Tools of the Trade – Firebug for Firefox

There are an awful lot of pixels on a computer screen, and trying to get every single one to look just right is a core challenge of web design. One of the main reasons I choose to develop websites using Firefox, the world’s second-most popular web browser, is the extraordinarily handy plug-in called Firebug, which helps me to visualise my website project pixel-by-pixel.  Using Firebug, I can tweak design parameters, font sizes and image locations without having to upload new files or even so much as refresh the page.

Firebug can be useful for non-developers too.  Website owners and casual browsers can learn a lot about the web by using the ‘inspect’ tool, which highlights HTML elements on a page as you hover over them with your mouse.  The highlighted element’s HTML code appears in the Firebug panel at the bottom of your browser window and, in this view, you can adjust the code and change the CSS styles with just a couple of clicks.  Because this is all done in the browser itself, none of the website’s files need to be updated and your changes are not visible to anyone else – it is all accomplished in the safety of your own web browser.  You can use this tool to experiment with layout, spacing, colours and more and see the changes instantly.

Another handy Firebug feature is the ability to get a blow-by-blow account of how your page loads and the components that make it what it is.  In the ‘net’ view you can see, to the nearest millisecond, how long each of the images, scripts and other external files take to load into your page – it’s a great way of discovering the bottlenecks in your site; for example, finding which pictures take a long time to load or which files cause the server to respond slowly.

For the more advanced user, Firebug also sports a Javascript console and an efficient debugger with breakpoints, etc, for easy debugging of your Javascript code, and a tab listing the DOM properties for your page for easy reference.

You can add Firebug to your Firefox browser for free, just follow this link.

When the going gets tough

Enquiries were down – our expenditure on SEO and Google Adwords was at a record high. An alternative – semi-targeted emails?? Not quite as good as mailing your database of existing contacts – but a start.

We purchased 20,000 named e-mail addresses of companies within a 60 mile radius of Shrewsbury. We designed and produced a quality e-mailer CLICK TO VIEW. Of the 20,000 emails sent 2000 opened the mailer – of those 200 had a good look at the e-mailer and clicked on more than one link.

We then had a telesales company call 150 of those potential leads – the result 8 qualified leads that resulted in £8500 worth of business in the first week – and we still have 4 leads to follow up.

If you would like to find out more and trial a similar e-mail project please CLICK HERE

On time and on budget…

A recent prospect put web design stafford into Google – and came across BeVivid. The client visited us in Condover, liked what he saw and after a bit of negotiation on our second meeting the deal was done. “I’d like the site live by the end of the month was the request on the 7^th August.”

A quick call to the office confirmed this possible if we worked together and buttoned down the data and content – the usual cause of delays. Having been involved in designing and programming websites for more than 10 years we have the systems and team in place.

A site map was produced, spreadsheets populated with data and visuals designed. Week one – design approved, week two – programming and data population, week three – testing – and the site was ready to go live 31st August. And what’s more, since the site has gone live our client has passed us 2 referrals.

A BeVivid Point-of-View on Search Engine Optimisation

Here is a question…“What are your thoughts on the differences between SEO companies vs web design and programming companies that do SEO?”

The differences aren’t obvious to the untrained eye – but there are many key areas in SEO that non web developers simply cannot do!

Successful SEO is about a combination of many disciplines – design, programming, articles off site, relevance, inbound links, page rank, social networking links and user generated content to name but a few.

Here are just a few of a very long and complex list that we recommend as part of our website programming and advanced SEO projects:

• Inbound links
• Inbound links from sites with matching content
• Inbound links from sites with high page rank
• well written content ( keyword and key phrase density)
• key phrases in content
• key phrases in title
• key phrases in description
• key phrases in h1 tags*
• key phrases in h2 tags*
• key phrases in links
• key phrases in inbound links (consistently)
• strong tags around key phrases
• alt tags with key phrases*
• title tags with key phrases*
• key phrases in image file names*
• key phrases towards top of content i.e. to the left of the page as it gets read first by search engines*
• well structured minimal code. i.e divs not tables*
• javascript in external files*
• css in external files*
• internal links throughout the site on key phrases
• high number of pages*
• all pages with different content/title/description*
• keyphrases in page/file names (mod_rewrite)*
• dynamic content for as many pages as possible*
• content added frequently*
• avoid flash navigation*
• avoid gateway pages*
• avoid image or flash navigation*
• automatic SEO on new page creation* (they don’t want to return to the SEO specialist every time they add a product)

The above list is just a small part of successful SEO but there are some key points amongst them.  Bold* identify built-in SEO programming areas the SEO marketers cannot do unless they have access to the programming source code and therefore access to your data.

External SEO companies cannot help on the programming optimisation because they are normally approached after a site is ‘complete’ and further advanced SEO is then identified as an urgent requirement.

Built-in SEO programming can only usually be completed successfully by the web developer when the site is under construction, or, better still, considered in the design prior to development.

Ironically the items marked with bold* above are rather important parts of basic SEO. That’s not saying that SEO cannot be achieved without looking at these items, however it will take a lot more time and money to achieve the same goals, without considering design and development first.

These 2 types of SEO marketing rarely cross paths because you can achieve effective results doing both independently. What I mean is, web developers can do their SEO, and if it is successful the website owner doesn’t need to look for an SEO specialist. However if a web developer hasn’t done a good job SEO-wise, then the SEO marketeer can do SEO marketing their way. Both achieve results… yet in both scenarios only one type of SEO is used.

Imagine what can be achieved when both methods are integrated from concept through to 1 year after launch!!

There are no magic answers for SEO. Anyone who promises the earth is unrealistic and by tomorrow their technique will be out of date or blacklisted. Many clients want the magic answer – but I’m afraid it doesn’t exist.

What I can say though is that the BeVivid team has designed, programmed and SEO’d over 150 websites using as many SEO techniques as the client’s budget allows. This means we get a good indication of what SEO techniques work and what do not.

Does it work? Today, 13/10/09, it does: type in Thomas the tank into Google. Our client’s relatively small e-commerce website, www.thomasthetankshop.co.uk, is on the first page; number 5, out of over 6 million. And if you do a Google UK search, number one – page one.

External SEO companies can be good at long term SEO once the site is up to scratch – it’s horses for courses as they say…

Written by Peter L Riches, Managing Director of BeVivid Limited. Integrated Website Design, Programming and SEO. www.bevivid.co.uk

Using Twitter Part One. Whats it all about?

So what is twitter all about? Simply put Twitter is social networking tool. In 140 characters you can post little snippets about your life, what you are doing, where you are or even what you had for breakfast.

2 years ago it was just another micro blogging service, a fun, but irrelevant tool mainly used by computer geeks (like me). Nobody could have predicted its growing popularity and the massive success of Twitter has now made it an exceptional marketing tool.

Anybody that uses Facebook will be familiar with the status update feature. This is essentially what Twitter is with one fundamental difference….

When you add people as friends to your page on facebook they also have to add you as their friend. Therefore only allowing people you have agreed to see your status updates, this is a symmetric relationship model. Twitter on the other hand, uses an asymmetric relationship model. You can ‘follow’ somebody on twitter without them having to ‘follow’ you back. This allows for four types of relationship….

1. People who follow you but you don’t follow back
2. People who don’t follow you, but you follow
3. You both follow each other
4. Neither of you follow each other

This relationship model is what makes twitter such an exceptional tool. Because people don’t have to follow you, its up to you to create a relationship with other twitterers (I will go over a few ways you can do this in the next article). Over the last 6 months or so, there has been a significant increase in Shropshire businesses that have now adopted twitter into their marketing strategy. Used correctly, it can increase traffic to your site, promote new products for sale, encourage people to signup for your enews, complete mini polls to gain more information about target markets, demographics etc and much much more.

This is the first part of an ongoing series of blog posts about the importance of social marketing, if you have had any any experience (good or bad) please tell us about it.