Archive for the ‘Technical Stuff’ Category

Its a common problem we get asked when we make changes to a website but the client cannot see the changes, the technical problem is described below by a question and answer:

[Client] We have tried viewing the updates to the website but there is no new writing or changes on it am i doing something wrong?

[Delicious] Its possible that your browser has stored or ‘cached’ the old version of your website prior to our changes, try looking at the site pages then pressing (CTRL + R together) or (CTRL + F5 together) to refresh your browser

Here is an example website scope and proposal document

Major projects demand this level of investigation and documentation to ensure us as the website builders and the client knows exactly what to expect, when it will arrive and how much it will cost and when the milestones are.

Its important to remember that if you use one of these tools you realise that its just a tool and not a search engine so the information may be incorrect or not worth worrying about, we use these tools for overviews to highlight problems we may not have noticed. In summary use with caution, here is some questions and answers about these tools from a client:

Our website is rated at 81% which is good – PADI for example get 99% – so we are doing good
I have been informed though of the following:

1. If we renew our Domain Name for several years in advance it will further help our ranking with Google. Therefore, how many years in advance can we renew the Domain Name for?
Delicious Comment: Up to 10 – its possibly a minor ranking factor ( but I have my domains renewed for more than 3 years)

2. That wonderful blog that you have done for us with Word Press – somehow cannot be found with the search criteria that the website grader uses?
Delicious Comment: You have a blog and its crawlable and indexed I changed the link from blogs to blog on every page. The reason the website grading tool cant find it is because you didnt install it in the /blog folder but in the /scubadivingphuket/ folder.

3 Apparently? (you would know much more about this than me anyway) we just need one line of code that links our website to our blog? You know anything about this? Once we do this then our blog will be found and we’ll achieve a rating higher than 81%!
Delicious Comment: You now have 84% but its only one metric (there are lots of graders) and the link is already there to your blog and its indexed

4. Even though we have loads of wicked images, the website grading tool can’t find ‘em? Again, I’ve been told (like it says on the summary!) that if are images are changed so that they have ‘ALT text’ (whatever that means!?) this will help us ALOT?
Delicious Comment: ALT text is alternative text and is a good SEO practise to label every image with a name / description but again dont worry too much about your grade here as the tool isn’t that important, rest assured that your images are fine and have alt text.

4. I have also been told that Social Networking Sites are super important. You already knew that anyway but apparently you wanna have the lot. I know we have FaceBook and Twitter but what what about My Space and Flickr?
Delicious Comment: Forget about myspace but you can use flikr to share your photos of diving courses and marine life.
Facebook Groups and Local Business as well as Twitter is your best bet, try to post and update regularly but concentrate on the blog first.

Then when you’ve got them all – they all need to be linked with EACH OTHER and then BACK to our website? The other thing is once they are all linked together – you don’t need to update them all! When you update one of them – it automatically updates the others! Is basically one big circle of links which brings you back to our website…
Yes you can set your facebook group to update twitter if you want
Delicious Comment: You have a fb group but 0 people like it why not put the new fb widget on your site, allowing people to ‘like’ you by just clicking on the ‘like’ button.

Delicious Comment: In general dont worry too much about website grader or any similar website grade tool as they are not perfect, much more important is your google ranking and visitors / traffic and how website visitors convert to become customers.

There’s hundreds of thousands of routers, networks and switches that make up the Internet. Not being able to reach one is generally just an indicator that the path taken is broken or misrouted. To identify whats wrong and where its wrong you run a traceroute

Do this (in Windows 7) by opening your command line (Windows Start > type “cmd” in the find line)

The command is:

tracert [domain name]

eg

tracert [scubacat.com]

then you can copy the trace by right-clicking > Select All > then pressing “enter”

Well actually we will if you ask nicely but its amazing how many of our clients ask for advice on PC / Windows / Office / internet problems they are having. We are obviously one of the few people that most of our clients know that are IT literate and having heard some of the stories people tell me about using high street PC support and the costs of them I dont blame them for asking advice on technical issues. I dont think I will be buying the tshirt ‘No I wont fix your PC’ yet but if this carries on will have to escalate all non website specific queries to our new Tech Help Desk person (aka PC Paul)