AUcs Webdesign

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of having a web site is attracting people your pages. Consider the Internet as a massive market, by which I mean the kind with stalls covered in tarpaulins with the stall owners standing behind trellis tables proffering their wares and calling out to passing trade. The din of the crowd and voices of other vendors become a background noise to the passersby and the message is lost. Often their are many stalls selling very similar products. How can a stall-holder attract people to the stall?

Rather than wander around the market aimlessly, jumping from link to link, as people once did on the Internet prior to massive search engines they now Google (or Yahoo or Bing) those things that they want to find. This at not only gets them to the right corner of the market, but also ranks the stalls they want to examine in an order approximating that which matches best what they are looking for. Being near the top of this ranking is Holy Grail of having a web site and guarantees that people will find you.

Getting to the top of this list is no small feat and so competitive is field that it has become an industry of its own. There are numerous methods employed to try and get to the top some of which are considered ethical and within the bounds of acceptability and others not. Often these methods are referred to respectively as white hat and black hat techniques. White hat techniques work and will continue to work. Black hat techniques often work startlingly well, but they can fail as soon as a search engine company becomes wise to them and they can fail instantly.

Since everyone is using these techniques the competition to get rival companies’ websites to the top of list becomes like the Cold War arms race with each side developing methods that are shortly copied, countered or surpassed by the other.

White hat techniques include creating websites which have well-formed code, include interesting, relevant content and use titles and descriptions that contain industry specific key words. Black hat techniques include the use of link farms (web sites which exist only to link to other websites), spamming links as comments in blogs and forums, stuffing websites with keywords and other such nefarious deeds.

Needless to say AUcs web design use only white hat techniques. We have a track record of getting web sites listed in the first page of Google for specific key words. Anyone who tries to guarantee otherwise is like that stall at the market that is selling genuine Gucci handbags.

During the mid to late 1990s the world was abuzz with the potential that the Internet represented for the generation of wealth. Many people saw opportunity in charging people to access the web, use services on the web and make purchases on the web. As the ideas became more ridiculous and the sums of money exchanged for .com companies became more extravagant the bubble grew bigger and bigger. In 2001 it burst and many companies vanished overnight.

As investors once more ventured into web companies a new term Web 2.0 emerged and free, user created content supported by advertising became the norm. Services like Blogger became popular and companies like Google realised the potential revenue from advertising. Facebook and its imitators soon appeared on the scene and suddenly it seemed as though the whole world was online and connected supported by advertising.

So, where does this leave small business? Do you need a web site? In short, yes you do. The first place that most people turn when looking for products and services these days is the web. If you want to compete on a level playing field with you competitors it is vital that you have presence on the web. However, simply having a web site is not enough.

Just like the real world word of mouth on the web is of vital importance and this is achieved by social networks. Think of your website as a hub, your home on the Internet. Naturally you want people to be able to find you on Google, Yahoo and Bing, but you also want people to talk about you, tell their friends about you, recommend your services. You want to create a buzz about your business and use that to get people to visit your web page.

There are a host of websites out there you want an active presence on. To name a few Twitter, Facebook and Four Square. You also want to have a blog, like this, that will hopefully keep people interested in what you do following what you are up to.

That’s where we come in. We can bring the web to you by building your website, getting you on local directories, creating Twitter and Facebook accounts, building your blog and keeping these up-to-date for you. One thing is for certain: your competitors are probably already there.

The old standard for programmers seems somewhat trite when writing a blog post.

It has become a cliché for in programming books and guides that the first program that readers are instructed to write is “Hello World”. This is often as far as many people get because, let’s be honest, learning to code is very hard and not only that, but who has the time to sit down and pour for hours over a computer.

Thankfully many people do and the code that people learn to write goes a long way toward defining what sort of geek they are. Why do I assume they are geeks? See the above paragraph with reference to who has time.

Naturally people that can actually write machine code are the geekiest. Followed by people who really understand the Linux/Unix command line and use emacs and think its great. Then there are the hardcore C programmers, then probably C+, finally the people that write the web. They can even masquerade as cool.

Anyway, in the grand tradition and risking being twee - hello world.