For the month of August only we are offering a Summer Discount on any of our web services. This includes complete website packages, any upgrades, web hosting, web development, SEO and even PPC marketing campaigns.

Even better, for those new clients who take a 6 or 12 month contract on a service which starts in August, they will get the 10% saving for the duration of the term.

To take advantage this August call us on 01827 897554 or email your ideas to hello@oneweb.co

Apple’s Safari browser is experiencing issues worldwide this morning. Searching from the address bar in both iOS and OS X is causing the browser to crash in some instances. OneWeb has confirmed the problem on several of our own iOS devices and at least one OS X machine. So, for our clients calling in this morning for advice, here is a simple temporary fix:

SAFARI’S SEARCH SUGGESTIONS ARE TO BLAME

Our iOS developer, notes that the problems are related to Safari’s search suggestions feature. Simply disabling this feature will stop Safari crashing, or using the private mode option in the browser as a temporary workaround. Not everyone is affected, and this could be because some have the search suggestions cached locally or they’re still able to reach Apple’s servers thanks to a DNS cache. OneWeb has reached out to Apple for comment on the problems, and we’ll update you accordingly.

Apple’s Safari Browser Fix → The Path: Settings > Safari > Safari Suggestions > Toggle to OFF > Done!

Selling and buying on the web has come a long way in the last 10 to 15 years and nowhere has that become more apparent than with the explosion in smartphone usage, allowing people to surf, and shop, on the move. 62% of mobile users now use their phone to make at least one purchase per month.

It’s a rapidly developing market place and if your product isn’t online you are missing out on valuable sales.

With access to so many customers, businesses need to have attractive and functional online stores that utilise high class eCommerce web design. Having a poorly designed or badly thought out site can dramatically reduce sales and the chances that customers will return to you:

• With the trend moving towards ever greater purchasing online in 2014 and beyond, it is vital for all businesses to get their eCommerce web design strategy right.
• More and more niche businesses are beginning to set up eCommerce sites. Developing an online store provides the easiest and most affordable way of reaching consumers and selling a product.
• Many shoppers see buying online as the cheaper option. 72% of US shoppers have browsed in store before heading to the internet to make their purchase.
• World eCommerce sales are massive and many businesses are trying to get their share of the pie. There are expected to be $1.5 trillion worth of online sales in 2014.

Having an online store for your product is not just about a colourful design. Many businesses now realise that integrating their site, having it fully optimised so that search engines can find it, and linking everything to an effective social media strategy is only part of the process.

In truth, eCommerce is a bit like a land grab, with many start-ups being created on a daily basis. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the UK where, last year, over half a million new businesses registered with Companies House. And that figure is set to rise in 2014 as the economic situation improves and people feel more confident in starting up their own online eCommerce stores.

With the increase in numbers vying for eCommerce real estate, there is also the problem of making your business look different from all the others out there. Buying an off-the-peg eCommerce website design is all well and good but finding one that is tailored to your business needs and, more importantly, the needs of your consumers could make the difference between success and failure.

Building a personal relationship with an eCommerce web design company can have many benefits:

• You get a professional team who understands and cares for your product.
• You get a more effective website with greater functionality that is tailored to your needs.
• You get personalised graphics and design that help you stand out from the crowd, which is critical.
• You get deeper and more potent search engine optimisation (SEO) integrated into the coding of your web site.

Finally, your eCommerce website design gets tested for usability by the experts – when it goes live you can be confident that your customers will be able to use it easily and that means they are more likely to come back to you.

eCommerce Web Design Tamworth

While new and existing businesses can access user friendly eCommerce webdesign packages practically at the touch of a button, many are choosing to opt for a bespoke service. Their ideas and desires are explored in house by a team that takes the time to find out about their product, consumers and future plans.

At OneWeb you have everything you need in one place, an experienced team committed to providing the service that your business needs.

Contact us today to see how we can help transform your ideas into powerful, online designs that make your eCommerce site one of the business successes of 2015.

Dave Hinxy

For the second time this week there has been big news of giant internet tech companies and their visions of the future. A few days ago Amazon revealed plans that they are heading towards having a fleet of unmanned drones delivering goods with their Prime Air service, which could launch as soon as 2015. Now Google has revealed that they have been secretly buying up specialist robotic companies and getting their cheque book out with backing for Andy Rubin’s plans to create intelligent robots. Google has declared the project is a ‘Moonshot’. Thing is, when Google describes a project as a Moonshot, they generally work out. Here is all the info in an article by the New York Times.

A few months back we were approached by the Warwick County Council who asked us if we would like to get involved with an initiative they were planning, where computer professionals visit schools and colleges to talk about subjects like web development, software development, programming and learning to write code. It was a great plan, getting high school students interested in subjects such as these and full marks to the Council for coming up with such a credible and worthwhile project, one we were honored to have been selected to participate in. As a small, and very busy, studio we couldn’t commit to schedule that would be required so had to pass on the opportunity and hadn’t really thought about it again … until now.

It seems that WCC weren’t the only ones who had a similar plan, another group were doing the same and on a massive scale too. If you haven’t seen the news recently, a non-profit organization in the USA is hitting the headlines by bringing programming into schools. CODE.ORG have amazingly brought together some of the world’s greatest leaders and trendsetters together to promote CODE writing as a subject in schools.

This is primarily an American venture right now but with the big-name backing they have on-board, it’s only a matter of time until the movement gains International momentum. The list of names giving CODE.ORG their support is like a ‘who’s who’ of IT and Internet giants, specifically the big players in social networking. Here’s just a few of the many: Bill Gates, Microsoft. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook. Richard Branson, Virgin. Jack Dorsey, Twitter. Yishan Wong, Reddit. Eric Schmidt, Google. Drew Houston, Dropbox. Gabe Newell, Valve. Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly media. Plus many other celebs from the worlds of TV, music and sport. As you can probably gather from that list, there is no doubt that this initiative will be successful in bringing the schools of the world ‘programming and code’ as a curriculum subject.

The statistics related to the next IT generation are nothing short of mind-blowing, in the USA by 2020 there will be 1.4 million jobs in computing but only 400,000 computer science students to fill them. 9 out of 10 schools don’t offer programming classes at all. Computer Programming students account for less than 2% of maths and science related subjects and yet 60% of all graduate jobs are in this category!

For any programmers, engineers or software professionals who have the time to get involved with this remarkable initiative, you can sign up and commit some of your time at code.org in a number of different ways. For every one else, why not visit the site and add your name to growing list of people who think that every student should have the opportunity to learn to code. We certainly do!

Dave Hinxy

Article first published as The Next Generation Of Web Developers, Coders and Programmers on Technorati

About mid-way through last year Google began delisting directories from search results stating that the reasoning behind this was that many had no quality content. This was initially aimed at directory sites that exist purely to provide backlinks whether paid or free. Everyone knows that getting links to your website is how to gain authority and increase PageRank. This is very true, but for some time now, poor quality and low value links from directories have been ignored and the directory site has been removed from the Google index. We keep a list of just under 400 directories for monitoring purposes and in recent months quite a few have disappeared from SERPs, some have reappeared, mainly those that changed the way they attempt to pass on ‘juice’ on by using rel=”nofollow” according to the webmaster guidelines. It seems that if you use the nofollow option, you are an actual directory serving the community, possibly a specific industry or niche. For example, Nuoret was a PageRank 5 directory last year but today it has PageRank of zero and has been delisted by Google altogether. This is one example of about 60 that we have seen delisted.

A recent warning issued takes this one stage further and many see it as a step too far, where a website is perceived to be listed in too many low-quality directories or bookmark site links the site itself is to be devalued. Google calls it ‘a loss of trust’. Punishing a website for being listed in directories which Google thinks are low value is somewhat unnecessary. Surely, the way to go would be to ignore the inbound links from the low quality directories.

The consequence of this stance will be far reaching. Site owners who have been listing in directories for years as it was the safe the thing to do whilst avoiding link swaps, 3 way linking, link farms etc. will have to request removal of their listings on the downgraded directory sites. The opportunity for ‘negative SEO’ attacks by listing your competitors’ websites will become even more effective unless they have regular checks and ‘disavow’ each and every link manually. Financial viability of web directories, even the genuine ones, has just been hit hard. What site owner will be requesting inclusion into a directory whether free or paid?

It seems both paid and free directories violate Google’s quality guidelines unless they incorporate nofollow attributes. In the words of Google “We do take this issue very seriously, so we recommend you avoid selling (and buying) links that pass PageRank in order to prevent loss of trust, lower PageRank, lower rankings, or in an extreme case, removal from Google’s search results”. The latest Penguin update ensures that the majority of existing directories will be overwhelmed with requests for subscription cancellations and link removals. Killing off directories and those who submit to them appears to be incredibly harsh but, if you follow the guidelines, the changes shouldn’t be a problem. If you have a directory, always use the ‘nofollow’ guidelines. If you are listed in directories check out if it has been hit by the updates and act quickly if it has. Either request removal or disavow the inbound links.

If you have concerns about this Penguin directory update, contact us for a full website audit. We can check who links to you, whether they are effecting your website’s status and clean up the problems quickly before it has a negative effect on your own search engine rankings.

Dave Hinxy

Some good news for anyone who has been pondering the thought of having a website built but hesitating due to the initial outlay. We are now offering interest free credit on all of our web design packages, making our best mega-value products even better value. For example, the ‘Starter Package’ at £495.00 which boasts everything you will need to get you online, only requires a 30% deposit of £148.50 then the balance can be spread over 5 months at just £69.30 a month! The deposit then 5 monthly payments option is available across the board on all of our web packages. There has never been a better time to get online and as of today it just got even easier. Contact us today to discuss your requirements. We are always happy to help..

Dave

In the words of Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, "GravityLive are fabulous!" Mikey and Kathryn are professional performers with acts that range from stilt walkers to angle grinders, living statues to feather showgirl dancers. They wanted a new refreshed website to showcase their acts which had to be a CMS (content management system) as they have so many new performances which are dreamt up almost daily. Each of the acts’ pages has an image slideshow and also an embedded video player so you get a real feel for the performance. There’s a ton of social network integration so GravityLive will soon be known globally.The website’s number of pages has shot up to almost 400 so there’s plenty of content to share. The site is available at gravitylive.co.uk so take a look and get sharing!

Sovereign Business Transfer is the UK’s fastest growing business sales broker based up north in Manchester and the owner, Matthew Trinder, was after a complete redesign of their old Joomla website and wanted the new one to be fresh looking and dynamic as a reflection of the company. The site has a large MySQL database of businesses for sale with loads of PHP-tech to handle calls to the database for search queries and filtering so a potential customer gets accurate results delivered. The important criteria was that despite the complexity of the backend, the content management system had to be relatively simple to use when editing, adding and updating new businesses… Feedback on the new website has been awesome, the client is delighted as are we in the studio. Very much looking forward to stage 2 of this development which is coming soon. Watch this space!

As of this month any public website should provide information about its use of cookies and give the option to disable them, not just a document stashed away somewhere, but on the homepage as the first thing a visitor sees! The cookie law was actually passed last year, but we were all given 12 months to sort ourselves out. Now that time is up, we’ll have to comply. In case you don’t know, cookies are small parcels of technical data that track our movements and browsing habits when we use the internet, or store items in a shopping cart for future purchase. Some websites use these cookies to offer us targeted products similar to those we have been looking at. I’m sure we have all wondered how that little window pops up and offers us a deal on the very same products we were looking at only a few days ago! This is done by using cookies for advertising. How does Amazon or eBay remind you what you ‘last viewed’? By using cookies of course. As with everything, the use of cookies has been abused by the unscrupulous advertising and tracking markets and forced the EU to act on it.

Cookies are awesome! Google Analytics uses cookies to track the route a visitor takes through a website, most social sharing networks use cookies and provide valuable information to site owners on what works on their website and what doesn’t. What to remove, what to add, what to update. All these things add to the visitor’s experience but now everyone should be given the option to turn cookies off. Why anyone would do that, I don’t know. There’s not much point in downgrading your ability to benefit from a particular website’s functionality. You may as well turn off JavaScript at the same time and have no navigation. Or get out the Yellow Pages instead of using Google. Dust off your Encyclopedia Britanica and stop using Wikipedia.

The new regulations have been put into place to show the public we have the option to disable these cookies if you want to. The ironic thing is this, we always need cookies to use the internet, so if the customer chooses to disable them, it sends another cookie to tell the site it doesn’t want to use them!

There are several different views on this new law – some believe that its nonsense, and others believe it’s a step in the right direction. Either way, it’s now the law, and there will be penalties for non-compliance. The regulations don’t apply to every website, but we suggest that you update your website now anyway, because if you make changes in the future, you may fall under the new law. In order to be compliant, your website needs to explain to your customer what cookies are and how to disable them if you want to. This involves an update to your front page and the addition of an external link. You can always contact oneweb if you want help in complying with this process.

Dave