Web Design and Drupal Development Blog

Commemorating those who fought and died in battle for our freedom is something close to my heart and so when I read this article in the local paper, Fundraising drive begins to replace rotting gate guardians, I thought I'd do my bit to help promote it.

The St George's RAF Chapel of Rememberance at Biggin Hill airport in Kent has two planes, one a Spitfire the other a Hurricane (saved from a film set), as gate guardians. These act as a memorial for those who flew from Biggin Hill and those pilots who died during the war.

I read a great article over the weekend in The Guardian, Are probiotics really that good for your health?, which went on to detail the rise and rise in probiotic drink sales.

It struck me as a prime example of how marketing a lifestyle can bypass any benefits the product claims to have (in this case, benefits yet to be verified by the European Food Standards Agency) !

Why wait for confirmation that your product actually improves people's health when you can persuade them with adverts and brain wash them in to thinking so.

Yakult is widely known in the UK and was the first to market with their probiotic drink in 1996.

When building a Drupal website it's important to get the basic site configuration right to help in everything from SEO to Usability.

Putting these basics in place will make your site load faster and avoid a potential increase in your bounce rate. A well oiled machine will make for a smooth running site and a good experience for visitors.

Drupal is a very powerful CMS with many core and contributed modules, these are just some of the things your should do, if you think there are others do add a comment ;o)

How important is service to you? Even if you don't work in the service industry you have to deal with customers and suppliers, so being approachable and contactable is important.

Now I'm not going to name the company I'm referring to, I can see a few frowns on your faces, but safe to say the system of customer support this relates to is a common one.

If you deal with a large company there are usually many different channels to contact support, most common being telephone, email, support ticket or live online chat. Now if you provide these methods it's normally good practice to actually be on the other end to respond!

When supplying a phone number it's good that someone, especially between the hours of 9 and 5, picks up the darn thing or you have the ability to leave a voicemail! What's the point of a support number if there's no support?!

Naturally your next port of call is live online chat, except when you go to use it there's never anyone there to chat to! Live offline chat would be more appropriate!

If you ever needed inspiration to start a blog and tips to keep people returning to read it then the video below, titled How to Build a High-Traffic Blog Without Killing Yourself by Tim Ferriss, is a great place to start.

Having viewed it the other day I felt I had to share with you, it was that good, I hope you get something from it even if you have an established blog.

There's background to where and why he started blogging, including an embarressing telephone call to a blogging idol!

If you're thinking about starting a blog or have doubts as to where to start then watch this presentation:

Blog comments are a hot topic at the moment and something we're constantly reviewing. Since Matt Cutts, at SMX Advanced, announced the 'nofollow tag' no longer passes pagerank, the blogging and more importantly the SEO community has been discussing the merits of page rank sculpting.

Barry Welford's post, Blog Comments and Google, gives a great run down of the situation and the merits of allowing comments on your blog.

We, at Makak Media, are interested in how a blog aids your SEO efforts and attracts visitors to the site but at the same time we're also mindful that this blog is primarily there for the reader. It's not all about getting visitors and gaining page ranking if your content isn't of quality and your readers can't interact.

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Securing your ecommerce website is a top priority to give customers confidence in purchasing from your store.

You may have payment options such as offsite or onsite payments. If you're using an offsite payment method, such as PayPal, customers are sent to an external site to complete checkout and so security issues are handled by PayPal themselves.

What about if you're using onsite payment methods, what do you need to do to secure the payment page?

The first thing you'll need to do is check your hosting package came with an SSL Certificate. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypts critical data, such as credit card details, providing security and data integrity for communications over networks such as the Internet.