One of the big advantages of having a virtual office is that, with a little forward planning and a slight increase in luggage, we at AlbanyWeb can continue meeting the needs of our customers anywhere.

This week I have moved locations from my usual upstairs study in Glasgow to a small town in Croatia.  As I type this blog, the sun has come out after a spectacular thunderstorm the night before.  The image shows the new view from my Croatian study, which is a breezy balcony part way up a mountain slope.  The breezy balcony has one important feature, which is that it is within reach of a good quality wireless network.  And thus, with a bit of homework before travelling, I have ensured a seamless change of office. 

Why have I come here?  My husband is running a computing summer school this week, and I have just tagged along. ...

Adding images to your website can be a most frustrating experience, especially compared to adding it to a document that you print out.  Here are some common frustrations:

• the image appears in the wrong part of the page.
• the text doesn't flow around the image nicely.
• the image is a strange size, or gets stretched.
• suddenly everything grinds to a halt.
• somehow it doesn't look as nice as you imagined.

A little bit of work managing your images before you upload them will save you a lot of difficulty.

Getting your image in the right place

Accurately placing an image requires one of two things:

1. a little knowledge of how html works.
2. letting your website software control the image placement and size.

If you are not confident using html, it is better that you have a good software platform to do the heavy lifting for you.  If you look at...

This week AlbanyWeb has launched a new email hosting service, in addition to our very affordable and fast website hosting.

What is the difference between email and website hosting?

Website hosting provides a place for your website to live and a means for the website to be visible to the outside world.  This will include a domain, and sometimes will include a simple email address on that domain that simply forwards to your 'real' email address (say, if you have an email address using Yahoo or Gmail or any other email provider). 

Email hosting is similar.  Email hosting offers a place for your emails to live, and an easy way for you to view them.  So if you have an email address on your domain, with email hosting, you can keep those emails separate from any other email addresses that you have, and check them separately too (or you can...

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...