Lucidity Technologies - Blog

Is Social Media marketing important and do I really need to master it? Part 1

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:14:00 +0100

Social media marketing is the promotion of your business, charity, organisation or website through social media channels, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook etc. The benefits are increased links, traffic and the positioning of yourself as an authority on your chosen subject.

It is low cost and high impact. There is no other low cost promotional method out there that will give you such large numbers of traffic. The more of an authority you position yourself as, the more you will have returning traffic and so the chance to promote yourself and your services.

Do you sell products and or services?

Do you publish content for advertisement revenues? If so, social media marketing is the most important tool in your armoury.

Are you one of these people?

Are you the kind of person that does not know much or anything about social media?
Are you the kind of person who is interested but don’t know how to use it?
Are you the kind of person who does not believe in the value that a social media strategy can bring to any site or business.

Read part 2 of this blog.

Guy Fagan
Director - Lucidity Digital
02/09/2010
www.lucidity.ie

Integrating Twitter into my website. Who can I talk to?

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:06:00 +0000

Here in Lucidity we have embraced Twitter and use it regularly. See @luciditytech
December of last year saw our first end to end, enquiry to sign off, web deal done over Twitter.
See the www.lucidity.ie homepage and you will see we have integrated a Twitter box.

You can have one of these social media feeds one your site from as little as €250.00

Give me a call if you have any queries, any comments or if you just wish to talk about social media and how it can help you.

Social media and “share” is here to stay, you need to consider how best to use these new resources to drive enquiries and business your way.

Guy Fagan
04/10/10
Director – Lucidity Technologies
www.lucidity.ie

Part 2 : Why should I use Twitter commercially?

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:04:00 +0000

6. Meet New People- But you don’t have to follow just the people you know. You can also make valuable new contacts with Twitter. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for people to work for your company or you just want to interact with others who like the same music as you, you can find all the new contacts you need through Twitter. Take the time to look through their profile, website links, and past Tweets to determine if it’s someone you’d be interested in following.

7. Be Several Places at Once- Let’s face it–you can’t be everywhere at once. You can’t always afford to fly out to that conference across the country, but you can keep up with it through Twitter. People often Tweet live updates from various events, meaning you can be in several places at once.

8. Build Your Authority- If you’re using Twitter to discuss a particular niche, you can build your authority by writing high quality Tweets. A few ways to build your authority on Twitter are to send out links to useful resources, provide useful tips to your followers, give insight into relevant topics, answer questions, and engage in discussions with your followers.

9. Learn New Tips from Others- In addition to sharing tips, you can also learn new ones from others. That’s one of the things about Twitter that hooked me . So many of the people I’m following provide useful information based on their unique experiences. There really is a wealth of knowledge out there if you know who to follow.

10. It’s Entertaining- Lastly, Twitter is just fun. Come on, what isn’t awesome about following updates from the Big Aristotle (aka Shaq.) But it’s not just about Shaq. You can get involved in some great conversations with your friends, and you’re bound to see some hilarious Tweets that make your day a little better.

Guy Fagan
04/10/10
Director – Lucidity Technologies
www.lucidity.ie

Part 1 : Why should you use Twitter commercially?

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000

1. Keep Track of Breaking News- One of my favourite things about Twitter is it keeps me up to date with all the news that’s important to me. I’m not just talking about world news that you can find on Sky / CNN or anywhere else. I mean industry news that often flies under the radar. By following the right people, I always have the latest niche news I can’t find anywhere else.

2. Monitor Your Reputation- If you’re using twitter for professional purposes, it can be an effective tool for online reputation management. Track your name to keep tabs on what people are saying about you at any given time. This information can be useful for fixing in-house problems, and it can also help you eliminate any untrue rumours that might be spreading around.

3. Fast Answers- If nobody is around to answer your question or you just want a fresh perspective on a topic, Twitter is one of the best ways to get a fast response. Simply pose your question to the community, and within minutes, you’ll have an array of responses from your followers. It could even spark a larger discussion that gets you some attention.

4. Gain Exposure for Your Website- Perhaps the most obvious benefit of Twitter is generating traffic to your website. When you’re connected with followers who care about you, they’ll help spread your content by ReTweeting it to their friends. Just be careful that you don’t overdo the self-promotion as that will drive your followers away. Use Twitter responsibly, and you’ll experience more traffic to your blog and website.

5. Stay in Touch- Whether it’s a business contact from across the country or a friend from down the street, connecting with them on Twitter is an easy way to stay in touch. You’ll always know what they’re up to, and you can engage in brief discussions through DM or @ messages. Even if it’s someone you see all the time, you might get to experience a whole new side of them by following them on Twitter.

Part 2 to follow

Guy Fagan
04/10/10
Director – Lucidity Technologies
www.lucidity.ie

Is Twitter (Micro-Blogging) for me? Random thoughts on the subject...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:47:00 +0000

Twitter is one of those things that either you get or you don’t. If you don’t get it, then you probably won’t miss it that much since it was never a part of your daily life. But if you get Twitter, and you have used it, then you understand just how powerful a tool it is…and you probably can’t imagine not using it on a daily basis.

It has revolutionized the way I do many things in the area of communication, work, relationships, hobbies, news, trends, collaboration, etc.
Some online polls suggest that the early commercial embracers have reported that up to 75% of the people that they meet, collaborate with, and talk over coffee with are people they have met and communicated with on Twitter.

What Wikipedia has to say about Twitter :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

We have built a website plug in module that enables you to plug in social media tools such as Twitter & Facebook feeds to your website.
As an existing website customer of Lucidity, you can avail of these Google ranking enhancements from as little as €250.00.
The effect of such social media integration to the website is truly astonishing when you look at your analytics for traffic and review before integration and then after integration.

Follow Lucidity Technologies @luciditytech

Guy Fagan
04/03/10
Director – Lucidity Technologies
www.lucidity.ie

Developing and deploying websites

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:18:00 +0100

Have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes when we develop a website for you?

In Lucidity we have developed procedures that allow us to deliver high quality websites consistently, while quickly responding to any changes that need to be made as we go along.

Collaboration:
Websites in Lucidity are developed as a team. While the Internet offers great tools for collaboration, there’s nothing like having all the developers in the same room. Whenever questions or issues arise, answers are available immediately from the other developers. Each of the developers is running their own version of the code, so we can work in parallel without stepping on each others’ feet. Changes are synchronised often, so we all have the most recent version of the code.

Version control:
Git! That’s not an insult, that’s the name of a powerful, fast and reliable version control software we use here at Lucidity. Version control allows us to know for each change in the code who changed it, what was changed, and when was it changed. It allows us to quickly pinpoint and resolve issues should they arise, or go back to older version if needed.

Development environments:
Each change is tested throughout. First of all each developer tests it locally on our server. Once we see everything works, we have an automated procedure to copy all the code to the development server. The development server is identical to the production server. We get several people on the team to test out things on the development server to see everything works correctly. Once that’s done we send it to the customer. The customer can check out all the functionality without any risk of the changes affecting the production website. Once it is approved, our automated procedures will automatically deploy the development website to the live website. Once it is live, we will test it once again.

Together, this allows Lucidity to develop high quality websites and respond quickly and efficiently to the needs of our customers as they arise.

Microformats

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:49:00 +0100

What are microformats?

Microformats are basically existing HTML and XHTML tags structured in a standard way to convey specific information, like address, events, reviews etc. They are not intended to directly help end-users but are instead intended to be interpreted by software.

Microformats are viewed by some as the 1^st step along the path to the “Semantic Web”, Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web in the future.

What do they do?

Microformats make it easier for software to identify specific information and determine how this information should be handled. For example a search engine spider crawling a website would come across a contact page on a website with a Microformat h-card (web version of a v-card). From this page it would then very easily be able to categorise the information into name, address, phone number, email address, longitude and latitude etc...

How can they help search engine optimization?

It is already rumored that Yahoo! Is giving a big weighting to Microformats in your web pages and also that Google in the US is using it for contact and location information. Weather this is true or not nobody can say, however, from my research it is certainly more than a co-incidence that a lot of the higher ranking sites have microformats installed. This is particularly prevalent in directory listing websites.

To understand why Microformats are gaining in popularity and weighting in the search engines all you have to do is picture a couple of senarios:

You are searching for someone online. So you type their name into Google. You are then presented with the persons contact details, links to websites they have profiles on, a picture and even their company contact details.
You are searching for a product “Nintendo Wii”. You are returned with not only a list of websites that sell the Wii but also a list of reviews, average ratings, prices for comparison and many other product details.
Microformats can also be used to store information about events. So if you were looking for information on an upcoming event you could search for the event name or even date and you’d find out the name, date and time and could even be provided a map to the location.

All this is very useful information to the user and for that reason alone will help your site move up the rankings on the major search engines.

What Microformats are available?

At the moment you can use Microformats to describe, contact information and events. More and more formats are being developed by the active community at microformats.org and there are some extremely interesting ones in the pipeline for launch in the near future. These include:

Audio
Product info
Recipes
Resumes
Reviews

And many many more.

Get started with Sharepoint

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:26:00 +0100

One of the great aspects of Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2008 offering is what it bundles into the package, e.g. a windows domain controller, email server and file and print server platform.

The default install of Microsoft SBS 2008 also comes out of the box with a powerful collaboration platform – Sharepoint version 3. This allows you to create rich sites to manage documents, host online discussions, create Wikis for your teams and generally centralise storage of your documents and your ideas.

The default Sharepoint installation is essentially an empty shell, however, its power lies in its customisability. It is a website, and therefore only requires a browser to view and use. Subsites can be created off the main site, and these subsites can contain completely independent structures and data. You can create workflows to ensure information is entered in a certain format or to that Business Rules are applied to everyday processes.

When presented with this blank canvas, it can be a bit daunting to figure out what you can do. However, Microsoft has lent a helping hand. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/bb407286.aspx (overview).

Microsoft has released a suite of 40 Sharepoint templates which can assist in moving to Sharepoint or inspiring further research into its capabilities. While the templates are a bit fiddly to install – they require access to the server hosting Sharepoint, they are then immediately usable on the site. The templates include ones for a document review site, a project tracking and budgeting site, an employee vacation site with vacation approval or denial built in. These leverage Sharepoint’s capabilities but can also be expanded upon themselves if they don’t do exactly what you require. Download all 40 templates from here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5807b5ef-57a1-47cb-8666-78c1363f127d&DisplayLang=en

With SBS, the default sharepoint install can be web accessible, either directly (the default port is 987) or through Outlook Web Access. This allows you access to your important information anywhere, and at any time, and all you need is a web browser.

Emmett Higgins

9/9/09

www.lucidity.ie

Dedicated Servers

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:54:00 +0100

A dedicated hosting service, dedicated server, or managed hosting service is a type of Internet hosting in which the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone. This is more flexible than shared hosting, as organizations have full control over the server(s), including choice of operating system, hardware, etc. Server administration can usually be provided by the hosting company as an add-on service. In some cases a dedicated server can offer less overhead and a larger return on investment. Dedicated servers are most often housed in data centres, similar to colocation facilities, providing redundant power sources and HVAC systems. In contrast to collocation, the server hardware is owned by the provider and in some cases they will provide support for your operating system or applications.

Management
Managed dedicated server
To date, no industry standards have been set to clearly define the management role of dedicated server providers. What this means is that each provider will use industry standard terms, but each provider will define them differently. For some dedicated server providers, fully managed is defined as having a web based control panel while other providers define it as having dedicated system engineers readily available to handle all server and network related functions of the dedicated server provider.

Server management can include some or all of the following:

Operating system updates
Application updates
Server monitoring
SNMP hardware monitoring
Application monitoring
Technical support
Firewall services
Antivirus updates
Security audits
DDoS protection and mitigation
Intrusion detection
Backups and restoration
Disaster recovery
DNS hosting service
Load balancing
Database administration
Performance tuning
Software installation and configuration
User management
Programming consultation
Dedicated hosting server providers define their level of management based on the services they provide. In comparison, fully managed could equal self managed from provider to provider.

Administrative maintenance of the operating system, often including upgrades, security patches, and sometimes even daemon updates are included. Differing levels of management may include adding users, domains, daemon configuration, or even custom programming.

Dedicated server hosting providers may provide the following types of server managed support:

Fully Managed - Includes monitoring, software updates, reboots, security patches and operating system upgrades. Customers are completely hands-off.
Managed - Includes medium level of management, monitoring, updates, and a limited amount of support. Customers may perform specific tasks.
Self Managed - Includes regular monitoring and some maintenance. Customers provide most operations and tasks on dedicated server.
Unmanaged - Little to no involvement from service provider. Customers provide all maintenance, upgrades, patches, and security.
Note: The provider will continue to maintain security on the network regardless of support level.

Guy Fagan
15/06/09
Director – Lucidity Technologies
www.lucidity.ie

Shared Hosting

Tue, 12 May 2009 12:11:00 +0100

Are you considering writing a blog, setting up a personal website, doing some photo sharing or hosting a forum?
Are finances not what they once used to be or do you just wish to trial a new project and not expose yourself to financial risk?
If the answer is yes, you should consider a Shared Hosting platform for your new venture.

Shared Hosting is probably the most common type of web hosting available. It can be UNIX, Linux or Windows based hosting, depending on the operating system the server uses.

The cost of Shared Hosting is relatively low because all of the server’s resources are shared by any number of sites.
There can be hundreds or thousands of sites on a single server, depending on the parameters allowed by the hosting company, all sharing the same processing power, memory and bandwidth.
You need to make sure before you sign up to a provider that you will not be sitting on a server that is being maxed out by some resource hungry site or that the provider has little or no limits as to the number of sites that they will allow on a shared server. We at Lucidity have very strict policies on numbers and resource usage for our shared clients, thus ensuring maximum performance for minimal outlay.

Another often practised margin booster for the unscrupulous provider is to oversell. This is where the provider can massively oversell the space and the bandwidth that the server can actually cover!
Think of it like apples. If I have 10 apples in my hand I will actually sell 15 based on the assumption that not every body will collect on their purchase.
It’s the same on oversold servers; the provider is counting on not all the sites using their allocation. The problem arises when that assumption goes wrong.

Shared Hosting is a no brainer to set up, run and maintain. Server maintenance and upgrades are generally carried out by the provider.

The advantages of shared hosting are many while the disadvantages are few. Make sure you go to a provider that has strict policies regarding usage and allocation of resources.
Its is a great value way to get started in hosting with minimum exposure.

If you are ready to get started with shared hosting for you or your organisation, or, if you have any queries call us today +353 1 2830777 or mail info@lucidity.ie

Guy Fagan
08/05/09
Director – Lucidity Technologies
www.lucidity.ie

Twitter integration on lucidity.ie

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:02:00 +0100

One of the things we wanted for the homepage of our site was twitter integration. I wanted to display the most recent 2 tweets from our twitter page. In this post I will discuss how I did this and how I optimized it in a way that minimized the impact on page response time.

The first step was to get the tweets. Since the site is built with Ruby on Rails, I was able to use the excellent twitter gem. Using this gem, getting the public timeline of statuses for any user is just one line of code:
Twitter::Base.new('luciditytech', 'password').timeline(:user)

However I noticed that it took about 1-2 seconds to retrieve this data. This was far too much time to add to each page load. The twitter statuses would have to be cached in some way. Since they would not be changing too often, I wrote a rake task that would run every few minutes and would update a locally cached list of statuses stored in memcached. The site would then just use the list stored in memcached for every request.

The code for the rake task and the class for retrieving the statuses is available on github.

- Dermot

Web Accessibility

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:29:00 +0000

Why is Accessibility important for your website?
In recent years as the net has become more engrained in our everyday life the issue of accessibility has become more and more prominent. It is estimated that 6% of the population is visually impaired. Add to that people that are also deaf / hard of hearing and people with cognitive/learning disabilities. That’s a large portion of the populous.

We also need to consider the people that browse the Internet using mobile devices, people that don’t have the latest browser and/or plugins, people that browse without graphics and those that don’t have speakers. Add to that people living in rural or remote areas with limited connectivity to the Internet, let alone broadband.

Having an accessible website is of benefit to both the user and the provider. Users will have access to required information / services / products and contact information. Providers will have a larger target audience, better reputation, easier to use website and depending on where you live, conforming to legal requirements.
We really need to look at things from the point of view of those with disabilities.

For example 14% of the population is classified as having some sort of disability. A big portion of those will come across some sort of a barrier in accessing the web. To eliminate the portion of people from accessing your site is from a moral point of view, simply wrong and from a commercial point of is disastrous.

What can be done to help?
One of the biggest things a web design company can do is make your website work correctly on all common browsers, i.e. Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. Other easy to implement features would be re-sizable text, large easy to find navigation bar, and clear, easy-to-follow instructions and of course a consistent layout.

Make sure your website is W3C compliant. W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and they have produced a minimum standard for code that makes it easier to render your website on different browsers and devices.

Use your “alt” tags correctly. If you have an image as a button and it contains text, give a short concise description. The longer your alt tags the longer it will take somebody with a screen reader to navigate through your page.

Consider a mobile version of your website. The number of people browsing the web from mobile devices has gone through the roof in the past 18 months, especially since the introduction of the iPhone. Once you have your main website up and running it is relatively easy to create a mobile version which can automatically detect when you’re browsing using a mobile device and display the site appropriately.

With a little bit of effort and some consideration we can make your website open to a lot more people. We do not have to steer clear of JavaScript, Flash or other rich Multimedia features, we just need to provide an alternative option. Let the users have the choice!

What can Lucidity do to help?

All the websites we are now building are W3C compliant.
Our sites work on all major web browsers.
If you website is not currently WC3 compliant we offer a service to convert it from its current format into a more friendly one.
We can create mobile versions of your website.
Part of our web design ethos is to create sites that are easy to use.

8 Tips For Launching Your Website (Part 2)

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 12:25:00 +0000

Go here for for part 1.

5. Be different
The content and design of your site should emphasize clearly and succinctly to a user what makes you different than your competitors. You need to communicate the organisation's distinct brand and personality.

6. Be the same
While you should certainly innovate when it comes to your message, you should be wary of innovating in how you deliver that message. People are web-savvy enough these days to expect things online to work in a certain way and will get frustrated if those expectations are not met.

Examples of best practices include:

Logo in the top left corner.
Layout doesn't change between pages.
Consistent navigation - People expect a navigation system near the top of the page or on the left hand side. They expect it to stay the same as they browse the site.
Left-aligned text
Minimal to no distracting animation

Check out your competitors sites. What do you like about them and what do you not like about them? From a user's perspective what works and what doesn't? What tone do they use in the text? Website content generally has a relaxed informal tone.

7. Be Involved In The Build
You should get involved in the build process as much as possible. If you want to maintain momentum in the site build, you need to be giving feedback early and often. The development team should be able to give you a daily version of the site for you to review.

While you should certainly make changes, over the course of the build, those changes should become smaller and smaller. For example, by the end of the build, you should be tweaking the text rather than overhauling the colour scheme.

8. Launch!
Another big mistake that people make is not launching the website. They can have a 'Coming soon' on their site for months, or worse, they have a launch date for the new site listed that is in the past. This can happen for a number of reasons:

Having less time than expected to work on content and/or feedback.
Writing content/feedback requires more work than originally estimated.
Change of scope in the website :-

Organisations might add increasing amounts of features during the build. Each of these adds time and money.
An organisation might undergo a change of direction halfway through the build resulting in having to start from scratch.

Waiting on feedback from stakeholders.
Perfectionism and misplaced priorities. For example, spending months on a look-and-feel and not leaving any time to write content. Get the most basic and important things done first.

For these reasons we would recommend 'launching early and often'.

'Releasing early' means releasing the very minimum with which you would be comfortable showing a customer. Remember that the sooner you launch the sooner you can start getting attention and making money. Don't worry about not having all the features, they can be added over time.

'Releasing often' makes the next release date easier to estimate simply because there is less to estimate and hence less to go wrong. Your release dates should be weeks even days apart. 9 months should be the absolute upper range between releases.

Dermot Brennan
Web Developer

What is a VPS, and why it might be the right choice for you?

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:44:00 +0000

Lucidity offers a gamut of hosting services tailored for your needs.

On the lower end, we offer shared hosting. The problem with shared hosting is that you have to share, yuck! Resources are shared between all users, you can't install software on the server because it will affect other users, and you have to share CPU and RAM resources between all clients. Also any issue with other websites hosted on the same server may affect your website as well. Shared hosting is out of the question for any site that requires high security such as e-commerce sites.

On the high end, we offer dedicated servers. Dedicated servers give you the full resources of the server -- just for you. They offer you stability, security, and performance and a unique IP address. You have freedom on what software to run on the server, and to customise your server to your heart’s content. However, all these advantages come at a price... as you might have guessed dedicated servers are significantly more expensive.

A Virtual Private Servers (VPS) also known as Virtual Dedicated Server fills the gap between shared hosting and dedicated hosting. Like a dedicated server, our VPS’s offer you all the advantages of a dedicated server, at a much lower price point. You have full control over the VPS -- you can install and customise the VPS in any way you want.

Lucidity VPS’s use state of the art Xen virtualisation technology. They are hosted on lightning fast servers and you get a guaranteed amount of CPU, RAM and disk resources. In fact, in many cases they may be faster than the dedicated servers of other providers!

As your requirements grow, the VPS can easily grow with you. You can easily grow and scale the VPS to use more resources (CPU, RAM and disk) with very little downtime. On a dedicated server there’s usually no way to increase CPU resources without getting a new server which may involve downtime and migration efforts.

Since everything in the VPS is hermetically sealed from the other VPS’s, you get the same stability and security as a dedicated server.

VPS’s are also the greener choice, as they radically reduce carbon emissions compared to dedicated servers.

Since a VPS gives you a unique IP address, they give an edge for Search Engine Optimisation, and they allow you to install an SSL secure certificate on them for e-commerce sites.

So the next time you’re ordering hosting, give VPS's a closer look.

Why SBS 2008?

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:29:00 +0000

Small Business Server 2008 is the latest incarnation of the Microsoft server offering for SMEs and was released in November 2008. SBS is quite possibly the most compelling software offering ever developed by Microsoft as it combines a Windows Server infrastructure along with Microsoft Exchange and Windows Sharepoint for email and collaboration, for what is essentially a knockdown price. However, the real gem in the offering is the ease in which mobile access to the systems is configured. SBS 2003 is an incredibly mature and stable platform, and it does raise the question, why consider SBS 2008?

Well, for a start, SBS 2008 is easier to manage. A task-based administration console rather than SBS 2003’s feature based one gets you up and running quicker and makes it easier to manage existing infrastructures. The new console has better centralised administration – for example, it gathers information from client computers to provide an at-a-glance network health check.

The remote access features of Exchange 2007 on its own can provide the answer to the why SBS 2008 question. Outlook Web Access has been improved markedly. One of the things that used to bug me about the 2003 OWA was not having a spell checker, OWA 2007 has, and it works like all the Office products. OWA 2007 also remembers the email addresses you use when you create new mails, just like Outlook. From the OWA interface it is now possible to preview common file formats without having the viewer installed on your local machine. The best feature however has to be the ability to access shared folders or Sharepoint sites from within the OWA interface. Exchange 2007 also provides improved Windows Mobile features, such as the enhanced Exchange search, which searches the whole Exchange database, rather than just the messages on your device.

The standard installation of SBS 2008 also includes Sharepoint version 3. The latest iteration of Sharepoint includes the ability to create Blog sites, Wikis and even RSS feeds of your content, along with the collaboration and document management features existing previously.

One significant change in the way SBS 2008 is licensed is that the Premium version is now a two-server solution with an additional license to run SQL 2008 on the second server. This is a much improved solution as the SBS 2003 premium package running on one machine could possibly make a lot of demands on server resources.

Maybe these features taken individually are not enough to make you think about switching, but combined, I think they make a convincing argument for installing or switching to SBS2008.

If you are looking to know more about any of the Microsoft Small Business software, call us.

SEO / Search Engine Optimisation Top Tips - Part 3

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:37:00 +0000

Are you worthy?: Search Engines place big emphasis on how high your sites link popularity is. Be popular! Be link-worthy. If your content is poor and your site is not of a high quality, who is going to link to you? Very few, all but the desperate will say no. They are ways that you can request thousands of links; it’s not worth it if the site is poor. Worthy sites will be linked to naturally and without having to ask for the link. Feel free to trade links, but be careful. Set high standards.

Deep Links: This is where you have links to as many pages in your web site as possible. If all your links are to the Home Page you are telling the Search Engines that you have a site of little value and interest. When you have multi page links you are announcing that you have a site that is populated with worthy content, content that is in demand.

Image / Text Links: Search Engine spiders will follow the first link they find to any particular page. If you have image links in your navigation bar, include text links. Make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because spiders will not follow additional links to the same page.

Buying links?: This is ok, there are many directories that will for a certain time period and a certain fee provide you with links. The down side is that these directory sites send out more links than they take in. This being the case Google will see these sites for what they are, directories, and so the link value will decrease. I am not saying not to use these directories, please do, they form a part of an over all managed SEO program, just be aware of their value.

Reciprocal Links: How many times have you received n email asking for a link trade? If you link to me, I’ll link to you. Well that seems fair enough, if the site is good enough you may wish to link to them. A question to ask yourself? Is there a real benefit to your audience in having this link? If the answer is no, don’t have it.

Broken Links: Keep checking your site for broken links. Search Engines hate sites with broken links. It suggests that the site is not being looked after properly and that it is not current and up to date. Also, broken links stop the spiders from indexing your site. There are many link checkers available, just Google it.

Title Tag Incorporation:
Keywords into Title Tags: Title tags are critical to the success of a web site. They are given a very high weighting. Key word phrases should be repeated in your title tag.

Site Map:
Site Map: Web sites, big or small all need site maps. They need to be linked to and from every page on the site. As far as the Search Engines are concerned, every page on your site is but two clicks away.

Archives / Newsletters:
Newsletters: The great thing about archives is their longevity. If you write a newsletter or an article and it gets posted to an archive, that’s excellent. It will be linking to your site for years to come. Make sure that your article has a link to your site in the “About the Author” section. Many articles are published by organisations looking for content. You may become famous! The key part in all this is to become an authority. If you can do this through blogs, newsgroups and newsletters people will link to your site.

I hope the above helps you in the quest for SEO greatness!

Guy Fagan
Director - Lucidity Technologies

Microsoft Office? I didn’t know it could do that! - Part 2

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:06:00 +0000

Part 2: Excel Pivot Tables

One of the biggest issues for most SME’s is having quality business information at their fingertips, total sales, gross margin, units sold, sales commission, daily/weekly/monthly breakdowns etc, etc. Sounds difficult a lot of reports and a lot of hassle! expensive accounting and reporting software? No! Microsoft Excel and pivot tables will do just that. The really great thing about a pivot table is how easy it is to record information, no need for fancy groups, frozen panes, precedents or formulas all you need to do is record the information across the spread sheet, standard rows and columns (flat) with headers and no gaps.

Once you enter the data it is very easy to report on it by creating the pivot table. Whether you have 1000 entries or 50000 entries the results are arrived at the same way.
One, Two, Three...

1. Click one of the fields in your spread sheet and then click the “Insert” tab on the ribbon and click “Pivot Table”

2. Next “Create Pivot Table” dialogue box will appear, it will select all the data in your Excel spreadsheet. Click OK to create the Pivot table report.

3. Then simply create the report by checking the boxes.

What I have highlighted above is only the first steps of using pivot tables to create pivot table that will give you real business intelligence and the ability to get that fingertip information, but it’s good start in the right direction. Before you start give it some thought and what information you want to get from the report, it will make it far easier in the long run.

There are plenty other articles online but a good place to start for some training is with Microsoft .

Click here for training

When you are really blown away by pivot table and the information they can give your company you can then move the access to that information and have it exported into Microsoft Share Point, where you can create dashboards allow users to view department specific information all created from a pivot table.

Next week: Microsoft Powerpoint

8 Tips For Launching Your Website (Part 1)

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:37:00 +0000

We've helped a lot of people launch websites. We've done many types of sites: property sites, e-commerce sites, sites for services, product sites, brochure sites. Many of these sites were from organisations who had never launched a website before. We've seen what works and what doesn't. If you are planning on starting a new website or re-developing an existing website, you need to do or think about the following: 1. Have a business model
If you own a business, you can probably describe how your business adds value to your customers. If you are a non-profit organisation, you probably have a mission statement or charter. Your website needs something similar. It doesn't have to be difficult or complicated but it should be more detailed than "we should have a website" or "because our competitors have one". Here are a few examples:

"People search for our name in Google to find our phone number and nothing comes up. We should have a website with our contact details."
"People want to know what we do"
"People want to browse our catalogue from home"
"Our customers are spread all over the country/world, so it makes sense to sell our products online."
"We want to keep our customers up to date with upcoming events and news."

Knowing why your website exists will help you prioritise during development. While you can and should change the underlying vision as your organisation grows, changing it too often is a bad idea. 2. Be realistic
There are over 100 million websites online. Becoming a smash hit is like winning the lottery. On the other hand, the web is perfect for catering to a niche group of people. Nobody can predict which type of audience your site will get. Find out the potential size of your audience and think about the numbers of visits per month that you would be happy with. If you are planning an e-commerce site, how many sales would you be happy with? What number would you consider a failure? What would be break-even?

It's hard to predict but putting some thought into these issues will help you decide how much you will want to put into development and promotion. 3. Know your audience
Who is in the audience? Investors? Customers? Employees? Fans? Who are they? What do they like? What do they expect? What do they know? What don't they know? Put yourself in their shoes. What are they likely to be looking for when they visit your site? Are they looking for certain information? Are they looking to spend? This information will be useful to your development team when deciding a number of things including visual layout (e.g. serious, playful, exquisite, sparse) and overall tone of the writing on the site. 4. Write the website This is the part that most people underestimate. Nothing kills the momentum of a site build more than waiting on content. This is perfectly understandable since people are often too busy running a business to sit down and write the content. Unfortunately every site needs at least some written content and while a development team can help, at the end of the day it needs to come from someone who knows and understands the business. Besides text you will also need to think about the information architecture of the site:

How will the user navigate the site?
What links will appear on every page?
What are the categories and subcategories in the site?
What photos/icons should appear on each page?

Our general advice is to start writing the website as soon as possible. If you are having trouble writing content for the site, consider decreasing the scope of the website. You can always add more later. In addition, you should consider that the most successful sites are ones that continuously add fresh content. This keeps people coming back. If you intend having your full product database online you need to factor in the time and cost of keeping that up to date on a regular basis.

Part two: When to copy your competitors, how to give feedback and tips for launching.

Dermot Brennan
Web Developer

SEO / Search Engine Optimisation Top Tips - Part 2

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:55:00 +0000

5. Keywords:
Keyword Research: Research your keyword phrases. You think you know what people will search for you under; you may be surprised to learn that what you think and the reality of the situation are two different worlds. Use tools such as KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker or Google's Keyword Tool. Never use general keywords such as "golf" or "computers," as they are not what your site is all about. You are different, you are not generic. Write lists, compile relevant phrases for your site, and choose different ones for every page. Be adventurous, don’t stay safe.
Primary / Secondary Keywords: Decide on 4 or 5 primary keywords and base your web site sub sections on those keywords. Secondary keywords are words associated with the primary keywords. Use the Primary keywords as the sub section headers and use the secondary keywords as headers for content pages.

6. Search Engine Friendly:
Spider / Crawler Friendly: Search Engine Spiders are very clever, but, there is a lot that they cannot do. They can't fill out forms, they can't read JavaScript links and menus, they can't search your site and they can't understand graphics and Flash. Your site must be "crawler-friendly." I am not saying you can’t use those features on your site, you can and you should, however, you do need to provide alternate means of navigating your site as necessary. You must have HTML links on every page that will bring you back to the top level of the site if you use drop down menus. HTML links do not have to be text only links. Use a graphical image for navigation that is wrapped in standard <a href=""> tags, the spiders can follow image links perfectly well!

7. Links:
Label Your Links: Label all internal text links and clickable image alt tags as clearly and descriptively as possible. Search Engines (and people!) look at the clickable part of your anchor text to help them understand what they're going to find once they click through. Be as descriptive as you can with all text and graphical links, don’t make the Search Engines and your site visitors guess as to the destination of the link, tell them! Build the destination pages keyword into the description, it all helps.
Are you worthy?: Search Engines place big emphasis on how high your sites link popularity is. Be popular! Be link-worthy. If your content is poor and your site is not of a high quality, who is going to link to you? Very few, all but the desperate will say no. They are ways that you can request thousands of links; it’s not worth it if the site is poor. Worthy sites will be linked to naturally and without having to ask for the link. Feel free to trade links, but be careful. Set high standards.

NEXT WEEK : Part 3 of SEO / Search Engine Optimisation Top Tips

Guy Fagan
10/02/09
Director – Lucidity Technologies
www.lucidity.ie

SEO / Search Engine Optimisation Top Tips - Part 1

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:04:00 +0000

1. Domain Names:
Old vs. New Domain Names: If you own a Domain Name and have done so for a while, use it. Try not to purchase a new one unless it’s absolutely necessary. Search Engines will rate older names higher. New Domain Names will take from a few weeks to a few months to achieve “normal” levels of traffic.
Multiple Domains: How diverse is your web site? Could you have more than one Domain Name pointing to individual areas? Normally Search Engines will only list one page for one name, Directories will normally only accept Home Pages, so you see, the more Domain Names you have the more you increase your hit potential.
Location: If you operate a business in Ireland and your target market is Ireland, use a .ie Domain Name. If the UK is where you are based, go for a .co.uk Domain Name.
Hosting: Make sure that the Domain Name and the web site is hosted in same geographic area that you conduct your business.
Domain Keywords: Include primary keywords in your Domain Name. Example: a site that sells printed T-Shirts should have a Domain Name like www.printed-tshirts.ie

2. Target Audience:
Target Market Optimisation: Optimize your site for your target audience, not for the search engines. Search Engines look for the best fitting keywords or phrase that is entered. Remember, if I search for a keyword that relates to your business, I am your target market. Optimise to meet my needs. Know your target market. Check forums, communities, check out other sites; go where your target audience might go, learn from them.

3. Content / Copy:
Compelling Writing: A vital element in a successful website is how visible your content is to the Search Engines. They need to be able to read your copy, locate the keywords and then they will be able to classify your site correctly. Make it easy for that to happen! Copy should not be hidden in graphics or behind Flash. Copy should be based on keyword phrases, your product or your subject. Your copy should be unique. Do not get tied up in word count or concern over keyword repetition. Write for real, write for the target market and the copy will be noticed by the Search Engines. Avoid keyword stuffing, it looks silly and may land you in “blacklist” territory! When the copy writing is done, leave it alone; come back to it with fresh eyes. See if there is a good balance between copy, keyword phrases and a nice flowing style of writing. Learn as you go and make edits accordingly. Keep your writing focused and do not allow yourself to stray. If you can offer unique, interesting, useful, quality and informative content you will find people linking to you.

4. Sharing:
Digg, Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Delicious: Share everything! It’s a new concept to many, however, it works. The more people that share content the greater the benefit and the greater the impact that your content will have on your rankings. You do the sums. If this article is shared to 10 people that’s 10 more people reading this article. Now, let’s say those 10 people have 10 friends each on their social networking site... Well, it adds up! So, go share!

NEXT WEEK : Part 2 of SEO / Search Engine Optimisation Top Tips

Guy Fagan
06/02/09
Director – Lucidity Technologies
www.lucidity.ie

Microsoft Office? I didn’t know it could do that!

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Part 1: Microsoft BCM (Business Contact Manager)
As you are probably aware the Microsoft Office suite offers companies an enormous array of software, which the vast majority use on a daily basis. The reality is that most users only scratch the surface when it comes to the functionality that’s pre bundled in your Outlook, Word, and Excel etc. It is with this is mind that this first blog in Lucidity Technologies Networks section is being written, to highlight some of the great software or features available in Microsoft Office that will make your business more efficient and give you better control of your data with no added cost!
If you are not using a CRM (customer relationship management) package and have purchased Microsoft Office Small Business Edition or higher then Microsoft Outlook with BCM (Business Contact Manager) might be for you. Why? because you’ve already purchased it as part of your Office Package.

Features
• Manage your Contacts
• Create and manage your sales pipeline
• Associate activities (email, phone calls etc) with accounts or contacts
• Create projects and timelines
• Create & assign tasks within projects
• Run and manage marketing campaigns (mail merge, e-shots etc)
• Link to your PDA
• Its integrated with Outlook

Home Page showing Sales pipeline

Campaign Management Page

I have used a variety of CRM systems in the past with varying degrees of success, Goldmine was a great CRM system but a little clunky in how it integrated Outlook and like Microsoft CRM was just too much of a behemoth for an SME like ourselves to get proper functionality from. The reason Outlook BCM works (for us anyhow) is that it allows us to efficiently manage our contacts and accounts and does not try and be all things to all people, it gives us the ability to keep in contact with our clients, run our projects efficiently, manage our sales pipeline, and track and measure our marketing efforts. Whether you are a 5 user company or a 100 user company if you are not using a CRM system properly or at all then you could do worse that look at Outlook BCM, and if you have purchased your software in the last 2 years the chances are its FREE.

If you wish to find out more about Microsoft Outlook with Business Contact manager visit the Microsoft site http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/contactmanager/HA101656361033.aspx or call us.

Next Week: Excel Pivot Tables