Change should be good - some Facebook users beg to differ!

Over the last month I've seen far too many complaints from users of Facebook - currently the world's largest social networking site. The complaints have been sparked by Facebook's development team launching a new design which, apparently, is a usability nightmare.

Personally I don't see any issues - in fact once you get used to it I find it much more appealing and a lot faster to load, especially when viewing profiles. But one thing which concerned me a little was the discovery of a group on Facebook telling users how they can get the "old Facebook" back.

It relies on the user downloading Firefox 3 if they don't already have it (you should do this anyway if you don't use it - it's a fantastic browser!) Once downloaded, they must embark on a full-scale challenge installing programs and changing settings on their computer. The instructions provided mentioned emulating Internet Explorer 5.5, which can only spell trouble. Microsoft's IE5.5 was released back in 2000 and there is clearly something in this browser stopping the new design from working.

While following the instructions is all well and good, it means the potential for many of today's websites to stop working is very high due to technologies developed since IE5.5 was released.

My advice? Take some time and get used to the new Facebook design. The Internet is an ever-changing world and nothing can stay the same forever.

The Planet explodes into darkness

The Register today reported that one of The Planet's 6 data centres has plunged into darkness, taking 9000 servers and 7500 customers down in a massive outage caused by, they say, a transformer exploding and causing a fire in their electrical equipment room.

Fire crews disallowed the hosting company's Houston-based centre from activating their backup generator plan, so whilst they have established their network and server equipment has suffered no damage, their customers are left unable to access websites, email and other facilities.

The Planet are posting hourly updates to the situation on their forum, so if you are a customer affected by their H1 data centre outage, please get the latest information here.

RedGalaxy UK offers website hosting at fantastic rates, offering quality service from friendly and helpful staff. If you'd like to find out more about what we can do for you, please contact us today!

Google blacklist recovery - long time no see for GoCompare

Last week I received an email from Robin Goad at Hitwise, updating me on the car insurance aggregator website GoCompare.com I wrote about here. GoCompare tried to cheat the search engines by buying links on other websites, a "black-hat" method of search engine optimisation. Unfortunately for them, Google picked up on this and gave them a ranking penalty, dropping them over 60 positions for the search term "car insurance", and even blacklisting them for their own brand name!

Robin talks about the recovery process for GoCompare and graphs the paid and organic traffic comparisons before and after the penalty was imposed; not surprisingly GoCompare catered for their loss in organic search traffic by increasing their PPC (pay per click) campaign bids - something which will seriously impact their marketing budget.

Some people commented on Robin's post, suggesting they took 6 months to recover from similar penalties, which certainly suggests GoCompare have a long drive ahead of them!

If you have a website and need to improve your chance of ranking higher on the search engines, don't incur penalties - contact our SEO specialists and see what we can do for you.

Pakistan imposes YouTube ban - the wrong way!

There are ways of blocking content found on the Internet. Child safety software, filtering built into routers and firewall equipment. Even good ol' Internet Explorer has the capability to some end. While these are all viable ways of stopping users of a particular machine or Internet connection accessing content, it clearly doesn't work in favour of government bans.

Unfortunately, Pakistan went about it the wrong way on Sunday when they caused a 2 hour near global blackout on popular video-sharing website YouTube. The ban was ordered by Pakistan's government in response to the posting of a forthcoming Dutch movie trailer portraying Islam negatively; to enforce the ban it's alleged that Pakistan Telecom "hijacked" the Internet address of YouTube's web server. What effectively happens is you can route traffic to a completely different address, display a different website and disable access to the intended website.

The details of the "hijack" were leaked onto the Internet by PCCW, a Hong-Kong Internet provider, and as a result many other ISPs worldwide blocked access to YouTube.

YouTube's owner Google has since confirmed that Pakistan has lifted the country-wide ban and full service has been restored.

GoCompare gets knocked by Google penalty

Penalties are issued by Google for numerous reasons - link spamming, buying and selling, "black hat SEO" (or "spamdexing"), duplicate content, keyword spamming - they're all violations of Google's terms of service and can result in a pagerank penalty, listing drop, or even complete removal of your listings from the engine's database.

GoCompare found out recently that it also hurts to openly buy blog posts and reviews on other websites. Having held the #1 spot on Google for "car insurance", they dropped down below position 60 after Google issued a penalty on them for, seemingly, sponsored posts. To indicate the severity of the penalty, Hitwise seems to think GoCompare received an 87% drop in search term traffic after being banned for the term "car insurance". Obviously other companies will benefit from such a penalty; while an 87% drop in traffic from the term wasn't enough for the comparison site to comprehend, Hitwise also states in the same blog post that Compare.com, one of the comparison site competitors, found that traffic from the same search term increased by 77%.

What Google are doing is proving a point. It's in the best interests of website owners to think before they buy themselves into the top spots. In GoCompare's case, it might have been better for them to request a guest spot, or contributed articles to websites.

Going tableless in 2008

CSS, tableless website design and XHTML are three terms which will probably mean nothing to the average web user, but if you run a website, are in the website design business or have approached a website design company recently you may have heard of them.

XHTML is becoming the de-facto standard when it comes to developing websites for cross-browser compatibility, and while CSS has been around for quite some time, up until this year many designers stayed with the tables and spacer images previously needed to develop a complex website layout. Now, thanks to browser developers becoming more genned-up on CSS standards, more and more designers are starting to drop tables and go DIV.

So what's the difference, and why bother?

Take below the HTML code for an average table:

<table style="border-collapse: collapse;" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%">
 <tr>
  <td valign="top" width="100%">
   Place your content here.
  </td>
 </tr>
</table>

This might not seem like much, but when you take a complex layout or design, you can soon get tangled in line after line of table code. And that's without any colours, fonts, images...

<div>
 Place your content here.
</div>

Who would have imagined that the three lines above do the same as the code before? Well, it doesn't until you add CSS code. But still, why?

• Better for search engines
  This can be somewhat debatable. The argument for tableless design is that there is far less styling code for the search engines to crawl through, meaning it's easier for search crawlers to pick out relevant content. On the other hand, the larger search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN's Live Search should be able to cope amicably whether a site uses tables or not.
• Reduced bandwidth usage
  This is certainly a bonus point. If you have a limit on the amount of bandwidth your hosting account allows, then using tableless design will help. The less your browser has to download from the server, the less bandwidth each pageview uses.
• Easier to manage
  Table layouts can be set up to do many things if you're experienced enough. What happens when you want to move your navigation from the right side of the page to the left? CSS tableless coding allows you to define "elements" which allows you to move them as if you were moving paper, depending on the styling code used and the position of the "element" in the HTML.

There are other reasons as to the benefits, and the three mentioned above should certainly appeal to most. When designing for our customers, we are now using tableless design as standard. Our own website is also being converted from tables to tableless as we speak, and should be completed sometime in January!

At RedGalaxy UK, our focus is always on how we can provide a high quality service. Whether you need website design, website maintenance or low-cost web hosting, give us a quick e-mail and see what we can do for you!

I've seen that Festival Too!

For 22 years, Festival Too! has been bringing free entertainment to West Norfolk, a sponsorship-driven event held on the Tuesday Market Place in King's Lynn. 2007's event saw artists such as Heather Small, from 90s group M People, taking to the stage.

Over 10,000 people attend every year enjoying various events spread over a three-week period, and this year saw an overhaul of the website, quickly thrown together with just three weeks' notice.

Following negotiations with major sponsor Adrian Flux Insurance, and Festival Too! charman Alan Taylor, RedGalaxy UK are delighted to become a Festival Too! sponsor, providing website updates and maintenance for the event. A new, sleek and up-to-date design is planned for 2008, and with it, the ability for people to interact and discuss the events with others on the web site.

You can see the 2007 site, including a video from line-up artist Birkenhed, by visiting www.festivaltoo.co.uk