Calling all web design and SEO companies, Google have updated their page ranks again. There was a page rank update in April of this year as well which begs the question why has it happened now. It is thought page rank is changed every quarter, although this is an average and comes from the fact it is usually updated 4 times a year. Hopefully this will mean the page rank will be update more often and all us SEO experts/Web designers can see the results of our hard work more often.
Attention all Web designers
May 28th, 2009Stockport fall into Administration
May 19th, 2009Stockport County have recently entered administration. They have failed to come up with the estimated £250,000 bill from the Inland Revenue and are believed to owe £300,000 to another creditor.
The penalty for not paying up is a 10 point deduction, but fortunately for ‘The Hatters’ this still leaves them safe in the league. They will surely lose out on some money from this 10 point deduction, however they live to fight another day in League 1.
Web Design vs. Web Analytics
May 14th, 2009Douglas Bowman recently left Google, as they preferred analytics to design. He was one of the top visual designers at Google and has now left to become creative director at Twitter. Douglas has since said that Google takes decisions on design based on analytics data rather than their designers suggestions. Apparently before he could make a decision on any design he would have to test most of the options online, seeing which option was clicked more, shown more etc.. and sometimes the differences could be as simple as how tall a line of text was.
“Data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions,” Douglas wrote in his own blog.
In my opinion (and I don’t claim to be a designer) designers aren’t always right, but they know what looks good and looking good is usually what gets the job done in web design.
Why have clean markup in web design?
May 8th, 2009The internet never stays still. Having a clean markup these days wil keep your website up to date… at least for the foreseeable future (that’s not very long in web design). The latest language to use is XHTML rather than HTML, the purpose for this is to allow for AJAX a new web development technique. One example of AJAX is Google suggestions, this gives you an instant suggestion on whatever you type on real time data. The difference between XHTML and HTML is relatively small, the main thing to note is to close all tags! Simple changes like that will make your site XHTML compliant and allow you to use AJAX, but then you’ll have to master AJAX though…
Credit Crunch hits PPC
May 6th, 2009In the first quarter of the year Yahoo missed it’s earning expectations. It wasn’t by a massive margin, but Yahoo had shed 1,500 of it’s workforce at the end of 2008. Yahoo’s profits were down by 78% on last years figure of $1.16 billion. The future isn’t looking brilliant for Yahoo although they are reportedly in talks with Microsoft about making a partnership, which will use Yahoo’s 20% and Microsoft’s 8% market share to compete with market leaders Google’s almost two third share.
However it isn’t just Yahoo that are showing a decrease, Google reported it’s first sales drop in the first quarter of this year. Rather than standing still and waiting for the economy to pick up companies are working hard to make themselves more appealing in this market.
Yahoo have announced they intend to let 5% of their workforce go. They are also working on globalizing its platform to react quicker, building ‘wow’ products on top of that platform and continuing to invest in new advertising products.
