The Timbergram is a postcard sized piece of wood with engraved personal messages, produced and sent out on your behalf. At the moment The Plinth (www.theplinth.co.uk) has a special offer on the Timbergram as a Valentine’s Day postcard. Customers can choose from 3 different designs and can choose a personal message for their loved one.

The Timbergram can be customized for your needs to keep check out www.timbergram.com for more options.

This means that school students, alumni, and other interested parties will be able to read any edition of the school magazine online, and even search the archive for mentions of them or their family.

Having a digitized archive of school magazines online has a number of clear benefits such as:

-       better search engine optimization (SEO) since all pages and articles are indexed by Google.

-       a great opportunity to re-engage the alumni community as past pupils can search and read editions from their time at school

-       marketing benefits as prospective students and parents can see the long history of the school and the range of activities that have taken place

The Web Kitchen is also offering to publish the content of the archive in a special bespoke site for the magazine. This would be linked to the main school site but would act as a special online site showcasing all that goes on at the school. Email enquiries@thewebkitchen.co.uk for more information

It’s a design shop with a twist. The Plinth features just one product for a special price for a limited time.

The first product ‘Timbergram‘ is an engraved wooden postcard that can be ordered and delivered for no more than your average mass-produced greetings card. 

Timbergram is the first product on the plinth. This delightfully different and stylish postcard is the perfect way to tell someone you love them, or just a bit of fun to send your friends. Stand apart from the plethora of cheesy cards and make someone’s Valetines day one to remember. The Timbergram is a carved wooden postcard and has been designed and produced in the UK on Birch wood. (150mm x 100mm). It’s just £3.85 including UK Postage. What’s more, for every ten cards that are sold, The Plinth will plant a tree in Africa through the charity Tree Aid. Simply choose your design, personalise the card, and the rest is done for you. Design your card now.

We’ve compiled our ten-point list of benefits of mobile website design compared to apps:

1. Users don’t need to download anything. It’s especially annoying to have to download something if you want to see it once.
2. Exactly the same User experience can be created using a mobile website as an App.
3. Users can bookmark a mobile website to their home screen in just the same way as an app
4. The experience can be so similar to using an app, that your users will probably think it is an app
5. Mobile web works on all smart phones – so you don’t need to develop and maintain different apps for Iphone, Android, Blackberry, and Microsoft.
6. Indeed using responsive web design, your same mobile website can be optimised for tablet devices
7. A mobile website can use the same Content Management System and content as your main website, so you only have to update content once
8. Mobile websites can be updated instantly, so you don’t need to wait until you’ve developed a new version of the app
9. Mobile websites are independent of App markets – so you can commercialise your own site without paying a share to the market
10. Mobile websites are cheaper – did you need another reason?!

Incorporation of Social Media

Universities generate a huge amount of social media. We would recommend that as well as generating strong communities within various social media sites, it’s important to bring the best of this content within the University website itself. As well as showing which bits of its own content are gaining traction via retweets, facebook likes, and google plus, Universities can pull social rich content into its own site.

Interaction with University Computer Departments

Universities are often well resourced with computing staff. We seek to work with departments to make the most of their infrastructure, and to deploy websites that are easy to manage and fit in with current structures.

Strong and well structured layout

School websites are large and dynamic. It’s imperative that they look good whatever content is uploaded. Using a strong and structured layout keeps it looking clean and clear at all times.

Audience Groups

School websites attract a number of different audience groups – prospective pupils, prospective parents, current pupils, current parents, staff, alumni and outsiders. It’s important to create user journeys that reflect these groups.

Easy Management of the website

With so much content, and with time pressured environments, it’s crucial that management of a school website is easy and quick. We always seek to design school websites with a view to easy management.

Relevant News and Events across website

School websites generate a huge amount of news and events. To show the depth of what a school has to offer, and to avoid dead-end pages, we normally recommend that relevant news and events are fed around the website.

Strong use of imagery and video content

Users are much more interested in impact images and videos than long boring pages of text.  Videos are especially good at putting messages across. In the same way as news and events, we suggest that relevant videos are fed throughout site as well as kept in media repository. Images should be big, but not at the expense of content.

Responsive design

With so many different devices these days, it’s crucial that a school website adapts to the device through which it is viewed. Read more here about what makes a design responsive, and how this can work for a school website.

Let us delve deep into understanding what Social Network is all about.

Social networking of late has become purely web based and through this platform it has become easy to connect with people across the world that share similar interests as well as activities across the political, geographical and economic borders.

Online social network has become the order of the day and online business owners have figured out assured ways in which they can reach out to a wider customer base and garner more business for themselves so as to see an increase in their revenue. In fact, this has become the best platform to attract potential customers which would indeed make a lot of positive impact on their business.

Social Networking sites

For instance, it we take the social network site Facebook, it provides live feed wherein the activities of the users are streamed immediately after an action takes place. If there is a business XYZ and a person happens to ‘Like’ it, this input is given on the profile page of the individual who has liked it. Curiosity gets better of the visitors and they too chance upon the website or the business and in case they too like it, they click on it and like the same. So, when the number of people liking your website/profile increases, it becomes easy for more people to visit your website.

People have realized that this latest technological finding has proved to be a boon for businesses. Companies have identified this medium as an ideal way to establish their brand image. Here are top uses that businesses get out of social network websites.

• They can easily establish a brand image and create brand awareness
• Use it as a reputation management tool
• Use the platform for recruiting people
• Get ideas regarding the kind of action that is happening on the competitor’s website
• A tool that would greatly help in intercepting potential prospects

The ultimate aim of these businesses is therefore to drive more traffic to their individual websites and encourage their clients and customers to participate in discussions on various ways in which the services could be improved.

So, you could ideally create profiles in various social networking sites and make it work in a systematic and strategic manner such that it facilitates more business.

Internet provides an answer to numerous things for us the moment our day begins. And when we search for a few things on the World Wide Web, we key in few specific terms into the search tool bar which will throw open a serpentine list of websites that are relevant to our search. So, it is these various online businesses in the form of websites that are vying for the top search engine ranks on the results page.

Online business exists and becomes successful if and only if there is an incessant flow of traffic which would later on get converted into sales. So, when the websites are thoroughly search engine optimized, the chances of the website getting lifted and indexed in the top search results become high.

Top rank on a major search engine, for instance Google, means tons and tons of traffic to your website. And when the website is SEOed in various significant aspects, the search engines rank it higher in comparison to million other sites.

Here is an effort to elucidate on the various aspects of Search Engine Optimization—an overview, how it works and the various ranking criteria that the major search engines take into purview while giving a website a particular ranking.

How do search engines actually work?

None of the search engines are humans…this is a fact and a basic truth that one needs to bear in mind when they are talking about search engines giving a rank to the websites in question. While people can discern they cannot understand the way humans and the major search engines view the websites and web pages. Search engines are purely driven by text and crawlers look for the text that has been keyed in the search tool bar and picks up a website that closely matches those terms or what we call the keywords.

Search engines, before delivering us the results in milliseconds, perform a series of activities. They crawl, index, process, calculate relevancy and retrieve the information from the relevant web pages…all of this accomplished in a matter of few seconds.

The search engine spiders crawl the websites to find out if anything relevant is there and this is performed by the Googlebot in case of Google. It is the spiders that follow various links and move on from one web page to another and enroute index those web pages they find relevant. As there are billions of web pages on the World Wide Web, it becomes highly impossible for the spider to check if something new has been included in a web page. At times, the crawlers may not even visit your website for a long time.

Once the search engine spider crawls the web page it indexes the content and stores the same in a huge database which it will retrieve later. Indexing involves identifying the keywords. It is humanly impossible but the search engines do it with great aplomb. And when there is a search request, the request is processed…it compares these keywords with the indexed pages that are stored in the database. And as there are millions of pages that contain the keywords, the search engines begin to calculate the relevancy of these web pages.

Relevancy of the web pages is calculated by various algorithms that have relative weights assigned for some common factors like title tags, metatags, alt tags, links, and keyword density. That is the basic reason why we get different search results for the same search strings on different search engines. And the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Bing keep changing their algorithms periodically. So, if you want your website to feature on the top page ranks, you need to modify your web pages in accordance with the changed algorithms of the search engines.

The final step of the search engine’s results is the retrieval of the information which is nothing but displaying the results in the SERPs. And these results are a whole list of web pages that have been sorted from highly relevance to low relevance.

Licensed under GPL, WordPress as a CMS is compatible on platforms like PHP and MySQL gives the user total control over his weblog. You can access as well as modify anything that is related to your blog whenever you think is necessary. WordPress offers different user levels so as to control access and the ability to create or modify the content on your blog. Installation is very snappy and nothing else can be accomplished at such pace, ease of usage and simplicity. Upgrading is also equally simple and one does not need to rebuild their pages every time an update is made. Having a weblog that is completely customized to your choice and the chosen language can be created in less time.

WordPress Content Management System allows connecting with other weblogs through PingBack and TrackBack so as to facilitate more traffic to your blog. The design of your blog could also be customized by making use of the templates that help in generating dynamic pages. All you have to do is edit the templates by taking the help of the Template Editor. There are a lot of features like the plugins, themes, template tags with which you could give your blog or website a customized look.

While creating content too, WordPress CMS allows for password protected account, and an ability to post a blog at a future date. Uploading files and pictures and linking them to your articles is very much possible on your weblog. The entire effort towards integrating content management system is for making searching and archiving extremely easy and the same is accomplished through WordPress too.

Building communities around the weblogs is a task that one can achieve with the help of WordPress. And comments by visitors are allowed too but with the help of the moderation options, you could moderate the comments prior to their appearance on the blog. Touted as very powerful blogging and CMS software, WordPress as a CMS is used by top agencies and companies too for the host of benefits it brings along.