April 2014

My Zumba instructor does it. Our judo club does it too.  Both use Facebook pages instead of a website to promote their businesses.  They have more in common too - both are running a business on their own and depend on keeping their class numbers up to keep afloat.

Let's look at how well this works.

Facebook makes sharing news easy

Photos of classes, competition results, and confirmation of this week's class times are easy to do on Facebook, especially if you already spend a lot of time using Facebook.  Facebook's mobile interface is easy for quick updates so you can add stuff from wherever you are.  Once you have made an update, everyone who has a link to your page is automatically informed.  All good stuff.

By contrast, some people find updating a website is a lot more effort, requiring you to be at a desktop computer. Or the...

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), or the process of making your website attractive to search engines like Google, is something everybody wants - what is the point of spending money on a website just for it to be invisible?  However, not all companies mean the same thing when they discuss SEO.  Read about what to look for when searching for SEO services.

1. SEO is an ongoing process

Often, we will discuss SEO as though it were an item you just add to your website, like inserting a logo or a blog post.  Many fixed-price web design packages 'offer SEO', and when they do this, it is not the ongoing monitoring and reporting that a comprehensive SEO policy requires.  What they offer is some features that will help you on your way to developing your own SEO process - things like a web stats package or automatic integration of search engine...

All AlbanyWeb sites have been protected from vulnerability from the Heart Bleed bug.

As part of our ongoing maintenance service, we ensure our server and your website are up to date with the latest patches.  In the recent furore over the heartbleed bug, I was calm in the knowledge that our server was one of the first to be updated with the security patch,  on April 7th at 23:17:01 whilst I slept soundly.  Automatic hourly operating system patches are part of our commitment to reliable hosting.