Archive for May 2009

Whilst you were busy building a website, an important milestone in Internet history was passed last month. The Internet- in the sense of being a proposal of how to link computers and servers – turned 20 years old.

The chap credited with it all is Tim Berners-Lee. Whilst working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, Tim published a paper that was an early blueprint of the web.

Berners-Lee’s idea was that a system that could be developed that linked computers so that scientists could share information. The computers could be linked using something called ‘hypertext’ – what we now just call ‘links’.

The web address off the very first website was www.info.cern.ch.

We’ve written before about how fast the web is growing, but where are we now? Although there is no agreed way of measuring the size of the web, it is generally held that by the end of 2008 there were around 200 million websites with around 30 million new ones being added annually.

I don’t know about you but that makes my efforts feel quite small. And a little daunted when it comes to getting to the top of the Search Engine Results page (SERPs). I’m off to study the SEO guide…

With a bank holiday approaching, there’s a lot of weather related chatter going on.  In the office we’ve been talking about stuff like how busy the campsites are, and how choked the roads will become. But as we’ve mentioned before, the weather has a big impact on the sort of things people search for online.

There is of course the obvious stuff: bad weather brings about a surge in searches for weather websites, as Brits look for a break in the clouds.

But also there is the range of activities that warmer weather brings with it. If search engines are anything to go by, the first thing on people’s minds when the sun comes out is the garden. The Hitwise ‘Hot Consumer Electronics List’ shows that garden related search queries have trebled over the last few weeks.

Here’s the top 10:

1  black and decker
2. lawn mowers
3. flymo
4. black & decker
5. petrol lawn mowers
6. petrol lawnmowers
7. petrol lawn mower
8. cheap garden furniture
9. lawnmower
10. lawnmowers

Of course the take away point if you’re selling any garden or weather related equipment is to have a list of keywords sorted out well in advance of this surge. You need to make sure your website is ranking well in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS) for your important keywords – follow our search engine optimisation guide for the best advice. But owing to the length of time Google takes to crawl changes on your site, its best to make sure you’ re working on your SEO programme through the winter, so that come springtime you’re ready to take advantage.

For those of us not selling this stuff; is there a weather or summer related angle you could give to your site? For example, if you run a B&B take the opportunity to add in a page about the weather in the local area, and optimise that page for local weather keywords. You might well be able to pick up some extra traffic.

Have any of you taken advantage of weather related searches to boost traffic to your site? Leave us a comment below.

Do you ever want to make the same change on every page of your website? If you’ve got lots of pages then that can take a while.

That’s where the Page Master comes in. Changes in the page master affect every page of your site. Get to grips with this feature and your website building and editing experience is going to be a lot quicker and easier!

Have a go, and let us have your feedback!

A few weeks ago we asked you submit your website for our new gallery page. Thank you to everyone who has submitted their site.

The good news is that the new website gallery page is now live!

Please don’t worry if your website hasn’t yet been published; we had so many submissions that its taking a while for us to add them. We’re going to be adding a few more every week until we get through the list.

Keep watching this space! And thanks again for the submissions.

More exciting news here at WebEden! This time its strictly for the advanced users amongst you.

Our Sitebuilder developers have been burning the midnight oil and have produced an ‘HTML widget’ that lets you place pieces of HTML on your WebEden website. You can find it in the File manager and its called ‘HTML Snippet’. Beware though – its still in BETA, and there are some very good reasons why its not on full release yet.

What does it do?

It allows you to add HTML snippets to your site! Add your Amazon links, web rings, banner ads, friends list from Facebook or try any other snippets you find on the web. We can’t guarantee it will work for everything but it’s worth trying.

How does it work?

Place the widget on the page and using the ‘Setup’ tab on the ‘Editor’ paste in the HTML for  your snippet and click ‘Apply’. If a height and width is detected in your code you will be given an option to resize the widget accordingly. To view the HTML widget use the ‘Preview’ button on the ‘Editor’ or click ‘View my site’ on the toolbar. If a visitor is using a browser that doesn’t support the widget it will render as a broken image link and the HTML will be displayed just below your site along with instructions on how to fix the problem.

Issues

There are known bugs with this widget.

Currently the HTML widget only works correctly if you view the site using Internet Explorer 6 or above, with Flash Player 10. So for Firefox users, it displays the HTML content below the site so they can still see it, but its not ideal.

We’ve had some exciting news from Firefox that the bug that prevents the HTML widget correctly displaying in your site for Firefox users will be fixed in the 3.1 release of the browser, due sometime in the next couple of months (hopefully). This is great, as this bug was something we couldn’t fix ourselves.

The main bug that we’re looking at on our side is why some HTML snippets don’t load correctly, which seems to be mainly those that use external JavaScript files in the HTML. Hopefully we’ll be able to fix that too and open the net wider.

Once the HTML widget is fully robust we hope to be able to offer many different pre-configured flavours of it. There will always be the generic ‘paste in any HTML’ widget, but we’ll also do some that are focused on particular services.

Have a go, and let us know what you think!