Some of you may have heard that they are filming the new Hollywood blockbuster “World War Z” which stars Brad Pitt in Glasgow over the next few weeks. So after following all the buzz on various social media sites like Twitter and Facebook over the past few days, the team managed to pull themselves away from their desks at lunch time to go see what all the fuss was about.

We didn’t manage to see much of the action which was taking place as most of the streets have now been closed off, however we did hear a few gun shots being fired, and the set that they have created to make Glasgow look like Philadelphia was very impressive.

Its nice to see a bit of the the Hollywood magic come to Glasgow.

We managed to take a few pics from the set  which you can find below.

Google announced this week in a blog post that it has made a significant update to one of its search features called sitelinks, which you may know as those small links you see beneath the main webpage when you search for certain key terms on Google.

Now when you search, you will find a mini description for each link that shows beneath each result, and the full web address of that page also now appears under each link description. You will also now find 12 sitelinks , instead of the 8 links which would have shown previously. Google also confirmed in the their blog post that they are making significant improvements to their search algorithms, which will see them combine the sitelink ranking and the regular result rankings in a hope to provide a higher quality list of links for the user.

According to Daniel Rocha who is one of the Software Engineers in the sitelinks Team at Google, this feature “is particularly handy for large and complex websites.  Sitelinks can also give you a good overview of a website’s content, and let webmasters expose areas of the site that visitors may not know about.”

Below is an example of how our website is now displayed on Google with the new sitelinks.

The new update will become effective over the next few days for everyone and will be supported in all modern browsers.

Overall the new sitelinks will make the user experience much quicker and easier, and far more relevant from what we have seen before. What do you think of the new sitelinks? And will they have an impact on SEO ?

Matthew Marley

360innovate

We are delighted to announce that we have recently acquired a large number of clients from Sabre Webdesign in Glasgow.

We are excited at the prospect of working on some great new web development and internet marketing projects with our new clients that include restaurants, photographers, florists, large ecommerce sites and public sector clients including the NHS, a few large national and international organisations.

We would like to welcome all our new clients and look forward to working with them.

Facebook launched its new business centre product this week following Google’s recent announcement this its now fast tracking its Google + for business service. The new service has been designed to help small businesses who wish to promote their business and engage with new and potential customers online set up a Facebook page, if they have not already done so. Many local businesses are still using profile pages as this is a much easier way to connect with Facebook users, however this is against Facebook’s T&C’s and it has been rumoured that Facebook will begin to shut these down shortly. “Facebook For Business” which was launched on Tuesday, gives users a step by step guide how to set up a custom business page, build a community online and create targeted adverts aimed at specific demographics. It also makes it much easier for you to find the various social plugins that can be used to promote you Facebook page on various other social platforms including blogs and your website.

If your business is looking for a custom Facebook page and would like to discuss further please feel free to contact our social media management team at 360innovate on 0844 414 0434

Matthew Marley

Looks like Google is rolling out a nice little update to its search bar. We have been testing this new feature this morning and it seems to be intermittent just now which could mean that it could still be under development. The new feature will now make the navigation bar at the top of the page sticky, this makes perfect sense as users want the ability to modify their search queries and click other links that are part of the navigation bar while they are scrolling on the page.

 
This could also be the reason that Google has decided to remove the search bar at the bottom of its page. Hopefully this update will also be rolled out to other Google products like G+, Gmail and Google Reader soon, which will give users a universal experience across all of Google properties.

Matthew Marley

What has Google done?

After the recent page rank update and the update to Google’s interface we have noticed that several shopping sites, including Amazon and Play have been badly affected by having really nasty looking meta descriptions.

I initially noticed this issue while doing weekly checks on a clients site and noticed that visits had dropped slighty for certain keywords.  So I ran a quick search and found something weird had happened to their listing on the search engine results page.  Google had placed ‘Product 1 – 7 of 7 – ‘followed by the sites defined meta description.  I immediately checked the meta descriptions on the page and had one of our developers look at the code, he could notice anything that immediately stood out.

So I then went on to search Google using the string ‘inurl:.cart.php?m=product_list’ and found 100s of pages that have been affected by the same issue!  This tells me that this is not an isolated incident.

My colleague John McCollum, a developer here at 360innovate, discovered that it was also happening to Amazon.  We then went on to find that it’s also affecting Play and Argos – there are examples at the bottom of this post.

Now, we understand why this would happen if you didn’t specify a meta description, or if your meta description was not relevant enough to the content of the page.  But most of the sites we have found have had proper meta descriptions in place, so there is no reason for Google to add in this information before the listing.

I am unsure if this update was intentional or not, some people might argue that it is to add value to the result and provide additional information to the searcher about the number of products on the page.  If this is Google’s intention the it should read a lot better and say something like ’10 products -’ followed by the meta description.  Not “Product 1 – 7 of 7 -” followed by the meta description.

Examples:

Gordon Campbell

Online marketing can be a great way to generate leads for your business. By creating an online presence you can reach a wide range of customers that you may not be able to through traditional media. However just like a company with a brick and mortar location your online presence needs to be marketed to create awareness. You can create awareness for your company through online leads.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process that moves your website’s listings up on the rankings of a search engines organic results, this can be a time consuming process and takes a lot of work. However if you have a well optimised site, then it can create a steady flow of business and pass you very relevant leads. We have optimised our website for the keywords SEO Glasgow – this obviously brings leads to our site from people search for a SEO service in Glasgow.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is also another great way to generate leads for your business. PPC involves bidding for advertising space in Google’s result pages, these ads will appear at the top of Google’s results pages or on the right hand side. It sounds simple but you have to ensure that you have relevant content on your website, a well optimised advert and a well thought out business strategy. You need to know what keywords would be best for your ad to appear for ensuring that your ad is relevant to the search. Although PPC can be extremely effective there is the risk of throwing lots of money down the drain if you haven’t researched your market properly.

Another way you can generate leads is by interacting on social media sites. This works very well in B2C markets, especially restaurants and hotels. Through social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook it allows you to interact on a personal basis with customers, you can promote any special offers and can target this to certain individuals depending on what they are posting or their recent activities are. We use highly effective software to allow us to monitor your social network accounts and create leads. By simply providing your company address or url on your social network sites this could also create leads for your company.

Through generating leads online you can dramatically increase the traffic to both your online and offline locations. At 360 we know that online lead generation is a cost effective way to generate leads.

Call us today to see how we can help – 0141 241 6190.

At the “Inside Search” media event held in San Francisco on Tuesday, Google announced a few new innovations that are aimed at helping users save time when searching online.  The first was a complete revamp of its mobile search interface which will now give users easier access to restaurants, bars and coffee shops in their local area. The new mobile version of Google.com which has a new set of icons at the bottom of the mobile site will gives users instant access to local search results. Google Goggles also has a new translate feature which will allow users to point their phone at any foreign text and then receive instant translation to their native language.

 
Next was Google desktop which will have a few new features, this includes voice search similar to mobile voice search.  Users will be given a microphone icon next to the search bar which you can speak your query to find what you are looking for. Mike Cohen, the manager of speech technology at Google, said: “I want people to be able to speak [their query] to find what they want…We want to change users’ mental model, he also revealed that there is two years’ worth of mobile speech put into Google’s system every day and added that the voice team were working hard to improve the tool’s accuracy. You will also now be able to drag or upload images directly in to the search bar, Google will then take your image and break down the components and provide you with any relevant information that it has stored on that image. Both of these new features will be rolling out over the next few days

Finally, Google Instant Pages which is designed to prerender search results in the background which Google is confident that you will click. This will save users between two and five seconds on typical searches giving near instant page display.

Amit Singhal, who leads Google’s search and development, said

“Instant Pages is the next big leap for Google,” “It will break down big barriers in users’ quest for information. At the end of the day our job is to get the information and knowledge people need in a blink of an eye.”

The beta of Instant Pages will roll out the week; however will only be available to Google Chrome users for now.

Something that was missing from the event was the mention of the new social features that Google have introduced, maybe these will be announced at a later date when Google finally decides what its going to do in the social media space.

Matthew Marley – 360innovate

Job Title: Business Development Executive

Based: Glasgow City centre

Reporting to: Operations Director

The Company

Based in Glasgow’s city centre, 360innovate are a dynamic, forward thinking web design and internet marketing company.  We provide web design and online marketing solutions to a large variety of clients across the UK.

The role

Due to an increased demand in our service, we are now the position to recruit a business development executive.  We are looking for candidates that are ambitious, have excellent communication skills and have previously worked in a sales environment.

Key responsibilities

• Responding to sales inquiries from new and existing customers
• Proactively generate new sales leads
• Meeting monthly sales goals and targets
• Producing monthly sales reports
• Negotiating the agreement terms and closing sales
• Upsell to take advantage of every sales opportunity
• Monitor and report on the current market and competitor activities to identify new business opportunities

Essential Skills/Experience

• Able to demonstrate consistently meeting sales targets
• Good communication, writing and customer service skills
• Excellent problem solving and organisation skills
• Able to communicate complicated technical issues, with effective presentation skills
• Self-motivated and flexible to work with minimum supervision
• Excellent interpersonal, negotiation and communication skills
• Should be able to quickly establish rapport
• Highly innovative and proactive
• Should be able to handle varied tasks

Desirable Skills/Experience

• Knowledge of social media marketing
• Knowledge of search engine optimisation
• Understanding of search engine optimisation
• Understanding of PPC marketing
• Knowledge of content management systems (Drupal, Joomla,Wordpress etc)

• Previous experience selling within the web development/digital market

Candidates should apply by sending their CV to info@360innovate.co.uk.

A basic guide to using WYSIWYG for content managed systems.

Definition

WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get

The purpose of a WYSIWYG editor is to let a content editor update web content without having to know complex code. Sounds pretty straight forward, right? – Well it is… and its isn’t.

At 360innovate we create content managed websites for many of our clients. Often incorporating the use of WYSIWYG Text editors that allow non-skilled users to edit and update website content.

It is very easy to get stuck into using a WYSIWYG editor and create content right away, however it is also easy to create bad content which may be detrimental to the users of your site.

A little bit of understanding of what is happening behind the scenes of a WYSIWYG editor can help to produce results that are easier to achieve and better for website users, search engines and you.

The intention of this post is to enhance a first time user’s understanding and to give a bit of best practice advice along the way.

Why is it important to know these things?

A basic understanding of the different user types that may visit and interact with your website can be helpful in creating content that will add value to your site. If your content is easy to read and engaging it can pay real dividends with you users response.

In addition if you structure your content in a meaningful and semantic manner it can help to improve your search engine rankings.

Hidden Code!

When using a WYSIWYG to create content, the WYSIWYG editor is working hard in the background to translate your intentions into HTML code which will eventually be added to your web page.

HTML uses a tag based system to give plain text meaning. When you write a few lines of text  in a WYSIWYG and hit return the editor will be creating the HTML code(markup) in the background to make your text appear as a paragraph. When you select a word within your paragraph and make it bold, the editor wraps this word with more markup to tell the word how to behave.

A paragraph will look this this in raw format:
<p>This a paragraph with tags at the beginning and the end which indicate opening and closing of the code.</p>

A list of other common tags:

Links

<a href="http:www.google.com">This is a link to google</a>

Bold Emphasis

<strong>Bold Words</strong>

Lists (unordered)

<ul>
<li>List item </li>
<li>List item </li>
<li>List item </li>
</ul>

Which will look like this:

• List item
• List item
• List item

Lists (ordered)

<ol>
<li>List item </li>
<li>List item </li>
<li>List item </li>
</ol>

Which will look like this:

1. List item
2. List item
3. List item

Headers

<h1>Important Header</h1>
<h2>Quite Important Sub-heading</h2>
<h3>Slightly Less Important heading</h3>

Example of these tags in use:

<h2>Welcome to my test page</h2>
<p>This the first paragraph in my test page. I will use the content of this paragraph to explain a little bit about HTML tags</p>
<h3>Sub-headings help to break up blocks of text</h3>
<p>This second paragraph contains <strong>bold text</strong> and a <a href="http://www.google.com">link to google</a> < /p>
<h4>A list of things:</h4>
<ul>
<li>This is a list item </li>
<li>This is also a list item plus a link to <a href="http://www.google.com">google</a></li>
<li>This is just a regular List item</li>
</ul>

Below is how that code looks to the user.

Welcome to my test page

This the first paragraph in my test page. I will use the content of this paragraph to explain a little bit about HTML tags

Sub-headings help to break up blocks of text

This second paragraph contains bold text and a link to google

A list of things:

• This is a list item
• This is also a list item plus a link to google
• This is just a regular List item

Creating Good content

There are a number of different WYSIWYG Editors that are used widely for content management systems and other application on the internet. Functionality can vary from editor to editor, some have a huge array of options for creating content, others have a stripped down set of tools. Here at 360 we certainly favour keeping things simple when it come to updating content for a content managed website.

We often use a WYSIWIG called Tiny MCE, this is a widely used tool and is highly configurable. For most applications we tend to strip away some of the more complicated functionality and strip it down to the bear essentials. The reason we reduce the capability of the editor is to make it easier for the user and also to reduce the any possibility of creating “Bad Code” – more on bad code later.

What is good content?

Good content should be meaningful and easy to to read (This post is the only exception to the rule!).

Meaningful content can be considered primarily as being contextually relevant and readable for the end user. It can also concern how you set up your content so that it can be understood by search engines.

There are techniques and best practices that can be used that will ensure your content can be digested easily by your users and also help to search engines index your page so that it can be found by people searching for your topics.

Headings should be descriptive but concise – summing up the content to follow.

Paragraphs should be created in bite sizes chunks, that users can choose to dip in and out of.

Meaningful sub-headings throughout content will allow for easy scanning of pages.

For lists of items where the order is unimportant use the Unordered list (bulleted) button.

Unordered List Example – Things on my desk:

• Phone
• Newspaper
• Laptop
• Screwdriver (no sure why!)

For lists where the order is important you should use the Ordered list (numbered) button

Ordered List Example – Make tea:

1. Fill kettle with water
2. Set to boil
3. Fetch mug
4. Place teabag in mug
5. Pour boiled water into mug
6. Stir teabag then remove
7. Add milk and sugar (optional)

If a section of content is overworked with a WYSIWYG editor  the results can be

Bad Content – What not to do:

Many WYSIWYG systems allow for the addition of extra added features for decorating text. The ability to chage fonts and add different colours to text is common. It may be tempting to try and spruce up your content by playing the various effects available through the WYSIWYG.

DONT DO IT!!!!

IT WILL LOOK TERRIBLE!!!!

Why the dramatic statements?  Well thats years of eperience talking – I have seen the same mistakes repeated on many occasions by many different people. So what are these mistake and how can you avoid them?

“Jazzing” content up with different fonts.

Changing the font to make a bit of text stand out from the rest may seen like a decent idea but if your website has been built well it should already have a least a little bit if typographic styling which should more than suffice for 99.9% of the time.

Having more than one font for the body text of you web page will result in a mish-mash of styles that will rarely make the text any more readable or look any better. In addition the code generated by the WYSIWYG is likeley to mean nothing from a semantic point of view so any emphasis will be missed by search engines and people using screen readers.

Change the font size

This one catches a lot of people out – they start to play with font resizing options and before they know it a whle page of content is set to several different sizes and it is sometimes hard to tell whether a block of text has been resized or not. The truth is that a well designed website should make enough provision for the styling of text without the need for resizing. No content editor should have to use font resizing to format their site content – the default typography styles should suffice for all your content.

This is important to remember because changing the font size will create inconsistencies in how you are presenting your content to the end user, an unprofessional look and feel can affect a user’s perception of your business or organisationas a whole.

Adding a splash of colour.

Again it may be easy and tempting brighten up your page with a splash of colour. In reality you should not have to bother  – a good website design with pre-planned and well though out typography should provide all the typographic tools to deliver your content without the need for ‘crazy’ and ‘fun’ additional colours.

Adding colour to convey meaning is also bad practice as no semantic meaning is implied when you re-colour a font.

If you want your content to mean something to all users and search engines place your “Summer Sale Now On!” text in a heading and follow it with some descriptive content.

Why have all these tools and not put them to use?

WYSIWYG text editors are designed to plugged in or bolted on to other applications – they are designed to cater for a broad spectrum of users and often this means non-technical users can end up working with systems that are unnecessarily complicated. Often additional features are available that users will never need for their day-to-day content management purposes.

Conclusions

Make your content easy to read. Keep it simple. Dont go crazy with the typography options on the content editor. Maintain consistency across your content.

Googles webmaster  guidelines:

“Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.”

Provided you have a web design you are happy with you should not have to get involved in the visual appearance of your website – it should look after it’s self – leaving you to look after the cration of valuable and meaningful content.

Further reading

As mentioned at the top this post this article is intended as a very basic guide to getting started with WYSIWYG. If you are a content editor who should or would like to find out a bit more about the stuff I have talked about here  please click on some te links below.

Tips for good web content

Jacob Nielsen article Write for the web

More on Jacob Nielsen

List of WYSIWYG editors

Another list of WYSIWYG editors