Latest Web Design BLOG

Syncrony's web design blog has been moved to a new server and a new corporate web site. This simple sentence belies the hours of hard SQL work that was necessary to set the BLOG up.

 

As predicted by this writer and some other industry observers, Eric Schmidt CEO of Google has officially agreed to step down as an Apple Board Director. Schmidt was taking increasing flak from both sides of the fence as Google steers for a head on course with Apple on products such as Andriod and Chrome OS. Steve Jobs made the annoucement today. Part of his announcement said "Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest" Let the war begin.  

Bing is doing a poor job of indexing South African web content. Fact! and I can prove it. As a good SEO person, with a deep interest in the workings of Google, I embarked on some tinkering with the Bing engine, in order to make sure that I have some understanding of how it works. I was especially interested in the local search capabilities of Bing and how these would affect the local search market. I fully understand that Bing may have a limited impact on local search simplt because of its small market penetration, relative to Google, but that is now, who know how this will change in the future. Bottom Line: Bing sucks. My early research attempts lead me to believe that the Bing algorithm used for indexing SA websites (local search) has some serious flaws. It is not easy to determine how Bing evaluates and rates content that local searchers will deem to be valuable.  All we can do to assess this with any credibility is by looking at what pages appear as a ...

An announcement about the release of Google's updated search engine codenamed Caffeine is expected soon. Caffeine is an updated version of the search engine (i.e. the indexing and ranking system) . It is not a changed front-end. That means that results will be better (hopefully) and faster but the usual boring old Google search results page will not change. Various testers have test driven and investigated Caffeine's results against the current search engine's results with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Some like Mashable report that the search is “Lightening fast", coming back with results that halve the time of the normal search. Others however find that the speed differential is much lower. Of course SEO fears are that the new code will change the results and mess up well established rankings. The release seems to have something to do with improving or optimizing the results of local search, but we will have to see how the dust settles once Caffeine goes live. Howard Rybko (12 Aug 09) T ...

Recent studies in the USA point to the fact that some 55% of all United States businesses still do not have any online web presence. This is a stunning figure and one can only guess at the percentage in less electronically gifted countries like South Africa. I would guess that about 65% or more of SA based businesses lack an online presence. An article titled Leading New York Website Development Firm Wants to Know Why you STILL don’t have a Website made the following points: the reason is probably because of a lack of understanding of the sales & marketing potential of an online presence and a misconception of the magnitude of the costs involved. The author of the article Peter Crisafi, Vice President of dzineit maintains that most websites eventually pay for themselves. The fact is that in today's increasingly online world any business that does not have a website is simply making life harder and losing valuable online ground in the process. Google counts length of life of site on the web as one of i ...

I wonder how many Google users wonder about the occasional changes that happen in the sparse graphic world encompassed by the Google Search landing page? Most observers would have noticed the strange wiring apparatus that appeared on Google's page on the 14 of Aug 2009. This looked something like a science experiment: The aim was to celebrate the 232nd birthday of the 19th-century Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted .  In 1820 he linked electricty and maganetic fields and opened up the road to all the modern electical devices we use today. He showed that when an electrical current runs through a wire it creates a magnetic field that can deflect a compass needle. I think that it is pretty cool that Google takes the time to educate us and at the same time honour the not so famous, but massively deserving (in this case),  people who have contrinuted so much to our lives. Pity is that most people just carry on and ignore this kind of tribute. But that is life and that i ...