What can a Blog do for your business?
Posted by Jennifer Farley | January 20, 2007 | Leave A Comment
You’ve probably heard some of the hype about blogs. Blogs exist on everything from Britney’s baby to stamp collecting. Blogs are simple web pages (and yes, a Blog is a website) that you can create, write and maintain yourself without any technical skills for only a few Euros a month. They are often described as online journals or diaries, but really the can be so much more than that. So why would you want to use one for your business?
Both businesses and traditional journalists alike had begun looking at blogs in a different way. Blogs are really just a content delivery method, but the thing is they are really easy to use. You can update your blog instantly from any internet connection on any computer anywhere in the world. You don’t need to learn HTML or web design. You use a special type of blogging software (called a blog platform) to create and update your blog. You type your post into a simple online form, click “Publish” and it’s instantly available online for the whole world to see.
Writing a blog you can help your business and online presence because you will be offering your clients and prospects fresh content on a very regular basis. Blogs are generally written in quite an informal way (almost like sending an email to your friends) so visitors can get to know you better. By providing links to information related to your business area you can can demonstrate your expertise and knowledge in the field.
To break it down simply, having a successful blog can:
- Boost your web traffic
- Build trust with prospects and clients
- Increase the size of your email list
- Make you money online
Knowing what a blog does is one thing, but the best way to get acquainted with the conventions of the blog format is to read them. The more blogs you read, the more you’ll get a feel for the depth and breadth of style and subject matter they have to offer. The following list of sites contain links to blogs devoted to every topic under the sun. Take a bit of time to read a few.
Technorati
BlogPulse
Ice Rocket
Blogdex
One site I visit regularly, is problogger, an excellent site devoted to making money from your blog.
There are many different blogging platforms available. Some are free, such as blogger, and other require a payment, which is generally not very much. Typepad blogs are available from about €5 per month. The difference between the paid for and free blog platforms really comes down to features. For example, blogger does not include categories which is a very useful tool.
At this stage you could sign up for a free blog and try it out to see how easy it is. Eventually you will need to make a decision about what platform you will use. To differentiate your blog from everyone else’s your blog should will need to reflect your business, and should include your company graphics and logo.
So any small business can start, build and have fun with blogs. Use your rants and raves and opinions to get more traffic to your site and gain a flood of new customers. Start now.
Website Launch : MCOB Technology
Posted by Jennifer Farley | December 5, 2006 | Leave A Comment
Laughing Lion Design has recently completed a re-design and website build for MCOB Technology.
MCOB Technology provides Sybase Training for Database Administrators and Developers. Thanks to Margaret and best of luck with the company.
Website Launch : Flirt Shirts
Posted by Jennifer Farley | December 1, 2006 | Leave A Comment
Laughing Lion Design has recently designed, built and launched Flirt Shirts - a website offering a wide range of T-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies and more - all featuring unique and interesting designs.
The site includes shirt designs in many categories including; Celtic Designs, Astrology, Funny Thoughts, Irish Sayings, Vintage Illustrations and more. Below you can see a couple of sample shirts from the huge range. They would make great Christmas presents!!
Why Size Matters on the Net
Posted by Jennifer Farley | November 30, 2006 | Leave A Comment
The cost for the web space provided by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) is actually one of the lower costs involved in hosting a site. The biggest cost to a web hosting company is data transfer.
What is Data Transfer?
Data transfer is the amount of data that is transferred from the computer that is hosting a particular web site to everyone that is using it. It includes the downloading of everything that goes to make up the page, including HTML, images, sound and flash animations Often the term Bandwidth is misused and confused with data transfer. Although the two topics are related, bandwidth refers more to how fast the files can be downloaded rather than how much is downloaded. The more bandwidth a site has available, the quicker it can send files to your visitors and vice-versa.
Data transfer includes only the files that are used by the person visiting your site. So, it is possible that a site that uses over 100Mb in disk space can use only 10Mb a day in transfer, while a site using 2Mb of disk space may use 50Mb a day. Therefore, it is important not to confuse the amount of data transfer or bandwidth your site uses with the amount of disk space that it takes up
To illustrate the idea further: If a 1kb HTML file is visited 100 times a day, the page itself would use 100Kb of transfer for that day. If the same file had images, each of those would also be downloaded between 0 and 100 times for that day (depending if the visitor loaded the whole page) and the total transfer used by the site would increase by the size of each image (or other file embedded into the page such as a flash file or a sound file) multiplied by the number of times it was downloaded to visitor’s computers.
So why is File Size important
If you visit a site that contains many animated images, a flash file and possibly a music file, it is unlikely that you would stay to download it all if the files are anyway large in size. This is an example of the idea of wasted data transfer. All the bells and whistles you place on your website would quickly add up in terms of file size but if no one is staying to watch your Java applet presentation then it’s just a waste of both your transfer quota, and your visitors time. It is therefore important to build websites that are as small in size as possible (without sacrificing the design), even if you don’t pay much for your web space.
Reducing File Sizes
If your site is getting too near its data transfer limit for comfort then there are basically two things you can do to help minimise the effects.
- Reduce the number of files on your server
- Optimize your files for use on the web
Reducing the number of files on the server is only really effective in saving data transfer if you make the right choice about which files to delete. Deleting your least accessed files may seem like a logical choice, but if they are only being accessed 2 or 3 times a day then you are not going to make much of a saving.
The safest way of saving your transfer is to make sure that all your files are optimized for the web. Any file size savings you can make will add up to be a considerable saving on a busy site!
Optimize your images
When using GIF images (often used for logos and buttons on websites), try to use as few colours as possible without losing too much of the quality. When using JPG images (used mainly for photographic style images), experiment with different levels of compression.
Compress your HTML
It is important that the HTML used on the site incorporates the latest standards. Once your pages are following the standards, there are HTML compression tools available to squash any un-necessary code out of your pages.
Sound Quality
If you use sound files at all on your site and they are high quality, it is worth opening them up in suitable editor and experiment with saving them in different formats to see if you can get the same sort of quality by saving it in a different way.
The Basics
Finally, go through your each page in your site and make absolutely sure that you need everything that is currently appearing on these pages. For example, your Flash intro, is it for show purposes only or does it really have a function. Be ruthless!
Web Design: How do I add my site to Google’s search results?
Posted by Jennifer Farley | June 22, 2006 | Leave A Comment
How do I add my site to Google’s search results? This is a question that many of our clients ask.
It’s really easy to submit a site to Google - you can do it here and it’s free.
To get the answer to the question straight from the horse’s mouth, you can read Google’s own guidelines. They actually say that it is unnecessary to submit your site to Google (I’d still do it anyway!). Google uses software known as “spiders” to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to the index.
If a site is missed by a spider it could be because of one of the following reasons;
- The site is not well connected with other sites through an inbound linking structure.
- The site launched after Google’s most recent crawl was completed.
- Poor web site design makes it difficult for Google to effectively crawl your content.
- The site was temporarily unavailable at the time of crawling or an error was received.
Laughing Lion Design submit all their clients websites to Google and the other major search engines.
Website Re-Design : Replentec
Posted by Jennifer Farley | June 4, 2006 | Leave A Comment
Laughing Lion Design have just completed a re-design and build of the Replentec website. The re-design was based around the colours in the Replentec logo of blue, white and red. I’m very pleased with the design and most importantly the good folk over at Replentec are very happy with it too. We wish them the best of success with their site.
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About
Hi, my name is Jennifer Farley and I am a designer and design instructor based in Ireland. Read more about Laughing Lion Design .
Hire me for illustration work too!
view my portfolio:
coroflot.com/jennyrusks -
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