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Dear Lamtha2 customers,Welcome to our spring newsletter. This month we're having a round up of online image editors, considering the impact of Internet Explorer 8 and once again offering our clients £30 of free Google advertising.
Lamtha2 Web Solutions |
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A Roundup of Photo Editors |
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If you have an ecommerce shop or web site then there will come a time when you need to prepare images for your web site. We are often asked why this is necessary and why images can't be used straight from the camera? The answer is two fold: firstly images from digital cameras are now very large and if used directly from the camera they would take forever to upload and visitors to your web site will experience very slow pages. The second reason is one of aesthetics; the image must have a specific height/width proportion to match existing images; for example a ecommerce site will often have all it's product images cropped square. To prepare your images you need an image editor and your choices are: a paid for application, one of the many free applications or use one of the free online image editors. |
Free image editor applications include: Online images editors: So which is our favorite? Pixlr gets our vote; not only is it very easy to use but it is not even necessary to register to use it.
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Internet Explorer 8 is here | |
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This month Microsoft released their new browser Internet Explorer 8. Like any new software release the company's marketing machine trumpeted it's new features, better security, ease of use etc etc. But what is not said is how the new browser affects existing users; specifically web site owners. As the internet marches on it is natural that it's component parts; everything form the web servers and their application software which hosts all web sites to the end users PCs, operating systems and browsers etc will evolve. As a consequence a web site will not work forever. Techniques used this year may not be compatible with next years internet. Of course in many cases web sites, particularly simple sites will go on for years without any noticeable impact, save for perhaps minor cosmetic glitches which are often easily rectified. It's a bit like the move from leaded to unleaded petrol. It was a change that wasn't foreseen and so when it happened it necessitated engine modifications on many vehicles to keep them running. So it is also with web sites - more complex sites which rely upon server or client side scripting such as database driven sites, ecommerce sites, photo gallery's etc are much more vulnerable to being affected by external factors. |
So what can you do? Microsoft have provided in IE8 a feature called 'compatibility view'. If you visit a web page which renders incorrectly in IE8 you can hit the compatibility view burron and IE8 will attempt to re-render the page as it would have done in IE7. On the surface this sounds fine except for the fact that it doesn't always work and most users simply wouldn't know of the features existance let alone try it. So as a web site owner you have two choices: 1) accept that one day your web site will be affected by an external change and that you will incur some cost to resolve the issue or maybe even have rebuild your entire site. Or 2) you can insure against the eventuality. When we send our hosting renewals to our clients we now identify if your web site is vulnerable and offer a 'Premium Maintenance' service.
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IE8 Web Slices |
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One of the interesting new features of IE8 is Web Slices. Web Slices allow you to can subscribe to specific content within a web page and monitor things like auction items, sports scores, entertainment columns, weather reports, and more. Similar to RSS feeds in function, a website owner can designate areas of their websites that update frequently as web slices. Site visitors can add a web Slice to their Favorites bar and updated information will automatically be delivered to their browser. You can learn more about web slices at Microsoft's IE8 site here. If you think your website could benefit from web slices please contact us. |
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Get £30 worth of Google Advertising FREE |
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If you've read any of our previous articles you'll know that we describe search engine optimisation as something of an inexact science. These days SEO is very much biased towards peer-to-peer voting whereby a web sites search engine ranking depends upon quality inbound links form related web sites; the more you inbound links you have from related businesses, the more of an authority you will be seen by the search engines and the more likely you will be given in search engine results. But obtaining links is often difficult and certainly time consuming. The easiest way around this is to sign up to a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising system such as Google's Adwords, Yahoo! Advertising or Microsoft's adCenter. From time to time we have vouchers for free advertising on the above, so If you want to give any of the above PPC advertising systems a try at no risk to your finances contact us. This month we have £30 vouchers for Google's Adwords. |
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Top Tips |
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If you use Google's Adwords or have links from other sites (which you should) you will want to identify which of your online advertisers are being effective. To do this you can append the source to your website link e.g. www.yourdomain.co.uk/?source=google_adwords The source of the page visitor will now show up in your website stats. |
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Have you read our previous Newsletters and Articles? | |
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In addition to our newsletter we occasionally publish articles. Previous articles have included SEO techniques, avoiding email spam and how to hold onto your domain. If you are interested to read our previous articles please visit our newsletter page.. |
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