Julia Bradbury launches Peak District friends website.

Countryside television presenter Julia Bradbury launched the all new Friends of the Peak District website today.

She is currently and will be staying on as the Friends of the Peak District's president for another year. "Friends of the Peak District does brilliant work protecting the beautiful Peak District countryside, and I'm delighted to support them for another year," she said.

http://www.friendsofthepeak.org.uk

The website features a simple PayPal donation and Subscription payment system as well as extensive use of Hammer Design's own content management system - Chameleon CMS.

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If you've spent any time looking at the results you get back from a Google search, you'll probably have noticed that the domain names of the sites that rank highly almost always have one or more of the search keywords in them. Time to abolish some old practices so you can now do this too!

Buying keyword-rich domains and just redirecting them is so last decade...

Traditionally, boosting search engine rankings for a particular keyword or keyphrase could be done by buying one or more keyword-rich domain names and setting them up as Permanent Redirects (also known as 301 redirects) to the main website. Google and the rest of the search engines have seen through this one and as a technique on its own this method doesn't hold water any more.

If you're a holder of many such domains you'll probably find they're not in Google's main index and thus not doing you a lot of good from a search engine rankings point of view. Google has done this because there's very little real-life benefit to an internet user in clicking through a redirected domain name - the target site is where they end up so as far as the search engines are concerned the keyword-rich domain they went to in the first place is basically useless.

...but dedicated micro-sites can make them useful again

Lets say you have a company with a small number of 'primary areas' for which you are the leader in your market sector. You could place all your information on one website and this is recommended if you're a new company as it'll make website maintenance simpler. If, however, you've been in business a while and can buy some new (or already have some) domain names containing the keywords you'd like to be found for, you can use these to better reflect your primary areas of business on the internet.

Create a micro-site on each domain name, with a small number of pages, entirely dedicated to a given primary area of your company. Link back to your main website for anything unrelated to the primary area you're catering for (general company information; other services; etc.) and keep the user on the micro-site for everything to do with this primary area. Make sure, of course, that anything related to this primary area is moved from the main website to the micro-site and appropriate links are created so users who reach your main site first get to the micro-site easily too.

This is, of course, a bigger maintenance job but the results can be worth it.

If your keyword-rich domain name did end up out of the Google index, file a reconsideration request explaining you've now created an appropriate dedicated micro-site and you'll get back in. As always with optimising search engine rankings, slow but sure is the way and don't expect results overnight!

Ben.

This article is an abridged version of It's a feeding frenzy for keyword-rich domains, from the SEOmoz blog which provides SEO advice for those in the field but can be terse reading for a non-specialist. Hopefully the above overview provides a suitable plain English summary of the key concepts.

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Hammer Design went out on the BBC today. Si Homfray heading the new technical line up for 2010 was talking to Gareth Evans on BBC Radio Sheffield about the Hammer e-Awards.

Si went into some detail on how they are enticing the more pioneering and adventurous businesses to get into the new technologies and how they shouldn't be afraid of asking for what they want. Just about anything is possible nowadays and to a certain extent is affordable. The people are key - but so is a really good idea.

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A big wow - Phil Wickens and Hammer Design launch a new website featuring photography from the Antarctic and the Arctic. Windy tundras, falling ice shelves, Polar Bears and some seriously hard core timber shacks paint an incredible portrait of our Polar heritage.  Phil's work hasn't been seen before and we are incredibly proud to work with this elusive traveller, explorer, mountaineer, photographer... Go have a look - they are incredible. http://www.philwickens.co.uk/

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Rick Weldon of Audio Images launches their new website this afternoon after a smooth debugging. We are proud of this one - not only because of the long standing relationship between the two companies - but as we feel it is a masterful delivery of simple navigation and the triumph of common sense over the unecessarily complicated for technical's sake. Although the website isn't fully loaded with all the proposed content as yet - we are proud to let it go out there - the big dark eternity of infinite webspace. Visit the website www.audio-images.co.uk

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Over on the Google Webmaster Central blog, there's an informative page on Google's attitude to the keywords tag in HTML - its not interested.

Long time web authors will no doubt be aware that when search engines first started becoming prevalent on the internet, the main 'Search Engine Optimisation' technique was to populate the HTML meta 'keywords' tag with a large list of everything you wanted to be found for. This practice of 'keyword stuffing' was frowned upon and Google's answer was to ignore the keywords tag and develop a better search robot and algorithm that didn't need it.

If you write content for the web, or are about to do so, the exercise of coming up with the keywords list is arguably more valuable than the actual keywords tag itself. In any case, be sure to include your keywords for a given page in a meta tag because although Google doesn't pay attention, other search engines do.

Beginning next month - the Hammer Design 6x6 offer for well-optimised search engine friendly websites.

Original Source: Google Webmaster Central blog

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The latest e-Newsletter rolls out today taking advantage of the easy to use NEW hHammer Mail + programme - lets blow our own trumpet :  )
In summary it outlines what has been an extraordinary year so far, to say the least, and we how we have seized the opportunity to build, focus and drive everything forward from strength to strength.

Throughout 2009 we have been continuously honing and toning the latest techniques in web usage, improving navigation around websites, launched new promotion and marketing support packages and increased our commitment to the Hammer mission to build the greatest websites ever.

Promotional Offers: Hammer has launched some exciting 6x6 challenges for 2009 running into 2010 including our most exciting offer to date - the Hammer Design e-Awards.

The future: looks good for Hammer… new faces at work, new clients, new exciting projects that push the boundaries of what has been done before and drive us healthily and happily onwards.
Si Homfray.

Go to the full e-News Sept 2009 >

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Because we wanted to let everyone know just how much we can do to drive your websites along - because we do so much work no one ever knows about - 'white box' work if you like, we thought we should offer a few challenges to new and existing clients.

We thought the number 6 was devilishly appropriate and the fact that this work can take you anywhere made it all seem quite sensible to call it the 6x6 challenges - 6 great website offers.

Basically there are the six challenge offers to offer to anyone looking for web design, development and promotion. The object of the exercise is to work with those companies and organisations who are looking to refresh, rebuild or completely transform their web presence.
So to cover all the bases we are answering those frequently asked questions that customers keep asking for.

Questions, or problems if you like, such as...
'...we need to create a fresh new look for our website'. Which shows off our design and build services.
'...we need to take our website to the next level'.  Which is all about our capacity to develop great website function and systems.
'...we need to increase our online sales'. That shows off our brand new e-commerce systems and development.
'...we need to regularly update our website'. An offer that challenges you to the simplicity of our powerful CMS (content management systems).
'...we need to get found in Google'. A simple facility we can give new customers that shows them step by step the great new search engine optimisation tools and guides we have written and developed.
'...we need to reach more customers'. An offer to take us up on our marketing services, a straight forward methodology, step by step analysis and action stepped approach to generating more customers.

Whether you have any of these 'problems' or not, we hope you get the message that Hammer Design can really 'nail them'.

Si Homfray
Creative Director.

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The Hammer Design e-Award is a unique opportunity for innovators to have their website designed, built and developed with secure matched funding to the value of up to £20,000.

Hammer Design and a local business ‘Dragon’ have got together to offer website design and development awards of up to £20,000 every quarter.

The eAwards are aimed at regional businesses, entrepreneurs, organisations and charities with a great or worthy online idea they are trying to get off the ground or develop.

This is the first award of its kind in the region and digital agency Hammer Design are well placed to make these great enterprises happen.

Great ideas deserve great websites

more about Hammer website design and development e-Awards

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I found this artist whilst crawling through flickr. His name is Lunchbreath. He is a talented creative artist and I would highly recommend checking out his work.

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What is CSS?

CSS is short for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is a language used to separate elements written in a markup language. CSS allows designers to bespoke the look and feel of a website design. Designers have total freedom over font, colours, background images, margins, navigations and general layout of a website.

10 reasons to use CSS

 • To enhance user experience by making a site more aesthetically pleasing.
• Makes small design updates easier
• Keeps the design consistent throughout
• Allows alternative layouts/templates for example. blog or events pages can have different styles.
• Allows designers and Developers to work independently
• Makes the pages render quicker as CSS files are stored in the Cache
• It is very quick to make small alterations for future development
• For our clients with a CMS (content managed systems) it gives them a robust template for consistant content.
• There are Search Engine benefits as the ratio between code and content is in the favour of content.
• Accessibility -  People who experience readability issued caused by the appearance of a page can choose to view it without the style sheet or, if they know what to do, replace it with their own user-defined style sheet.

CSS in various browsers

CSS is handled differently across browsers. There are a number of known bugs in IE (internet explorer) but good CSS can accommodate for these shortcomings.

Ryan

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I thought the best place to start our new website design and marketing blog would be the beginning.

Nice and obvious really.

There seems to be one Golden Rule above all the other Golden Rules of marketing which is...

Treat people as you would wish to be treated yourself.

So here it is; pithy and to the point.

Rule No. 1

I wish to be treated with respect, talked to as I would converse with friends and above all honestly.

I hope you are going to enjoy our blogs - I am sure they are going to be fun to write, but their purpose remains as serious to us, as it is to you, which is a simple guide to save time, so you can concentrate on the more important things in life, like children, the great outdoors and untying the knots of unecessary online complexities.

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Gently, unannounced and quietly the new hammer design website was turned on as the veteran old site was docked in the boatyard of heritage internet vessels.

No champagne was wasted or smashed into her side - just a busy clicking of keyboard strokes and a passionate wave of her founders arms. Quiet smiles all round as her proud fabricators hammered the last rivet in place, moved stat counters, coded pages across and checked links.

She slid into the world wide ocean a hull with no frills and no real imagery just a skeleton ship awaiting the sail makers and carpenters, eager to build her cabin, fill her sails and really feel the wind in her sails…

We all wish her well, and all who wish to sail with her.

Si Homfray

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Creating webpages that load as fast as possible - there's a lot to it and I'll try to cover a few of the major topics here, starting with a brief look at the user experience considerations behind www.google.co.uk from a page loading point of view.

User experience in page loading

The holy grail of website loading is for the user to have the pages instantly available with no delay as soon as a link is clicked (or a page requested, depending on your approach but we're talking about the same thing here). This is a holy grail and can never happen*, because there will always be delays such as limitations of the broadband connection and time taken for the server to get the request and make a webpage out of it before sending it back to the user. When the webpage gets back to the users browser, there's another delay involved in actually translating that from 'computer-speak' (HTML) to 'human-speak' (visible text and images/video/whatever) before the webpage can be used and before the user actually sees anything.

As developers there's very little we can do about the users' broadband connection, but the server-side and user-side renderings are within range for optimising. I'll talk about this more in future postings I'm sure, but for now here's a brief mention on the user-side as this impacts the user experience much more where slideshows/portfolios and other non-text page elements are concerned.

Take a simple webpage like the Google homepage for instance - all browsers render this really fast but there's still several requests sent to the server before its all there. The text is collected first, followed by the images such as the Google logo and then the extras such as the script that makes the 'more' menu appear as a menu rather than a text link. 

Each one of these items is sent as a separate 'request' to the server and the server responds to each one with the appropriate content. The time taken for that request to appear to the user depends what it is - taking the example of an image, it'll take a finite amount of time for the image to download, proportional to the speed of the user's broadband connection but once downloaded the image appears instantly. Its now actually more common to see an image 'progressively' appear, where the browser show you pieces of the image before its downloaded the whole thing. This makes the experience better for the user, because you know something is actually happening.

Requests are generally sent to the server concurrently, so more than one thing downloads at a time and the whole thing is done in a few seconds. Good job too, because when visiting the Google homepage you generally go there when trying to find something and the thing you really want to do is type your search term in the box and get some results with the minimum of fuss. I've used the Google homepage as an example here because every aspect of it has been put through the wringer as far as optimisation is concerned and that's all well and good, but lets be honest there's not a whole lot going on on the Google homepage is there. 

In my next few postings, I'll talk about other aspects of webpage loading, site optimisation and other technical considerations that bring themselves to the fore when webpages get a bit more interactive than a few words and a simple text box.

* Technology advances all the time, browser and broadband speeds increase with every passing year and one day these things will happen so fast as to be imperceptible in the length of the delay, but there must always be a delay even if this is a few microseconds or even less.

Ben.

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Here's a video that never fails to make us laugh: What happens when you mix a flock of sheep, a lot of LEDs and a few farmers with too much time on their hands? This:

There's a High Quality version available on the main YouTube page which looks really good blown up full size on a 24" screen!

Location: YouTube
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Moral is high and laughter resounds in the Hathersage studio. It might possibly be due to the weather being glorious, but one might hope that we are all just in a good mood!

While making a few CSS amendments to our new site for IE6 I received an email from Si titled "Time Breakdown for a Web Designer"

I will let the image speak for itself in this case...

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At the weekend the Hammer Design Team went on an excursion to the Ogwen Valley. The weekend was jammed full of rugby, whiskey and lots of climbing.

Location: Ogwen Valley Wales
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