Horizon Web Development

How to get the best from Google Adwords

2008-05-29T23:30:00.001+01:00

Many websites today utilise what has to be one of the most cost effective methods of advertising, Google Adwords. Adwords is simple to set up and gives the user complete control over everything, allowing them to change their keywords and adverts almost instantly and quickly and easily respond to visitor trends.

Sadly the area where many users fall down, is right at the start with the keywords, and this area can be tricky to understand. Many users of Adwords assume that simply adding every conceivable word that someone will search for, such as price or sale, will get the best response, but as any SEO specialist will tell you, this isn't the case. This just leads to visitors finding you by mistake, and of course you pay for every click to your website, mistake or not.

We offer a full Google Adwords Consultation service to optimise your campaign for you, but we've also placed some pointers below to help you get the best from Google Adwords.

Be Specific

The best way to get potential customers to your website is through specific keywords. If you sell nodding dogs on your website, you may assume that your best keyword is dogs, but you really don't want to use dogs as a keyword. If you do your adverts will be shown to anyone searching for the word dogs, and if you your advert says something along the lines of 'Cute dogs, take one home today..' and doesn't make it clear what the product is, you'll get thousands of clicks from people looking for something completely different. Plenty of clicks and no sales means money down the drain.

The owner of the above site would be much better served with keywords such as nodding dogs or bobbing dogs.

For the same reasons avoid other generic terms like price, sale, or cheap, unless you use them to form part of a phrase, i.e. cheap nodding dogs

Be Relevant

Google constantly monitors your adverts and marks your adverts down for irrelevance. If your adverts or keywords have been disabled it's because Google decided that they weren't relevant enough for you, i.e. not enough people were clicking on your adverts for that term.

Which means you may have to pay more for a keyword, and this can get expensive if it keeps happening, I have seen people paying £5 per click for some keywords!

Tempting as it may be to go for one of the most searched for terms, you should avoid this, remember it isn't about getting thousands of people to your website in the hope that one of them will buy, but rather getting people who are searching for the product you sell to your website to purchase it.

Having your adverts appear when someone searches for Nintendo Wii, might seem like a good idea as it is searched for 10,000 times a day, but Google will soon realise that your keywords are not relevant to your adverts and you'll either have your ad disabled, your keywords disabled or end up paying more and more to have Nintendo Wii as a keyword.

Narrow your keywords down to make them more relevant to the product that you are selling. Put yourself in the position of someone looking for your product and think carefully about the words that they would use to search for your product.

Using Brackets

Another way of focusing your keywords is to use some of the options available in the keywords tool within Adwords itself. For example for the site mentioned above it is probably not a good idea to have the keyword simply as nodding dog as that will trigger the adverts whether nodding is mentioned or dog. So someone searching for cheap dog food may see your ad and click it before realising their mistake.

A better option would be to have the keyword as "nodding dog" in quotes. This means that only that phrase will trigger your adverts, but it can have words before or after. For example nodding dog toy and brown nodding dog will trigger your adverts but brown dog will not.

Brackets around your keyword, e.g. [nodding dog] means that only that exact phrase with no other words will trigger your adverts. This is useful as you'll know that the people seeing your adverts are definitely looking for that term, however if they add any other words, such as nodding dog car toy, it won't trigger your adverts and they won't see your advert at all, so the brackets must be used wisely.

Another option is the minus sign (-), this can be used to denote a word that you do not want to trigger your adverts, known as a negative keyword. For example if your site sold nodding dogs of every colour but black you would add -black as a keyword, ensuring that your advert doesn't appear when someone searches for black nodding dog.

Use Many Adverts

It is also important to have quite a few adverts to try different things and see what works and what doesn't, you should check your account regularly and see what adverts are getting clicks and which ones are not and work out why, the same goes for keywords. If certain keywords aren't working out, stop paying for them.

Don't be afraid to experiment, if something doesn't work, you can always change it.

The Landing Page

The landing page is often overlooked, it is vital that this page not only makes a good impression but that contains the product that the person was searching for.

Visitors make their minds up quickly, if they don't see the product that they were looking for, they'll hit their back button and be off to your competitors site.

Remember, the aim is not to get as many people to your website as possible but to get a good return on your investment. You may get thousands of people visiting your website, but if they weren't looking to purchase your product, they are unlikely to do so because you've a nice website.

Target your keywords, make them relevant, you'll get less hits but the people visiting will be the ones looking for your product and therefore far more likely to buy from you.

Technorati Tags: Google Adwords,Google,Adwords,CPC,PPC,CTR,Click Through Rate,Adwords Optimisation,Horizon Web Development,ROI,Adwords Campaign,Pay Per Click,Advertising,Cost Per Click

Web Hosting and Domains

2008-05-29T15:17:00.001+01:00

We've made some changes to our website here at Horizon Web Development, our hosting packages have been revamped and we now have an automated set up in place meaning you can buy your domain and hosting at once and set up your website immediately.

Domains

If you are looking for a domain name look no further than our new domain name look up feature of our website.

Here simply enter the name you would like to register, all available domains will appear on the following page along with prices and registration periods. Simply tick the box to add the domain name to your basket.

If you already have a domain name registered with another company but are interested in our hosting packages, simply enter your domain in the second box on our hosting package page here. You do not need to transfer your domain over to us to use our hosting packages.

Hosting

We offer some great web hosting packages, with our Starter Package at just £14.99 a year (£1.25 per month) and with more features than many of our rivals business or professional packages.

Simply visit our hosting page to view what we have on offer. If you see a better like for like hosting offer elsewhere in the UK, let us know and we'll match it for you.

Technorati Tags: Website Design,Web Hosting,Horizon Web Development,Cheap Hosting,Hosting,Domains,Domain Names,Domain Name Lookup

Sale now on at Horizon Flash Memory

2008-03-20T20:05:00.001Z

We have just started a massive sale at Horizon Flash Memory. If you are looking for SD cards, look no further as we have slashed 27% off the price of our 4GB SD card - from £15.01 to just £10.99!

We have massive savings on our huge 8GB SD card down from £27.62 to just £22.99 a 17% saving . That is unbelievable value for such a large amount of storage space.

You can also save £2 on our 1GB CompactFlash card, which means you can now pick one up for less than a fiver!

MicroSD cards are also down, we've taken £1.50 off our 512MB microSD card, now priced just £2.99!

There are even greater reductions on our largest capacity microSD card - the 2GB microSD card has 21% off - now just £5.99!

In our miniSD card department we have also dropped prices. The 1GB miniSD cards are also down - saving 33% - just £4.99 each!

xD cards for Olympus or Fuji digital cameras are our No.1 bestseller so a sale wouldn't be a sale without knocking down the price there too. Our 1GB Olympus xD Picture Card is now just £7.99!

If you're not sure whether your camera is compatible please visit the Horizon Flash Memory website to see if your digital camera can accept our xD picture cards.

N.B. All prices exclude VAT and postage.

Horizon Flash Memory, Horizon Web Development, xD Picture Card, SD card, Secure Digital, CompactFlash Type I, CF, CompactFlash, MicroSD card, MiniSD, USB Pen Drives, USB Flash Drives, USB Storage, RAM, DDR, SDRAM, Olympus, Fuji, Olympus Cameras, Fuji Cameras

Update to our Control Panel

2008-03-17T19:36:00.001Z

We are updating our Horizon Web Development web hosting control panel giving it a more modern look making it more intuitive to use. These changes should help those used to using other control panels such as cPanel as it brings the layout more inline with other control panels.

An example of the new look is below:

However the changes are not just aesthetic, we have also made improvements to the features on offer in our control panel and we'll have more information on this at a later date.

Customers should see the changeover to the new control panel in the next few days. Anyone having difficulties should contact our support team.

Technorati Tags: Horizon Web Development,Website Design,Horizonweb,Control Panel,Website Hosting,Web Hosting,Hosting,Cheap Hosting,Affordable,Nottingham

End of an Era

2008-03-04T19:24:00.004Z

This past week has been a sad week for web users, with the final death knell for Netscape. For some it is a sad day and the end of an era, others would say a well flogged old horse has been finally put out of its misery.

When I first starting browsing the web there was really only ever Netscape, it was launched in 1994 and dominated the browser market for most of the nineties, offering better features, faster browsing and generally being more advanced than any of its competitors.

For most internet users today that probably seems pretty hard to believe, but there was an internet before Microsoft Internet Explorer, which itself wasn't launched until 1995 and didn't really start to compete with Netscape until version 3 (IE3), released in 1996. At its peak in 1996 Netscape accounted for 90% of the browser market (at the same time IE had about a 4% market share).

Netscape just had more to offer back then, it was a full internet suite with a built in mail reader, very similar to Mozilla Thunderbird of today, a WYSIWIG HTML editor, that surprisingly at the time was a pretty good match for Microsoft's paid for, Frontpage.

For me Netscape Communicator 4.7, released 1999, was the one that remember most, chiefly because it was the one that I used the longest and also because it was just about the last version of Netscape that I used as my main browser.

This was the peak of the so called 'First Browser War' and unfortunately Netscape dropped the ball. Netscape 5 was in development for a long time, before finally being scrapped. By the time Netscape was purchased by AOL and work began on Netscape 6, Internet Explorer 5 was out (1998) and it pretty much signalled the end of Netscape. By version 5.5 in 2000, I too was using Microsoft Internet Explorer.

To be fair to Netscape, Microsoft always had the advantage, not only were they a huge company, they accounted for around 90% of the operating system market and so included IE with the operating system. Few people felt the need to download a new browser when one was already included with the OS, particularly during the days of dial up.

By the end of 1998 IE had a 50% market share, Netscape had dipped below 50% for the first time. Netscape 6 arrived in 2000, I used it but unfortunately it was a bug ridden flop and so IE5.5 became my browser of choice, as it did for most people. By 2001 Netscape had just 10% of the market share and the browser war was over.

Personally I was glad to see the end of the browser war, not just because it meant that I had just one browser to choose from but because it made website design easier. During the browser wars, website design became a nightmare. Netscape and IE followed their own, mostly incompatible rules, meaning that it was extremely difficult to get a website to display properly in both browsers. This was of the course the days of the 'Best Viewed In' banners. Things were able to move on once again in website design, after the several years of stagnation during the browser wars.

I did download Netscape 7 in 2002 and even Netscape 9 in 2007, but just for nostalgia really. They were unimpressive and so seldom used. By then I had been using Mozilla Firefox for 3 years as my primary browser. With Firefox, Mozilla had done what Netscape had failed to do since the mid nineties, produce a ground breaking and advanced browser, which revitalised the browser market. At the time of my switch to Firefox, Netscape accounted for less than 1% of the browser market and to all intents and purposes, was dead in the water.

Whilst I agree that perhaps the end of Netscape is long overdue, it is sad that the only browser that truly matched IE, is no longer with us. Although a far better browser, Firefox only accounts for about 18% of the browser market share, and will take years to chip away at Internet Explorer's huge lead.

Netscape, Horizon Web Development, Browser Wars, Website Design, Website Hosting, Horizon Blog, Firefox, Netscape Composer, Internet Explorer, FrontPage

What’s new at Horizon Web Development

2008-01-24T19:15:00.001Z

Frequent visitors to the Horizon Web Development site will have noticed a change to the design just before Christmas. Our new website design should make it easier to navigate and also give better information to current customers. The most important changes are to the web hosting section of the site, where we have altered our web hosting packages and now offer a Starter Package giving excellent value at just £14.99 a year or £1.25 per month. We've looked long and hard and there isn't a better offer available on the net, if you find one let us know and we'll match it.

Here is what we are currently offering in our Starter Package:-

Online File Manager
Free Web Mail
FTP Access
Free Website Builder
200 POP3 eMail Addresses & Auto Responders
1GB Mail Box Storage
5GB Bandwidth per Month
750MB Storage Space
Online Web Statistics
FrontPage Extensions
CGI / PERL / PHP / SSI
Mailing Lists
Site Submission to search engines
Google Sitemap Generator

We are currently running a special offer over the winter, whereby anyone who purchases our Starter Package through our site will receive a FREE domain name! To see what domains we have available why not take a look at our domain name look up page.

For those with higher requirements please take a look at our Business and Professional Hosting Packages.

Another important change has been to our website design packages, we now have more detailed information on what is involved and also have feedback from some of our customers. There will be some important changes to this page in the coming weeks so keep your eye on the page if you are looking at getting a new website.

Finally there are also some alterations to the site that have been made with current customers in mind. Now it is possible to view the current status of our network with the System Status page. We will also be adding other customer information to the site at a later date and also possibly a customer zone, with information and help for current customers.

Horizon Web Development, Web Hosting, Website Design, Hosting, Cheap Hosting, Price Match, UK Website Design, Website Design Nottingham

Blog Discounts for Horizon Flash Memory

2007-11-25T16:59:00.001Z

Regular readers of the blog will be aware that there is currently a 5% discount available for Horizon Flash Memory and on any of the products, from SD and xD cards to USB Memory Sticks, for anyone who reads the blog. Unfortunately that discount has ended today. It is still possible however to receive a 5% discount, simply sign up to the Horizon Flash Memory newsletter.

The newsletter gives updates on upcoming products, news on special offers and also information on how to claim further discounts, all exclusive to subscribers.

You can un-subscribe from the newsletter at any time.

For more information please visit the Horizon Flash Memory website.

Horizon Flash Memory, xD Picture Cards, SD cards, USB, Memory Stick, Pen Drive, UFD, USB Flash Memory Drive

The mystery behind SDHC

2007-08-21T19:18:00.001+01:00

For those of us that use SD cards there's a new acronym floating around, SDHC. Many may dismiss this as some kind of marketing gimmick, just another way of dressing up the new batch of 4GB, 8GB and the upcoming 16GB cards. However Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) is far more than just bigger capacity cards, it's a whole new standard and unfortunately that means that your camera or other device probably won't be able to make use of them.

Ordinary SD cards peaked at around 2GB and even this capacity caused problems. Basically the file system that the cards used meant that 1GB was as big as they could get. 2GB was possible with a little bit of tinkering with the file system, however this tinkering meant that many devices wouldn't even recognise 2GB cards (as many people later found out). To continue to create bigger capacity cards a new standard was needed, and SDHC (or SD 2.0) was born.

The new standard means that cards with capacities from 4GB up to 32GB are possible, although only 4GB and 8GB cards are available at the moment.

The new cards also promise greater speeds with the new specification having four speed classes, although in reality there are only three as Class 0 means there is no guaranteed speed. The other classes guarantee a minimum write speed:

Class 2: 2 MB/s
Class 4: 4 MB/s
Class 6: 6 MB/s

All the SDHC cards supplied by Horizon Flash Memory are rated Class 6, with a minimum write speed of 6MB/s.

With the new range of digital cameras reaching up to 12 mega pixels, the humble 1GB and 2GB cards just couldn't cut it. With a 1GB and a 12MP camera, you would only be able to fit around 150 photos on the card, hardly enough for a day out let alone a family holiday. As for video, well it was always tight fitting DVD quality movies on ordinary SD cards but now with the latest High Definition video cameras needing much more space and you would need a pocket full of ordinary SD cards. SDHC now makes recording DVD quality home movies on SD cards a reality and HD home movies a possibility. The fast write speeds of the cards ensure that jerky, stuttering videos should be a thing of the past.

As mentioned earlier, SDHC is a new standard using a new file system. This may mean greater capacities and speeds but it is no use to devices that were built to the old standard. The new file system means that older devices and card readers that only recognise the old file system simply won't be able to read the disks. Only the very latest digital cameras, camcorders and even card readers that recognise both the new and the old standard will be able to make use of SDHC cards, for everything else they are pretty much useless. As consumers we are getting used to this kind of thing, with VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The 'latest technology' is now superseded with increasing regularity. But this doesn't make it any less annoying, particularly if you have just spent several hundred pounds on a new digital camera or camcorder that is not SDHC compatible. In that case you'll just have to wait to be able to make use of the bigger capacity cards, either that or buy a new device.

Most devices are incompatible with SDHC cards, basically anything that first came on sale more than three months ago isn't likely to be able to make use of SDHC cards. Some of the recent devices that are compatible are:

The HTC Touch smartphone
The Palm Treo 680
The Nokia N800 Tablet
Nokia N95 mobile phone
Nikon D40
Nikon D80
Pentax K100D
Pentax K110D
Pentax K10D digital SLRs
Crucial 12 in 1 USB Card Reader

It is likely that all new devices that use SD cards will also support the new standard of SDHC as well as the old.

The faster SDHC cards also have another potential use for Windows Vista users, Windows ReadyBoost. Assuming you have a card reader that is SDHC compatible you can use your SDHC card for caching Windows files, rather than storing them on the hard disk. This will give read speeds around 100 times faster than a traditional hard drive. Particularly useful if you are running Vista with the bare minimum amount of RAM.

While you may be forgiven for thinking that the latest crop of 4GB and 8GB cards could be used to give your device a much needed storage boost, this unfortunately isn't the case. The new standard of SDHC cards are only really useful to those who are purchasing the latest SD enabled devices. For those of us who are still using devices that only read ordinary SD cards, we'll just have to stick to our 1GB and 2GB cards until we buy another SD enabled gadget (which in all fairness probably won't be too far into the future), and make sure that it is SDHC enabled.

If you aren't sure whether your device or a device that you are thinking of purchasing is SDHC compatible, you can contact us here for confirmation.

How to stop spam bots with FormMail and CSS

2007-07-10T01:08:00.001+01:00

Most people who run their own websites have some type of online form as they are very useful for getting the information that you require from a potential client or site visitor, unfortunately there is little to stop spammers or spam bots from using your form too. Which means you get an endless stream of information about cheap holidays, medication and porn sites that they feel you should visit, rather than the enquiries about your products and services that you hoped you'd get.

The more popular and better ranked your site is, the more of these spammers use your contact form, if you're lucky it could just be 20-30 a day, if not it will be upwards of 100 a day. One of the major causes for so much spam coming through your online form, is the form itself. Most people use a ready made form, and why not? Why pay someone else, or spend the time writing thousands of lines of code for a script youself, when you can download one for free? Not to mention that custom written scripts, particularly those that will be the target of countless spammers, have to be very secure. With the free scripts available on line you are assured that thousands, if not millions of people are testing that script and any holes are quickly discovered.

The most popular on line form script is FormMail from Matt's Script Archive. Many web hosts offer this free with their hosting packages, some web designers offer this too and it is available to download in countless locations. The reason for the huge popularity (the site has a PageRank of 7/10) of this script is that it is free, it has been around since 1995 so almost everyone in the industry has heard of it, and it is very simple to use, even for those with little or no knowledge of HTML or Perl.

What isn't generally known is that the script was written by Matt when he was about 16 and still a high school student studying Perl (the programming language that the script is written in), so unfortunately the script was (and still is) full of holes. In fact even though it is still one of the most widely used form to email scripts the general consensus within the webmaster community is 'Don't Use It!'

A better and easier to use script was made by the nms project. This is generally regarded as a far more secure script by the webmaster community but works in a similar way, so no need to change all of your online forms. This is the script that is generally used by Horizon Web Development in their online forms but even though it is quite secure, it still isn't perfect, spammers can still get through by simply filling in your form or by creating an automated 'robot' or spam bot to do it for them.

This is very difficult to guard against as there is no real way of the form being able to tell a spam bot from a real person, or is there?

There is a trick to fool spam bots into filling the form out in a particular way so that they give themselves away, without annoying or asking for extra input from potential clients as a word verification test would do. It is actually amazingly simple, just add an extra text field and name it something that a spam bot would mostly likely be programmed to fill in automatically, such as 'Surname' or 'First Name' or some other variation of it that you haven't used in your real form and assign it to the class 'Surname'. Then in your Stylesheet simply add the following bit of code:

Surname {

visibility: hidden;

}

The 'Surname' field will then be hidden from legitimate users, so they can't accidentally fill it in, but not from spam bots who will see it as merely another field to fill in on your form and mostly likely just another space to insert countless porn links.

So simple and yet brilliant, except that that is as far as I managed to get. As I mentioned our web forms use nms FormMail, but unfortunately there aren't any Perl programmers in the Horizon Web Development Team. We tried and failed to guess at how to edit the FormMail script so that it would verify the 'Surname' field and automatically reject any forms that had that field filled in, our knowledge of HTML, CSS and PHP not really coming in handy.

Many, many hours were spent trawling the internet for a solution, but amazingly none of us were able to find one. Even though it is the most widely used FormMail script, there was no solution to be found for Matt's FormMail script either. It was as if the users of these scripts had never needed to verify fields in their forms.

Then I struck gold! This site:- http://codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=113863 in which 'rwedge' had revealed the answer. Again it was amazingly simple, using the nms FormMail script (and I advise anyone that is using Matt's Script to change to this one as it is far easier to set up and much more secure), add this piece of code into the user customisation section:

# USER CUSTOMISATION SECTION
# --------------------------
# Place any custom code here

use CGI;
sub spam {
my $q = new CGI;
my $spamcheck = $q->param('Surname') || '';
if ($spamcheck ne '') {
print "Location: http://www.farfaraway.com\n\n";
exit;
}
}
spam();

Surname of course being the name of the trick field that you want the spam bots to fill in and location where you want them to be directed after your FormMail script rejects them.

It was all so simple and yet amazingly effective. I felt that I had no choice but to write something about it so that anyone else searching for a solution won't have to devote hours and hours like we did to find the answer.

Since adding that field to our forms and adding the above code to our script we've not had a single spam email via the contact form. If only all other spam could be dealt with so effectively.

Safari BETA for Windows – now working!

2007-06-23T18:07:00.001+01:00

Apple have released another update for Safari and this time it works! Again I must say how impressed I am by how it looks, sites seem to look much better in the browser, in much the same way that they do in Firefox on Linux.

I haven't had much time to play with it yet and I am not sure that it could replace Firefox as my default browser but so far I am impressed. The one thing missing that I have noticed straightaway is the lack of a 'New Tab' button. There also doesn't seem to be a way to add more search engines to the search box, such as Amazon, eBay and so forth.

But it is early days yet and this is afterall only a BETA.

Apple release Safari 3.0.1 – still not working

2007-06-16T17:12:00.001+01:00

I was quite pleased yesterday, I discovered that Apple have released an update for Safari making it Safari 3.0.1. At last I thought, I will be able to use Safari!

I was wrong. Still the same problems persisted, missing text on sites such as BBC News, Amazon, Horizon Web Development and so on. Oddly Horizon Flash Memory is fine, so if I want a new SD card I can use Safari, anything else though and I have to use Firefox.

I am surprised that they have released an update but not sorted out, what must be for most people, the biggest problem with Safari, they can't read the pages.

I hope that they sort it out soon, otherwise this Safari hype could run out of steam and lose all those potential users, myself included.

Safari BETA for Windows – not working yet

2007-06-11T21:35:00.001+01:00

Many designers, be they graphic designers, desktop publishers or web designers have Macs. Not just because they are cooler but also because things seem to just look better on a Mac. I have noticed the same thing with websites viewed on the Mac and as a web designer realised that it may be worth getting one. Well Apple have solved that problem for those web designers who use Windows, with Safari for the PC.

Safari for Windows has been released today and I couldn't resist taking a look, and unfortunately I was disappointed from the off. Firstly I had garbled text. A quick Google, well found nothing as the browser was only released today but I did manage to discover that it was something to do with the font Lucida Grande and that I should uninstall it and then reinstall the one that came with Safari.

Very annoying and I was very close to just removing the browser, but I persevered, I opened my Control Panel, clicked the Fonts folder and deleted both Lucida Grande fonts that I had there. Then I went to the Safari folder (C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources) and copied the two Lucida Grande files there into my Fonts folder and that got it looking normal.

I admit I was impressed with the look and speed of it so I thought I would try another site so just for fun I thought that I would visit the BBC News website and this is what I saw!

Something about cats was all I could gather from that News story, but perhaps it was a one off, so next to the Horizon Web Development site and this:

Oh dear. Trips to Amazon.co.uk and Play.com produced similar results and so in the end I gave up. Not only can I not use this browser for fun but testing web sites in this browser will probably lead me to try and correct problems that don't really exist.

Back to the drawing board for Apple and back to Firefox for me.

SD Card: The New Standard?

2007-05-27T16:13:00.001+01:00

The SD card, or Secure Digital is fast becoming the industry standard for digital cameras. It had succeeded the No.1 card of the late 1990s, Smart Media, by the early 2000s; and now virtually all digital camera makers, not to mention PDA, camcorder, mobile phone and GPS manufacturers use the card.

Having said that calling it the "New Standard" is something of a misnomer. Although used by big brands such as Casio, Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Kodak, Panasonic and Konica Minolta there are three big names in the industry that use their own cards. Olympus and Fuji use the xD card in their digital cameras and Sony use the Memory Stick. So unless your electronics product is made by Sony, Olympus or Fuji, the chances are that you'll need an SD card.

The SD card hasn't reached this level of dominance by chance, this is a quality card and I always ensure that any device I buy either exclusively uses an SD card or at least has an SD card slot. This not only makes all the cards that I have collected from my other devices interchangeable but also mean when I upgrade to a bigger capacity card it can be used in all my devices.

Another reason for their popularity is that SD cards have two smaller cousins that are used in many mobile phones at the moment, miniSD and microSD. The miniSD cards are small at just 20 mm x 21.5 mm x 1.4 mm but the microSD cards are even smaller at just 11 mm x 15 mm x 1 mm and weighing less than half a gram, making them smaller enough to use in even the tinniest of devices. All the mini and micro SD cards sold by Horizon Flash Memory come with an SD adaptor so that they are also backwards compatible with any SD card readers.

Of course the only draw back is that the smaller the cards become the more expensive they are.

The miniSD and microSD cards aren't the only reason for the dominance of the SD cards. SD cards have a faster read/write speed than the likes of the xD card and a maximum capacity of 8GB (only 4GB are currently widely available and coming soon on Horizon Flash Memory), compared to the 2GB max of the xD card. But the SD card has a theoretical maximum capacity of 132GB, four times the theoretical limits of the Memory Stick and 32 times that of the xD cards!

As I said I use them in every device that I can and at the moment that is two mobile phones and a Panasonic Lumix digital camera. The speed and 2GB capacity means that when using my Panasonic Lumix camera I am able to just keep clicking away taking pictures continuously and can store about 700 pictures on the card. On one mobile phone I have a 1GB microSD for storing music, TV shows, documents etc, a life saver when on the move. The other has a miniSD card as is used mainly to transporting documents. The adaptors for the miniSD and microSD mean that they can also be used in my camera and in any card reader that accepts SD cards.

There are many that believe the SD card is the successor to the floppy disk. Which in my view is an ideal replacement that seems to have been a long time in coming. The demise of the floppy disk has been dragging on for years. I miss the floppy, not the slow speeds or the errors or low capacity but the fact that every PC had a floppy drive, they were universal and you could save your work and take it home with you in your shirt pocket, slot into your PC at home and carry on. There have been many attempts to get that kind of flexibility, there was the ZIP drive, but they were expensive and not everyone had them or could afford to have them. Saving your work to a ZIP disk and then making the journey to work/friends or wherever, only to find that they didn't have a ZIP drive!

Then came the CD and DVD, both though had the same problem, they didn't fit into my shirt pocket, or trouser pocket, or any pocket for that matter. Of course then there was the bigger problem of taking information on a CD but then being unable to change it and save it back to the same CD when out and about! Something that was taken for granted with floppies.

As for USB flash drives I have found them very unreliable and for some reason not as handy as an SD card. Most, if not all, new PCs come fitted with card readers, all of which read SD cards. They are small (even the largest of the SD family fit into my shirt pocket with room to spare for a card reader), fast and the readers are almost ubiquitous so the SD card is at last the perfect replacement for the floppy.

Unlike the floppy disk though, SD cards are used and will be used in all manner of gadgets in the home. At the moment it is printers, TVs, Cameras, Camcorders, PCs, Media Centers, and DVD recorders with SD card slots but it won't be long until fridges, cookers, microwaves and even washing machines have them.

SD Card, microSD, miniSD, CompactFlash, xD, Card Readers, Floppy Disk, Digital Cameras, Mobile Phones, Flash Drives, Flash Storage

Be Ranked No.1 on Google!

2007-05-24T16:49:00.001+01:00

"We can guarantee to get your site a Top Ten ranking in Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Lycos…."

I get emails like the above quite a lot, usually I can't go a week or so without having some random company sending me an email guaranteeing that they'll get my site ranked No.1 in Google, or even just the Top Ten for the less optimistic ones.

The fact is that no one can guarantee any kind of ranking on Google and the other search engines, not a top ten ranking, and certainly not the prized No.1 position. Many of the so called SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) specialists that send these emails are just after a quick buck. Some won't even attempt to get you higher others will get you ranked for a keyword or phrase that you are already highly ranked for, such as in our case Horizon Web Development, which we are already in the top two for, as you can see here (I'll save you having to type in "Horizon Web Development").

Others use unscrupulous tactics that could get you banned from Google and other search engines, typically after you've paid. A common tactic is what is known as keyword spamming or keyword stuffing whereby they literally cram your pages with keywords in lists or in such a way as to make sections of your site unreadable. Tactics such as this usually work quite well at first, normally right up until after you've parted with your cash and thanked them for the good work, and then get you banned.

A famous US company that employed unscrupulous tactics is the one mentioned in this article.

So how can you be sure that you're aren't being conned into parting with your hard earned cash for little or no benefit? Well here's a bit of advice:

Always check out their website and find out how well it is ranked.
Carry out a quick Google search to see if you can find recommendations or complaints out there from any of their previous customers, or to just get a general idea of their reputation.
If they have a list of previous clients, contact one or two to ask what they thought of the company.
Ask them what they are going to actually do to get your site better ranked. Never hand over control of your site to a company without knowing exactly what they are going to do.
Ask for a detailed invoice so that you can clearly see what your money has got and don't let them blind you with jargon.
Finally make sure that you check to ensure that they've delivered what they have promised, preferably before you pay!

At Horizon Web Development we design our websites with Search Engine Optimisation in mind and are always on hand to offer advice of keywords, SEO, rankings and search engines.

SEO, Horizon Web Development, Web Design, Site Design, Google, Google Ranking, PageRank, Search Engine Results, Keywords

Is your site well designed?

2007-05-07T01:45:00.001+01:00

It's a common problem. Many businesses have websites designed by local web design companies and believe that they've received a good service, when in fact they receive an absolute turkey of a website that looks like it was designed by an unskilled amateur ten years ago. But how can you tell if you have a well designed site?

The first thing to check your site for is what's known as the 1990s look. These are sites that were either designed in the early days of the internet or by designers who learnt their trade in the early days and haven't updated their skills. A classic example of this kind of site is Northbridge Police Department.

How to tell if you have a site from the 1990s

Background image - The days of the quirky repeating background image are fortunately long gone. If your site has a repeating background such as the one in the above example you should think about a change. A background image shouldn't interfere with what's on the page or make the text difficult to read and it certainly shouldn't repeat an image over and over.
Animated GIF's - Another sure-fire way to make your site look dated. The animated GIF was a novel idea, briefly, and has long since lost its charm. Nowadays annoying flashing animations such the US flag in the above example make a site look out of date, cheap and unprofessional and should be avoided at all costs. It is much better to have a nice clear picture that complements your design than some meaningless moving picture.
Music – It is simple to embed a little sound clip into a page and so about ten years ago everyone was doing it, and to be fair I was one of them. But I soon realised that there is nothing more annoying when trying to read text than having the same piece of music playing over and over and over. It is not only distracting, but if it can't be turned off, deeply annoying. Remember the person viewing your site may be doing so late at night, on a train or during a meeting, so the last thing they want is to have a crap little ditty that you particularly liked blaring out uncontrollably. If your site plays a little tune, remove it. If you disagree and like having the sound effect, try reading your whole site text with it playing and see if you change your mind.
Splash Pages – Something else that was 'in' several years ago. It seemed that if you wanted to portray an air of professionalism on your website then you needed a splash page. However today nothing could be further from the truth. If you have one, get rid of it as soon as possible. Apart from wasting the most important page on your site and being annoying it is one of the most obvious giveaways of a site from the 1990s. Most web designers avoid these now, however some clients still ask for them.
Site Best Viewed with…. – If your site has "Site Best Viewed at 800x600" or something along those lines then it is in serious need of a revamp. These kinds of messages were popular in the late 1990s, I didn't actually use them myself but most sites did and even today there are some relics of sites that still have them. They are completely pointless as no visitor would ever really change their screen resolution just to view your site, they'd just go elsewhere. It also shows laziness on the part of the web designer, as if they either couldn't be bothered or weren't capable of designing a site that looks good on any screen resolution. The other popular "Best Viewed with…" message from the time was "Best Viewed with Internet Explorer/Netscape." These messages (in most cases buttons) were from the browsers wars of the mid-nineties between Netscape and Internet Explorer. If your site has one of these buttons (and many do) remove it immediately. The so called 'Browser War' ended in 1999 (yes that is eight years ago!) so you are making your site look incredibly dated. More so if you have a Netscape button as Netscape pretty much disappeared and now accounts for less than 1% of the browser market so if you are claiming that your site is best viewed with Netscape on your homepage you are alienating 99% of your visitors.
Blinking/Scrolling Text – These are both now seen as something of a joke among web designers. Blinking text was never really that popular amongst designers but because it was a simple effect, achieved by just placing <blink> either side of the word you wish to make blink (e.g. My <blink>Flashing</blink> Text), that didn't require a knowledge of JavaScript or DHTML it was widely used by hobbyists and amateur web designers for homepages. It was a similar story with scrolling text and both became associated with poorly designed, amateurish sites and so just about everyone stopped using them by the late 1990s. Again if your site has them, look for a new designer.
Garish Text/Background Colours – This is another sign of a bad web designer or a really old site from the 1990s. Simply because you could have a variety of different coloured backgrounds many people, especially new or amateur website designers did. This led to sites that had text that was near on impossible to read. Colour clashes such as a bright red background and yellow text were highly popular! Some sites even had sections in different colours resulting a multi coloured mess that was impossible to read. The general rule of thumb when it comes to backgrounds is to have a white or very light coloured background with black text or a very dark or black background with white text. Most sensible designers don't try to go for something in between. If your site has a coloured background and coloured text you should certainly think about a change. Not only does it make your site text hard to read but it makes it look like a personal website from the late 1990s.
Non-Standard Fonts – Another technique that was popular with novices back in the 1990s was to make good use of the available fonts, I have even come across sites that had different fonts for each paragraph! While it may have seemed a good idea at the time, designers must remember that not everyone has the same fonts on their PC. Even those that did have the necessary fancy fonts would most likely find the text difficult to read. If your site is using fancy fonts as the main site text you should think about a changing to a more common font, such as Arial, Georgia, Tahoma or Verdana. Studies have shown that the easiest fonts to read are Sans Serif fonts such as Arial and Verdana so while it may look fancier to have a great unique font, the viewer won't appreciate it and will probably think your site is from the late 90s.

If your site doesn't have any of the above then you can breathe a sigh of relief but that doesn't necessarily mean that you have a well designed site. There is more to a well designed site than simply the look of it but we'll come back to this in a future post.

Horizon Flash Memory

2007-03-15T00:34:00.000Z

It has been a while since the last post on the blog and there is a good reason for this - Horizon Flash Memory. This site will be officially launched in the coming weeks but we are giving Horizon Web Development customers and readers of this blog an early chance to get your hands on these great flash cards from Crucial at great prices.

We're giving Horizon Web Development customers 10% off any orders from the site, this discount voucher will be arriving via email in the next few weeks or so. If you'd rather not wait we are also giving readers of this blog a 5% discount off any orders on the Horizon Flash Memory site.

To get the 5% discount simply enter I-READ-THE-BLOG in the space Coupon space at the checkout, there is only a limited number available so be quick.

The site offers a range of flash cards such as SD , miniSD, microSD, MultiMedia, CompactFlash, xD Picture and also USB card readers, all the Crucial Cards have a Lifetime warranty and all prices include delivery.

Flash Card, MMC, SD Cards, miniSD, microSD, MultiMedia, CompactFlash, Digital Camera, mobile, mp3 players, USB, xD Picture Card, xD, Card Reader, Memory Card, photography, flash, laptops, camera, flash drive.

eBay Auctions.

2007-01-11T19:42:00.000Z

Once again the eBay auctions are back. Although they have a slightly more expensive starting price than some previous auctions (formerly £9.99, now £19.99), it is still excellent value. The hosting package alone is worth more than the £19.99 starting price.

The most important thing of course is the design, just what do you get for your money? Well take a look at some previous auction winners below:-

Some of the winners added a few extras once their site was completed, so the above sites are not a precise example of what the auction winner will receive, however all parts of the actual design were included in the auction and should give a good idea of just how your site could look.

I really don't think that you can find anywhere else that will design you a five page website, host it for one year and optimise it all for under £20.

Horizon Web Development, eBay, eBay Auctions, Website Design, Cheap Website Design, Web Hosting, Free Web Hosting, Web Host, Cheap Web Hosting, Horizonweb, Web site Design, Website.

Happy New Year

2006-12-31T18:36:00.000Z

I'd just like to wish everyone a Happy New Year and I hope you have a great 2007!

Google Myths.

2006-12-31T18:32:00.000Z

Google Myths

I came across this interesting article on Google the other day and I have to admit that I also believed at least some of these myths to be true. Particulary myths 1 and 2, which is the main reason that I do not use Google Desktop Search. I should perhaps rethink that now. It's amazing how these kind of myths start and are spread very quickly as fact.

Google, Myths, Google-Myths, Horizon, Horizon-Web-Development, Desktop-Search, Search

How well is your site doing?

2006-12-18T02:06:00.000Z

You have your site up and running, you've done all the SEO, or had someone else do it for you, and now you're sat back waiting for the hits to come in. Except that they don't, or perhaps not as many as you'd hoped and you're not sure why. What can you do to check on things?

Well, below are some simple tips on discovering how well your site is being ranked in the search engines.

Are the search engines actually finding your site at all?

A simple way to check to see whether your site has been picked up by a particular search engine is, quite simply, to search for it, i.e. just type the name of your site (Horizon Web Development) into the search box. However this doesn't always work so well if you have quite a common business or site name or if you haven't got top ranking for that name. You could well end up trawling through hundreds of pages trying to find your site.

A simpler way would just be to search for the website address itself into the search engine, i.e. www.horizonweb.co.uk, and if your site has been picked up by that particular search engine, it should appear.

A more effective way, that only works using Google, is to type cache:www.yoursitename.co.uk into the search box. If your site has been indexed by Google you will then see a white box filled with text and your website underneath. This box displays information about when your website was last accessed by Google. If you notice that the date that your site was last accessed by Google is several months old, you know you have a problem.

Links

Assuming that you have found your site within the search engines, you will probably now want to know how many sites link to your own. Linking is how most search engines determine how important your site is, the more sites that link to a site, the more important it is and the higher they will rank it.

Thankfully it is very easy to find out, just type link:http://www.yoursitename.co.uk into the search box for MSN and Google and you will be presented with a list of all the sites that link to you. For Yahoo type linkdomain:www.yoursitename.co.uk to get the same information.

This isn't an exhaustive list of all the sites that link to your site, some won't appear such as websites that aren't in the search engine themselves .

Keyword Standing

Checking your keyword rankings in the search engines can be pretty time consuming, you'd have to enter the keyword or phrase into each engine one at a time and then look through the results to find your site. There are, thankfully, quicker ways. This site, GoogleRankings.com for example offers a quick easy way to find where your site ranks for particular keywords and phrases. You just have to enter the search term you'd like to check for and the name of your site so it can look for it in the results and press search.

For example for the keywords, web design, Nottingham, Gedling, Horizon, the Horizon Web Development site ranks No.1 in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Not only is this website extremely useful for pinning down what keywords and search terms you need to work on, but it can also be used to check up on the competition and see where they rank!

SEO, Search Rankings, Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask, Google Sitemaps, Optmisation Advice, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Tips, Optimization, Horizon Web Development, Website Design, Web Design Nottingham, Nottingham, Gedling, Search Advice.