What is Panda?

For those of you who don’t know, Panda is Google’s new search algorithm that was launched back in March. The purpose of the update was to favour higher quality sites and get rid of the websites with low quality links. This approach is opposite compared to the other search engines such as Yahoo.

How Do I Stay Clear of Panda?

The most important way to keep your site in the clear and safe from Google’s new update is to stay as legitimate as possible with your SEO tactics. Don’t try to get a million links to your small little site and build link farms. When I first started SEO, right off the bat I stayed cleared of link farms because they seemed sketchy to begin with. Who wants to go to a page full of links of random websites? Back in the day before SEO was even around, marketers posted links on websites because they wanted to bring traffic to their sites, not because they wanted to rise in the rankings. If you keep that same mentality in mind while performing SEO and social marketing you will be fine.

I Was Hit by Panda, Now What?

It’s unrealistic to say that you can 100% figure out Google’s algorithm. I bet Google engineers love reading all the blogs and reading what people write. But there are some things that we are pretty sure of that could help you stay clear of the next Panda update, if not improve your ranking.

1. Re-evaluate your website. Make sure that all of your content is unique, original and useful for your visitors. Take the time to look out on the web to make sure that no one is copying your content as well. If they are, change it. You cannot help what they are doing, but you can help what is on your website. Promote your website so people will link to your content (legitimately). If your content is good, believe me people will share it!

2. Check your Google analytics for high bounce rates. You want to keep your audience engaged on your website. If your bounce rate is above 50 than you are doing something wrong. Between 30-40 is a decent bounce rate, under 30 is amazing.

3. Check the percentage of your site that is taken up by low quality pages. You don’t want a number of your pages to be low quality. Google would rather have a 10 page website with all high quality pages, rather than a 100 page site that has only 10 quality pages.

So, there you have it. Hopefully, Panda hasn’t hit your site too hard, if at all. Continue to be on the lookout for the effects of Panda and how you can maintain strong search engine results by checking back with us regularly.

It seems for the past year Google has been working on a “super-secret” project and for the last couple of weeks, more and more information are being leaked. The site is in a limited field trial with no confirmed date for when it will officially be open to the public.There have been a few complaints that the site is a little slow to handle tasks, but for the most part it all looks promising. Knowing Google, I’m pretty sure any kinks will be worked out before the launch of the site.

I personally think Google Plus is going to have a difficult time competing with Facebook and Twitter, especially in the start-up stages. Although I’m sure Google will eventually muscle their way into the VERY profitable social network market, the same way they’ve managed to get their “Chrome” foot in the door of the browser market. If this was any other company bringing out a social networking site, I would have been confident enough to put money on the site dying out within a years’ time, but I don’t see that happening with a company that’s been able to turn their company name into a common term…

At its core, Google+ is a social network. The first thing users are introduced to is the Stream. It’s much like the Facebook News Feed, allowing users to share photos, videos, links or their location with friends.

Circles:

That’s where Google+ begins to diverge from Facebook, though. The focus of this social project is not on sharing with a mass group of friends, but on targeted sharing with your various social groups. To do this, Google uses a system called Circles.
Gundotra explained that most social media services (read: Facebook, Twitter) haven’t been successful with friend lists because they’ve been designed as a “tack-on” product rather than being integrated at every level. Gundotra also believes that current friend list products are awkward and not rewarding to use.
Google+ Circles is an attempt to address that challenge. The HTML5 system allows users to drag-and-drop their friends into different social circles for friends, family, classmates, co-workers and other custom groups. Users can drag groups of friends in and out of these circles.
One of the nice things about the product is its whimsical nature — a puff of smoke and a -1 animation appears when you remove a friend, and when you remove a social circle, it rolls away off the screen.

Photos & Group Video Chat

It’s clear from the extended demo that Gundotra and his team have thought about every aspect and detail of Google+ thoroughly. The photo, video and mobile experiences are no exception.
Google has created a section specifically for viewing, managing and editing multimedia. The photo tab takes a user to all of the photos he or she has shared, as well as the ones he or she is tagged in. It’s not just photo tagging, though: Google+ includes an image editor (complete with Instagram-like photo effects), privacy options and sharing features.
The video chat feature might be one of the most interesting aspects of Google+. Gundotra and his team thought about why group chat hasn’t become a mainstream phenomenon. He compared it to knocking on a neighbour’s door at 8 p.m. — most people don’t do it because it isn’t a social norm. However, if a group of friends are sitting on a porch and you just happen to walk by, it’s almost rude not to say hi.
That’s the concept behind “Hangouts,” Google’s new group chat feature. Instead of directly asking a friend to join a group chat, users instead click “start a hangout” and they’re instantly in a video chatroom alone. At the same time, a message goes out to their social circles, letting them know that their friend is “hanging out.” The result, Google has found in internal testing, is that friends quickly join.
One cool feature of Hangouts is that it doesn’t place a chat window on the screen for each participant. Instead, Google changes the chat screen to whoever is currently talking. It quickly switches from video feed to video feed, moving faster in bigger groups. The maximum members in any video Hangout is 10, though users can get on a waitlist and wait for someone to leave.

Content Discovery Through Sparks

To spur sharing, Google has added a recommendation engine for finding interesting content. The feature, Google+ Sparks, is a collection of articles, videos, photos and other content grouped by interest. For example, the “Movies” spark will have a listing of recent and relevant content for that topic.
The system is algorithmic — it relies on information from other Google products (e.g. Google Search) as well as what is being shared via Google+ and through +1 buttons.
The goal, according to Gundotra, is to make it dead-simple for users to explore their interests and share what they find with their friends. Google+ is attempting to become the one-stop shop not only for sharing content, but for finding it as well. In some ways, it reminds us of Twitter and its mission to become an information network, and “instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.”

Mobile

Google will also be launching mobile apps for Google+, starting with Android. The Android app includes access to the Stream, Circles, Sparks and multimedia.
The addition of these features in a mobile app isn’t a surprise. What is a surprise, though, is the app’s auto-upload feature. Any photo or video you take on your phone through Google+ will automatically be uploaded to your computer, ready to share. These uploads aren’t public, but the next time you log onto your desktop, the photos button in the status bar will have a number, indicating how many new uploads are available for sharing. It keeps these photos and videos available for sharing for eight hours after upload.
Gundotra says that Google intends to launch apps for Google+ on other platforms in the future.

The language website’s are built in is called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and the last released version was HTML 4.01 back in 1999 by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). It was only until 2008 that a working draft was released for HTML 5 and it took another two years for browser developers to really start supporting some of HTML 5′s new features. Although HTML5 probably wound be official released until 2019, most of the features are already supported by all the major browsers (Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera). Fortunately even if a browser doesn’t support HTML5, it will resort back to HTML 4.01 and the website will still work.

If you don’t build website’s yourself, you probably wound notice a difference between the two versions, but being able to utilize HTML5 makes websites work better, faster and more compatible over different platforms. The biggest advantage of HTML5 is that the functionality is built into the browser. Web Developers have been increasingly trying to create applications which display fluid animations, stream video, play music and integrate with Social Network sites such as Twitter and Facebook. In most cases we could only provide these things by learning and applying add-on tools included Flex, Flash or Silverlight or building complex javascript tools. This increased the complexity and the time it took to develop the Web Applications. HTML5 changes this with DOM and HTML support, (without the plugins and 3rd party programs) for video and audio embedding, high-quality drawings, charts and animation and many other types of rich content demanded by users.

Some other improvements and add-ons include: Geolocation, Improved Accessibility and smarter forms.

Hopefully you will now understand a little more about the wonderful world of web design and why we are excited to announce that we will be building better and faster websites!

Bonzai Web Design has the perfect solution for you! Using today’s latest web technology, we can create mobile version of your main website! When someone visits your site, your website will pick up on the visitors screen resolution and then display the appropriate website version.

Here’s a example of how it works:

Main Website:

Tablet Version:

Mobile Phones:

Pirum IT is a local computer company selling, repairing and installing PC’s, laptops, servers and everything else in the West Yorkshire area.

Due to the client base being mostly more elderly clients, they wanted a very clean and functional website.

www.pirumit.com

Due to the client base of Pirum IT being mostly of the older generation, the client requested for a very clean and functional design.

Services provided:

• Logo Design
• Website design
• Website Coding
• Contact form
• Business Email
• Twitter Feed integration
• Google Maps integration
• Google Analytics intergration
• Short flash animation

Technology used on the website:

• HTML 5
• CSS 3
• Jquery
• Flash
• PHP

Example of our E-commerce Store. You can have a look at the admin panel by going to http://keighleywebdesign.co.uk/shopping/admin – the user name is: admin and the password is: pass.

Feel free to browse around, sign up for an account or even complete an order or two if you want to test out the system.

For only £295.00 you can have your own full working and personally designed online store! Took have a look at a basic store you can go to: http://keighleywebdesign.co.uk/shopping and you can even get access to the admin panel and see how everything works. Just go over to http://keighleywebdesign.co.uk/shopping/admin, the user name is: admin and the password is: pass.

Feel free to have a look around, sign-up for an account or even purchasing a few items to test out the checkout process!

The Improvements

Speed

The biggest improvement that Firefox 4 has made is the loading speed, whether it’s JavaScript performance, startup times, or graphics. Mozilla boasts that its new speed is up to six times faster than the older versions of Firefox. In fact, even the beta versions were faster than their predecessors, but Mozilla claims that the new release is even faster than the beta versions tested. To really see if this is true, you will have to download the new version and check it out for yourself.

Interface

The new user interface has been stripped down to make the browser less cluttered, easier to navigate, and with a single menu button like that which you would find on the Google Chrome browser. Also, the tabs have moved to the top of the browser to give users space for more tabs, whereas before it was at the bottom and only allowed users to have limited space. The toolbar even has more space: Mozilla has moved the reload, stop, and bookmark buttons into the address bar. It may take users a little while to get used to, but it’s a simple and clean design for the new toolbar.

Panorama

One new feature that was tested during the beta release, called “Panorama,” helps users to organize tabs into manageable categories while navigating around with many tabs open. It lets them create a little window to display the tabs they have open, which they then can sort to be organized by tasks or categories. Once users have organize their tabs, Panorama allows them to open only one group at a time, saving the other unopened groups so that the tab bar doesn’t get too cluttered.

Pin

Another feature that Firefox 4 offers is that users can now “pin” tabs in the same way Google Chrome allows for its users. This lets users send tabs to the left side of the tab bar as a tiny “favicon only” tab for those sites they utilize the most. Also, users are able to search for tabs that are open in the address bar, making it quicker and easier to jump from tab to tab.

Other Additions

The above improvements are some of the biggest features added to Firefox 4, but are definitely not all of them. Mozilla has really stepped it up with their new release, adding support for the WebM video format, full hardware acceleration for graphics, plugin sandboxing for crash protection, extra privacy protection, and increased HTML5 and CSS3 support. There’s an even longer list of all the features that were added, so if you would like to find out more about Firefox 4, go to Mozilla’s page. Download Mozilla’s new release and tell us what you think about the new browser.