Even an appearance by Justin Bieber in the video isn’t enough to put us off.

On Saturday April 21 2012, the Hilton Hotel in Bradford will play host to the Daffodils and Diamonds Ball, inviting guests to “dress to impress” and enjoy a champagne reception, four course dinner and entertainment from Michael Buble (ok, a tribute act) and illusionist Shahid Malik (the real one).

If that wasn’t enough, attendees are also in with a chance to win a diamond.

Not bad for £40 a ticket (or a table of 10 for £385).

We’re happy to do all we can to publicise this worthwhile event and if you’d like to know more, then email the Lord Mayor’s Appeal, call 01274 434965 or  click here to download a PDF flyer.

Alternatively, visit Marie Curie and donate directly.

If only it were that simple.

More often than not, the “SEO expert” is a modern day snake oil salesman, promising the world but rarely explaining how this miracle will be achieved. And 30 seconds on their web sites usually demonstrates this.

There is no such thing as a quick fix for search engine ranking. And attempts to create them ultimately leads to long-term damage to your site.

If someone approaches you making search engine ranking promises, ask them to outline their techniques – and see if any of them fall into one of these categories:

• Link farms: 1000s of ‘dummy’ web sites containing nothing but links to the sites of paying customers
• Hidden keywords: white text on a white background or false text boxes moved off screen
• Cloaking: showing Google one version of a site, and visitors another
• Duplicate content: massive repetition of pages, hidden from Joe Public
• Dummy doorways: pages not linked from any other page on your site and designed purely to draw in visitors

If they do, then you’re likely to ultimately get penalised by Google.

Or more accurately, GoogleBot, the company’s ‘spider’ that goes out across the web to find web pages.

Speaking at a recent event, Matt Cutts of Google said: “We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

In short: they’re going to start penalising over-optimised sites.

There’s only one way to get a high ranking in Google. Great content.

Forget Google as such, and write for your audience. Include relevant keywords in your copy by all means but write first and foremost for your visitors.

As Google gets even smarter, this will be the *only* way to ensure you get a good search engine ranking.

And, of course, we can help you with this…

So, you should be setting up your Facebook fan page, Twitter feed, YouTube channel, LinkedIn profile and blog immediately shouldn’t you. Shouldn’t you?

Possibly not.

Many social media ‘experts’ provide a great deal of shock and awe when advising companies to undertake a social media campaign. Not fully-embracing social media will, they claim, mean the death of your company as your competitors gain all the adulation.

When was the last time you went onto Facebook to find out information about engineering parts?

Whilst scouting around for prices for new widgets, do you ever engage with the Twitterverse to ask advice?

You may. But I’ll wager it’s unlikely.

The truth is that social media isn’t a one size fits all deal.

As a very rough rule of thumb, if you’re a b2b business then stick to LinkedIn. But if you’re B2C, then add Facebook to the mix.

Whether you decide to use Twitter, YouTube et al comes down to your particular industry. For instance, whilst Inphinet is mainly B2B-focussed, we have our own Facebook page due to the nature of what we do.

However, if you’re the dirty end of industry, then your ‘need’ to be on Facebook is a lot less compelling.

A couple of our clients use YouTube or their own video ‘platform’ to deliver information rich videos on their web site; indeed we’ve seen more and more demand for this over the past few months.

But that doesn’t mean that video is the next bandwagon everybody must jump on. Can your product sell itself through video? Will the production costs outweigh the sales uplift?

As with all social media, the content is what breeds success. If your social channels are going to lie fallow for weeks at a time, then your audience will swiftly lose interest. And once they’ve gone, it can be extremely hard to get back.

From strategy through to delivery, design to editorial, management and evaluation, if you’d like to discuss how social media could help your business generate increased sales, then say hello.

Wireframes and wire framing fall into this category. They’re an essential step in any large digital project but, too often, their true value is undersold.

From Wikipedia: A wireframe is a visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website. The wireframe depicts the page layout or arrangement of the website’s content, including interface elements and navigational systems, and how they work together.

The idea of a wireframe is simple: let’s decide how a web site, iPhone app, back office system etc. should work before we write a line of code.

It’s a lot easier to add a new ‘box’ (to represent a Twitter feed, a video etc) to a ‘sketch’ than it is to add new functionality to a database-driven web site which has already had 200 man hours put into it.

At Inphinet we use a variety of tools for wireframing, with our favourite being Omnigraffle; indeed we’re currently using it to plan out a mobile web site, a back office membership system and a specialist software application.

By wireframing all of these before lifting a crayon or firing up the developers, both client and ourselves have a firm idea how a ‘product’ will function, how users will interact with it and where potential problems may occur. The time spent in this planning and testing phasing saves considerable time – and money – when beginning the heavy lifting of turning the wireframes into digital reality.

As well as doing some wonderful work for fantastic clients (of course), we’ve also been busy designing, developing and refining a new suite of content management systems (CMS).

Designed from the ground up to meet a variety of needs, the systems will be used for the vast majority of our new sites beginning this month.

And… we’ll also be developing white label versions for any marketing agency interested in using our tried and tested software.

Hopefully we’ve got a product to keep all marketers and IT departments happy.

1. Penguin

This is our PHP-based CMS, built upon a number of open source offerings. Simple. Slick. Extremely user-friendly. Out of the box, Penguin’s core system provides clients with a powerful content management system suitable for everything from simple brochure sites through to basic e-commerce.

Hosted on our own servers, Penguin is modular, helping to ensure all clients benefit from the constant updates.

2. Parrot 

Offering broadly the same functionality as Penguin, Parrot is the .Net version, for those who prefer a Microsoft-based solution.

Similarly extensible, Parrot is the perfect solution for clients with existing in-house Microsoft-based systems they wish to seamlessly connect to their new web site.

3. Elephant

The ultimate system, suitable for enterprise-grade requirements.

Elephant uses drag and drop to create pages, has a fully-integrated e-commerce store and allows you to design, run and track email marketing campaigns.

If there’s something it doesn’t do – then you probably don’t need it.

With these three solutions, we believe that Inphinet has a CMS to suit every client – and their budget – and, with our white label offering, can provide marketing agencies with a fully-branded product they can sell to their clients.

If you want to find out more, then please contact us.

The rest of us don’t see the attraction personally. But it keeps Dan happy. And a happy Dan is a productive Dan. So we’re not complaining.

1. Update copyright information. Usually in the footer of your web site, changing the date ensures visitors know the site is kept up to date – and it doesn’t hurt to let the search engines know this too.

2. Tidy up your page titles. Does every page of your web site have the same name (usually your company’s) ? Not good. Not only does this harm your search engine ranking, when people bookmark a page the title that is stored won’t explain what the page contains.

3. Read your pages. Put yourself in the shoes of both potential customers and the search engines. Are the pages well written? Do they explain the benefits of using your products and services in simple terms? Does the language ‘sound’ as professional as you are? Do the pages contain the keywords people will use in Google to find you? There’s little point using your own company terminology if everybody else uses other terms.

If you’re not happy with what you see it could be time to get a professional writer in.

4. Use the data your visitors are giving you. If you don’t have tracking software such as Google Analytics installed – do it now. Stop whatever you’re doing. If you can’t do it, find someone who can. I’ll wait…

Having an insight into what your visitors do when they visit your site is vitally important. How did they reach you? Which pages did they read? How long did they stay? What page were they on when they left to go elsewhere?

This information should be used to guide all your improvements. If you’re not creating a web site for your customers, then who else is it for?

5. Is this site fit for purpose? This takes a little longer but is well worth doing. Step away from your site. Now write up an outline of what your web site is meant to achieve. If you were creating a new site from scratch, what would it need to do?

Once you’ve outlined this – and it need be no more than a side of A4 – then answer honestly whether your current site meets these aims. If not, why not?

Of course, if you require advice or assistance, then you only need to ask.

AdWords are those text only ads you see at the right hand side of Google when you’ve performed a search. They’re linked to the keywords or topic you’ve just searched for and can be fantastic way of driving traffic to your web site.

Rather than re-write the words of others, here’s Google’s own overview of Adwords:

Targeted reach
Now you can advertise to people searching on Google. Even if you already appear in Google’s search results, AdWords can help you target new audiences on Google and our advertising network.

Greater control
You can edit your ads and adjust your budget until you get the results that you want. You can also display a variety of ad formats and even target your ads to specific languages and geographic locations.

Measurable value
There’s no minimum spending requirement or time commitment. And with the cost-per-click option, you’re only charged if people click your ads. This means that every pound of your budget goes towards bringing new prospects to you.

Through ‘connections’, we’ve got a number of £50 credit vouchers for advertising on Google AdWords – for new advertisers only.

If you’d like to find out more, please contact us.

We’re all in agreement: the Danish have the happiest looking plug sockets. And the Canadian ones look a little bit frightening. 

All the different standards came about because someone decided to go a different route to the same destination. And why not.

When we work with a client on a new web site we take the time to understand their very specific requirements. Only by getting that understanding of their various needs can we design the right ‘socket’ for them.

Every web site will do a job. But each will do it differently. Sometimes you need to be Canada and sometimes Denmark.

Original image from Imgur.com