We provided a combination of our web design, photography and identity development services to ensure that Key Issues can now move forward with an identity that is consistent across all of their public-facing documentation and marketing material as well as a website that accurately represents just how good they really are at what they do.

Focussing on client care and satisfaction we went the extra mile and arranged for business cards to be printed as well as mobile email setup. We firmly believe that going that bit further for our clients really helps in the way that they perceive our services. We look forward to working with Key Issues again in the future.

We approached this project in a very personal way, working very closely with them to produce a website that accurately reflected their business and what they do.

We continue to work closely with Shine Studios and have established a good working relationship with them over the last few months. If you’re looking for a photo shoot, give them a call. They’re honest, friendly and Lee Smyth who runs the company is an absolute pleasure to work with.

We filmed the iTunes extras for the album over in Belgium a few months back and figured it’d be nice to get a bit of footage of the launch, a small, intimate gig in a pub in the band’s home town of Helmsley called the Royal Oak.

It’s only a short little video but it really conveys what the night was like. If you like the tune, you can buy it from iTunes – they deserve to do well with it!

Music copyright Mercury 2010.

As part of our service, we tweaked their logo to make it appear more modern and contemporary, reshaping certain elements and adding subtle gradients. We also took photographs of their team and designed a gorgeous looking website focussed towards lead generation and information presentation.

Search Engine Optimisation also played an important role in the implementation of the website, and within a few weeks the site is already ranking very highly for search terms such as Leeds Physiotherapy and Physiotherapists in Leeds (links to Google search result pages).

We hugely enjoyed working with Leeds Physiotherapy Clinic and with our help they are now in a position to take advantage of web traffic and enquiries that were previously not available to them.

If you’re in Leeds and in need of Physiotherapy give them a call – they’re really friendly people, very honest and down to earth.

People often ask us about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and how to get their websites ranked highly on Google. This blog post outlines the basics of SEO, with some helpful hints and tips that you may find useful. SEO is imperative if you want to be found online. Searching for products and services online is a regular activity by internet users – there is a high chance you found this blog or website by searching online. If you have a business and people are searching for your products or services online then SEO should be part of your internet marketing strategy.

There are two main parts of SEO, these are explained below:

There are two main elements to SEO. Offsite SEO and Onsite SEO. The search engines must be able to find and read the content on your website to understand that it is relevant to what search engine users are searching for.

Onsite SEO

We do this as standard for all of our websites. It’s all to do with the content on the website.

Content and keywords are arguably the most important aspects of SEO. If you want to be found for particular keywords or phrases on Google and the other search engines, it is important that your site contains those keywords. If it doesn’t, the search engines will not know what the website is about. This doesn’t mean that you need to add those keywords hundreds of times – this is known as keyword spamming and will ultimately have the effect of being punished by the search engines. It is more important to ensure the keywords are in the right place within the site i.e. page titles, navigation etc and are present in the correct density.

Page Titles are also very important, each website page will have a title tailored to that page but with a common theme. Our clients using Expose CMS can change their page titles easily by using the admin toolbar. Headings are important too, on your website these are usually the bigger pieces of text. The content is also important, and as a general rule, the more content the better. Having content that is unique to your site is extremely important as Google penalizes sites that utilise content that is also found elsewhere on the Internet. Don’t get obsessed with writing website text for SEO alone – it’s primarily there for your site visitors and must be readable, fluent and sell your services.

Technical site issues – onsite SEO is also concerned with ensuring that any technical issues with the site don’t interfere with the ability of the search engines to see the content/keywords. Examples of common problems affecting this include badly coded or thought out navigation as well as the use of Flash.

Offsite SEO

Offsite SEO is what you do away from your website, it’s all about getting high quality links pointing back to your website. Quality of links to a website are much more important than the quantity. You will rarely see a website in 1st position on Google have the most number of links. Finding quality links in large numbers is the target here and will help you rank very highly. A website linking to your site is like a vote. The better the quality of votes, the better your search engine positioning. On the Internet, not all citizens are equal. Furthermore, increasingly with offsite SEO one way links and not reciprocal links are much more powerful. Google considers a reciprocal link (you link to a site and they link back to you) as an attempt to manipulate its search engine rankings and does not carry much favour with this activity any more.

What is a ‘quality’ link? There are 2 main considerations:

Relevance – Having a link within a site or page that is relevant to the context of your product/service is weighted highly. E.g. if you wanted to appear top of Google for phrases such as ‘Web Design York’ then having a link to your website within a review of ‘website designs in York’ would be very helpful. Having a link on a page about ‘fishing’ wouldn’t be very useful for example. E.g. web design in York would be a good link to have as the keywords are relevant and it links to your website.

Importance and page rank of the site linking to you – All sites have a Google ‘page rank’. The exact way this is calculated is not known to anyone except Google but it is thought that it is an indicator of how ‘important’ a site is. Generally if a site appears to be an established authority (.gov or .ac.uk are great!) on a particular subject and has lots of similar/authority sites linking to it then the site is likely to have a very good page rank. If your website has a page rank of 0 then that means it’s not seen as important by Google. Having said that, the pagerank of a site can often be outdated, incorrect or not exist at all for various reasons, so it’s not the be all and end all of judging a website’s SEO worth.

Offsite SEO can take a long time, there is never guaranteed success and it can be quite costly. It’s something that you need a long term strategy for. Nobody gets to the top of google without it, but nobody gets to the top of Google instantly anyway. If anyone tells you they can get you to the top of Google without a lot of work then there’s something they’re not telling you.

Finally, don’t be obsessed with the volume of website hits. You would be better off getting 10 hits a month from relevant searches than 1000 from irrelevant searches. People will leave your website as it wasn’t what they were looking for. The key to making a website work for you is to get the right, relevant visitors to your site, and then transforming these visitors into sales leads.

We can help you rank highly!

At Snapshot Media we do onsite SEO as standard for all of our clients and we can discuss long term link building strategies. This ensures that Google picks the website up, ranks it for what is relevant for your business and gets you those essential leads. Get in touch if you would like to discuss this further. Find out more information about our SEO services.

A very busy night

We recently launched the website for The Yorkshire Mafia, with a full online event registration system in place, and the turnout at this latest event was absolutely huge – there were between 280 and 300 people there, making it one of the busiest networking events that we have ever been to. The Yorkshire Mafia is quickly becoming so popular that it’s difficult to find venues capable of holding that many people. All in all, it was another big success for such a great group.

As we had done at the York event, we shot a short video with some select members of the YM to be used on LinkedIn, here and on the YM site itself.

Obviously it’s a great honour for us to be shortlisted – there’s very stiff competition and some amazing businesses based in the city.

We work very hard to provide the high levels of service that our clients have come to expect and it’s a really good feeling to receive some recognition for this hard work.

Obviously we have our fingers crossed for one or even two victories later this year in the awards ceremony, but either way this has been an excellent chance for us to receive some free exposure and publicity.

To take a look at the other businesses we are competing against, check out the shortlist.

It was an interesting evening and we met some good contacts – some of whom were especially interesting as we are currently looking to recruit an intern or two to join our team.

Experience Matters

One of the things that really stood out for us when listening to what the other speakers had to say was that there seemed to be a lot of focus on writing solid CVs in order to get a job. Unfortunately this is something that we wouldn’t really agree with doing – at least not in the digital creative sector, as experience really pays off and the time spent working on a CV would probably be better spent going out and doing some work so as to have a solid portfolio of work to go and see prospective employers with.

Need experience? Try working freelance

Because both the creative and digital sectors are so focussed on what potential job applicants have done in the past to showcase their talent, a comprehensive CV only goes so far. A candidate who has some freelance work under their belt to call their own will almost always be a preferred candidate.

The core message that we were seeking to bring across was that its not difficult to put yourself out there and start working in the digital creative industry if you’re willing to network and meet people.

One of our partners, Andy, is a graduate from Newcastle and one of the things that he said really brought to light the importance of real-world experience: He told everyone that he’s learnt more working with James over the last year, who is entirely self-taught, than he did in his three years at Newcastle. While this might not go down so well with a university, the truth of the matter is that experience really does count and the creative/digital industries are ones that you learn through doing, not necessarily solely by studying.

Photo courtesy of Zander photography

There seems, however, to be some confusion and misunderstanding as to what constitutes website speed and how to improve it, and some unscrupulous companies have been taking advantage of this confusion to sell products and services that are based on either outright lies or at the very least claims that would make trading standards have a heart attack.

Why Speed Is So Important

Generally speaking, with a few exceptions, a user’s perception of a website is based on three factors:

• How easy it is to use and find the content that they are looking for
• The design of the website and whether it creates any kind of emotional response
• The speed that the website loads in

The first two factors are out of the scope of this post, however we will look at the last one in depth. Websites need to load quickly because otherwise users get bored and go elsewhere. It’s as simple as that. A website that responds quickly to user input keeps users on your site, whereas one that takes more than a few seconds to respond to a user’s actions falls flat on it’s face.

Interestingly speed was one of the driving factors behind people’s transition from MySpace to Facebook as their primary social networking website. MySpace was slow, buggy and badly designed. But most of all it was slow. Facebook offered a slicker, quicker way of doing things, and users loved it.

How To Improve Website Speed

There are numerous ways of increasing the speed of a website. The first is by decreasing the size of pages, which seems like a pretty logical step to take. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to decrease the amount of content that you are showing users, it has more to do with writing intelligent code that minimises the amount of code on a page and maximises the content/code ratio as much as possible. Incidentally this also helps with search engine optimisation.

The second way of increasing the speed of a website is to minimise the amount of components that are being loaded when a visitor goes to view a page. Think about it – if you have a web page with 5 images on it, you are having to make 6 “requests” for data from the server (1 for the web page and 1 for each image). Each request that is sent to the server comes with it’s own overheads and when you have a lot of content loading on a page these overheads quickly add up. The trick here is to a) minimise the amount of requests that you are sending to the server and b) by minimising the overheads associated with each request. We’ll talk about the former angle first and cover the second a little later on in this post.

Minimising the amount of requests that you have to make to a server in order to display a web page is generally as simple as combining images on a page into sprites and ensuring all of your JavaScript and CSS files are combined into two files instead of 6 or 7.

The other aspect to look at speeding up is the overheads associated with each request made to the server. To fully understand how this might work, we have to quickly delve into the lala land of how the Internet actually works. Essentially it’s a big network of cables, connected at hubs by computers. The more hubs and computers that a request for information has to go through, the longer it’ll take to get the information back to you. It’s essentially a bit like chinese whispers, although (unless you’re really unlucky) what goes in at one end tends to be what comes out at the other.

To minimise the amount of latency (the amount of time it takes for a request to come back) you need to take into account geographical location – this is essentially why we have servers in the London Docklands area as opposed to in America where they are substantially cheaper due to lower energy costs. Although the difference between a server in the UK and a server in the US in terms of additional ping times may be as low as 250 milliseconds, these milliseconds quickly add up when you are doing multiple requests per web page.

Take the following example: if a web page contains 6 items that need to be requested from the server, and the latency is 300ms (typical for a server in the US when you are in Europe) then your overheads are going to come in at a hefty 1800ms – that’s 1.8 seconds that you’re sitting there, just waiting for data to come flowing back to you. If you have servers in the UK with a good connection to the BT backbone (hint hint, we do have exactly that), you’re looking at ping times of around 35ms, slashing the overall latency overhead of the same web page’s loading time to around 210ms – a fifth of a second.

By using fast, locally based servers, you can ensure that your latency overheads are low, and by minimising your requests per page, you can cut the amount of times you are multiplying your latency overhead per page load, leading to a much increased page speed.

If your customers are spread over a wide geographical area or are indeed global, the easiest way of ensuring fast servers for them all is to use something called a content delivery network, which lets you have multiple servers around the world and then automatically direct users to the one that’s fastest for them from their location.

The Effect on Search Engine Optimisation

Google have recently confirmed that website speed does have a very small impact on search results (“approximately 1% of search results”) – this is totally understandable, because Google are looking for their users to have a positive experience when clicking on their search results, and a web page that takes 10 seconds to load is the exact opposite of a positive experience. Let me quickly repeat that: Speed has a minor impact on search results, but is important for retaining visitors that click on your links.

What About The Lies?

At the beginning of this post I briefly touched on the fact that certain companies have been exploiting Google’s admission that they do take speed into account when building search results. I recently had a phone call from a company called UK Fast, who I have come across before by way of their ludicrous marketing material which bears no resemblance to the facts about website speed. Because of the uncertainty about what website speed does for your business, they have taken the advantage of this to market so-called “SEO Servers” – essentially servers that they say will get you higher search results. This on it’s own is a complete fabrication, as there are hundreds of factors more important than just purely the speed at which a website loads to gain ground in the search engine results pages. While I agree with them that a faster, geographically relevantly located server will serve your users better, it will not automatically triple the amount of business you get from your website overnight. There’s a very good article by Kay Dinsdale about the misleading marketing practices favoured by UK Fast which is well worth a read if you’re interested.

In Summary

To sum all of the above up – the speed of a website is important. Very important in fact, and it’s not even that hard to achieve decent loading speeds, however be aware that there are companies out there who will sell you something on claims that are too good to be true and are in fact an outright lie. If you’d like to have a chat about what we can do to increase the speed of your website, feel free to give us a call – we’ll always give out free advice and honest opinions. We won’t offer to triple the amount of revenue you’re making online overnight, but we can give you realistic targets and affordable solutions to website speed – something that is becoming increasingly important in what is becoming a very competitive market.

Photo by Irargerich

jsPDF is an open-source library written by our lead developer, James, for generating PDF documents using nothing but Javascript. You can use it in a Firefox extension, in Server Side Javascript and with Data URIs in some browsers.

Download Source

More examples and features to come.

New! Example of jsPDF using Downloadify, this makes it work in all major browsers.

Simple Two-page Text Document

var doc = new jsPDF();
doc.text(20, 20, 'Hello world!');
doc.text(20, 30, 'This is client-side Javascript, pumping out a PDF.');
doc.addPage();
doc.text(20, 20, 'Do you like that?');

// Output as Data URI
doc.output('datauri');

Run Code

Different font sizes

var doc = new jsPDF();
doc.setFontSize(22);
doc.text(20, 20, 'This is a title');

doc.setFontSize(16);
doc.text(20, 30, 'This is some normal sized text underneath.');	

// Output as Data URI
doc.output('datauri');

Run Code

Adding metadata

var doc = new jsPDF();
doc.text(20, 20, 'This PDF has a title, subject, author, keywords and a creator.');

// Optional - set properties on the document
doc.setProperties({
	title: 'Title',
	subject: 'This is the subject',
	author: 'James Hall',
	keywords: 'generated, javascript, web 2.0, ajax',
	creator: 'MEEE'
});

// Output as Data URI
doc.output('datauri');

Run Code

Example of user input

var name = prompt('What is your name?');
var multiplier = prompt('Enter a number:');
multiplier = parseInt(multiplier);

var doc = new jsPDF();
doc.setFontSize(22);
doc.text(20, 20, 'Questions');
doc.setFontSize(16);
doc.text(20, 30, 'This belongs to: ' + name);

for(var i = 1; i <= 12; i ++) {
	doc.text(20, 30 + (i * 10), i + ' x ' + multiplier + ' = ___');
}

doc.addPage();
doc.setFontSize(22);
doc.text(20, 20, 'Answers');
doc.setFontSize(16);

for(var i = 1; i <= 12; i ++) {
	doc.text(20, 30 + (i * 10), i + ' x ' + multiplier + ' = ' + (i * multiplier));
}
doc.output('datauri');

Run Code