Friday, December 02, 2005

'Skinning' your Blog

Today we decided to 'skin' the spiral Blog to make it fit in with the rest of our site.

There are three great reasons for this:

1) To keep the spiral branding when people are reading the Blog. Having invested in a custom built web site with a look and feel to represent your company it seems silly not to carry this look and feel through to your Blog.

2) Bringing the main navigation from the website into the Blog so users can efficiently access your site.

3) SEO (search engine optimisation). Modern search engines rely heavily on two things content and links. The content on your Blog although not as keyword rich as say a well-designed homepage is likely to contain many of the key words and phrases relevant to your business. Links between your Blog and your site will help improve the ranking of both as they are indexed.

Once it has been 'skinned' and linked the Blog can be treated as part of the companies' web site rather than a separate entity.

Something else worth mentioning is a feed from your Blog can be used to add some dynamic content to your home page which will keep the interest of both users and search engines. See the right hand column of www.spiral.co.nz/ for and example of this.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Can't see your web site changes?

Sometimes clients phone us and say they can't see any changes to their web site. This is easy fixed and relates to the settings you have in your web browser. Your web browser caches (or saves) files, pages, images etc on your computer, in a temporary internet files folder, while you are browsing the internet. We make the changes and your browser, thinking its doing you a favour, displays the old page, which it has cached on your computer.

To fix this and see the new page immediately, you need to clear or delete your temporary internet files. If you are using Internet Explorer simply click on the Tools button at the top of the screen then Internet Options then on the General tab half way down you will see, under the Temporary Internet Files heading, a button -> Delete Files - click this then go back and look at the web site - you should see the changes in place.