2010 Company Blog Entries
Toile Solutions 2010 company blog entries2010 blog entries from staff at Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire web design agency Toile Solutions, older items are archived.
Xmas day!!!
25/12/2010Merry Xmas...
Whose looking after your hosting today, making sure its running as it should?
Our team are keeping things running smooth as silk.
Im not the only one working ...
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Im here too!
25/12/2010I'm working too, no let up in service from us over the Xmas period!
Merry ...
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Xmas shopping online
13/12/2010Its the time of year the ecom sites take a hammering...
Last minute shopping (or as late as we dare leave it before the delivery wont make it).
Most of the big retailers i've been using are runnign fine, one a little sluggish, but still usable.
How is your site going? Is it coping with the extra traffic this time of year brings?
Loving the way the bigger retailers are very promintently displaying the last order date for guaranteed delivery, very enticing to dive in and make the ...
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What Server Is Powering Your Application Online?
12/11/2010Web hosting companies are ten a penny these days with new ones springing up all the time and design agencies just reselling someone else's services, which is fine to a point, if you have a small brochure style site you are unlikely to encounter many problems.
But if you have a large online application, do you really know what servers your website is running on? Who is running the server infrastructure? What security measures do they take and how backups are done (if you are thinking now that you should check to see if your site is actually ...
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Put Some Human Emotion Into Your Website
27/10/2010Question: What Do You Want From Your Audience?
Answer: A Reaction?
Whether you are looking for your audience to buy your product, sign up to your newsletter or enquire about your services you want them to react - right?
There is nothing like getting a reaction than to stir up some human emotion.
Example of the human reactions your website would generate could include pain, love, laughter or compassion. An obvious industry to look at would be the ...
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Is Your Website Ready For The Christmas Period?
22/10/2010It may only be mid-October but you need to plan ahead!
Is your website ready for the Christmas shopping period?
Have you left it too late to maximise this year's online shopping period?
By now as a retailer you should have your Christmas products all entered and sitting in your e-commerce system, ready to launch now or a little closer to the big day.
If you have your products online already then you will be starting to enjoy the SEO benefits gained through early listings on Google, Bing etc, it takes time for pages ...
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Making Your Website Content Unique
18/10/2010Making your website stand out from the crowd is something we specialise in.
Anyone can knock together some pages, programmers can build the content and you can get stock imagery for the pages, but so can everyone else.
Google and the other search engines are looking for unique content. Writing good unique content for your website is a must, but why stop there? The imagery does not have to be the same as everyone else. Remember, you can get traffic from the image searches as well.
We've just completed a second ...
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Less Speed More Detail for Web Design
12/10/2010When planning out a website, it takes time, do it correctly the first time and it will pay off in the long term.
Too often we see clients who want to dive straight into designing the site, before they even know what sections/functionality/content the website will have. Until the content is decided upon the structure of the menu cannot be decided upon, and that will impact the layout as it could be a horizontal, vertical or both style menu system.
At Toile Solutions the detail is the first thing we will get right, once all the ...
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Web Conversations In and Around London
04/10/2010Imagine you are having a conversation with a client...
What Questions Are Your Clients Asking?
How Are You Answering Those Questions?
Think About It - Does Your Client Understand Your Answer?
Are You Clearly Explaining What You Mean?
Does Your Client Get It?
Now apply the same question that your clients are asking to your website. Does your website clearly answer those questions?
The only difference between your client asking you a question and a client asking your website the ...
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SEO, Google Updates and Web Design
27/09/2010How many of you spend hours each week checking and re-checking your Google positions?
Quite a few I bet, I have been a self-confessed Google checker myself.
We've noticed a bit of a jump, drop, bounce trend in the Google updates recently, client sites climb a few places drop nearly twice as many and then re-appear in the listings higher than the first initial gain.
Is this a procedure Google are following now? I'm not sure, it doesn't appear to be the same with all sites, some are updating in the index quite regularly, ...
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How Will The Changes at Twitter Affect Your Social Media Marketing?
21/09/2010Twitter's announcement of new improved functionality to their tweeting system is going to be a welcome boost to companies who actively use social media to promote their business, but what will you do with it?
At present you are restricted to the 140 character tweets that are short, snappy and easy to write, which is why they get updated so often.
New functionality will allow you to show mentions, retweets, searches and lists in your timeline.
Related content and mini profiles will show you more information about user's profiles ...
Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire | Search Engine Optimisation | Social Media Read full blog entry ...
Web Design with HTML5, Will Microsoft Beautify the Web?
16/09/2010Faster, cleaner and greater HTML5 support - Microsoft have launched Internet Explorer 9 Beta. Microsoft claims to beautify the web, so will it deliver or frustrate.
In the old days developing websites with only a couple of browsers on the market was nice and straight forward, nowadays with the intense competition in the browser market compatibility testing is an important part of the process of building our clients websites.
Opera, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari - browser competition is fierce, with Google's increasing ...
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Website Content, This Should Be Obvious But Many Sites Do Not Do It!
06/09/2010Don't hide your content!
If you have good content don't hide it away! Bring your dynamic content to your homepage providing rich snippets of relevant information and quickly giving your audience what they want - easy to find, up-to-date information.
Examples of content that works well on the homepage are News, Blogs and Video Galleries. The key is to provide just enough relevant and interesting information to make your users want to click through to your content pages.
Keep your content fresh and make it ...
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Notting Hill Carnival, London 2010
31/08/2010Had a fantastic weekend in London at the Notting Hill Carnival with family and friends. The rain quickly subsided and the sun came out over the parade.
Everyone was having a fantastic time and the colour, music and creativity was amazing.
The passion for creating the costumes was clear to see and made me think of some projects back at our Covent Garden, London office.
Our creative team are an amazing bunch and the passion for what they do is clear to see in their project work.
Whether it's designing the ...
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What Should Be in a Web Project Spec?
26/08/2010What Should be in a Web Project Spec?
Every now and then we get sent some really bad specs here at Toile Solutions.
Being Content Management and Application specialists our work is often very complicated and coding intensive, so making sure the spec for the project is right is absolutely crucial.
Making sure the spec is 100% correct is important for both the client and us.
For the client it ensures they get exactly what they want and for us it ensures we can accurately quote for the work we are going to ...
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Social Media It's Not in the London Dictionary!
20/08/2010'Social Media' It's Not in the London Dictionary!
No, it's not the London Dictionary, but the Oxford one, 'Social Media' has made it into the Oxford Dictionary, along with 'Interweb' & 'Defriend'.
I always thought Interweb was the word my mum used because she kept confusing it with the word 'Internet'! Perhaps that's why it only joined the dictionary 20 years after it appeared as an alternative way of saying 'Internet'.
Oxford English Dictionary (not the London one!) analyses over two billion words used in online or printed ...
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Free Marketing Tip from London Hosting Specialists Toile Solutions
19/08/2010Performance Tips Part 1
Performance is now a key factor for Google, so where do you start when trying to increase the performance of your website? Well, there are three key areas to consider:-
1) Programming - how your site is programmed, and if database driven, how that code talks to the database can impact site performance
2) Webserver Software - whether using Microsoft IIS or Apache, the webserver software has an impact on site performance. Microsoft.com reported a 10% increase in site performance when ...
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A Busy Week at our New London Design Office
18/08/2010Another busy week at our new London office!
Continual improvement is a key aim for us, we are planning our new Customer Care Centre to ensure all of our customer calls are answered and efficiently logged, this is a high priority for us.
Our new ticket system will speed up support and ensure problems are resolved to a high standard. Being custom programmed means it will be fit for purpose and easy to use.
To see how we care for our customers why not give our services a try, we retain 99% of our clients year on year and ...
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Social Media and Supermarket Sweep in London and Beyond!
10/08/2010It's amazing what you can buy in a supermarket today, whether you are shopping in London for your fruit, a nice bottle of wine or even to run a print of your best Facebook snaps. It seems ASDA are to offer photo printing of Facebook shots, the supermarket giant ASDA has teamed up with Fuji and PNI Digital Media to offer photo kiosks in a three month deal which will allow you buy your Social Media snaps whilst dashing in for your weekly supplies.
Toile Solutions, a London based Web Design Company have been developing innovative Social Media ...
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Creative Marketing Ideas Come at All Times
08/08/2010It is the weekend and new projects are buzzing around my head today. It is true that sometimes it is difficult to switch off but the opportunity for ideas does not always come when you want them to.
I read a fantastic book a while back, I remember it well. A chap was looking into the science of opportunity and had gathered a room of students to watch a pre-prepared video. The video was a basketball match and the audience was asked to count how many goals each team scored. At the end of the video the question was asked - everyone ...
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Top Requested Feature for YouTube?
05/08/2010What is the Most Requested Feature Made to YouTube?
Answer: To increase the 10 minute limit.
YouTube have responded and announced on their blog that they are increasing the limit to 15 minutes, now you can have your 15 minutes of fame.
Using video on your website can enhance your users experience - our own video work is in production and will be integrated into our website shortly. Carefully planned and executed video can greatly benefit visual edge.
Three benefits of adding video to ...
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Mobile Website Design and Navigation
04/08/2010Today I've been working on the layout for a mobile website, it's a scaled down version of the main fully interactive site which really opens your eyes up to one of the most important points of website design.
Navigation, Navigation, Navigation
Making the users experience of a website is key in the careful design of a site. We spend quite a bit of time looking at how we integrate the menus into a website to make it as easy as possible to surf around the site, whilst still looking stylish.
On a mobile phone with ...
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How Are You Using Social Media?
01/08/2010With so many different social media platforms out there it is difficult to know which one to be using for your business.
I have seen so many websites with a long list of social media platforms that you can follow them on - but are they all kept up-to-date?
When deciding, the best question to ask yourself is "What are my clients using?"
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn?
Pick just one or two and do them well rather than spread yourself too thin and end up with lots of empty accounts. That's what we do here at Toile ...
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Late Night Out In London On A Photoshoot
27/07/2010Had a real late night out in London tonight.
As part of the new website (which you are now looking at!) we needed some iconic London shots for the background of the site.
With everything we do here at Toile Solutions, we don't just rush off to istock, to get those same images that are used everywhere, we packed up our camera gear and headed off to the Big City.
Walking round late at night (in the rain!) we spent a good few hours taking shots of iconic images, tourist hotspots and the not so famous areas of the ...
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Google's Caffeine Update To It's Search Engine Indexing
08/06/2010Today Google announced that they have completed the introduction of their new search engine indexing system known as "Caffeine." Caffeine is focused on bringing website content such as blog posts, news, video, images and web pages into the search results index much quicker than before. Previously the results were stored in layers and the web pages gradually moved up at different rates into the live Google search results.
To keep up with the way the internet is growing so quickly Google have developed the Caffeine indexing system which analyses ...
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Domain Name Renewals - It's Important To Do It!
20/05/2010One of the scenarios we have had a spate of lately is clients who we just provide hosting for calling us up to tell us our servers are down as they have no email and website.
Whilst they may think they are being detectives in their diagnosis (they were incorrect by the way, our servers are monitored 24/7 so we would know before them!) it seems to be increasingly that domains have not been renewed.
Where people are changing email addresses and not using a domain one they own, they are missing out on their registrars emails and the domains are then ...
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Off to Internet World 2010 at Earls Court
29/04/2010It's that time of year again when we all head off to Earls Court to see what's new and innovative in online world at Internet World, our industry's trade show.
Via tube, train and car we all met up outside Earls Court 2, had a coffee and got down to business, checking out the competition and seeing what's new and upcoming.
Various seminars on Search Engine Optimisation, User Experiences and E-commerce backed up what we already practice as well as opening some new methology in what we can do in the future.
Hosting was quite ...
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Site Performance Counts Towards Your SEO!
15/04/2010Google have announced that site speed is now a new signal that the search engines are looking out for when indexing your website.
If two sites have similar content but one loads quicker than the other, then that site will provide a better user experience ultimately, and so is likely to be favoured more now in the search results.
At Toile Solutions we have been talking about the importance of site speed for sometime and the effect it has on userbility - so not only do we ensure the code is optimised for speed but also that the hosting of your ...
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Is Social Media The Future?
15/03/2010Getting current, regularly updated content onto your pages is always the key goal of any search engine optimisation campaign, but is there a way of achieving it without spending countless hours each day creating the content in the office and publishing it up?
"Yes" is the quick answer. "Using social media within your own Company's website" is the longer one!
By integrating social media into your own website, you can set up your own website community, making it a hub people will return to again and again.
This has two ...
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Why Do They Do It?
11/02/2010Today was one of those days, constant sales calls from the usual suspects...
Q: Do we want to change our electricity supplier?
A: No
Q: Do we want to change our gas supplier?
A: No we don't have gas!
Q: Would we like a conservatory?
A: We are on the 1st & 2nd floors of the building. Then again, maybe I should have requested a quote!
Then the call I always love:
"We can get you top of ...
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First Anniversary at Office in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire
20/01/2010How time flies!
It doesn't seem five minutes ago that we were kitting out the new office with desks, chairs, air conditioning, meeting room, green screen equipment and networking.
Yet here we are now twelve months on and double the size we previously were. More staff, lots more work and almost to the point of outgrowing the offices...
Luckily for us, we have a good bakers round the corner so the anniversary cake was easy to get hold of and was rather tasty!!
For those of you who haven't visited us at the new ...
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