Google AdSense is a simple advertising service that integrates with your website and displays adverts related to the content of your site.

All of the adverts displayed are derived from Google AdWords, a service that provides cost per click (CPC) advertising.

The AdSense service is free and the money you receive is a share of the advertiser’s fee to AdWords.

How Does It Work?

You can apply AdSense in many ways – to RSS feeds, mobile content, unused domains and even videos. However, the most commonly used methods are:

• AdSense For Content

  This compiles a list of adverts to be shown by looking at the content of your website, picking up which words and phrases (keywords) are most popular in the page and searching the Google AdWords database for compatible ads.

  You can make money in two ways – a fee is paid to you for every advert that is clicked on or you get paid when an advert reaches a set number of impressions (displays) on your website.

• AdSense For Search

  This allows you to place a Google search box on your website. In this case the results are generated by searching both the internet for web pages (as in a normal Google search) and the AdWords database for ads that reflect the search terms.

Factors such as your country and location are also taken into account when the list of results is compiled.

For example, say you have a website that reviews venues in London and you are using AdSense for content on your site. AdSense will pick up on the most popular keywords in your content and display relevant adverts, a logical choice would be for local restaurants and bars.

Advantages

The great thing about this method of advertising is that the ads are targeted. The theory is the adverts are more likely to be clicked on because your visitors have already shown interest in the topic they cover by visiting your website or searching for the term.

This option also takes away the hassle of trying to find willing advertisers and negotiating fees.

Disadvantages

It would be fair to say that Google AdSense will bring in a relatively low income unless you have a high volume of traffic on your website. However, if you’re only looking for a bit of extra income then remember it’s a free service and well worth a go.

Another issue that you may come across while using AdSense is inadvertently advertising your competition. Your competitors offer the same service and/or products as you and this means they have the same keywords so it’s more than likely they’ll appear in your list of adverts. To remedy this, AdSense lets you block adverts that point to certain URLs but, unless you know of every competitor you face, you can’t block every ad that could potentially take business away from you.

How Do I Get Google AdSense?

As mentioned, Google AdSense is a free service.

You’ll need to take a moment to sign up for the service at www.google.com/adsense (it may take a few days for your site to be reviewed and authorised, Google have to make sure your site adheres to their guidelines).

All you pay for is the time it takes us to integrate the software with your website, we estimate this would cost you no more than £40.

Update 11/11/10

Google has just released a new interface for the AdSense system.

The new interface includes graphical reporting so you can easily see how well your ads are performing, better tools to control the ads displayed on your website and it also promises to be more efficient, allowing you to see your data and make changes to your ad strategies more quickly than ever before.

All in all, the new and improved AdSense is easier and quicker to use and boasts more powerful tools to help you make money from your website.

If you are interested in integrating Google AdSense or you have any other questions about this article, please call 0121 286 9390 or email us at support@ballyhoo.ltd.uk.

What Is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is an invaluable tool for measuring the performance of your website.

It’s one of the many services in Google’s repertoire of online web tools designed to help you improve your standing on the internet and increase traffic to your website. Other tools in the same family include Webmaster Tools and Google Adwords.

Analytics’ main function is to measure the number of visits to your website, not only providing you with the number of visitors your website gets each day but a whole range of other statistics such as traffic sources, visitor locations, page views, keywords, visitor frequency and e-commerce conversion rates.

And it’s free!

Number Of Visitors

Do you know how many visits your website has had and does this figure match your expectations? Google Analytics tracks not only how many visitors you have had but updates this figure on a daily basis – all shown in a easy-to-read graph. You can even delve deeper to see what time of day these users visited your site.

Once you know how many visitors you have on your website you can easily track the effects of your efforts to improve traffic.

Traffic Sources

How do people find your website? Did you appear in their search engine results, did they click a link through to your site from another website (referring websites) or did they type in your web address to reach your website directly?

Analytics can tell you how many visits you have had through search engines as well as which search engines are being used – Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

You can also see which websites have links visitors are clicking to reach your website; is anyone clicking through from your advert on Yell.com? Are the links you’ve added to online directories paying off?

Direct visitors know your web address and have typed this into the address bar in their internet browsers. But where did they find your web address? Most commonly this is through offline media such as magazine advertisements or posters.

Knowing how people find your website is very valuable. If no one is finding your website through search engines you’ll know you have to invest in this area, the same applies to referring sites and offline media.

Keywords

‘Keywords’ is an umbrella term for the words or phrases internet  users type into search engines. You can target specific keywords by  including them in your website in the hope that your website is one of  the search engine results when someone uses them as their search term.

When  someone accesses your website from a search engine Google Analytics  notes the keywords the visitor used. These are extremely useful to know:  you can see if you are actually being found under the keywords you have  targeted – if you are not, you know that these keywords require more  attention and investment. It can also be useful to know the other  keywords you are found under – there may be some terms that you have not  considered but are providing a good amount of traffic.

Visitor Location

All over the world people have internet access and the location of some of your visitors may surprise you!

If you are targeting your local area it is good to know whether this is actually the location you are receiving visitors from. For example, if you are selling services to the London area, your website is no use to someone in Australia.

Conversely, if you are selling all over the country but the majority of your visits are from one location, there is clearly a market for your products in that area.

Visitor Loyalty

Do the majority of your visitors only visit your website once? A  great website is one that people want to visit again and again.

One of Analytics’ great features is the Visitor Loyalty chart -  showing how many people have visited your website once, twice or  multiple times. If you have a low level of loyalty perhaps you could  consider incentives, such as customer discounts, to encourage repeat  custom. New products and regularly updated content is also a great way to entice visitors back in the future.

Page Views

There’s no point in having excellently written content and beautifully presented pages if nobody is viewing them.

Analytics not only allows you to see how many people visit your website but which pages get the most visitors too. Which pages of your site do your visitors view the most? And how long do they spend on each page?

You can then use this information to improve the rest of your website by considering what is different in your most-viewed pages compared to the rest of your site.

E-Commerce Conversion

This is a particularly excellent feature for e-commerce websites – websites that sell products online. By integrating Google Analytics with your e-commerce software you can find out what percentage of your visitors actually go on to make a purchase from your website.

If the e-commerce conversion rate is low then you know something is going awry between the visitor landing on your website and making the decision to purchase from you.

How Do I Get Google Analytics?

We can integrate Analytics very quickly and easily. The cost is minimal – Google Analytics is a free service provided by Google and we will only charge for the time it takes to set up your account, so no more than £20.

If you are interested, please get in touch by emailing info@ballyhoo.ltd.uk or calling 0121 286 9390.

What Is Content Management?

Content managed websites can be updated at any time by the owner of the website through a user interface.

The website will have been configured by the web developer to allow the owner to amend content pages and add new pages which can include images, links and any other content you may expect to find on a website.

Should the owner want to update their website all they need to do is log in to the administration area of their website and the changes they make will be instant.

Web developers build content managed websites on a number of content management systems (CMS). You may have heard of WordPress or Joomla!, both of which are open source (free).

Why Would I Need Content Management?

Many people prefer content management due to the flexibility and control it gives them over their website. The speed with which they can update their content is undeniably quick.

Content management systems particularly suit those businesses that have a high content turnover, i.e. those who update their content weekly or even daily and the extra expense when commissioning a content managed website is usually recouped relatively quickly.

However, we will only recommend content management if you:

• have a high content turnover
• have the technological expertise required to use a CMS
• have the time and resources to maintain your website content

What Are The Costs?

As mentioned before, many CMS are usually open source which means they are free to download. You only need to pay your web developer to configure your chosen content management system -  £240 with Ballyhoo on top of your initial website costs.

Content management systems usually have frequent updates – these can be to improve security, add new features or fix minor bugs in the system. You don’t need to update to every new version of the software but it is wise to update your system regularly to ensure your website runs smoothly and you are making the most of new technology.

You will need to pay your web developer to upgrade your CMS but this is a quick job. At Ballyhoo prices start from £40 to upgrade you to the latest version of your content management software.

Are There Alternatives?

Pay As You Go

If you rarely update your content it may be best to simply send any amendments to your web developer who can either give you a quote to do them or simply charge you for the time it takes to implement your changes. At Ballyhoo we log any updates to your website down to the minute at our hourly rate and invoice any amendments we’ve made at the end of each month.

Support & Maintenance Contracts

If you think you need content management but don’t have the technical knowledge or are too busy to update your website in-house there is an alternative – support and maintenance contracts. These can help you save both time and money.

Under a support and maintenance contract a monthly retainer is paid, usually at a discounted hourly rate, to the web developer who will agree to administer any updates you send in a set period of time. As with the previous option your updates are logged by the minute and a little time goes a long way, one or two hours is more than adequate per month in most situations.

At Ballyhoo we discount our hourly rate by 25%, a support and maintenance contract can therefore cost you as little as £30 per month!

With both alternatives you can be assured that:

• Updates are administered professionally and efficiently
• Content is formatted correctly
• Content is proof-read before going live

Summary

In short, we recommend that you only commission a content managed website if you are going to be updating your website regularly and have the knowledge and resources to do so.

However if you do have these attributes then you will find content management an indispensable tool for your business.

If you would like to more about content management or to organise a support contract, get in touch.

Designers use this filler text to demonstrate the typography and structure of your website, especially if we do not yet know what the content of your website will be.

While this text looks like Latin, it is in fact a jumble of words, with no real meaning, that has been modified and added to over the years. It is widely accepted that it’s origins lie in Cicero’s text De finibus bonorum et malorum, written in 45BC, which may have first been adapted in the 1500s by typesetters for the same reason we use it today.

There are a number or Lorem Ipsum generators on the web that you can use to create dummy text for your design projects. These often randomise the text to avoid repetition, for example where the text wraps at the end of paragraphs, and can provide as many paragraphs or words as you require.

If all of your valuable data – in short, your hard work – was to become inaccessible, what would be the repercussions?

At Ballyhoo we use all three of the following methods to back up our files and keep your information and website data safe.

Internal Hard Drive

When you click save on your computer or download any file from the Internet it is saved to your internal hard drive. This information is then easy to access again and again, but only from your computer. It is assumed that this data will be saved forever but there are a number of factors that could cause you to lose it all.

Fire

In the unfortunate event that fire razes your office to the ground not only will your equipment be lost but so will your data. While your equipment can often be replaced, your data cannot.

Hard Drive Failure

Hard drives can fail for a vast number of reasons. While this is rare, many types of failure are often nearly impossible to recover from – or at least extremely expensive.

Age

There is another reason for hard drive failure that people commonly forget; age. Hard drives are not made to last forever and will eventually fail. A hard drive has an average life expectancy of no more than five years if used regularly.

External Hard Drive

What Is It?

An external hard drive connects to your computer and synchronises all of your data so it’s not only backed up; it’s portable.

Today it is possible to buy a lot of storage for a relatively inexpensive price, though in reality the average user won’t need very much storage space. Once your data is synced you can transfer it to other devices, such as a laptop or a computer in your home. Should your main hard drive fail you can easily transfer all of your data to a new one.

It is recommended that you back up your data to your external drive at least once a week, if not more often – it can take just a few minutes to fully sync your devices.

What Are The Risks?

As with internal hard drives, external drives are prone to some of the same risks:

• Fire can easily destroy your external drive, however a small fireproof safe is a good investment.
• Technical failure can occur rendering your external drive useless.
• Accidents do happen, for example dropping the drive on a hard surface.

The Cloud

What Is The Cloud?

The cloud is a vague term for information stored on the internet. If you back up your data to the cloud it is secure in a separate location that cannot be harmed by any risks that may harm your internal or external drives, for example a fire that could consume both at once.

How Do I Use It?

Information backed up to the cloud can be accessed anywhere, at any time, through a variety of Internet applications.

Ballyhoo recommends Dropbox, an easy to use application that allows you to back up your data quickly and easily. By downloading the Dropbox application to any or all of the computers you use not only will your data be stored in the cloud allowing it to be accessed through the Dropbox website, Dropbox will automatically sync your data between all of your devices everytime you make a change to a file.

What Is The Cost?

Many applications allow you to have a small amount of space for free (with Dropbox this is up to 2Gb) which can be useful if you want to store a small number of files. If you are uploading a large volume of data, such as all of your work files, this can incur a small monthly cost (starting from $9.99 with Dropbox).

What Are The Risks?

There is precedent for an online storage company to ‘lose’ their customers’ data, although this is an extremely rare occurrence. In reality this method attracts less risks than other methods of data backup.

In Conclusion

By backing up your data in more than one location you are insuring yourself against the worst.

The small cost incurred by backing up to an external hard drive or the cloud will give you peace of mind and potentially save you time and money.

If you have any questions about this subject please get in touch.

If you are a victim of a spoofing attack rest assured that it is unlikely the security of your account has been compromised. Your email address has likely been selected at random to dupe unsuspecting people into opening a spam email.

However, if you are still concerned about the security of your email account, please contact us and we will investigate.

Webkit

The Apple iPad uses Webkit which in technical terms is the engine it uses to render web pages. In more simple terms it’s the software that translates the code we write to create web pages into what you actually see in your browser. Webkit is currently widely used, not only in other Apple products such as the iPhone but also in Google’s Chrome browser and Palm’s Web OS browser. Our development techniques have never had to change to ensure a site displays correctly in Webkit based browsers; quality code should be rendered correctly.

Screen Size

As web developers we have had to battle with ensuring our sites appear correctly on a number of devices for quite some time. Since mobile devices started introducing full web browsers we’ve had to take smaller screens into consideration. More recently, computers have been shipping with widescreen monitors and some TV’s are even ‘web enabled’ meaning huge resolutions also need to be considered. The iPad will simply be one of many screen sizes, but again a well thought-out design should have no problems.

Hover Effects

The touch screen on the iPad, and notably many other devices now availble from smart phones to netbooks, does mean we need to re-consider hover effects. Some sites rely on, for example, text changing when the cursor rolls over it to indicate you can click it to perform and action, such as a link. In essence, this is poor design practice anyway as it is easy for a user to miss this with their cursor, so again if thought has been put into the usability of the site it shouldn’t suffer on the new device.

Adobe Flash

Apple have openly stated that the iPad will not be supporting the Adobe Flash plugin. While as a rule we don’t tend to use Flash for building entire websites for accessiblity and search engine considerations it does have it’s uses; rich media such as animation and audio can add a whole new dimension of interaction for users. According to the latest statistics, the Adobe Flash plugin has been installed on 99% of internet users’ devices. It seems stupid to sacrifice the tools Flash provides for the sake of 1% of users. Just be sure to offer alternatives for those not using Flash.

Google have announced that throughout 2010 they will be phasing out support for their Google Apps suite of services in Internet Explorer 6. This means by the end of 2010, services such as Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Docs (services we have set up for some of our clients) will run slowly or not at all in Internet Explorer 6.

It’s worth mentioning that this does not affect the standard Google search service, only their more sophisticated services that are being held back by the need to ensure any new developments work correctly in Internet Explorer 6 and other out-dated browsers.

“Over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers” – Google Apps team

According to the latest browser statistics at the time of writing*, Internet Explorer 6 still has a 10.9% share of the browser market, thought to be mostly government and other large organisations for which it is a large undertaking to update all workstations to newer software versions.

We will be monitoring the statistics closely to see if this and recent bad press towards Internet Explorer will have any significant effect on this market share before making a decision as to whether we will also no longer test websites in Internet Explorer 6 as we currently do.

* Correct at the time of writing based on statistics for December 2009 taken from W3 Schools Browser Statistics.

/* Create DB table */
CREATE TABLE states (
   iso CHAR(2) NOT NULL ,
   name VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL
) ENGINE = MYISAM COMMENT = 'Table of US States';

/* Insert records */
insert into states (iso,name) values ('AL','Alabama');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('AK','Alaska');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('AZ','Arizona');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('AR','Arkansas');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('CA','California');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('CO','Colorado');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('CT','Connecticut');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('DE','Delaware');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('FL','Florida');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('GA','Georgia');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('HI','Hawaii');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('ID','Idaho');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('IL','Illinois');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('IN','Indiana');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('IA','Iowa');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('KS','Kansas');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('KY','Kentucky');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('LA','Louisiana');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('ME','Maine');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('MD','Maryland');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('MA','Massachusetts');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('MI','Michigan');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('MN','Minnesota');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('MS','Mississippi');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('MO','Missouri');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('MT','Montana');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('NE','Nebraska');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('NV','Nevada');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('NH','New Hampshire');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('NJ','New Jersey');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('NM','New Mexico');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('NY','New York');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('NC','North Carolina');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('ND','North Dakota');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('OH','Ohio');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('OK','Oklahoma');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('OR','Oregon');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('PA','Pennsylvania');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('RI','Rhode Island');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('SC','South Carolina');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('SD','South Dakota');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('TN','Tennessee');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('TX','Texas');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('UT','Utah');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('VT','Vermont');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('VA','Virginia');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('WA','Washington');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('WV','West Virginia');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('WI','Wisconsin');
insert into states (iso,name) values ('WY','Wyoming');

An SSL Certificate is an internet security technique that encrypts sensitive information sent between your customer’s web browser and your website. Only recognised certificate authorities, such as GlobalSign and Thawte, can issue an SSL certificate. This is then unique to your website and will be verified by your customer’s web browser each time your website is accessed. Evidence of an SSL Certificate on a website is characterised by the locked padlock symbol in the address bar or bottom right of a web browser.

How will having one benefit my website?

Consumers are increasingly aware of internet security and fraud and know to look for the padlock symbol when buying online. Having an SSL Certificate installed on your website gives them confidence that their details and payments are being securely transmitted. If you do not have this in place, some customers may choose not to purchase from you.

What are the costs?

At Ballyhoo, we provide a competitively priced SSL Certificate package.

Included:

• GlobalSign Certificate
• Up to 256-bit encryption enabled
• Universal browser compatibility
• Dedicated IP Address
• Maintenance of certificate (including set-up and renewal)

Annual payments are usually required in advance but we want your website to be affordable and will allow you spread the cost over 12 months for only £10.95 per month.

Contact us to learn more or request an SSL Certificate.