Optional www expands Canonical confusion with MS Office Small Business Live & Google Pagemaker

Writing about web page http://tsfcoventry.co.uk

I have written about the problems of different aliases of a page such as to the WMCCM home page below.

http://www.wmccm.co.uk
http://www.wmccm.co.uk/WMCCM/
http://www.wmccm.co.uk/WMCCM/DesktopDefault.aspx
http://www.wmccm.co.uk/WMCCM/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=1

The http:// has always been optional and so has the www so the 4 aliases’ above becomes 16 or 32 if you have https secure variations too.

Two of the main free and inexpensive website hosting options Microsoft Office Live Basics and Google Page Creator both create websites without the www at the start but these still work if www is added. These links also have many aliases’.

TSF Coventry’s site is provided by MS and the main version does not use the www. so all links to the site should look like http://tsfcoventry.co.uk/structural.aspx for their structural steels page. Good practice should use the same URL convention for the internal links as those used for the inbound links.

Robert McGonigle : 04 Feb 2008 11:58 |  Tags: Canonical Canonicalization Ms Office Live Pagemaker |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Poor British Gas Service hits Comic High!

Writing about web page http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/consumer/bills/article.html?in_article_id=425641&in_page_id=510

I decided not to Blog about why I am leaving British Gas Dual Fuel until this morning when I received a standard letter:

I’m sorry to hear you’re leaving British Gas. .... please call us on …. this will help us make sure the process is as smooth as possible for you.

To help this Smooth Process they included a Special Number to call and leave your final readings. Special indeed it was 0845á964á6464 and the same special number was printed twice on the letter; in the body & in the header! I know that many telephones have letters on them to allow clever mnemonics as phone numbers but which country would have the á character on the buttons?
Yes I just counted up the real numbers and worked out that á represented spaces but this letter was in the name of the Director of Customer Service, a Lois Hedg-peth. Another typo?!!
Since they have got me started, here are some of the examples of British Gas’s customer service that led me to move to Southern Electric.

• Set the Direct Debit payments such that I built up a debit of over £400 for electricity.
• Ignored my requests to adjust the payments before increasing the monthly DD to £107.
• I decided to calculate the annual consumption myself and tried to access my on-line billing record.
• I failed to log into my old British Gas Home account.
• Called the number on the error page.
• Called the next day to find out it was the wrong number.
• Called the online specialist helpline to enable the new ‘dual account’. “You should see both Gas & Electric”, I was told.
• Logged on to find that I could only see the Gas account.
• Called back to find the accounts were NOT linked “You will have to use a different email address for the second”, I was advised.
• Tried this but was still locked out.
• “You will have to wait until we join the accounts properly”.
• I got them to dictate the numbers I needed to caluulate the annual bills.
• Logged on to Money Supermarkets Gas & Electric site.
• Switched to Southern Electric for both because of their good service record.
• Selected the Hydro-Electric option for electricity. I wanted to decouple this from Oil & Gas prices. Gas should not be used at such a rate for power generation.

Yes I realise that my middle class green selection simply reduces the renewables content of the main tariffs for Southern Electric & Scottish Power customers. Customer service and the carbon produced will not be changed if customers do not vote by changing.

Just getting the right direct debit levels at British Gas prices has reduced my monthly bills by £40. Added to the £20 a month cut in my household insurance with 1 comparison and 1 call. The advice to spend one day on your finacial affairs can save you some real cash was true for me.

Robert McGonigle : 12 Jan 2008 13:15 |  Tags: Poor British Gas Service Switching Electricity Switching Gas |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Little Britain and the Nuclear Power Debate

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3177360.stm

Bill Bryson in his book Notes from a Small Island remembered his days as a reporter in Bournmouth. He was surprised to find more French radio stations than English when tuning in his car radio and even more surprised to note that he was closer to Paris than London. His mental geographic picture had been distorted by the ‘Little Britain’ view of our media. I laughed as everyone squeezed into Cornwall not to see the ‘99 Eclipse when a great view was had across thousands of miles of mainland Europe.
The same parochial blinkers are being deployed with all the angst about safety and waste as we debate the replacement of our aging Nuclear Power Stations. This map from 2003 shows that France has more reactors on the English Channel coast that the entire UK is envisaging in this next round. In the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Windscale (remember we were the first) scale of things these are in our back yard. Yes, the French DID decide to renew their reactors back in ‘03.

We have been struggling with the waste management problems for more than 50 years and the nuclear waste problem has not gone away. But our understanding and available technologies have improved and these problems seem very long term compared with climate change!

Robert McGonigle : 10 Jan 2008 10:17 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Additional Domain Names make it easier for Visitors

Writing about web page http://www.ascot-precision-tooling.co.uk

One of the rip-offs that infuriates me are the charges that web-hosting companies charge for the renewal of a domain name. I have seen invoices for £180 to renew a .co.uk domain.

Often the best deal that an SME can achieve is through their Internet Service Provider, ISP. One such company’s domain is www.ascotpt.freeserve.co.uk . Since then Freeserve became Wanado then Orange. Their email addresses also had an extreanous .freeserve.

Domain names for .co.uk cost only £5 + VAT for two years from www.telivo.co.uk or 123-Reg and are currently only £4 at Telivo.

So I registered www.ascotpt.co.uk with its short email addresses and www.ascot-precision-tooling.co.uk as their referrals link. These are currently just redirected to their existing site but can be pointed to a new site in the future.

Robert McGonigle : 21 Dec 2007 10:44 |  Tags: Domain Names Redirection |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Microsoft Office Live Small Business Websites

Writing about web page http://www.tsfcoventry.co.uk

I have been helping TSF (Coventry) Ltd to launch their new website and branding. The next quick win was to improve the page titles and I was given access to their MS Office Live, Small Business account.
Changing the titles and keeping the simple navigation links was very simple in the Properties menu. I believe that longer link text is also helpful to people as well as bots. In both cases more information can build confidence in what to expect at the other end.

Overall Office Live seems to have a strong business centric offer to contrast with Google’s Page Builder and its widget library.

Robert McGonigle : 20 Dec 2007 14:59 |  Tags: Office Live Online Website Builders Small Business |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Domain name redirects or masking?

Writing about web page http://www.wmccm.co.uk/WMCCM/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=4367

One of the problems that the search engines have to solve is to work out which version of a page is most representative. The CCM home page can end in four ways but always displays the same content.

• .co.uk/
• .co.uk/default.aspx
• .co.uk/WMCCM/DesktopDefault.aspx
• .co.uk/WMCCM/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=1

The CCM team often hosts web content for our members. Initially all of these used masking because this was the only option using the domain registrant FreeParking but after moving to Telivo we have the choice. Masking means that the visitor appears to be on the redirected domain even when navigating within the host site. With masking the search engines can just treat this as the redirection page with its title and description.

Most search engines prefer a 301 redirect that makes clear which is the main page.

I have been creating ‘mini sites’ using CCM catalogue pages and a cluster page as an index. These can easily be associated to the companies site with an additional domain such as www.unilight-lighting.co.uk which redirects with masking to the CCM page, above.
This will cause problems with the search engines but is less confusing to the user who navigates there from e-newsletters etc.

The masking will have some negative impact but this can be reduced if you treat the underlying CCM page as the main page for search. The strong internal links from the rest of the CCM site helps with this.
Where the different domains are similar or related such as .com and .co.uk then non-masked redirection should be used.

Robert McGonigle : 10 Dec 2007 14:53 |  Tags: Cannonicalization Domain Redirection Masked Redirection |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

How web–authoring technology can get in the way.

Writing about web page http://www.wmccm.co.uk/WMCCM/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=1&tabid=4203

The CCM team are recruiting transitional companles according to the EC postcode lottery. I helped a company on a small trading estate and noted more firms with the same postcode.

I followed up three, all with websites, some showing considerable investment but all three failed to work as a business tool. Their websites were positively search engine hostile with combinations of the usual culprits, below:

• Flash landing pages.
• Frames.
• Complex database generated pages with many parameters.
• Confusion of domain names and masking.

One of my project students last year evaluated simple checklists for websites and used 5 or more functional checks. All three of these websites failed my simpler 2 step test (see Web Poster ).

1. Copy a unique extract of text from the site, add quotes & search.
   This can include their brand.
2. If the words can be found check for links to the rest of the site.

When the words CAN be found and the pages act as a site then you can improve the titles, write better copy and build good links. All this is a waste of effort if hidden by the technology.

Robert McGonigle : 27 Nov 2007 11:09 |  Tags: Seo Webpage Authoring Website Technology |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

An Extra Forward Slash foils the Googlebot

Writing about web page http://www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk

LR Products have migrated from solely serving the automotive and truck cabs business to mainly serving the building trade and renovators with GRP Chimneys, brick effect cladding, stone and brick effect arches window canopies, dormers etc. Moving from the mass identical to individually colour matched products they have rebranded to GRP Building Products.

Their web hosts redirected their old domain www.lrproducts.co.uk to the new domain www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk but unfortunately added two forward slashes after the .co.uk. So these linked to www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk// (note Blogbuilder fixes the problem!)
www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk//products.html
www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk//finishes.html
When you click on these most browsers take you to the correct page just like the real links below:
www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk/
www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk/products.html
www.grpbuildingproducts.co.uk/finishes.html
I suspected that this was not helping the Search Bots and found confirmation here from Webmaster World: Google dropping urls because of an extra forward slash

GRP Building Products Ltd’s hosting company are removing the extra slash. Good adherance to standards will always help the search bots. Yes these could get around the problem but all the extra parsing and code that they add increases their already considerable carbon footprint. Simple, fast, easy to navigate sites are also greener.

Robert McGonigle : 20 Nov 2007 10:54 |  Tags: Carbon Footprint Googlebot Search Search Engines |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The CCM Blog is set up for the whole Team

Writing about web page http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/wmccm

I have just set up this new Blog for the team. Adding everyone as administrators/authors was easy. Thanks again to the BlogBuilder team.

I sent out the link as I was setting it up and Jay Bal beat me to the first post! A paralell world made serial by the blog-roll.

Robert McGonigle : 15 Nov 2007 15:46 |  Tags: BlogBuilder New Blog |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

So many Google Widgets you have to search!

Writing about web page http://stjames.whitley.googlepages.com/childrens-activities

I have been having fun with widgets in Google’s Page Creator.

These can place themselves somewhere other than where you wanted but it is easy to tidy them up in HTML.

The simple swimming fish behind a picture has generated the most reaction with fish swimming in the sky in the Children’s Activities Page . If this bothers you move your mouse from side to side in the water but what’s wrong with flying fish.

The problem is that there are so many widgets that browsing might never reveal that perfect tool. Even searching for weather brings up dozens of US sites. I had to search for BBC weather to get the useful Coventry 3 day forecast on the Hall Bookings Page where the folk banqueting were Warwick SU’s own LARPS.

Oh and these widgets also work here at http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk ! I have added that BBC Coventry 3-day forecast on the left.

Robert McGonigle : 04 Nov 2007 17:28 |  Tags: Google Page Creator Google Widgets Googlepages |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Using Blogs & Feed Readers to allow easily changable content on Webpages.

Writing about web page http://StJames.Whitley.googlepages.com/

Helping SMEs I frequently find websites that are stale and out-of-date. The problem is that these businesses lack the skills and resources to update their web presence.
I have been experimenting with the use of blogs as ‘news pages’ for websites. One example at my local church puts the news stories as posts on Blogger, www.stjames-whitley.co.uk uses Google Reader and displays the headlines on the website . This might seem to be unnecessary as the actual site is created using Google Page Creator which does not need web expertise. Page Creator does allow more complex code so this approach frees the design.

I have also experimented with a complete copy of this Blog on WMCCM’s ASP.NET site
On this page the Google Reader Javascript that works on most Blogs and sites is rejected. I did create a punchout link and combined the punchout within an IFRAME to encapsulate this whole Blog.

Robert McGonigle : 02 Nov 2007 21:03 |  Tags: Feed Reader Google Reader Punchout |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Problems with duplicate content or canonicalization.

Writing about web page http://www.tsfcoventry.co.uk

I am helping a very local company over at Brunsall Road, Canley, Coventry. TSF (Coventry) Ltd, trading as Howard Thorne Steel & Fabrications produce structural steels, fabrications and material handling equipment. The TSF (Coventry) website needed only minor changes but Google had found their prototype website on their developers domain. The Blog of Google’s Matt Cutts gave a good explanation of the problems the search engines have with pages with more than one alias or canonicalization.

TSF were introduced to WMCCM by Dirk Schaefer of Techmark over at the Science Park as a part of a growing partnership.

Robert McGonigle : 01 Nov 2007 16:43 |  Tags: Canonicalization |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Snap Shot's MapShot | Beta tested, unknowingly, on this Blog.

Writing about web page http://blog.snap.com/2007/10/17/snap-shots-experience-making-your-links-more-interactive-with-snap-shots/

Snap have announced a new service.

The newest member of the Snap Shot family is MapShot which you can activate by typing a very specific address into Google Maps, click “Link To This Page” and copy the URL. Now paste the link into your site as you would a normal link and we’ll add a MapShot automatically.

This new ‘feature’ was working on this Blog back in the middle of August but with branded links.
Check out how to use Google Local to create previews of your own branded page on Google Maps.

Robert McGonigle : 18 Oct 2007 09:33 |  Tags: Branded Page Google Local Google Maps Mapshot Snap Shot |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Brian Burtt – Celebrating his life

Writing about web page http://www.burtt.co.uk

I have learned how well weblog entries can work to gather together comments of those left behind after a death. The posts on Mike Smith here generated many comments from people who became his friends through business. Some of these were from friends that I did not even know of including students and staff at Northumbria University.

My father-in-law, Brian Burtt, died at the end of september.

Alison has been busy with the estate so I have helped her to set up a site to remember Brian .

Robert McGonigle : 17 Oct 2007 22:44 |  Tags: Brian Burtt |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Rising Sun, A5, Brownhills | Good food, service & Spuds!

I was on the road yesterday and found that my route took me past an old favourite stop, The Rising Sun, Chester Road North, the A5, Brownhills.
Picture by Andy Venn
I found that the service was still friendly with a varied menu and selected the fish pie. The pie had varied fish and seafood and was tasty as usual but the potatoes brought out the spud snob in this irishman. New season boiled Maris Pipers, perfect!

Find the Rising Sun on Google Maps

Robert McGonigle : 12 Oct 2007 10:33 |  Tags: A5 Pub Food Potato Snob Rising Sun Brownhills |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Links get sites found & Warwick Blogs links work Fast & cuts carbon!

Writing about web page http://www.malverncurtainmaker.co.uk

I blogged yesterday about an ‘out of the box’ website that I had reviewed. The main problem was that it had no links to it so the search engine’s bots were never going to find it. I linked from our new sub-site www.startup-support.co.uk last week and then blogged about the tools after my visit.

The whole site is now cached by Google with the only traceable link from yesterdays blog entry! Even better the owner found out about this with her first web generated enquiry.

This speed of responce is due to the friendly lists of updates maintained for us by the Warwick Blogs site. These direct the search engines to the changed content without the bots needing to spider the whole site. This saves electricity at the search engines data centres. So use sitemaps to the www.sitemaps.org standard in your websites to reduce your carbon footprint!

Robert McGonigle : 09 Oct 2007 18:14 |  Tags: Carbon Footprint HTML Links Sitemaps |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A Website Out of a Box?

Writing about web page http://www.malverncurtainmaker.co.uk

Last year I asked a student to research website templates; how to evaluate them and to create an approved list.

Last week I helped the owner of www.malverncurtainmaker.co.uk and found that her site was quite good from the start and easy to update and improve.

She had bought a Takeaway Website from http://www.mrsite.co.uk/ for £35. This will cost £2.90 a month to renew and host after 1 year which is clearly where their business will build earnings but this is still a low-cost way to a web-site.

I did not like the pages being labelled page2 etc but apart from that all of my requirements can be met with this package and on-line tools.

I was going to repeat the project this year to see if another student could make better progress but now I shall add mrsite and competitors.

Robert McGonigle : 08 Oct 2007 12:44 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Was Live Search a 'piece of junk'? Or do Googlers search more?

Writing about web page http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/27/microsoft_unveils_major_update_to_live_search/

Thr Register’s story about the, now annual, relaunch of Microsoft’s Live search platform reported that MS now claim to be ‘as good as Google’.

The Reg went on to say:

According to the latest numbers from research firm comScore Media Metrix, Live Search is the third most popular search engine in the US, handling only 11.3 per cent of all web queries. Compared to Google’s 56.5 per cent, that’s a pretty paltry number. But Microsoft is quick to point out that Live Search reaches more people than this would seem to indicate. In August, the site handled only 11.3 per cent of all searches, but it was visited by 37 per cent of all searchers – i.e. almost 70 million people.

From our perspective, this indicates that the company’s existing search engine is a piece of junk. People go there, and then they quickly leave for another site. The Redmond outfit confirms that 46 per cent of its users are “not satisfied” with the current state of Live Search, with most complaining that search results aren’t as “relevant” as they should be.

The statistics of people who use a particular search engine have always added up to well over 100% as many searchers use more than one search engine. More searchers turn to Yahoo for the latest from BB but would use another for their work.

My research has shown that the heaviest searchers use Google and have the toolbar or deskbar installed. Often Yahoo has led the toolbar installation race but this is because Adobe has pushed it with their reader downloads. The more expert, heavy searchers, choose their tools.

So do most Live users think it is a ‘piece of junk’? I do not think so despite MS’s own poor satisfaction numbers. The heavy seach users will continue to use Google untill they find a better engine. ‘As good as Google’ may tempt some more to try Live but they will need a compelling reason to change their Googling habits.

Robert McGonigle : 27 Sep 2007 16:42 |  Tags: Google Live Search Microsoft Live Search Visitors |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Go.Warwick domain solves my Landing Page problem.

Writing about web page http://Go.Warwick.ac.uk/wmgMasters

I was disappointed when WMG’s new website, relaunched to reflect our new branding and focus was not built around the old domain www.wmg.warwick.ac.uk For several practical reasons such as access to the Universities support and SiteBuilder tools the new site’s home page was and this has allowed many more WMG staff to edit and publish content, add events etc.

I have been asked to look at setting up a Google Adwords campaign for the new Full Time Msc Program and Site for 2008. Using the www2.warwick.ac.uk form of the new home page did not inspire as a landing URL. So we have taken a series of the
http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wmgmasters URLs so I can display
Go.Warwick.ac.uk/wmgMasters

As I am over 50 and clearly not in the tagret demographic for this site so I will not comment on the look of the new student portal. You CAN comment on the colours, look, etc., here but you can also post directly to the Portal’s Student Forum

Robert McGonigle : 25 Sep 2007 11:23 |  Tags: Adwords Business Msc Display Url Engineering Masters Full Time Masters Go Warwick Google Adwords Wmg Masters |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

When TalkTalk goes silent!

Writing about web page http://www.talktalkproblems.co.uk/broadband/

I have been watching the customer service problems of TalkTalk with interest. First these were the problems of success as users queued up to get connected to their competitive offer.

This week a neighbour asked to use our internet access. Her TalkTalk phone service and broadband access had been down for several weeks. Repeated attempts to get this fixed via TalkTalk’s offshore call centre had failed.

She then cancelled the direct debit but even this did not provoke any response. BT cannot provide a service untill she successfully terminates the TalkTalk contract. Several expensive mobile calls to TalkTalk always seemed to be cut off when being held “whilst we go through the disconnection process”.

TalkTalk are great whilst things go well but this has turned into a nightmare, she said.

Thinking about joining up with TalkTalk? Just type talk talk problems or talk talk cancel into Google first.

Robert McGonigle : 21 Sep 2007 16:26 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem