So, Google Plus is currently not available to the public but is already causing quite a stir. Nobody likes change, especially when it means changing the social network habits you are now comfortably ensconced in. A good verdict, and one which I can’t really confer with (as I am not part of the select few using Google Plus right now), is that of Neil Gaiman, taken from his blog.

I joined Google+ and decided that I didn’t want another public platform yet.

I like Twitter. I tolerate Facebook. Google+ seemed (for me) like an awkward mash-up of the two. I found the continual stream of notifications telling me that another 500 people I did not know had put me into circles and that lots of other people I didn’t know had mentioned me really irritating and distracting, and I couldn’t turn them off or easily find the signal in the noise (or find my friends in the flood of people putting me into circles), and when I grumbled about it mildly (agreeing with Warren Ellis that I couldn’t find friends I’d actually want to put in circles among the thousands of people who I was being told were putting me in circles) a couple of hundred people explained to me that I was Doing It Wrong.

It was the “You’re Doing It Wrong” messages that were my personal tipping point. As far as I’m concerned, the mark of a good social network is that it either does what it was made to do easily and cleanly, or it’s bendy enough that you can make it do what you want. And being told “you’re trying to use it like Facebook but really it’s like Twitter!” just made me strangely nostalgic for Twitter. And as Twitter was still there, I cancelled my Google+ account, feeling at this point that I didn’t need another time sink, another place to check, another distraction from work or from life.

(If you cancel your Google+ account, Google+ will then start helpfully emailing you notifications every time someone puts you in a circle or mentions you, even if you had all of the “Email notifications” options previously turned off. This is fixable when you discover the “unsubscribe” option at the bottom of the emails that wasn’t visible when they came in on your phone, but you shouldn’t have to unsubscribe from something you didn’t subscribe to.)

Anyway, I wish Google+ all the best. I’ll probably check it out again in a year or so, if I’m still on the Internet, or sooner than that if they make things so I can’t blog without it. And it may well be an excellent Social Network eventually. It’s still in Beta, after all, and most users aren’t going to get a huge instant flood of followers (circlers?).

So that’s a social network I said goodbye to.

I said hello to Turntable.fm, however, a service (currently US only, alas) that lets you make a room, or join a room, and DJ in it. You and four other people can DJ at a time, sharing music you’ve taken from Turntable’s extensive databases or uploaded. I loved DJing, especially once I decided that there should be more spoken-word stuff out there, and that people might like it, and created http://turntable.fm/neilhimselfs_house_of_poetry and have slipped in there from time to time and just played poetry, and been delighted as other people DJ poetry too.

One of my recent assignments was to redesign a website called Vera Paradise. The site had been designed using HTML with heavy use of tables, illogical names of pages and files and ludicrous use of CSS.

The first step then was to completely gut out the entire site, looking for any HTML tags which weren’t even needed. There were many of these. I also completely took out all text from the tables and deleted the tables completely. The sooner I got rid of those the better. Instead of using tables I set-up CSS using the float command and relative positioning to get everything into place.

The next step I took was to rename all the files and photos so that they were relevant. This including adding extra descriptive words into filenames. Instead of about.php, we now had about-vera-paradise.php. The more description the better. I also optimised all of the images used on the site. Some of them had huge file sizes despite being the size of postage stamps.

The last stage was going through each page, creating unique meta keywords, meta descriptions and page titles, and then also making sure that the words used in those recurred somewhere in the text. It’s very important to make sure that each page is optimised individually for the search engines.

And that was essentially it. A complete revamp that has already seen the site gain traffic.

After that I was asked to turn that site into a completely new site, with different branding, logos, design, a completely new experience basically. As a lot of the SEO had already been down this was a far easier job.

This is the first site, Vera Paradise. The second site, which was based on Vera Paradise, is Naturist Apartments.

Hey everyone, we hope you like the new look web site. Hopefully we’ve finally found a nice way of showing off the work we’ve done over the years.

In the past three years we’ve seen so many changes that have completely changed the way we design web sites. In the same time that we used to be able to design small personal web sites we can now design huge resources capable of offering a highly-valuable service. We like to think we’ve stayed on top of things.

Our recent projects have revolved around WordPress, mainly because this is what our clients like to use. It is simple, professional and it gets the job done. Recent projects including Sounds and Colours, Brazilian Football, CCA and On the Road to Find Out have all made the most of this software.

If you like what you see, and fancy your own website built using WordPress, then please get in touch.

Just a quick one as I thought this site was definitely worth flagging. SEOLOL is a site that lists all the things that people actually search for.

Some of my favourites are:

- I want to be not guilty because I have insanity
- Hippo people search
- How to kill a monkey with a wet paper towel

Check out the site for plenty more:

SEOLOL

After searching in Google for ‘Google Sitemap Template’ I was bombasted with hundreds of options for creating sitemaps with a minimum of fuss. The majority of the links involved registering at the site, or involved a method as complicated as creating the sitemap from scratch in the first place.

Eventually I found XML Sitemaps. It is by far the easiest tool I have encountered. In a little less than five minutes I created sitemaps for five web sites that had been long overdue. The reason it’s so quick is that it’s automatic priority function is very effective, and it fills in all the fields too.

If you want to get all your sitemaps done in record time, simply go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and soon all will be taken care off!Tags: xml, sitemap, google

One very quick tip for people. I have recently found a message popping up whenever I load Windows stating that it would be in my best interests to run Windows Genuine Advantage Notification and find out if I my copy of Windows is official. Now the laptop I have been using is second-hand so I have never questioned whether Windows is genuine or not, but have just got on with using it.

I believe it is still possible that my copy of Windows is genuine but I don’t want to run the program to find out in case I then get stuck with an even more permanent program in my taskbar informing me every 5 minutes that I should really consider buying an authorised copy of Windows.

There is one thing that can be done to prevent this message ever appearing and one thing to remove it once it does start appearing.

To prevent it simply change your Windows Automatic Updates (they can be found in Control Panel) so that you are informed before any updates are downloaded or installed. When you get the prompt that there are new updates have a look at them and if there are any involving Genuine Advantage Notification don’t install them. There are also some other strange things that Windows tries to install so this is never a bad idea.

To remove the message from your start-up simply go to Control Panel and find Scheduled Tasks. In there will be a scheduled task for Genuine Advantage. Delete it and hey presto, no more warning!

I feel the time has come where my experience providing IT solutions for small businesses and not-for-profit and voluntary groups might be of usefulness to the masses, or at least the couple of people who may find their way here!

I find this area extremely interesting. The evolution of web 2.0 has made a vast array of applications available to small business. Some of the open source packages available are as powerful as those commercially available, and in many cases, are more appropriate for the clients need.

The other side of this is trying to create solutions from current programs and creating systems that allow small businesses to flourish in ways they may not have imagined.

I hope to use this blog to show some of these systems and applications and in turn hope they I might also learn something from the process. Web 2.0 is evolving at an incredible rate and I definately need help keeping up so will be grateful for anyone reading this to give me their own solutions.