Web designers around the world will be rejoicing that Google is taking a lead in banishing the deeply unloved Internet Explorer 6 to the annals.
Those not familiar with web design probably won’t know that we routinely have to ‘break’ code to make it work in this old browser, yet people still refuse to upgrade — mainly corporates who lock down desktops for fear of security issues. The irony here, of course, is that IE6 is a security vulnerability in itself — as one bright spark once remarked about Windows “its not like theres a load of back doors its more like the back of the house is missing”.
As we previously posted, Google launched “Chrome Frame” back in October 09, which essentially replaces Internet Explorers rendering engine (ie. the main bit inside the window) with a Google Chrome-based replacement. A stealth-like approach if ever there was one.
Google Buzz is possibly the most long overdue movement from Google that one could imagine.
People (myself included) spend a good deal of their time sitting looking email… increasingly more on web based mail clients. To add social networking / status updates / microblogging / call-it-what-you-will to the main hub of your online experience is at best, genius, or at worst, blaringly obvious.
A bit scary. Looking forward to finding out what has happened here — could be very powerful in the wrong hands and totally screw up the search engine indices for everyone.
The British government and armed forces are to continue their widespread use of the version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser that was attacked by Chinese hackers who broke into Google’s corporate network – even though both the French and German governments have advised people to stop using it.
The Cabinet Office, which oversees the deployment of computers in government, said today that “it doesn’t think the issue [of being open to hacking] would be resolved any better by going elsewhere”.
I’ve been putting this together in my spare time and relying on the kind help of friends with graphic design, Wordpress and CSS skills as years of management have made me rusty! Thanks Dave H and Phil for your patience and help!
As has become customary for RD, we have donated to a worthy charity rather than spending on cards and postage – thus saving a few trees (and denying the Royal Mail some income – but you can’t have everything!)
This year we have made a donation to the World Wildlife Fund to help with their campaign to safeguard the natural world and tackle the global threat of climate change. You can also make a donation here: http://www.wwf.org.uk/
One thing we seem to have to deal with when building recruitment websites more often than not is explaining the difference between web design and web development. The scenario my colleague Dave Bancroft always refers to is that ‘you wouldn’t let a painter and decorator design your house’. That’s not meant to be disparaging to website designers – graphic design has a massively important role to play in helping a website do its job – it’s just that it’s just part of the overall project. So many designers whose work we’ve had to unpick seem to have let form become more important than function…
Read more about FXRecruiter here or call us on 08000 199 737
We often get asked exactly what a blog is, how to manage one, and whether it is better for it to be on your own domain or on something like Typepad or Blogger.
Well, a blog is simply a publishing system. The beauty of it is that it categorises itself as you add new articles, and create the categories or tags you want to associate the article with. The nature of blogging is that it does not need to be formal. It is a great way to talk to your customers, publish thought-leaders, or just link to something interesting or amusing you have found elsewhere on the web. Blogs are a great SEO tool as well — naturally optimised for search engines, they also notify Google of news articles as soon as they are posted meaning your article is listed very quickly.
Our view is that the blog should be part of your own site: the content you add to your blog will (or should) be relevant to your market(s) and hence adds more authority to your domain — the search engines will see your website as being more relevant to that topic than a site with little content.
An integrated blog also adds more credibility that you are a serious business and not a fly-by-night.
With the fantastic WordPress software being free, and easily customised, there is no excuse really.
Twitter and LinkedIn yesterday announced a partnership (sorry real-time searchers – old news!!) to allow LinkedIn status updates to be tweeted to Twitter and vice versa.
Seems to make sense that this should happen I don’t know about you but I rarely update my LinkedIn status so this makes more sense for LinkedIn than it does for Twitter.
Search giant Google has just announced on their blog they have reached a deal with Twitter to include Twitter tweets in search results.
Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.
This means a great deal for the online marketing industry in so many ways. “#Hashtags” that were once Twitter trends now have become very real to non Twitter users. What people have previously said about your brand on blogs and forums is now joined by the inexpliccably huge volume of tweets. Twitter’s power is now vastly increased – and so is Google’s, once more.
