ParlourDesign

How can I improve my natural listing position on Google?

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Wed, 25 May 2011 18:11:00 +0000

There are of course huge numbers of people claiming to be experts in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), the largest Search Engine of all of course being Google.

However, the only real Google Experts, are those that actually work for Google right now. They're constantly trying to improve their search results, making them more intuitive to humans, and more like human rankings.

People will often find little loopholes on how to artificially improve your ranking position, with 'black art' techniques (things that will typically get your website blacklisted from Google, and therefore hidden entirely from view for at least 3 months). So as I've mentioned before, do the things primarily for the human user.. and Google will follow.

So assuming that your website is already accessible to people with visual challenges (and therefore search engines can read it more easily too).. you've already made sure all your images have 'alt' text.. and of course you have lots of good readable text on each page (especially the homepage), etc.

Google likes a few key things in particular:

Old websites (so you must therefore be an 'established' business)
Websites with lots of good real content, related to the search terms (so you have something worth looking at, when the visitor gets there), especially content that's updated, and added to regularly.
Lots of links to your website from other websites (meaning lots of people like it enough, to want to share it with other people)

So what is your speciality area? If your business is about hair extensions, talk about it through your integrated blog. Also, if you're a geographically based business (ie in Reading), then talk about things going on locally too.

Typically, the more often you update your website, the more often Google (and others) will think it's worth looking at, which means the higher up the natural search rankings you'll appear.

So, for example, write about things related to hair extensions, or even anything to do with hair! i.e. your thoughts on the Royal wedding, any celebrities you see or know about with hair extensions in the press.. or even “if you’d like to have hair like ‘xxxx’ we have just the hair extensions for you”... It doesn’t really matter what you blog about, just blog more!

If you can get your website talked about on related web forums (ie the types of forums your clients might read.. ie young mothers’ forums, rock, grunge, tattoo, etc..), with links back to your website, that will help too (try to keep it natural though, when mentioning your website).

You could also reply back on other people’s related blogs, with genuine comments (and links back to your website in the signature). Any links through newspaper article websites, or the BBC would of course be very good for your natural search ranking.

Having a Facebook Group for your business, that people can 'like' is of course also a very popular choice these days, with links back to your website (and photos on your Facebook page too of course).

You could also try shooting a video of you doing what you do best. Put this on YouTube.. and this can then also help a lot with rankings too (as Google owns YouTube, and seems to really like links from popular videos back to related websites).

All of the above should essentially be free!

Why you can't believe what you read in spam!

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 09:42:00 +0000

Had another one passed through today, from a company claiming to offer financial reports of the top 600 companies in that particular business sector, which included the client company they were emailing.

However, although this particular client has a limited company in the trading name, all of their trading actually went through a different company entirely, so the company details listed in the email, who was apparently performing in the top 600 of that industry (totalling tens of thousands across the UK), actually has the equivalent of a dormant company!

Would you think it'd be appropriate to provide money to a company starting off with this false information?

--

This is why it's so important to not share your primary email addresses with mailing lists (or anyone who subsequently makes a mailing list out of your details). Once you're on the spammer's list, there's no escape from junk like the one above (apart from shutting the email address down entirely).

Web Designing - spam email

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:31:00 +0000

Although I run Parlour Design, I'm also involved with a number of other businesses too. One of these businesses has a generic info@ email address (which will get spam, regardless of how well the email address is encrypted on your website). I've advised the client to remove all traces of it, but historically it is still used by some genuine clients.

They've ensured that everywhere the email address was published, is now changed, including the main client website. However, I do also know that this info@ email address appears on a number of spam mailing lists people can buy into. It was therefore humorous to receive the following email today:

info@client-domain-hidden.com

Hi

Hope you are well.

My Name is Joy, and I am a web consultant with a website design/development firm with offices in the US/UK, and development center in India.

I was browsing websites from your domain and came across “www.client-domain-hidden.com“. From what I could notice, your current website does not have an appealing design that visually caters to your client demographic.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it has leveled the playing field when it comes to competing with the big boys. You have one shot at making a good first impression. With a well- designed site, your little operation can project the image and professionalism of a much larger company. The inverse is also true. I've seen many big company websites that were so badly designed and hard to navigate that they completely lacked professionalism and credibility. Good for you, too bad for them.

Do let me know if you are willing to discuss a possible redesigning of your website, to make it more appealing and comply with the International web standards. In fact, it would be best if you could send in your phone number, location (city) and a convenient time for you to speak.

Before I end, I thought it may help for you to know that our pricing packages start at USD 199 with no monthly fee and that, we have delivered more than 5000 websites over the past 6 years.

I look forward to your mail and to speak with you.

Kind Regards
Joy
Email: joy@spamming-site.info

PS A call now could get you our inaugural discounts.

Disclaimer: The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them. The above mail spammers-email@gmail.com and we ensure you will not receive any such mails

So, apparently, Joy has had a look at the website, and now wishes to help us make it more appealing to web design standards (even though the site has been completely redesigned, optimised, made accessible, etc. in the last two months).

However, even though she's apparently 'seen' the website, she didn't use any of the contact details from the website (as the email address she contacted the client on, isn't listed anywhere on the website), similarly, all the other questions are also answered clearly on the contact page!

I thought I'd do a quick check on how many times this email has been sent out.. (by taking a copy of a big bulk of text, and putting it in quote marks into Google)... however, rather than finding websites showing this email, I actually found 14 web design companies from around the world, using the same exact words on their own website! I doubt all these web design companies are the offices mentioned in the email.

So these guys apparently redesign websites around 1,000 times a year, but they don't look at them first but want you to contact them with your own details so they can sell you things. It's true that the gist of their email is correct. But for them to claim to be part of the CAN-SPAM movement, send spam themselves, and not actually read anything of the people they contact (just send a generic email to people on a spammers list).. doesn't give me the impression of an honourable business, just yet more people out to make money on the internet from people who don't know any better!

Making digital content accessible by everyone

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 22:09:00 +0000

Thankfully, the Government, industry workers, and members of the voluntary sector have come together in an eAccessibility forum, to develop an action plan to help make digital content accessible by more users.

Parlour Design works hard to ensure all their websites are accessible in a wide variety of formats, using:

Logical page structures for all the content (even with style sheets switched off),
Not using 'flash' animation for layout or content purposes (just for pleasing design aesthetic features)
Always using 'alternative text' for images (and only then when text is not appropriate in the first place).

(rather than the common technique by many designers of using images for text, because they're being lazy designers and can't work out how to make the text appear how they want to, in it's pure form!).

Placing the bulk of navigational links at the base of the page (even if on display, it seems to be before the main text)
Helping the page render differently, depending on the type of browser being used.
Using flexible font sizes (rather than fixed pixel dimensions), so users can easily increase the size of any text with a simple mouse action.

Thankfully, this particular group mentioned at the outset are also working on expanding the roll out of these simple methods, along with many other ideas as featured in this initial report:

http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/business-sectors/docs/e/10-1194-e-accessibility-action-plan.pdf

(The report is also due to be updated every 3 months, with new developments).

One key area I was interested in, is point 3, Website Services:

3. Websites services work stream
Websites are the gateway to almost every business, voluntary organisation, or provider of information about public services. Whether or not they are direct sales and marketing tools, they are key contributors to the financial efficiency of each body. A well designed website draws in more users, and reduces the need for other means of customer support such as call centres. Although there are internationally recognised standards and guidelines of website accessibility, these are poorly adhered to by the public sector or by the private sector. This work stream will explore the reasons for this and assist both government and private sector to develop websites and online services that conform appropriately to web standards, guidelines and best practices, such as WCAG 2.0 AA and relevant W3C specifications. It will also take forward plans for a One Stop Shop for information on eAccessibility, and look at how the website designers of tomorrow can be trained to design accessibility into their products and services.

I'm very often so disappointed with the incredibly poor 'housekeeping' of so many website developers, and just how much extra code has been thrown in to most of the source code, particularly when using 'design software' to try and make things look like they think (rather than understanding the language behind it, to just use the 'pure ingredients').

I look forward to the further adoption of these developments, and seeing how the working party get on.

Super fast broadband nationwide by 2015

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 11:06:00 +0000

You may have heard in the news today that the government is trying to get everyone in the UK (including rural areas) access to super fast broadband in the next five years.

Obviously, this will be of great benefit to the online world as such, and will enable a great degree of rich website content (with video streaming, faster downloads, etc.), also paving the way for increasingly popular technologies like TV on demand, and interactive contents.

For those who have been using broadband for a while (I've personally had broadband for 10 years, and was one of the first 1,500 BT Broadband customers!), almost no-one would go back to dial-up now.

I was fortunate to meet a very senior person within the telecommunications industry a few months ago, who helped explain to me how this could be achieved, (as I was puzzled over the knowledge that broadband quality decreases significantly, depending on your copper cable distance from the phone exchange. similarly, it wouldn't be affordable to run fibre optic cable many km to just one house in a remote valley).

As you may know, from 2012 analogue tv is being switched off entirely (many parts of the UK are already digital), and when this happens, the digital signal will actually become stronger (because the analogue signal, interferes with the broadcasting of the digital signals, from the same arial).

Because the analogue signal uses up quite a large portion of frequencies for TV (ie like your FM radio broadcasts on a range of frequencies), when the digital switch happens, because digital can be broadcast on a smaller isolated frequency, it opens up a lot of spare frequency space. Which can be reused.

In the more rural areas, you might also already be aware of satellite phones (that enable two way communication with satellites, virtually anywhere in the world).. well this same type of technology will also enable very fast broadband speeds in rural homes (and is capable of speeds much greater than we can can currently get via cables at the moment in the UK).

All this means that my dream of living in a remote sustainable farmhouse in the valleys of North Wales, whilst maintaining my website design and development on-line, will soon be a real possibility! :)

Interflora Vs Marks and Spencer - Adwords row

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 07:45:00 +0000

Some of you may haven heard in the news today about the Interflora Vs Marks and Spencer row, over the use of the search term 'Interflora':

This screen clipping was taken a few moments ago, and as you can see, in the 'sponsored adwords' listing, both Interflora, M&S, and ASDA are all bidding on the search term 'Interflora', in the 'Pay Per Click' 'sponsored links'.

Firstly, from the people I've already spoken to today, there is some misunderstanding between paid listings, and natural listings:

Natural listings are the search results that appear with a white background, on every search results page. Whereas sponsored listings are paid for advertising links (which may or may not take you to the product or service you've searched for).
Natural Search listings can be improved through having a great website, and naturally working on your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This are the most valuable placements to have, as many users will prefer to click on the natural links, rather than the paid links.
The PayPerClick (PPC) advertised listings, as seen in the above example (with the faintly shaded background) are the search results which either appear above, or to the top right of every search page.
With PayPerClick, Companies can thus pay Google (which is part of the reason the stock value of Google is so high) to appear high on this listing.. the more you offer to pay Google for each person who clicks on your link, the higher in the rankings you will appear.

The minimum bid is 1p (or in reality it's more like 2p), but there is no upper limit I'm aware of (you just need to work out the value to yourself of someone clicking through..

If you have a product that sells for £10, and you make £1 profit on each item: if 10% of the visitors to your website purchased one item, then the value to you of each click would be 10p (so you'd need to set your bid to a lower value to ensure you can still cover your costs, unless of course this £10 product is a 'loss leader' to help get customers to buy other products too).
However, if your product sold for £10,000, with a £2,000 profit margin, and 10% of the visitors who visited your site from your chosen search term, then the average value of each click would be £200, so the amount you bid on each click could of course be much higher.

This is the reason why companies cold call many businesses, and guarantee you 'first page on Google'.. this is easy, if you pay enough for the relevant search term, you can appear as high as you like for those search terms.

However, the interesting thing about this case is that Marks and Spencer are using a worldwide registered trade-mark as a means to promote their own competitive services (even though the trademark phrase itself doesn't appear in the advert, nor on the associated page with it).

I know that Red Letter Days used to be very clear to their resellers, that as part of the agreement to resell Red Letter Day vouchers, the resellers were not allowed to bid on the search terms directly related to their brand (ie 'Red Letter Days'). However, in this case, M-and-S have not entered into such an agreement, as they are attempting to sell their own competitive product/service instead.

So it's understandable for the case to now reach the high court. Trademark and Copyright rows are rarely simple.
By my understanding, you are typically only allowed to quote someone else's trademark; with their permission, if you are a licensed reseller of their product (ie Starbucks coffee), or for a news feature or similar.

But then, many trademarks/brand names have become a generic description of a product (ie 'Tannoy' rather than a 'public address system', 'Hoover' rather than 'vacuum cleaner', etc.) so in these cases, you could argue it would be 'fair' to associate your competitive product or service with such a name.

I look forward to seeing how the case continues.

New Xtrahair website

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 10:06:00 +0000

I'm very pleased to announce the launch of the new Xtrahair website, at www.xtrahair.co.uk.

As you can see, this is a very fresh looking design, with a conceptual design by our great colleague Matt.

In the process, he also wanted to update the Xtrahair logo, as seen.

The site is now also in the hands of the client, who has the facility to update each page of her website through an integrated content management system (CMS). And of course, we've kept the old blog on their too (but now restyled it to fit in with the new design).

Certainly quite a significant improvement on the old design!

If you'd like us to improve your current website, or if you'd like a new one built entirely from scratch, do let us know.

New 'written contract' now available through our website

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 10:51:00 +0000

To help keep things clear to our clients, we've just added a new plain English written contract, to our website.
www.parlourdesign.co.uk/contract.html

This was very kindly provided, under the creative commons licence, by Andy Clark of Transcending CSS. We've subsequently modified his version to fit more appropriately within our own policies and procedures, but are very grateful to Andy for his excellent direction in this, and of course his inspirational book: Transcending CSS, the fine art of web design.

Many thanks Andy.

.co domain names are nearly ready for purchase

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:58:00 +0000

If you're not a regular purchaser of domain names, you may have missed that .co domain names are about to go on to public release, so anyone will soon be able to buy their own .co domain name (ie www.my-new-domain.co).

.co is the new domain extension, that's been released from Columbia.Columbian nationals have the rights to www.my-domain.com.co however, you'll soon be able to purchase your own domain, ending in .co

There are of course many other domain extensions you can buy, such as the most famous .com, and .co.uk, as well as .net, .org, and slightly more recently .info and .biz. This newer range of domain extensions (such as .me, .tv, .us) are related to countries that have decided to allow open purchase of their second level domain names (ie the bit, just before their country abbreviation).

There have been four phases to the launch of .co:

The first round that allowed registered Columbian brands to buy their name in the first round ,
The second round allowed national trademarks to buy their domain,
The third round was an auction style landrush (ie customers interested in domains with a high global value, to bid against each other)
And now the fourth round, where any person or company, anywhere in the world, can purchase their own domain on a first-come first-served basis, from 7pm British Summer Time (6pm GMT).

We've had a number of pre-purchase requests made with our domain registrars, so hopefully we may be successful in purchasing a few domains.

According to the official .co website www.cointernet.co, 87,489 domains were registered in the first 15 minutes of the domain name extension going live on the public market!

Microsoft Tag, for your mobile, on Parlour Design

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:43:00 +0000

You may now have seen the multicoloured triangular shaped as one of the contact numbers on our contact us page. This is part of a new free application for your mobile, called Microsoft TAG.

The idea being, you download and install the free application via your mobile, from http://gettag.mobi, and when you scan the bar code above, it will automatically offer to dial our main contact phone number to reach us at Parlour Design.

The barcode can be designed to do other things too, such as:

Open a URL suitable for your mobile, in your mobile internet browser.
Have a text automatically sent to your phone, with further information about whatever you've just seen
Open a new contact card, with the relevant company details, names, numbers, email, etc. onto your phone.

Microsoft are expecting this tag to take off in a big way.

(other applications have already been developed to read standard bar codes from products, and then compare prices with local stores automatically, this system however should offer quite a lot more)

Official launch day was yesterday, and over a million posters have already had this kind of tag printed on them. Mobiles are of course a part of every day life for most people now (recent research shows that a 7 year old is more likely to own a mobile than a book in the UK!). So having a simple way for people to walk around with their mobiles, see a tag, and get the relevant information directly onto their mobiles could well be the future of things to come.

If you've got a 'new generation' phone (ie one with a built in camera, internet access, and the opportunity to install applications), then just visit http://gettag.mobi on your mobile.

To learn more about it in your normal web browser, just visit http://tag.microsoft.com

Spam is getting more selective - Annual Design Awards

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 09:29:00 +0000

Spam emails are certainly getting more selective.

The email harvesting robots which trawl the web are now (on a strangely positive side) aligning harvested email addresses and targeting them at specific groups (ie email addresses that have not been opted in, but just collected in plain text from different websites it finds).
I'm sure my email address has now just been 'sold' (for a very small price no doubt), to lists claiming I've been opted in.

One of the hidden email addresses on the Parlour Design website (one that a typical human browser would have no reason to find), has just been invited to the 'Annual Design Awards', whereby for a fee, we can enter into a competition and submit our best design.
Using their special promotional code sent via email, we can also get a discount!

So if we were genuinely being invited by a human, they would have used one of the publicised email addresses on the main website.

Similarly, my belief is that if this was a genuine industry award, we wouldn't pay to enter, but that the cost of looking through my entry would be covered by their advertising and sponsorship of the event.

I will of course be keeping clear of it.
That particular email address has now been blocked from further spam indefinitely, and the area it was used for, has now been updated to a new email address again.
I wonder how long it'll be before this new email gets spammed again!

PayPal Virus Email - "Urgent Notice: PayPal Limited"

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:12:00 +0000

Just had a classic virus attachment email:

We recently have determined that different computers have logged into your account, and multiple password failures were present before the login. Therefore your account has been limited.

Please download the form attached to this email and open it in a web browser.

Once opened, you will be provided with steps to restore your access.

We appreciate your understanding as we work to ensure account safety.

Copyright © 1999-2010 PayPal, Inc. All rights reserved.

PayPal Pty Limited ABN 93 111 195 389 (AFSL 304962). Any general financial product advice provided in this site has not taken into account your objectives, financial situations or needs.

[Attached of course, is a file "Profile Update - PayPal.mht (144KB)", and an html email, likely infected too]

So how do I know so quickly it's not real?

This is a classic threat of 'act now or you'll loose access to your account', under the guise of your safety.
PayPal would not send attachments via email.
If there was an issue, at most, they'd ask me to visit the genuine PayPal.com website by going there directly, (ie not using a hidden link on the email) and then view something from there.
PayPal would not send programs to help your computer. That's down to Microsoft, Apple, Linux, etc.
The email address this was sent to, was harvested from one of my websites, not the email address I use for PayPal.
The 'To:' field was empty within the message body (it should have my PayPal email only)
They did not use my full name, or my PayPal name in their message
The message layout doesn't even contain the normal things PayPal send (although having them, does not make it genuine either, but at least not having them flags up more warnings)

For more information about greater safety with PayPal, please view the mail PayPal website:
https://www.paypal-marketing.co.uk/safetyadvice/safetytools.htm

And of course, don't open anything or forward on anything, that is sent to you via email, apparently for 'security' or 'safety'. Virtually 100% of the time it's a complete fake and will do more harm than good.

Microsoft Browser Choice Screen Update for EEA Users of Windows Vista (KB976002)

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:44:00 +0000

Many of the browsers to the internet are using Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and for most people, the default option within Windows is the one people stick with.

However, for so many web designers, they first design websites to 'W3C accessibility standards' for browsers like Mozilla, Safari, etc, and then they work out how to make things to display properly in Explorer (although the introduction of IE 8 has helped a little with this particular challenge for many designers).

A quick check on the last month's 9,500 unique visitors to a couple of sites (that we've designed) brings up statistics over the last 28 days:

Between 61-75% of unique visitors to the sites are still using Internet Explorer,
Between 15-21% are using Mozilla/Firefox.
Google Chrome are averaging just 2.5-5% of unique visitors (although they are compartively 'new' to the market). This significant share however, has been helped by advertising heavily on their Google Search homepage to Explorer users, as well as large billboards, etc.

This recent 'important' update by Microsoft however should help rebalance these statistics a little more.

Thankfully though, with all new websites designed by ourselves at Parlour Design, because of the way we make websites, they're not only compatible across all the major browsers (even when javascript or images are turned off), but they can display on mobile phones too!

Blogger has extended it's ftp support until the 1st May

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:46:00 +0000

I'm very pleased to say that Blogger has extended it's end of support of ftp by about 5 weeks to the 1st May 2010

http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/2010/02/migration-deadline-extended-to-may-1.html

It's good news on some regards (gives us extra time to sort out a viable solution for our clients, before it's cut completely)

However, based on the increasingly slow service of publishing photos, videos, and even plain text blogs, changing to a self-hosted system like WordPress, does seem to be the most appropriate option for most of our clients.

The Blogger IP address to help circumvent the ftp lock

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:28:00 +0000

I was very pleasantly surprised to receive a personal email from Rick Klau, the Business Product Manager for Blogger today, after my recent blog post below.

He was kind enough to let me know the fixed IP address of 'Blogger', so that I may whitelist the blogger server, so that it can interact with our own servers, and continue to update the various blogs hosted on each of our clients websites.

74.125.66.132
74.125.112.132

You can also confirm these addresses by viewing the following page on Google:
http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?answer=41485&cbid=4qunbeknm8kq&src=cb&lev=answer

Unfortunately though, this will only be a temporary solution for some of our clients, as from March 26th, Blogger will be totally withdrawing it's support of ftp publishing (ie typing your blog on the blogger platform, and then hitting 'publish' so that it appears on your own website):
http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/2010/01/deprecating-ftp.html

(An email to this effect, should also be going out to all the email addresses associated with a blogger account using FTP to update their blog on the published server. I've already received about 10 copies this evening at various times during the evening).

They should be releasing a 'migration tool' in the next few weeks, which should help with some of our clients (after a certain amount of reworking). Unfortunately though, those blogs within a password protected members area, are unlikely to be supported by the new migration tool, so those parts of people's websites will need to be recoded, and will be interacted with differently in the future.

FTP Lock for our customers (also affecting Cushy CMS & Blogger)

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:51:00 +0000

We wanted to let you know in advance of a new development that we will be rolling out to the 'manage' control panel from the 15th February 2010.

Over the last year there has been a substantial increase in the number of sites on the internet that have been hacked due to viruses that steal FTP credentials from user's home computers. The hackers then use these credentials to insert hidden code within your website.

Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumblar for more information on this type of attack.

To reduce the significant threat from these viruses, our server hosts have been working with a focus group of administrators and direct customers to come up with a solution that protects websites. The solution is to lock FTP when it's not in use, making it extremely difficult for the hackers to infect your site via this route.

To unlock FTP, customers will simply log into their 'manage' control panel and click one button to unlock FTP for a period of time. FTP will then automatically lock again after the time period has expired.

Customers will also be able to nominate an IP address that has permanent FTP access, customers FTPing from that IP address will not have to unlock FTP. Resellers will also be able to add an IP which will give them access to all their FTP accounts without having to unlock. Nor will you have to unlock FTP if you use the File Manager within the 'manage' control panel.

These security measures will ensure that the majority of sites have FTP locked, greatly reducing the risk of having your websites infected.

Please remember that this change will go live on the 15th February 2010. Of course to help further reduce the chances of these types of attacks, always ensure your computer is kept up-to-date with anti-virus, malware, and spyware protection. Similarly, try to ensure that you have the most up-to-date software from the different manufacturers.

There's a good chance our customers using 'Cushy CMS' to manage their websites will also need to log into the 'manage' control panel to release the FTP access, prior to making updates through cushy.
We expect the same will also be true for those trying to make updates to their blog through 'Blogger'.

We're sorry for the inconvenience this may cause you, and are looking for a way to work around this particular problem as soon as possible.

What Content to Include

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:39:00 +0000

What to put on your website will of course depend very much on what you're planning to do with your website. There are a few 'standard' uses for a website:

The Online Brochure - Essentially a digital version of the sort of brochure 15 years ago you may send out to prospective customers / clients. Containing general text and images (and maybe a few videos or audio files) related to promoting your business. The sort of website content that doesn't need to be updated too often, but still gives a reasonable overview of what you / your company does.
The Online Shop - A digital version of all a high street shop, or postal catalogue shop, whereby all your stock / services are arranged in a logical way by category / type, with search facilities built in, online payment options, instant stock levels linked into your main database, etc.
The News Portal - Updated hourly / daily / weekly / whenever, with changes to your business and updates your customers / clients / followers may be interested in. Visitors can view the most recent news items, browse previous items, look back through the archives, etc. These services may also broadcast other items that may not be directly relevant to the broadcaster, but that may be of interest to the visitors (thus helping drive visitors to the website regularly).
The members' area / subscription based services - The sort websites often attributed to 'adult' services (although it's also useful for many other business models too), ie monthly subscription gives unlimited access to various photos / videos / documents, that users can then view or download, or subscribe to updates and similar. A good way to maintain a regular revenue, if you can provide content that users for that sector are interested in.
The link farm - An all too familiar site these days, whereby often 'good' domain names (purchased by domain name squatters and similar, or who brought up a popular website domain when it expired), who rather than having any useful content on, are simply a page of links, often computer generated (so not necessarily appropriate to the actual domain name), which link through to other websites who've paid to be on there (and who 'pay per click' for every user who travels through one of those links). Some 'domain name registrars' (ie GoDaddy) now use a link farm as their 'free holding page' when you buy a domain name through them at 'x' amount per year, and they then get paid for anyone who clicks on a link through their holding page, to competitor websites!

In general though, the following pages are normally a good guide to the basic minimum:

Main Index Page / Homepage - This will normally be the 'front atrium' for visitors to your website. Don't just put a glossy intro on there (that's sooo 2003), but contain all the main basic information about your business/company/profession that will encourage users to go further into your website (and provide the links for them to do so). Not all users will come via this page though, so make sure the rest of your website has links back to the main parts too.
Contact Us - a link to your main contact details (such as telephone number, postal mailing address, fax number, contact email address, online form). It's REALLY important to put a contact link on every page of your website. You can never be sure when someone will decide they want to get in contact, and if you don't make it easy for them, they may well go elsewhere.
Sitemap - This is a simply coded page, that provides a text link to all the main parts of your website (normally to about two levels down). It used to be this would help search engines find there way around, and similarly if your navigation wasn't as intuitive as it could be, this was a good way users could go to where they wanted, directly. There is a new sitemap.xml document however, that's designed primarily for Google, that helps a lot more with Google finding it's way to all your main web pages. (As you may see from the link, it's a little different to normal html, but thankfully there are free programs out there now that should generate this all for you, especially if you have your website hosted with Parlour Design).
About Us - If a new user visits your website but knows nothing about you, the 'about us' page or section should provide them with an overview, and reassurance that they wish to continue browsing through your website, and of course buying your products/services.
Terms & Conditions - Get some professional legal advice on this one. In general, the basic terms and conditions about the use of your website / products / services should be linked to on each page (normally at the base of the page). But don't just copy and paste someone else's: firstly it's illegal (breach of copyright), and secondly most of the terms and conditions I've read on SME websites (Small and Medium Enterprises) are actually invalid under UK law because of various unfair/unreasonable terms they include!

How to build/design your website

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:55:00 +0000

General Information

To actually make a website, you need to be able to draw upon skills from four distinct areas:

Graphic Designer
Programmer
Content Writer / Editor
Accessibility / Usability

Graphic Designer

This is about the look and feel of the website, its layout on the page, the choice of colours, the choice of images (both photos and graphic elements), the way it balances on the page, etc.

Proportionally, very few people are naturally good at design, with the most common design mistakes being to overcomplicate designs.

In general, keep things simple, and don't be afraid of subtle curves.
Use a simple colour pallet (that match with your brand, and don't clash with each other), keeps page sections in proportion to each other, use crisp powerful images, and don't use too many fonts.

CSS Mania has a great selection of new and classic design layouts that may help inspire.

Color Lovers has thousands of colour pallets that work well on their own.
And don't be afraid of using maths to calculate your proportions (ie 1:3 ratio, 1:4 or 1:5 ratios tend to be the maximum range for many elements within website design).

If you are going to design the website yourself, it's normally best if you don't have a natural flair for graphic design, to use one of the thousands of free to use design templates that can be found online, or with your web hosting providers.

Programmer

This is the element that's all about the actual code of the website. The 'source code' behind the design.

For many websites, this would typically be the programming languages of html, css, and javascript, although of course there are many more.

html coding is a relatively simple process once you can learn the basics of the language. In general, you need to 'close' any 'open tags', and failure to do so in the correct order, is the reason why most websites seem to fail validation, or display the same on multiple web browsers.

If you use a right click on this page, and select 'view source code', you can see what html actually looks like of this page at least.

If you'd like to learn, attend a course at your local FE college, or buy a good book and work through the exercises. Having a good basic understanding of html can make things a lot easier when it comes to trying to 'fix' any problems you may have with your website later.

If you have made a start at learning html, WebDeveloper is a pretty popular forum for programmers to exchange thoughts and ideas, or help solve problems for each other. But don't expect free support if you've not been making the effort to work it out for yourself first.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are an increasingly popular way to help display the design elements of your website.

These are most usefully held in an external file that multiple web pages can all reference at once. Thus helping reduce your bandwidth, and also making things far easier to change the design of your entire website by modifying just one file.

CSS did take a few years to reach the level that was originally intended of them (html was not supposed to be about design, but actual content). In the meantime, lots of designers were forced to use 'tables' to layout their content on a page.

Tables are for tabular data, not design, and should have been phased out of new web pages at least 4 years ago.

If you use tables to layout your web page, it may look fine and intuitive to a user who can physically see your website, however it normally adds a lot of confusion to someone using a character screen reader (ie a person with visual impairments), similarly, search engines can't find their way around your website as easily either.

Tables may see like a good option for their apparent ease in diving the page up into rows and columns, but don't be fooled. There is so much more that can be achieved much more easily using CSS for the design elements.

JavaScript is the programming code that runs more like a traditional 'program' within a web page.

Again this is a useful language to learn if you want to add certain basic interactive features within your web page, without needing to use server side scripting languages like Pearl or PHP.

In general though, you normally don't need it to build a website, although you may need to copy and paste the code from suitable providers, for things like 'Google Analytics'.

Content Writer / Editor

Professional Journalists, Poets and Authors are normally very good with words. Most website content however is written by non-professional writers who are either passionate about their subject, or are asked to write about it within their work role.

Have a quick look around and see what catches your eye. Normally large volumes of text that aren't separated with headings or images, can put people off from even starting to read. Typo errors, spelling errors, and grammatical errors are also a put-off.

Before publishing your website, run a spell check, get your friends and/or colleagues to read it, and try reading it out loud. Or ideally get a professional proof reader to go through your website, and highlight any errors others may have missed.

In general though, try breaking up large amounts of text with headers, sub-headings, and images. Keep paragraphs small, and try to use the words within your page that you would like people to be able to search for and find within search engines.

For brilliant content, employ a professional copywriter to write it for you. You'll probably be amazed how much they can do with relatively simple effort and changes.

Accessibility / Usability

Websites are included under the Disability Discrimination Act, and so need to be accessible to people with character screen readers and such like. Machines aren't yet as sophisticated as the human eye and brain, so it's important to take a few key steps to try and keep your website accessible.

Don't use images for text. In particular, titles, navigation links and headings should all be in plain text within the page, not as pretty images that look like text, just to try and keep the font in keeping with your design.
Wherever you do use images for the purpose of enhancing the user experience of the page, always use the 'alt' tag within the code. This provides 'alternate text' if someone isn't physically able to see the image, this should summarise what the image is for, or what it represents. You can also provide a 'long description' of the image on a separate page, with links through to it accordingly (ie if your picture tells a story about what you do, provide that story on another page, so that those who can't see the image, can understand what you're 'trying to say without words'.
Validate. This is such an important part of any web design, but is so often overlooked/ignored, to that website's loss.
Validation of your html code, is much like a proof reading of your website text. It makes sure you've written it properly, and that the code can be interpreted correctly by most of the major web browsers.
For example, validation checks that you've closed all your html tags, ensures you're using agreed standards of code, ensures you haven't written in hacked bits of code that may only be recognised by a limited number of browsers, etc.
Strangely enough, it's very rare for me to visit a commercial website that does actually validate, as many web developers seem to be happy to leave it with errors because it seems to display okay in a particular web browser, so feel it isn't worth their while trying to fix the problem.
The two free validation tools I tend to use the most are:
1. HTML (website coding) checker
2. CSS (Style Sheets) checker
Layout and navigation are two further areas that are easy to get right, but often forgotten by many designers.
The layout of a website page needs to be clear, open, and intuitive as much as possible.
There are various books written on the subject of the psychology of website browsing, where the eyes scan the page, etc. Normally, as you'll see, most websites have a series of navigation links across the top, and down one side of the page.
Typically, the company logo takes you back to the main home page. Similarly, every page should have a link to 'contact us', and your website 'site map' (and of course a link to your 'terms and conditions').
If you want to highlight something, make the text bigger, or add a colour to it (or behind it).
Images are great to helping direct people's attention to certain links, but try not to use some form of cryptic code in your images, to represent the various parts of your website. Although the research shows that users can quickly find their way around once they get used to the representations, the main research shows you only have around 4 seconds to hold someone's attention on your website, otherwise they go elsewhere.
Keep your navigation links in plain text, using words that summarise what the link is for, and keep it in the same part of every main website page.

Hosting Your Website

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:56:00 +0000

Your web host is essentially the computer space that stores your website on their computer server, and then broadcasts this across the internet when people request it by typing in your domain name.

Because of the nature of the internet, your .co.uk domain name for a UK company, could actually be hosted in Australia, and no-one would know the difference. It is normally good to have a UK company website hosted on a UK server, as this makes things easier with ensuring standard UK laws on data protection and such like, are easier to maintain.

If you do decide to have your website hosted outside of the UK, you will need to abide by their laws on content, ie certain states of the USA forbid certain content that others allow.

When looking for a web host, there are a few key things to look out for:

Bandwidth & Storage Space (in Gb)
Features (incl email hosting and future expandability)
Cost

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is essentially the amount of web traffic you get visiting your website each day/week. The larger and more complex the website, and the more visitors you have, the more bandwidth you may need.

For most small businesses, bandwidth is not normally a concern (especially if you're just displaying a simple 'online brochure' style website with mainly text content that's low on images & video, etc.

If your website is coded cleanly, this can reduce the memory of each website page from 80kb, to 20kb (these are the common savings I make to each page, when recoding someone's website).

60Kb per page may not sound like much in itself, but when your website is receiving 10,000 unique visitors per month, these small savings can make a significant difference to your bandwidth usage.

If you're on a capped package (ie limited to a certain amount of web traffic per month, unless you pay additional penalty fees), your website could go 'offline' at the time it's the most popular, so it's well worth considering uncapped / unlimited bandwidth packages, if they're not too overpriced.

Competition between web hosts, and the capabilities of web servers have improved things dramatically over recent years, so if you've been with the same web host for a couple of years or more, on a fixed package, it's well worth shopping around now, you're very likely to make some significant savings to your web hosting charges.

N.B. If you're planning a peer-to-peer file sharing website of sorts (which is banned on many host servers), or if you have large numbers of pictures, videos, or audio files for people to download, this could make a significant difference to your bandwidth usage.

Features

The features that come with website hosting are all the add-ons that can be useful to some, although many features will go unused. In particular though:

POP3 Email hosting / Webmail
Free web templates and CMS (Content Management Systems)
ftp file access
Other add-ons (ie PHP & Pearl hosting, free scripts, members areas, secure servers, etc.)

POP3 Email hosting / Webmail

There are two main types of email: Those your log into to view your emails online (web mail), and those you download onto your computer to read (POP3).

Some of the most common webmail providers are hotmail, yahoo, and gmail. With these providers, you can access your emails through almost any computer with internet access, view your emails online, reply online, and store your old messages online.

POP3 email accounts however, are more like a physical mail box, that gets delivered to your location in seconds, the moment you request it wherever you are in the world. Those emails are then stored on your computer (ie in Microsoft Outlook), and you reply from your computer which is then sent when you next connect to the internet.

You can also choose email forwarding, which enables you to forward all emails to certain email addresses, through to your preferred email provider.

With your website hosting, you should really get at least 10 POP3 email accounts with your hosting package, and at least 100 forwarding email addresses, as standard.

Many providers (including ParlourDesign) now offer unlimited POP3 Accounts and web forwarding, with the option to also log into your emails via a 'webmail' interface to send and receive emails from your various accounts if you're not near the computer that normally downloads them to the PC or Mac.

Free web templates and CMS (Content Management Systems)

If you're starting out with your first website, and not employing a professional designer to make it for you, it's worth looking out for free web templates as part of your hosting package.

These typically allow you to build your own website and add your own images and colour scheme, without any programming knowledge.

There are of course normally downsides to this (ie pages that may not validate, excess coding, and normally quite generic designs), however, if you're on a very tight budget, and not planning to do much with your website, it can be a good option to help you get your first website online.

Content Management Systems (CMS) is an interface which allows you to update your own website, whenever you wish, via an interface that's not dissimilar to something like Microsoft Word. Thus making it easy for you to update your website regularly with new features, news, events, etc.

ftp file access

If you're getting someone to design your website for you, having ftp access is a 'must have'. Essentially this allows your web designer to connect directly to the files on your host server, via their own computer, and then update multiple files in seconds by 'synchronising' the files.

Typically, only very cheap packages will not allow ftp access, but it's well worth having, for the future scalability of your website.

Other add-ons (ie PHP & Pearl hosting, free scripts, members areas, secure servers, etc.)

There are many other add-ons that normally available with any hosting package.

If you are having a database driven website, you'll need a host that allows something like PHP or Pearl.

You might want to have a blog on your website (which are sometimes available as part of your hosting package).

You might need a secure members area, or an online forum to help create an online community.

Generally, if you're building your own website, and you don't know what the additional features listed mean, you're not likely to need them. If you're getting someone else to design/develop your website for you, they should be able to advise on what you'll need as part of your hosting package.

Cost

Clearly, the monthly / yearly price of your hosting package will be a significant part of your decision making process. However, many people are still paying out for packages that area many years out of date (and so massively overpriced).

Through Parlour Design, as an example, we offer unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, unlimited POP3 Mail boxes, unlimited web forwarding, and a massive number of free add-ons, for just £50 per year.

In general though, ou can spend anywhere between £0, and £100 per month for website hosting.

Just be warned, anything that's 'free' has to be paid for somehow. So if you choose the free hosting package with your Internet Service Provider (ie BT Openworld, TalkTalk, etc.) you may be restricted in the opportunity to change ISPs later. Similarly, if you choose a free online hosting package, the cost for doing so will often be forced advertising throughout your website to other competitors.

Many other host providers will offer you website hosting from around £5 or £10 per month for limited bandwidth and features, but these are normally suitable for most small - medium sized businesses.

If you're having a specialist website built, you should be able to get a dedicated server for between £200 and £400 per year. However, this is not normally needed for most websites (even database driven websites with visitors in excess of 20,000 people per month), unless specifically advised to do so, by your reputable web hosts.

If you have any questions about any of the above, please do get in contact.

Buying Domain Names

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:18:00 +0000

Your domain name, is essentially your address on the internet. This is the name people find you by, and should ideally be a name very closely associated with your brand.

www.bbc.co.uk for example, is one of the most comprehensive and regularly updated websites in the UK.
www.facebook.com is one of the most popular.
www.google.com is one of the most visited.

Where to buy your domain name from:

There are countless companies on the internet, through who you can buy your domain name with. Some are great, some are questionable, some are out to overcharge. These companies are known as a 'Domain Name Registrar'.

www.heartinternet.co.uk are a company I tend to use the most myself, as Parlour Design has all our main websites hosted with Heart Internet on behalf of our clients, and the domain names are pretty cheap too.

www.1and1.com are one company I generally hear lots of good things about. They tend to be one of the cheapest for buying the domain originally (without too much in the way of 'hidden' charges). And their hosting packages aren't so bad either.

www.123-reg.co.uk are a company I used to use a lot, however, after a bit of a change in management, and a few changes to their server technology, I've been let down a few times by their systems not working as expected.

Domain Registry of America - AVOID THESE COMPLETELY The DRoA.com (also known as 'Domain Renewal Services' and with an American Flag on their envelope) are a heavily documented bad provider of domain names. They have a tendency to use unscrupulous tactics to take control of your domain name, and then charge well over the odds to maintain it for you. You can read a little more about the DRoA on Wikipedia. Essentially, if you have a .com or a .net domain name, they are highly likely to contact you by post, warning you to renew with them. They've also now started sending 'domain transfer completion notices' via email' when high traffic websites point their domain to a new location. If you get ANY sort of contact from them, just ignore it / delete it / shred it. If you've already responded to their request, try to block or cancel your request immediately (contact your existing registrar if you can). If you're too late for that, and your domain has already been transferred to them (by your direct actions only, not by what they try to tell you has happened), be prepared for higher costs, and even higher costs to get out of it.

Domain Name Extensions

The domain name extension, is the few letters at the end of the domain (ie .com, or .co.uk).
The main (and generally most wanted) are the .com domain extensions. However, due to their massive worldwide popularity, it's now almost impossible to buy a catchy short .com domain without buying it from someone else at a premium price.
.co.uk is particularly targeted at the UK market (however, unfortunately that hasn't stopped some people from overseas, buying domain names, with the .co.uk domain extension, to pretend they're based in the UK). If you're a UK based company or business, a .co.uk domain name may well be your best opportunity for a great domain.
.eu is also a relatively new domain name, for companies based in Europe.
You can also choose from .net, .org, .biz, .info, which are other popular 'generic' top level domain names, relatively well known and reasonably priced.
.name, .tel, .me, .tv and .mobi may also be suitable for you, however, these tend to come at more of a premium price.

How much to pay?

Once again, there are huge variations in price between where you buy your domain name from, and how much it costs. The following table lists some of the most common prices of the main domain name extensions:

Domain Extension:	Typical Low Price:
co.uk, .me.uk, .org.uk	£3.21*
.com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .eu, .name	£5.74
.tel	£13.99
.me	£14.71
.tv, .cc	£28.75
.uk.com, .gb.com, .gb.net, .eu.com, .uk.net, .mobi	£28.75*

*minimum contract for two years
The above prices include VAT, and are indicated above as a rough guide price, that I can purchase a domain at the time of writing, with no additional hidden costs.
Whenever choosing a new domain registrar however, the prices advertised on the main homepage (ie £0.39 per year), are rarely the actual final price (especially if lower than the prices above), but you may only find out the full price at the time of reaching the 'checkout' button to complete your purchase.

Things to check:

In general, don't get the hosting package offered at the time of buying your domain name originally. In many cases, you can get it cheaper elsewhere (although you will generally need at least one domain name, actually administered with the company who will host your website, but this can be moved later. Typically, the cost for moving a domain name between registrars, is equivalent to one year's domain registration).
Make sure the domain is registered in your own name. For example, VistaPrint now offer a monthly package for you to design and host your website through them, however, for your monthly fee, the domain name is not actually registered in your own name, but theirs, and you need to pay an additional fee (although quite reasonable) to gain ownership (ie if you wanted to move the domain to another register at a later date).
Make sure there is no forced advertising on your website (ie without paying your domain registrars an additional fee). For example uk2.net used to be one of the worst for this, doubling the price if you didn't want their advertising (which consisted of a banner at the top of every page, and then around 6 pop-up new windows when you closed that page of someone's website).
Don't go with the company who phones you up and offers you a domain name deal. They have to make higher profits from doing this, so the price is more too. Similarly, don't do a search for 'cheap domain names' or similar.. generally, those that appear first in the search rankings, won't actually be the cheapest, or best for you.

Choosing a name:

In general, the domain name should be as close to your company trading name as possible (many new companies now check for domain name availability, before choosing their company name).
Try to keep your domain name short, easily read, and not so easy to mistype (if read out verbally, or written down on the side of a company van, billboard, or similar).
Also, check that other similar names that may be mistyped, don't link off to competitors websites (and so if you can, try to buy the domains that would most likely be mistyped by your clients/customers when searching for you). ie for a company called 'The Therapy Agency' based in the UK, the main website is www.therapy-agency.co.uk which is the ones used in any advertising, however, the company also purchased www.therapyagency.co.uk and www.thetherapyagency.co.uk to help catch any stray traffic.

Search Engine Optimisation

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:22:00 +0000

I'm often asked about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and of course even more often hear of the huge numbers of people claiming to know lots about it, and will help you for a very significant price (without actually covering all that many aspects).

If you don't already know, SEO, is the term given to designing your website in such a way (at the coding level), that it appeals to Search Engines like Google. Essentially, the more it appeals to the search engines, the higher up in the 'natural listings' your website will be, and therefore, typically, the more visitors and thus more business you'll get.

For example, if you do a search for 'Pole Dancing Reading' on Google, you'll see it gives around 372,000 results. But right up there at the top, on number 1 of the listings, is one of my clients' websites PurityPoleDancing for Pole Dancing in Reading. This is an example, of free, good natural search listings (and good SEO).

The Purity website for its first 18 months since the changeover, was getting an average increase in visitors, by 15-20%, every month, based on visitor numbers from the month before. This accumulates to an increase of over 450% in web traffic over the year!

There really are massive numbers of things you can do to improve the natural search listings of your website, some are good, and others will actually damage your listing and may get your website blacklisted and thus removed entirely for at least 3 months from Google.

Techniques are also constantly changing, and things that work today, may not work tomorrow. The 'art' to effective SEO is very much an art form in itself, and the Search Engines themselves generally don't like to share too much on what they're doing next to help improve their search results. The general gist is quite simple though:

Design your website for a human user, not a search engine. What you do then isn't likely to upset your position on search engines over time, but actually improve it. ('Tricks' to help fool search engines to give you higher rankings, normally backfire in the near future).
Ideally, use simple html code for the content, and CSS for the design. That way, if you think of a character screen reader, on dial-up, trying to view your website: If they can find their way around easily, and read your content, it's likely the Search Engines will too.
Keep the content relevant, and up-to-date, and add new relevant content regularly ('blogs' are great for this).
Try to encourage real people and well positioned websites (ideally reputable news sources) to link to your website because they want to, because of your great website content.
Don't be drawn in to spending money with companies who phone you, offering to improve your Search Rankings by listing you on their website, etc. Bad links to your website, and bad links from your website, can actually damage your web reputation (and thus your visitor numbers).
Keep things simple, and write in clean English (or of course other relevant languages) with content that's relevant to your website. (Don't add lists of keywords, just for the sake of it to try and help with search rankings.)

If you'd like to learn some more detailed information about SEO, please feel free to get in contact directly.

I was also fortunate to find some nicely listed SEO tips on another website page recently, that's worth checking out if you design websites yourself.

Domain Registry of America are now emailing highly misleading emails too

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:03:00 +0000

One of our customers, thankfully got in contact today (before it was too late), in relation to a new scam by the Domain Registry of America, as follows:

-----Original Message-----
From: Transfer and Renewal Support [mailto:transfers@droa.com]
Sent: 06 August 2009 09:04
To: domain-email@headmassage.com
Subject: TT0, headmassage.com;
Order # 1686111

Hello John Smith,

The transfer and renewal of your domain name, headmassage.com is not yet complete at this time.

Reason:
-------
1) The Domain name is currently in a "REGISTRAR-LOCK" status with your current registrar 1&1 INTERNET AG
2) We require that you provide us with an EPP Key/Authorization Code from your current registrar In order to complete the transfer and renewal, the "REGISTRAR-LOCK" status needs to be removed and an EPP Key/Authorization code needs to be obtained. Please see below for instructions on achieving this.

Solution:
---------
- Log into your account with your current registrar, and change the status of your domain, headmassage.com, from "locked" to "active".
- Then look for the EPP Key or Authorization Code.

Alternate Solution:
---------
- Call your current registrar, 1&1 INTERNET AG (see phone number below) and ask them to remove the lock status of your domain name, give you your EPP Key, and allow the transfer to Domain Registry of America.
- Once done please notify us that you have done so, by clicking on the link below, or calling our toll-free number below.
https://namejuice.com/agree.asp?e=1&o=1686111&p=3110111

We will then re-attempt the transfer and renewal of your domain name.

As a convenience, we have supplied your current registrars phone number below.
Domain: headmassage.com
Current Registrar: 1&1 INTERNET AG
Registrar Phone Number: Please visit their site to contact them

Transfer Department
Domain Registry of America
Toll free 1-866-434-0212 or for International Callers, dial +1(905)479-2533

8/6/2009
4:04:11 AM

-----End Message-----

All the information they'd included in the email, had come from the publicly accessible 'WhoIs' information. The above email, was the first our client had received from DRoA, after absolutely no action from the client!

DRoA have been around since around 2001, misleading people, conning people, and overcharging people, etc.

For many years, these had been in the form of a highly misleading 'invoice' that would arrive in the post, with an American flag on the envelope, and an American reply address (even though they're a Canadian company), warning domain owners that they must renew their domain immediately, otherwise it will be lost, and using various scare tactics about what could happen when their domain is lost (these letters would normally go out, around 4 months before the domain was due to come up for renewal anyway).

Once you then replied to the letter, asking them to 'renew it' (as many people did, thinking they were linked to your normal registrar, etc.), they'd control your domain, charge around 5 times the normal annual price to renew it each year, and charge an even bigger release fee, to get the domain back to any other reputable domain registrar!

After countless complaints, thankfully their postal letters changed to be slightly less misleading. However, I now discover they've moved to emails instead!

I couldn't believe the audacity of the above email (the client's information has been removed for data protection, and the domain name has been changed in this email for confidentiality).

Thankfully, this was stopped before the transfer could be completed.

Surprisingly, although the domain was hosted with 1&1, nothing had been changed with it apart from some new web-forwarding within the 1&1 control panel, so either DRoA were very lucky in their timing, or they have an automated system, looking out for significant changes to the forwarding of good domain names!

New ISMA website

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:26:00 +0000

We're pleased to announce the complete redesign & redevelopment of www.isma.org.uk on behalf of the International Stress Management Association UK. This particular website started off as a requirement that their previous website (completely rebuilt in only late 2007) had significantly reduced their search rankings since relaunch, and very very few people actually liked the new design (after the initial gloss of the new launch in 2008).

Upon further investigation, we were amazed to see a new website like this (for a very significant design fee) was predominantly designed in tables (tables are for tabular data, not design), with hidden text in images (thus mainly hidden from search engines, and inaccessible to character screen readers), and essentially lacking in so many areas too numerous to mention.

The previous website didn't even validate with either the html or css checker (lots of major errors in programming markup)! The redesign took a little over a week of actual programming time for the main system, although, because we'd pulled the text content from the 'existing' website, and recoded it into the new accessible format, the clients discovered countless pages of out of date content, they didn't even know they had!

Also, as the design expanded, their requirements increased as they then wished to combine their other websites, into this one.

So, for a small additional fee, we incorporated their 'National Stress Awareness Day' website as part of the new design, also adding the 'ISMA Conference' website, and a new secure members area. (as well as an up-to-date web search facility, and new in-house newsletter feature within their server space rather than using an external one)

The site has been built to the latest standards, using good simple html for the main content (and thus keeping it fast to load, accessible to screen readers, and good for search engines), and then using CSS for the design and layout.

As you may see, many of the pages are also optimised for printing automatically (just go to 'Print Preview' to see what happens).

We've also now incorporated two web logs (blogs) with Google's Blogger, within the site, for a way to effectively add new press releases, new research, and various updates to ISMA for the public and their members. This is then all automatically archived, and indexed to search engines virtually instantly.

We've also incorporated the use of a very easy to use CMS (Content Management System) for every website page, allowing the administrators a very easy way to add/edit/update any of the main website pages, on demand, as required.

Of course, because it's hosted on our servers, ISMA also have full control of every file within the website, they can add unlimited email accounts, additional ftp access accounts, and a host of other benefits, for free.

If you'd like to check it out, just go to www.isma.org.uk and take your time perusing around the website.

You might also be interested to know, the new combined website came in, at around a third of the previous costs for just two of the four websites built less than 2 years ago!

If you'd like to get in contact about your website redesign, please do get in contact.

PayPal Phishing - Play and Connect Ltd

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Tue, 05 May 2009 10:52:00 +0000

Just had this one through today, to an email address that's only used by my web design clients (so unfortunately, some-one's computer in that link is currently infected with a email harvesting virus):
-----
From: PayPal [mailto:service@paypals.co.uk]
Sent: 04 May 2009 19:07
To: customer@paypal.co.uk
Subject: Receipt for Your Payment to Play and Connect Ltd

Dear PayPal member, You sent a payment of £100.00 GBP to Play and Connect Ltd (fairyland@playandconnect.com)

Merchant Play and Connect Ltd fairyland@playandconnect.com	Instructions to merchant You haven't entered any instructions.
Description		Unit price	Qty		Amount
750 Gold Item Number 103 , uid: 1400473058 , uid2:		100.00 GBP	1		100.00 GBP
Subtotal				100.00 GBP
Total				100.00 GBP
Payment				100.00 GBP
Charge will appear on your credit card statement as 'PAYPAL *MYFAIRYLAND' Payment sent to fairyland@playandconnect.com

Issues with this transaction? Y

ou have 5 days from the date of the transaction to cancel it. If you haven't authorized this charge ,click the link below to cancel transaction: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1fa798f5a5f5ae4
[Link: http://paypal.co-uk.dt6.pl/?cmd=_login-run&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1fa798f]

Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response.

For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and click Help in the top right corner of any PayPal page.

To receive email notifications in plain text instead of HTML, log in to your PayPal account, go to your Profile, and click Notifications

Copyright ©1999-2009 PayPal. All rights reserved. PayPal (Europe) S.а r.l. & Cie, S.C.A. Sociйtй en Commandite par Actions Registered Office: 22-24 Boulevard Royal L-2449, Luxembourg RCS Luxembourg B 118 349 PayPal Email ID PP120
-----

This one did take me a few moments to recognise the phishing scam rather than the immediate recollection I normally have. So how did I know?

The 'To:' field is customer@paypal.co.uk (rather than one of my actual paypal email addresses)
It's from a company I've never had any dealings with (normally a good warning sign) for a product I don't recognise
The 'cancel transaction' link, as I expected. If you hover over the link in the actual email (which claims to go through to PayPal.com), you'll see it link up to the website http://paypal.co-uk.dt6.pl/

Because of the nature of the link, each of these emails will probably go through to a unique URL (web address), which flags up on their system you actively use that email, wrongly (which means far more junk mail and phishing scams coming through to you). Similarly of course, giving your full username and password on the page requested, will mean your account will be subsequently hacked pretty quickly, and you'll loose money!

How can you prevent this type of phishing scam succeeding?

Never click on PayPal links in emails, to process any sort of transaction you're notified about. Always type the PayPal.com web address directly into your browser window. (The same applies to banking emails, etc.)
Have unique email addresses for different purposes (ideally one per company you sign up to, etc. and have these all forwarding automatically through to a smaller selection of email addresses you can pick up easily).
If you do want to check the URL in an html type email.. normally just hover your mouse over the link (without clicking on it), and check the URL carefully. Normally phishing scams are sub-domains of sub-domains of random websites (ie http://paypal.com.something-random.zz/ljasdasDAlkjasdaalalsad... )
Upgrade to the most recent Internet Explorer 8, which highlights the actual domain name you're on (or one of the others, like Mozilla, Chrome, Safari)
Keep your anti-virus (ie http://free.grisoft.com) up-to-date, and check regularly for malware, spyware, etc.
Never send bulk emails to the 'To:' or 'Cc:' field. Always use the 'Bcc:' field when sending group emails.

If you have any questions about any of the points raised above, please do contact us at Parlour Design.

Internet Explorer 8

noreply@blogger.com (JasonParlour) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:24:00 +0000

Finally, I'm very pleased to share that Internet Explorer Version 8, is now finally available for download. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/worldwide-sites.aspx

Hopefully this will mark the end of so many design issues with the previous versions of Internet Explorer, that up until now, has had it's own methods on how to display content (which largely goes against anything that the 'World Wide Web Consortium' have agreed).

Most used browser

As Microsoft's Internet Explorer is still the most used browser on the internet, the problem for web designers for many years has been to develop a website that looks good, adheres to the accessibility standards, and validates http://validator.w3.org. Then, the designer has to add various 'hacks' to make it still look okay with Internet Explorer (Explorer always seemed to have it's own way of displaying web pages)! Thankfully (apparently), Microsoft have finally listened more carefully to the WWW Consortium, and made a browser that displays more properly.

InPrivate

Another nice feature I'm particularly pleased about, is the ability to switch on certain privacy settings through something called 'InPrivate Browsing'. As a result, the browser will remove things like your cookies, browser history, etc. automatically, when you close down Explorer. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/privacy.aspx (This is a feature that's been around for a long time in other browsers like Mozilla). What this in particular means for me, is all those advertising cookies that monitor your browsing habits to serve you more effective advertising, will now be removed automatically (as long as you switch on 'InPrivate' of course!)

Well done Microsoft, for finally getting up-to-date with the rest of the web!