I discovered a very handy tool for creating Wordpress themes recently which goes by the name of Artisteer. I’m always a bit pessimistic about using any kind of  WYSIWYG editing tool to create website code, experience has taught me that such programmes are not without their bugs or coding inaccuracies, and their lack of flexibility usually stifles creativity. For example, I had a total nightmare today with the movie maker at xtranormal.com – it kept crashing and I lost two hours of work. However, I can’t really say a bad word about Artisteer, having worked on a Wordpress development project for more than five hours now (including first time user training) I am officially in love with it!

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On Monday night I attended an HP and AMD sponsored event ‘HP On the Rocks‘ with my graphic designer wife. The function was at at the Natural History Museum’s outdoor ice rink bar in London. Guest star at the event, fresh from a previous night’s singing on the X Factor results show, was Jamie ‘Afro’ Archer (right with my wife Sue).  We had a great night, and I managed to give the new Hewlett Packard DM3 laptop a test drive on Windows 7 – probably one of their better looking machines, quite dinky and funky without being flimsy, not the sort of thing I usually associate with HP at all. (more…)

Back in July I wrote about the usefulness of Twitter for use in an SEO strategy… or rather the lack of usefulness – beyond creating a powerful profile back link. In the past week this has changed rather dramatically with the inclusion of real time tweets within Google’s search results. Now, on popular and ‘news-worthy’ Google search terms you (or your customers) may find that Google results are shared with the latest related postings from Twitter. (more…)

The second part of this topic is long overdue so it’s time to cover YouTube and how it can be used as part of your website’s SEO strategy. Like with Twitter, this topic does come up with increasing frequency from clients these days because of media hype. There are three reasons why a web marketer might decide to use YouTube as part of their overall search engine optimisation strategy (none of them are overwhelming though in my opinion): (more…)

At Firetop we’re really very disappointed  by the lead story on the BBC Technology website ‘Microsoft backs long life for IE6’; Microsoft have announced five more years support for their ancient and flawed Internet Explorer 6 browser… taking it to 2014! Website developers hate IE6 because it doesn’t display website code in the same way as IE7 or IE8, Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome (more…)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Twitter

There’s rather a lot of Twitter rhetoric being bandied about in the Web marketing industry these days so naturally a common question that’s been coming from Firetop clients is “Would being on Twitter help our search engine positioning?” and my short answer on this is “Indirectly yes, but nothing momentous“. (more…)

The Web Analytics topic hasn’t come around in a while but today I was revisited by the evils of logfile analysis and its over-inflated traffic numbers! Clients often ask me which of their web statistics data tools is telling the truth and accurate. The main issue is that whether you’re looking at logfile analysis reports from WebTrends, or a client-side tracker like Google Analytics, both are correct in their own way you just have to understand their methodologies. It’s important to get your head around them because the variance can be as much as 30 percent! (more…)

Last year on the old Firetop blog I wrote an entry called ‘Web 2.0 forecasting for business publishers’ – publishing a slightly complicated formula to help estimate whether Web 2.0 tools would be successfully taken up by a business audience or not. At the time Firetop’s own rich media expert – Martin – said that he could create a Flash widget to do the calculation… now he’s gone and done just that so we thought we’d make that available to the wider world and republish it alongside the original article. Below is the article in full once again and underneath the interactive  ‘Peskett’s Posting Predictor‘ – enjoy! (more…)

Came across an interesting article today about Twitter on BBC technology, it suggests that the Twitter phenomenon is powered largely by media / PR hype. I found that quite unsurprising, the same happened with blogging three years ago, the number of new blogs being started each day was reported in the media to have exponential growth into the millions but in reality a much smaller proportion of blog owners were regularly blogging or even returning to their initial trial accounts. (more…)