Keeping the logo style and colors we created a design that complements this.
]]>GarnerTech designed and developed the logo and website, helped C.H.Bradford with domain hosting setup and social media advice. We believe, it’s got a lovely clean look, with splashes of color from the logo design. Check it out.
]]>A website is the sum of its parts
If you only think about your website as a collection of parts (eg. ecommerce, blog, photo gallery, online booking system), the overall impression to your users will be that of a fragmented website which is lots of parts, bolted together, rather than one seamless, flowing, experience.
Of course, you do need to think about these elements individually at some point, but you should always have the big picture in mind throughout the development and build process.
Content is king
The same goes for your content. Whilst you may have written the content for each page on your site separately, your users will consume it in any order and from any path through your site, so it needs to hang together effectively and present a unified website.
Remember: thanks to search engine deep linking, any page on your site could be a first contact situation with a customer and could be a first impression. You need to ensure that every page creates the right first impression and that your visitors can easily find their way around.
GarnerTech can help
If you need our help optimising your website to create an effective user experience, please do talk to us.
]]>Who’d use my website?
I recently read an article called Why your business needs a website (2012) on the theguardian.com, which states that 60% of small businesses in the UK still have no online presence at all. This is surprisingly high, as a study by Search Engine Land (2012) shows 85% of consumers look to the Internet to find local businesses. Although both of these studies are a couple of years old now, working in the industry does still give me the sense that these statistics are not too different in 2014.
No matter the size of your business, whether you are a sole trader or multinational business, having a website is vitality important in the technology age we live in.
What’s in it for me?
A website, when utilised in the right way can help grow your business and here’s how:
- New customers: Having a website will help you engage with customers that were otherwise unable to find you before.
- Affordable advertising: The running costs of running a website are relatively small and offer advertising that runs 24/7. This allows customers to find you at any time of the day.
- Contact details: Details of a customer can be gathered to allow you to send promotions.
- Inform customers: Having a website is a great portal for customers to learn more about your services. This will allow them to mull over decisions and avoid frequently asked questions.
In a nutshell
Websites can be affordable and the technology shouldn’t be a barrier that stops you from enhancing your business online.
Can GarnerTech help me produce a website?
Of course we can! We’ve been working in web for years and we’d love to help you embrace the web and all the advantages it can bring.
Give me a call on 07704 055390 and I’ll be more than happy to discuss how we can help.
I look forward to helping you.
Jenna Garner
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SEO is the practice of optimising your website to allow search engines such as Google and Bing to figure out what the website’s about and list it according to search terms and popularity in search results. Optimising your site for search is a relatively easy, but time consuming process. A combination of factors are employed to provide good SEO.
How do I use SEO?
First and foremost: you need to know what your visitors (and potential customers) will be searching for. You need to understand the language of your website’s users. Once you do, you can utilise this knowledge in a variety of ways to improve those users’ chances of finding you.
Some of the factors you need to consider when implementing SEO are:
- How your content is written – this is a very big part of your SEO. How your content is written and formatted plays a very big part in how search engines rank your website.
- Update often – search engines like websites which update regularly because it shows that new content is available to keep users coming back. Blogs are a great way add new content to your site whilst leaving the factual pages (like “About” or “Contact”) unchanged.
- Having a link strategy – search engines place value on links coming to your website, so you need to consider how best to utilise these.
- Use your meta tags – this factor may not be too familiar to some people; these are areas of the HTML code behind your website which tell the search engines what the website’s about.
Keeping the above points in mind when building or maintaining your website will really help boost your search engine position.
Finding out more about SEO
If you’d like to know more about how we can help you implement SEO on your website, please do talk to us.
If you’d like us to look after your website for you, check out GarnerTech’s sister website, maintainawebsite.com.
]]>To the untrained eye, it may look like a funky, abstract, 3D cube, but the clues are there if you know what you’re looking for.
Nested on two different planes within the logo are the company initials, G and T, highlighted in the images below in blue.
So there you have it! Testament to the genius of Lisa!
Want a cool logo like this with Lisa working on your company’s brand?
]]>Each year SpashData compiles a list of the most commonly used worst passwords. 2013 was no better on balance than previous years, which is surprising given all the media coverage surrounding us these days concerning online security.
There are several ways a website can store your password:
- Plain text: This means passwords are stored on a website’s database in human readable form. So no matter how good your password is, it wont make any difference. Most big websites won’t use this method but you can easily find out if they are by requesting your ‘forgotten’ password. If they email you your actual password, chances are its stored in plain text.
- Basic password encryption: Involves encrypting a password with a randomly defined key. This key would then need to be used to decrypt your password. This adds a basic level of encryption but its likely this key is stored in plain text in the database.
- Hashed passwords: Is a method whereby encryption algorithms are used to obtain an encrypted password. This is a one way process for which you are unable to obtain the original password. However, some websites show the original password text for some of the more popular/weak passwords, like those mentioned by SpashData. The most used encryption algorithms are: MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512 (the latter two are known as SHA-2). However, some problems have been found with MD5 and SHA-1, where the same encrypted password can decrypt into two different passwords.
- Hashed passwords + salt: Same method used as above but a password is given some salt, which is a specific string added to a specific point of the password before it is encrypted. This will often give a password extra complexity so it cannot be guessed by predetermined lists of commonly used passwords.
- Slow hash: Uses the same encryption algorithms used in hash methods, but the computation of the result is slowed down to a configured time so that during a brute force attack it will take longer to work out raw passwords.
The key to increasing your online security would be to use a different strong password per site but don’t forget you can protect yourself further by using a different email address per website. Your main email address would remain the same but you would setup email forwarding from one address to the main one. So if one website was to get hacked the others would be safer. This would also allow you to keep track of companies selling on your email address. Should a company do so and you’re not happy with this, you are entitled by law to have your email address taken off specific mailing lists.
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