may have heard of Google as the company behind the world’s most popular search engine. They recently released their own web browser to the public in attempt at stealing some of the pie from leaders Microsoft and Mozilla. Early reviews are promising; the browser is extremely fast and lightweight with an innovative search function and bookmarking. As with Firefox, Chrome supports tabbed browser windows and can automatically save passwords to your “toolbox”.

Apple Safari
While Microsoft have landed themselves in hot water by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, Apple have yet to receive the same sort of treatment despite the fact that they bundle their own browser, Safari, with their operating system.

Safari has been around for a long time, it is said to be the most standards compliant browser and is available on both Windows and Mac OSX. The interface is a little lighter than that of Firefox but not as minimal as Chrome, offering a nice middle ground between the two.

Opera
Opera has been around, in some form or another, since 1996. Despite the extremely positive reviews and the fact that it could be seen as the original innovative browser, incorporating functions such as page zooming and mouse gestures, Opera has failed to make a huge impact on the desktop browser world and languishes behind Chrome, IE, Safari and Firefox in terms of usage.

Most of you reading this will already be familiar with Internet Explorer, as that is your reason for reading, so I won’t go into that here.

In six days time, when Microsoft sends out the March 1st system update, take a moment to think about the choice available to you. When you see the screen above; don’t just ignore it and close the window, experiment with something new and you could just find yourself the browser that you’ve been looking for.

Include relevant search terms – These are key words and phrases contained within your website content confirming approximately 7 to 15 strong keywords or phrases throughout, identifying a pattern. These are effectively search terms that your clients would use to find you. Well optimised sites are content rich with lots of your keywords and semantically similar words (they are very clever and check that content reads well and has good grammar!).

Focussing on a product or keyword for each page/area is a good strategy. For the very best results, keyword research should be carried out to identify the most appropriate words/phrases for your market proposition. As with all marketing, define your keywords well and identify the most relevant to your market, look at you target location also and provide words showing this.

Google has some fantastic keyword tools, see below:

Google Trends – where you can compare trends in the words and phrases searched on

Keyword Tool – this helps you to find the right keywords

Ensure these key words and phrases are also reflected throughout the build of the site (Meta data within the code, document and page titles, image titles etc).

Reciprocal Links – links to and from your website provide the Google Search engine with information relating to the importance of your web page/s. These are given a page rank (3 out of 10 is average, 5 is good and 10 is fantastic but extremely rare!). Links count as a vote for your website and good quality links that come from websites with similar content to yours are of much greater importance. Use search terms as the displayed link address, such as copywriter Yorkshire – taking user to web page when clicked.

Showcase Your Talents! – Promote your latest work in the form of Case Studies or an online Portfolio. Search engines like to see websites being updated so a few minutes keeping customers informed will also improve your online visibility. Make sure your website looks good – think about the sites you like and why you like them then reflect this within your site. Make users want to revisit or share information.

Social Media – social media sites such as facebook, twitter and LinkedIn (specifically for business networking) may increase awareness of your company. Adding comments to industry related forums or starting a blog will also provide useful links to your site as well as position you as an expert in your field.

Website Statistics – Google analytics allows you to see how your customers are finding your website and which search terms they are using. Stats are powerful in the future development of your site.

Other factors include:

Refreshing your website content and good internal navigation (links through to other pages within your website using keywords). Overall, I believe a website is fully optimised by using a variety of techniques which ultimately enhance the experience for the user and also provide search engines with relevant information in order to categorise what you do.

I do love attending these business seminars, great to learn new things, revisit old ones and re-affirm what you’re doing.  And fantastic to meet fellow business owners and managers facing the same issues.  Highest praise goes to Danny Matharu for organising it superbly – he remarkably managed to take away the need for us to complete tiresome forms and the goodie bag was a winner!

Carl Hopkins, marketing guru, focused on answering key questions that attendees had emailed over prior to the day.  A brilliant approach as everybody could take away something personal to them and their business…as well as sharing experiences and information.

There are so many different marketing channels available – direct mail, website, seo, radio, pr, emails, telesales, exhibitions, tv – where do you start?  Some are brilliant for brand awareness and others keen to get that sale.

My understanding from Carl’s seminar is to test, test, test!  Really get to know your market, research it and make sure each venture is relevant to that particular client.  Separate out campaigns, change wording and offers to see which approach works best.  Many people give up after the first try without looking at what element of the marketing didn’t work.  Good luck!

See Danny’s site Hillrich, see Carl’s site, Kloog

Image from Julian Holtom Photography Ltd