Having been doing web design for over 12 years, I’ve worked with a lot of different UK web hosts (hosting providers) from the slow and disappointing to the downright terrible. In fact, it is only very recently that I have found a UK web host suitable for WordPress based websites that I would actually consider excellent and would wholeheartedly recommend to others. For years I have just made do with a web host that I considered good but not great. Sure, they had pretty good customer service, were fairly reliable, but what tends to let most hosts down (and this host was no exception), is the speed of their servers. When it comes to servers, the technology and how loaded up they are, are 2 major determining factors with regards to speed and by that I mean website loading times. Unless you have a large budget for web hosting, which most of my clients being small businesses, don’t have, they are usually limited to a fairly standard hosting package which is known as shared hosting. Shared hosting means the servers are shared with, in some cases, hundreds of other websites and if even one of those websites is demanding on the servers resources, perhaps it has lots of heavy scripts or self hosted videos, then it can cause all of the other websites to run slower too. This can potentially have a dramatic impact on the speed and response time of your website. If a hosting provider’s server is overloaded with too many websites then your website will indeed run at a very slow pace. Not only does this have a huge impact on the usability of a website (no one wants to be waiting around for a website to load) but it can also be a terrible thing in the eyes of a search engine. If a website takes forever to load you can guess what’s going to happen to your ranking on Google. Sometimes, simply moving the website to a quicker host, using newer technology on less crowded servers can turn the slowest of websites into a lightning fast user friendly website. I have seen this happen before. On one such occasion I was constantly contacting the host to ask them if they can do anything to speed up my client’s website, their answers were always the same, “use such and such plugin, or try this or that”. Nothing made a difference. When I finally decided to move away from that particular host, guess what happened, the website was fast and I mean lightning fast. No longer did I have to wait over six seconds for the home page to load, it was there almost instantly. It was all going so well until the website was hacked into. Yes, server security is another issue and a web host that manages this properly is a must! So the search for the perfect UK web host continued.
Backlinks are links from other websites that point back to your website. There are several ways to get backlinks and one of the easiest methods is to add your website to online directories. There are two main types of backlinks, ‘NoFollow’ and ‘DoFollow’. The aim is to get as many ‘DoFollow’ backlinks as possible as this will help increase your website’s position on Google. ‘DoFollow’ means that when Google crawls a website they will also follow all outbound links. As many websites were getting penalised by Google for linking to low quality websites, many webmasters changed the outbound links to ‘NoFollow’, which means that their website is not associating with or endorsing a particular website.
It is very easy to use any Google font on WordPress by pasting a simple piece of code into your WordPress theme’s functions.php file. Before you do this it is advisable to install your WordPress theme’s child theme. A child theme will allow you to add additional code to your WordPress theme’s files without running the risk of losing the customisations when you do a theme update.
Once you have embedded a youtube video into your webpage you may wish to allow the autoplay facility, especially if it is a welcome video or a sales video. This is very easy to achieve. Simply copy this code: &autoplay=1 and paste it in straight away after rel=0 in the youtube embed code with no gaps. It will now automatically start playing when the page opens, perfect for important videos.
An issue that I bumped into recently was that google was displaying my website’s page title (title tag) differently to how it should be. My website page title was perfectly fine on my actual website (on all web browsers) and on all other search engines, the problem was literally only showing in a google search.
This is my website’s homepage title as seen from a browser.
Hi and happy new year, I hope 2014 is already shaping up nicely for you! My soon to be wife and I started 2014 with a move to Lewes, having been in Brighton for nearly 10 years. I am now looking forward to being a part of the Lewes community and providing my graphic design services to the people of Lewes as well as continuing with any Brighton based clients. So if you are a business based in Lewes looking for a reliable Lewes based graphic designer, please give me a call, I’m always happy to discuss a new project! Please check out my graphic design testimonials from my existing clients.
Naturally if you are Brighton based or indeed based anywhere in Sussex or London I am still more than happy to work with you on any graphic design project that you may have, just get in touch!
This is a project from my University days. Everyone in my class was assigned an area of type to explore and to develop a piece of design based on it. I was given foreign characters. I decided to have some fun with this so I made a collection of various foreign characters such as umlauts, accents etc. I then pieced them together to make faces, stereotypical foreign faces that is. Whether or not I just insulted people by suggesting foreigners look like this, who knows. For every character that I used within the creation of the typographic face it features next to the face with a description about its use and origin.
There is a very simple way of checking whether or not your server is configured correctly and that the server response code is optimal for SEO. This is important for search robot requests and can affect your position by as much as ten places in a search result if it’s setup incorrectly.
Simply visit http://responsetester.appspot.com type in your website’s URL into the box and click test now.
The responsinator (as the tool is named) will give you a score, hopefully an A+ if all is well.