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Free image editors – Prepare images for your website

May 28th, 2010, by Chris Ward

If you run a website with updatable content areas, such as an e-commerce platform or content management system, the chances are you’ve been called upon to edit or enhance your own images in order to make them ‘web friendly’. Although Adobe Photoshop has long been the industry standard for image manipulation among professionals, its costly nature and feature-laden interface are generally a turn-off for casual users – however, there are a plethora of free and useful alternatives available for download, a selection of which are outlined in this article.

These free image editors can be divided into two categories:

• Downloadable Image Editing Software
• Web-Based Image Editors

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Tags: image editors
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Black Hat SEO, What to Watch out for

May 28th, 2010, by Paul Zanelli

Back in the early days of search engine optimisation it was more a case of everyone for themselves since search engine algorithms were nowhere near as complicated and sophisticated as they are today.  There were many tactics that were commonplace to help improve websites rankings that are now frowned upon by the search engines and SEO’s alike.

Like in any industry, there are always some people who want to try and cheat the system or fast track their website to the top of the rankings.  Short term they may achieve good results but eventually these techniques will always be found out by the major search engines and it is then that your site may start to suffer.  ‘Black Hat’ search engine optimisation as it is known should be avoided so let’s take a look at what to watch out for when considering online marketing.
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Tags: search engine optimisation, seo
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4 ways to help your customers this christmas…

December 11th, 2009, by Tamsin Whitfield

Every e-commerce website, no matter what its size or focus, could benefit from an increase in activity over the busy and highly competitive Christmas period. According to research conducted by eBay advertising, 85% of consumers intend to maintain or increase their festive online shopping for 2009, and it’s estimated that online retailers will see an overall spend of £8.9 billion this Christmas. We’ve just passed “ Cyber Monday” – the busiest Internet shopping day of the year, which typically falls on the first Monday of December (7^th December for 2009).

• Add a Christmas Gift Section
• Provide Extra Delivery Options & Notify Customers of Dates
• Focus on Email Marketing
• Offer a Gift Wrapping Service

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Think before you Move that page – 301 Redirects Explained

September 11th, 2009, by Paul Zanelli

As a website owner, there may well come a time when you want to reorganise pages or sections within the site. Since many modern websites and ecommerce sites are built around Content Management Systems this is a relatively easy task and in many cases, one you can do yourself.

What you need to be mindful of however is the fact that your website will have been crawled by search engine robots and its pages indexed accordingly. These pages will have a rank in the search engine results and could well be driving quality traffic and visitors to your site. Providing these visitors find what they are looking for then a conversion will be made and you will make money.

Moving these pages without planning ahead will likely result in one of two scenarios:

1. Your website may still show up in the search engine rankings but when viewed, return a 404 page not found error (because you have moved the page and it can no longer be found).
2. Your rankings for those pages may disappear completely from the search engines, which means potentially missing out on business.

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Tags: 301, 301 redirect, cms, content management, ecommerce, search engine optimisation, seo, website management
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Password management & security: the do’s & don’ts

July 14th, 2009, by Chris Ward

Despite campaigns recently to increase awareness about the need for secure passwords in the UK, many web users leave use themselves open to hackers by choosing easy to guess and insecure passwords. A survey by Visa Europe found that “over three-quarters choose passwords relating to friends, family and memorable dates” whilst following a recent phishing attack on the website MySpace it was found that “the five most common passwords are: password1, abc123, myspace1, password and blink182 (a band).”

A recent UK Government report carried out as part of the Get Safe Online campaign found the following information:

• 66% of users use the same password for more than one website
• 46% of users use the same 2 to 3 passwords for every website they access
• 45% of users use passwords made up only of dictionary words or names (the most easily cracked)

The lack of proper password security is one of the factors contributing to the ongoing problem of online fraud in the UK. The UK Cybercrime report identified the following worrying statistics: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: keepass, managment, open source, password, secure, security, software, tips
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