The British government and armed forces are to continue their widespread use of the version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser that was attacked by Chinese hackers who broke into Google’s corporate network – even though both the French and German governments have advised people to stop using it.
The Cabinet Office, which oversees the deployment of computers in government, said today that “it doesn’t think the issue [of being open to hacking] would be resolved any better by going elsewhere”.
I’ve been putting this together in my spare time and relying on the kind help of friends with graphic design, Wordpress and CSS skills as years of management have made me rusty! Thanks Dave H and Phil for your patience and help!
As has become customary for RD, we have donated to a worthy charity rather than spending on cards and postage - thus saving a few trees (and denying the Royal Mail some income - but you can’t have everything!)
This year we have made a donation to the World Wildlife Fund to help with their campaign to safeguard the natural world and tackle the global threat of climate change. You can also make a donation here: http://www.wwf.org.uk/
One thing we seem to have to deal with when building recruitment websites more often than not is explaining the difference between web design and web development. The scenario my colleague Dave Bancroft always refers to is that ‘you wouldn’t let a painter and decorator design your house’. That’s not meant to be disparaging to website designers - graphic design has a massively important role to play in helping a website do its job - it’s just that it’s just part of the overall project. So many designers whose work we’ve had to unpick seem to have let form become more important than function…
Read more about FXRecruiter here or call us on 08000 199 737
We often get asked exactly what a blog is, how to manage one, and whether it is better for it to be on your own domain or on something like Typepad or Blogger.
Well, a blog is simply a publishing system. The beauty of it is that it categorises itself as you add new articles, and create the categories or tags you want to associate the article with. The nature of blogging is that it does not need to be formal. It is a great way to talk to your customers, publish thought-leaders, or just link to something interesting or amusing you have found elsewhere on the web. Blogs are a great SEO tool as well — naturally optimised for search engines, they also notify Google of news articles as soon as they are posted meaning your article is listed very quickly.
Our view is that the blog should be part of your own site: the content you add to your blog will (or should) be relevant to your market(s) and hence adds more authority to your domain — the search engines will see your website as being more relevant to that topic than a site with little content.
An integrated blog also adds more credibility that you are a serious business and not a fly-by-night.
With the fantastic WordPress software being free, and easily customised, there is no excuse really.
Twitter and LinkedIn yesterday announced a partnership (sorry real-time searchers - old news!!) to allow LinkedIn status updates to be tweeted to Twitter and vice versa.
Seems to make sense that this should happen I don’t know about you but I rarely update my LinkedIn status so this makes more sense for LinkedIn than it does for Twitter.
Search giant Google has just announced on their blog they have reached a deal with Twitter to include Twitter tweets in search results.
Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.
This means a great deal for the online marketing industry in so many ways. “#Hashtags” that were once Twitter trends now have become very real to non Twitter users. What people have previously said about your brand on blogs and forums is now joined by the inexpliccably huge volume of tweets. Twitter’s power is now vastly increased - and so is Google’s, once more.
Google has made a cheeky and brave attempt to fix Microsoft’s Internet Explorer shortcomings, by encouraging Internet Explorer users to use the Google Chrome rendering engine inside Internet Explorer.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 - in particular -has no support from Microsoft and has
Working as a plugin for Internet Explorer, Google Chrome Frame leaves the rendering of the page to Chrome.
Google says this will lead to better browser performance for Internet Explorer users, thanks to a faster JavaScript engine, support for HTML 5 and better CSS handling. PC Pro’s own tests have repeatedly shown that Chrome far outstrips Internet Explorer in terms of raw performance, using JavaScript benchmarks such as SunSpider.
Google allows web developers to trigger Chrome Frame by inserting a single line of code into their webpages:
The switch of rendering engines is achieved using a tag Microsoft invented to emulate compatibility with older versions of Internet Explorer.
We’ve been saying it for years as this has been well known in the SEO community, but Google have finally made it official: the meta keywords and description are NOT used to work out what your page is about and decide on your ranking.
The meta description, however, is useful as it is displayed below your link in the Google results - this is called the “snippet”.
Google works out what your page is about by looking at the actual text displayed on your page. Focus your efforts on creating good keyword-rich content, rather than worrying about meta data.
Astute web users (or perhaps those not glued to Google!) may have noticed Microsoft Live Search changing to Bing back in June 09: a much more solid and accurate search offering from Microsoft and a step forward in their ongoing battle against Google (hey, we’re #4 and #7 for “recruitment website design” so we like it! )
You may recall Microsoft courting Yahoo last year only to be rebuffed.
Yesterday (July 29) Microsoft inked a deal with Yahoo to provide Bing as the search engine for Yahoo sites.
Essentially, this means we now have 2 major search engines: Google and Bing. Only time will tell whether Google will lose any marketshare to this new joint offering. We’ll be keeping a close eye on our analytics to see how this plays out.
This could be seen as the end of an era - “Web 1.0″ if you like. Yahoo was the original start point for many web surfers, starting out as a directory of all known web pages and morphing into a search engine. Will it ultimately be swallowed up by Microsoft now that its founder Jerry Yang has less control? Only time will tell, but I for one would not be surprised.
Microsoft clearly has Google’s search and online apps in its sights just as Google is gunning for a share of Microsoft’s desktop market with Google Docs/Apps, Chrome, Android and even launching its own operating system to compete head on with Microsoft Windows. Owning Yahoo would increase Microsoft’s search footprint: an area totally dominated by Google. Microsoft has also recently announced free online versions of Office Word, Excel etc. to compete directly with Google Docs/Apps.
Competition is healthy and I think Google are a bit too powerful online right now (just as Microsoft are offline). Interesting times ahead!
)
