See Reports 4 Planning.

• Website Grader*: 51/100.
• Page 1 on Google: 2 keywords.
• Page 2 on Google: 0 keywords.

Not a good place to be for a site you want to profit from!  Using our technical know-how and the marketing brains at Essential Marketer we’ve managed to up our clients online presence to great levels and they will only get better!

• Website Grader*: 82/100.
• Page 1 on Google: 10 keywords.
• Page 2 on Google: 11 keywords.

Containing over 200 pages of original and high quality content and a strong link campaign this site will go from strength to strength over the coming months.

This was only the beginning of our relationship and after completing the main site we launched an e-commerce platform allowing for the sale of Storwells products and services online.

* Website Grader is a website analysis tool provided for by an entirely independent US company.  Essential has no relationship with them but we strongly recommend using them as their insight into site SEO and their grading system is fantastic for quick summary reports on your site’s likely performance.

If you attened the marketing seminar we all hope you enjoyed your time and learned something useful to take back to your businesses.  We mentioned some useful websites on a handout with a URL to some of the tools and areas covered on the day.  The URL for future reference is here:  Marketing Seminar Links.

1. Violating Convention

Designers who go against convention on the web are trying to ski up hill.  Its a no-go and Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think” makes it pretty clear why.  Users have an internal model of how a site should be with a rough idea of what a navigation bar looks like, where it goes, how it flows.  Same goes for any other part of a site.

Have you ever noticed that shops, department stores and supermarkets will often put their “Branch Locator” in one of just a few places?  Convention!  There’s a time to follow it and a time to break from it.

2. Opening New Browser Windows

Everyone seems to be guilty of this and its an oldy but it sticks around because people won’t let go of the whole new browser window.  Remember: If a user wanted a new window they can get one.  @helping’ them out will often do no more than irritate.

3. What is It?

If a website can’t answer that simple question in less than a second it’s losing the battle.  People don’t consider a site for minutes or even seconds at a time.  Its less than a second and if the user needs to think - they’ll likely get irritaed and move on.  Make it clear what you’re about!

4. Ads

Unless its how your site operates then get rid of the ads - people rarely like being sold to and the more intrusive the ads are the worse off you’ll be.

5. Heavy Text

People don’t like reading on a monitor and so they’re unlikely to want to trawl through great tracts of your latest novella online.  If you need to write a lot then add images, break up text with sub-headings, etc.  Make it mor elike a magazine and people will be more inclined to read it.

Snom are a VoIP telephony manufacturer who produce wired and wireless handsets handsets as well as a range of accesories for call handling such as repeaters, headsets, etc.

Technorati Tags: snom, voip, telephony, asterisk

Even though this research has been public knowledge for some years now the same mistakes are still being made by web designers all over the world. By placing your most important content and expecially your call to actions at the top left you can easily see double, triple and quadruple jumps in your sales and leads online.

For more information on eye tracking check out Googles answers.

As approved suppliers we’re on the list of companies chosen by Business Link to help companies with their technical projects. Joining the supplier register required an approval process to ensure our company meets the required quality and legal guidelines set out for the register. In just 10 days Essential was approved and its a testement to the efficiency of the local Business Link service.

If you’re interested in a Business Link grant to help with your technical growth then get in touch.

Technorati Tags: business, business link

I’ve just spotted these three great voice packs available in British English format while browsing the UK Asterisk User Group:

• Cut Glass IVR
• PBX Prompts
• tel.net - Jay

So on to the subject of the post. Why Debian? Well for those not of the techy persuasion Debian is a server OS like Windows, Unix, etc. In fact its a ‘flavour’ or distribution of Linux. You may have heard the old saying about over 70% of the Internet’s servers run on Linux well Debian happens to be a major chunk of that and there’s a lot of good reasons why:

• Reliability - From our personal experience and the stats out there Debian is by far the most reliable server OS available.
• Simplicity - Due to the robust nature of the OS build Debian has made it incredibly easy to maintain. With Aptitude handling program installation and DPKG handing configuration, Debians ease of use makes working with it a pleasure.
• Aptitude - This is actually an app distributed as part of Debian. Its called a package manager and it makes the task of installing, updating and managing software an absolute breeze. Seriously - its easier than Windows and its ‘point-and-click’ method. Not only that it will install anything else you need to get things working. Want to install a MySQL database? Simply type:

  aptitude install mysql

• Stability - Similar to reliability above but this is more about Debians overall solid build. Its one of the most integrated OS’s out there and you can tell form using it that they’ve put effort into every small detail of the system. With over 2000 developers worldwide and thousands more volunteers working on the codebase this OS has a testing and development team unmatched by any other in the world of open or closed source projects. If you include Debian derivatives such as Ubuntu we’re talking of hundreds of thousands. Thats one hell of a seal of quality.
• Users - So who else uses Debian? Well here’s just a small taster:
  • Boeing - Commercial Flight Test Data Systems.
  • City of Munich - Being used as the main system and configuration platform for the city.
  • Digg - One of the biggest news sites on the net receiving millions of hits per day.
  • The Register - Major UK IT news service.
  • Technorati - Worlds biggest blog search engine.
  • Council of Europe - Uses Debian for their servers (SMTP, POP, DNS, etc).
  • Semiconductor Physics Group, Cavendish Lab, University of Cambridge - Providing NFS, NIS, CUPS to over 100 workstations.
  • Bittorent - The original torrent service uses Debian.
  • Ministry of Public Administration (Spain) - Have transferred over 8000 of their Windows workstations to Debian.
  • Thawte - One of the biggest internet security and certification agencies in the world.
  • United Drug Plc - Irish pharmaceutical company.
  • OpenDNS - An open and free DNS service.
  • Many, many, many more - too many to list but here’s some more you may have heard of.

Technorati Tags: debian, linux, os