The Yadabyte Websites Blog

A brand new website for Wimbledon Property Finders

2008-01-08T10:02:00.000Z

The brand new website for Wimbledon Property Finders has just been launched. We provided simple logo design and a bespoke website design and development. We also provided web/email hosting for the website on our reliable web hosting server.

An online registration form was developed so that visitors can make enquiries without leaving the website. Wimbledon Property Finders is situated in Wimbledon & are a specialist property finding service that covers the areas of Wimbledon, Southfields, Earlsfield, Raynes Park and Coombe.

Yadabyte Websites launches NAFAS Devon & Cornwall Region Website

2008-01-08T09:58:00.000Z

Yadabyte Websites has just launched a new website for NAFAS Devon & Cornwall region. The website consists of a clean and simple design based on the client's preferences.

The website also includes an integrated Content Management System, Google Maps page showing the location of all the associated flower arrangement clubs and an Image gallery.

'NAFAS' the National Association of Flower Arrangement Societies is an educational charity dedicated to the promotion of the artistic use of all types of plant material through the medium of its flower clubs for both adults and children.

Website Issues

2007-11-20T13:21:00.000Z

Our ISP is currently experiencing an unusual internet routing problem that the backbone providers (Line3) are trying to fix.

Some people, eg my dad, have full avccess, others , eg me, do not

This problem is out of our hands and out of our server provider's hands (www.server4you.com).

I just spoke to their technical support who described the problem as "a strange" one.

5 Things That Will Improve Your Web Site Traffic

2007-10-10T11:47:00.000+01:00

This is a good read if you have a website.

Mail Status

2007-09-07T09:56:00.001+01:00

All sites are up apart from out www.tomeraider.com.
We are currently working on mail backups.
We have mail backups for EVERY domain - this is very good.
Some mail backups have been messed up a bit by people using remedial options in the downtime like the webmail and the redirects, but it shouldn't be too bad...
We haven't restored mail like this before so we are going to try with a test account first.

All Clients Sites are Done!

2007-09-06T13:37:00.000+01:00

At last!

Something like 9 years after the server went down (it feels like that) all the client sites are up and being QA'd . There is lots more to do but we are in the home straight.

We are overwhelmed by the clients understanding

Really, I know a lot of clients have taken a big hit this week, we all have. But I just cant thank enough how understanding and sympathetic every single one of them has been - Bar one who hasn't been reading this blog (using this blog for updates has been a godsend too I reckon, for all involved).

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Its been pretty hellish but would have been zillions of times worse without this understanding:)

Its not all bad...

2007-09-06T11:59:00.000+01:00

I just got a call from a guy named Paul...

He said "Andrew... recommended you for a new website."

I said, "He did? his site's been down nearly a week!"

"I know" he said with a telephone smile.

"But I still want and Andrew still recommends...."

:)

Recovering "Old Mails"

2007-09-06T10:31:00.001+01:00

Once the client sites are set up and the email working the next big issue is the "missing mails" that were sent during the various stages of downtime.

In theory we should be able to get all of these, but I wont sugar the pill, the myraid mail systems that have been set up as temp measures and the general server problems means that some mails might have gone missing. We don't expect many, we hope none, but we just cant tell yet.

Some more sites are up....

2007-09-06T09:49:00.001+01:00

http://www.tm-clothing.com

http://opikopi.co.uk

http://vetprogress.com/

http://cornwallsustainabilityawards.org/

Morning update 9.12

2007-09-06T09:03:00.000+01:00

There have been some small issues since the last couple of sites, we have resolved those and are continuing updating the sites.

Its going well again.

Its a beautiful day out side in Truro and in Columbo its "sunny" (Its either "sunny" or "torrential ")

2007-09-06T04:38:00.000+01:00

www.burrowsestateagents.co.uk
www.duckworthpotter.co.uk

The Shipping Forcast

2007-09-06T04:01:00.000+01:00

Its 4.30 am and we are uploading and its going well. We haven't actually encountered ANY problems at all in the last couple of hours; so thats quite remarkable for the week.

I'm now going to try to get a few hours sleep. If your a client please try not to ring me too early but do email myprojects{at}yadabyte.com if your site isn't live by the time your up.

Launch Priorities

The remainder of the sites are being rolled out on a pretty ad hoc basis, if when you get up your site isn't up please email the myprojects{at}yadabyte.com address and just ask for it to be expedited.

The last sites we are going to do will be for our software business -tomeraider.com etc, which like out client sites have pretty much had their balls ripped out this week:(

Epic thanks to Sumith and Waruna who are on the last 2 hours of a 27 hour non-stop workthrough.

News Sites Up... even more....

2007-09-06T03:49:00.000+01:00

http://leapmedia.co.uk/
http://nfasoccerskills.com
http://www.ipsf.org/

News Sites Up...

2007-09-06T03:06:00.000+01:00

http://www.envisionsw.org.uk/
http://auntieannes.co.uk/
http://www.smorgers.com/

More sites up.....

2007-09-06T02:32:00.000+01:00

http://www.fingerprint-jewellery.co.uk/
girlstravelclub.co.uk

First site is up!

2007-09-06T01:32:00.000+01:00

We have the first site up and all seems well with it. www.vivastay.com

There are two types of sites we have, once with whats called Plesk backups (This is a server system) and Folder level backups. We are going to be doing the Plesk backups first, these are generally the most complex sites.

In terms of the order we roll them out, its nearly nearly 2am Uk and 6. 30 Sri Lankan we have a bit of a "production line" going in SL.....

I see a light!

2007-09-06T00:21:00.001+01:00

87.106.9.47

Put that in your browser!! There is the seed of a website there!!

on our server!!!

Update 22.23

2007-09-05T18:43:00.000+01:00

Its still ongoing.. its taking ages... its going to be an all nighter in Truro and Columbo and I know who has the best coffee...

Update 17.43

2007-09-05T17:43:00.000+01:00

There has been a delay of an hour with the new server company.

Update 15.00

2007-09-05T14:56:00.000+01:00

We are finally moving files over to the new server house. the server isn't quite ready (Should be by 4) but this new company has bent over backwards to help.

Its not over, but whatever happens, without the 3 day and 3 night dedication of the Yadabyte Sri Lanka team I would still be on the phone to the Philippines. Sumith, Waruna, Amila, Vaj, Pras, you guys especially, I cant thank you enough.

UPDATE 13.40

2007-09-05T13:39:00.001+01:00

We have the sites ready to start being uploaded.

This is a break in the clouds.

I'm preying to the binary gods its not just eye of the storm.

UPDATE 13.30

2007-09-05T12:50:00.000+01:00

The new company we have to provide the server is finalizing it. Thats good news.

Server Update

2007-09-05T11:56:00.001+01:00

The backup should be complete in 2 hours

Server Update 08 AM

2007-09-05T08:31:00.000+01:00

We are taking a backup of the server now, so we have access and nothing should have been lost (In between the 1and1 backups and our backups).

We are also preparing the sites for setting up on the new server as follows:

We will get a "Down for unscheduled maintainance" holding page up on all sites.
we will reset up emails on the sites.
We will upload the site to the new server.

Note that these can be done fairly simultaneously.

Its not directly relevant but...

2007-09-04T20:48:00.000+01:00

Stress

1and 1 problems

2007-09-04T19:55:00.000+01:00

One of our clients just sent this.... it seems we are not alone:

Thank you for your updates, it's not going to help in any way but I had a quick look at 1&1's impressive track record..

the first link talks about problems terminating contracts..

http://www.youwebhosting.com/Articles/Web-Hosting/Web-Hosting-Complaints/Web-Hosting-Complaints-About-1and1.co.uk/

http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews8783.html

http://www.deanmarshall.co.uk/content/view/70/103

Kindest regards,

Some progress...

2007-09-04T19:44:00.000+01:00

We have made some progress with the site. Our main aim is to get a complete backup of the site before we reimage it - but we are having problems mounting the raid (hard drive) - and getting no help from 1and1:(

The guys in SL are still working on it as well - its past midnight in Colombo.

Update and Some Closure

2007-09-04T14:39:00.000+01:00

As of 14.45 this is how it stands:

Email

We have emails working for all sites. If you think you are missing mails please contact me asap so we can investigate.

We are currently taking the sites off 1and1.co.uk server and Tomorrow, when we have them all, we will start putting them on a new server.
We will then start pointing the name servers, which can take up to 72 hours but usually is close to instant.
So tomorrow all sites (Apart from our own tomeraider.com which will be a monster move) should be up and running.

Conclusion

I hope that any clients readings realise that what has happened to your site, and the other sites, was very very far out of all of our control. I guess the only mistake we made is that 2 years ago we went with 1and1.co.uk

Nonetheless, if anyone would like to stop hosting with Yadabyte we will give you all the help you need to move your site to another server, and continue to support it as if it was on our server, free of charge.

Thank you all of our clients for being so very understanding. Its been a horrible and helpless 2 days but it would have been much much worse if you hadn't been:)

Mat

Some good news

2007-09-04T13:50:00.001+01:00

We still don't have the server but we can now telnet into it and retrieve the databases for the sites, which we are doing.

This means that when we get the new server fully installed we will be able to pick up pretty much where we left off... at least thats the idea...

This is officially the worst 36 hours of my working life.

It dint work

2007-09-04T12:19:00.001+01:00

same message "Bringing up interface eth0:
Determining IP information for eth0... failed; no link present. Check cable?
[FAILED]
"

There is hope....

2007-09-04T12:03:00.000+01:00

Dear Matthew Ripley, (Customer ID: 10236598)

Thank you for contacting us.

This is in regards to the phone conversation I had with you earlier.

With regards to your concern, we will advice you to please reboot your
server to rescue mode and then choose options.
Linux Rescue System (debian/woody - 2.4.x)
Linux Rescue System (debian/woody - 2.6.x)

.....

Watch this space..

We have been contacted by 1and1.co.uk !

2007-09-04T08:42:00.000+01:00

And lo! From the darkness!

1and1.co.uk have managed, after about 26 hours, to contact us with the following:

Dear Matthew Ripley, (Customer ID: 10236598)

Thank you for contacting us.

We really understand your frustrations right now, unfortunately, we
really cannot give any estimated timeframe for this. What we can only
suggest here is to wait for further resplies from our highest level of
support. Rest assured that your issue has already and still currently
being worked on.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

--
Sincerely,
Ell Sworth Guy Caballero
Technical Support
1&1 Internet

Its not actually any news because this came from: support@1and1.co.uk

The mysterious "Server Department", who are the only ones who can deal with this, use this email: server247@1and1.com

And don't reply, but if you are a client feel free to email them about your particular domain (That might help?)

Some Good news - emails

2007-09-04T08:18:00.000+01:00

We think that we can create new domains for email and thus the sites can start receiving emails again. We will have to do this one by one but we are about to start.

Update to the down date

2007-09-04T07:41:00.000+01:00

The server has now been down just over 24 hours.

The Good News:

The Bad News:

The server is down.

By 10 we are going to find a new company to host our server and will start moving the site, Cleint sites first.

Hopefully the server today will be up and we can do a more leisurely move rather than an evacuation.

Again, to our clients, I'm so very sorry. And thank you for being so very understanding

Goodnight Cruel Internet

2007-09-03T23:15:00.000+01:00

Its twenty past midnight.. after my last call... this time to the Philippines via the 1and1 head office I get the same old bull.

Meh...

1and1 server down problem update 19.10

2007-09-03T19:07:00.000+01:00

Still no joy, I cannot believe. This is the worst customer service of any company I have ever dealth with, ever. including Orange, Sky and even Compuserve.

1and1 server down problem update 17.20

2007-09-03T17:20:00.000+01:00

I have spoken to the head office in Germany, of United Internet.

They were no help. It seems that nobody in America, Germany or the Philippines can communicate directly with the UK server cluster.

I just got the phone again to the Philipines. Everything is saying its being worked on, but the evidence doesn't suggest that.

The feeling of helplessness is maddening!

Yadabyte Server Issues

2007-09-03T16:21:00.000+01:00

Its been a hell of a day. Our server went down this morning and hasn't been up since.

These things happen - although this happened to us in many years of serving; when it did go bad it went it in spades.

But whats been really terrible is the appalling support that www.1and1.co.uk internet have been providing us. We have been lied to, passed all around the globe between the Philippines and basically treated as worthless - which considering the large amount of money we pay them is even more frustrating.

1and1 are supposed to be the biggest ISP in Europe, and they are pretty big in the states too. They guarantee great uptime and speed but I guess when it comes to it, as a company you need to get judged by how you deal with the bad times too.

Clients have been understandably calling us all day to get the low down and I have been unable to give them any real information, its been stressful to say the least.

One of the real issues I have with them today is the fact that their entire support infrastructure has no connection with the hardware, as in the servers. So the guys and gals in the Philipines cant do anything about the hardware issues, like we are having.

At 8 am we were told to call back in 30 mins.
We call back they have no idea about it, but then escalate it.
We call back again, another escalation ; by 10am uk were were supposedly at the highest level.
Then we get told its a problem with UDP flooding (we didn't think that made sense)
Then we get told its a BILLING ISSUE - I cant believe this so chase it up with their accounts department. No billing problem - what ind of internet system allows such misinformation?
We can see now that they are doing something on the server. not sure what but now, over 12 hours after the initial report maybe we will have our sites, and most importantly our client sites, back up.

Stay tunes... and if this has affected you... sorry

Mat

Yadabyte's TomeRaider gets a great review in PC Pro Mag

2007-06-27T09:39:00.000+01:00

Ok, this isn't to do with the website site, buy its all technology:)

Content Management Systems

2007-06-14T10:43:00.000+01:00

We often get requests from companies recommending we use their bespoke content management system, I had one this morning. And I ask, generally always,

"What can your CMS do that Drupal cannot?"

And I haven't had an answer back that ever contained any real info of distinction.

The fact is this, many moons ago we designed our own CMS, it was pretty good. but it wasn't as good as Drupal, which rather than written by a team of 7 super talents was written by a team of hundreds of super talents over many years.

If your looking for a CMS you would be crazy to pay for bespoke code when Drupal is free and open source.

Site Launch: Unanimis

2007-05-25T10:33:00.000+01:00

Unanamis are Europe's leading Internet Advertising specialists. They have just been voted in the top ten of Real Business's Hot 100 UK Companies. But by far the biggest accolade that have just received is the little "Site by Yadabyte Websites" text on their site:p

Unanimis are the largest corporate client we have done to date and its been fun working with them... if a little different to working with smaller (but equally as valued) clients.

Check out the new Unanamis site.

An interesting post on page rank

2007-04-26T22:52:00.000+01:00

http://searchengineland.com/070426-011828.php

Site Launch: Girls Travel Club

2007-04-18T12:29:00.000+01:00

We have just launched a cool new site called www.girlstravelclub.co.uk. It’s a hybrid site catering for travelers of the fairer sex - but I guess there is plenty there for guys too. It’s a shop selling travel products, it’s a blog, its an info portal and other things as well. Technically there is nothing too new to it, but it’s a well thought out site, I think.

One new thing we had to do with this was make the Girls Travel Club Blog fit in the theme of the rest of the site (unlike this or our other blogs, for example). It’s not hard to do but it makes a big difference to the site experience. The blog is good reading:)

More and more its striking my just how much pure old fashioned leg work is needed to make even the best designed site a success . And Becci is keen and driven to this, so most of her time now is spent “web schmoosing” to get relevant and interested links in and out.

Have a look at Girls Travel Club at www.girlstravelclub.co.uk.

Yadabyte SEO Primer 4: Mommy, what's a search engine?

2007-03-26T20:58:00.000+01:00

Guaranteed Spider Vision

Every night, while you are sleeping, spiders are crawling the World Wide Web. These "spiders" are computer programs sitting, en masse, in the server houses of the search engine companies. These spiders see the web in one medium and one medium only, and that is text. They don't see images or animations and they don't hear sounds. Now, you might be thinking, if you have read any of my other blogs, that I'm just showing off with the metaphor about spiders seeing in text here. Well, for once good reader, I am not. If you look at your web page like a spider you get a new insight into your site's level of optimization. But how...?

There is a free-to-use tool that lets you see like a spider: its called Lynx View. Take a look at the Yadabyte.com Website and now take a look at it as a web spider sees it with Lynx View. This is how Google sees it, more or less. Google adds extra layers such as if text is bold or not, but at heart, that's the Google view.

Try this: Look at your website's Spider View here. What you should see, when you read down from the top through the page, are words that most represent what your site is about. If you don't, then you don't need an SEO expert to tell you that your site is critically badly optimized and unless you like it quiet, you need to take action. (If your site is totally unoptimized, in a few minutes you can do more good for your SEO than paying Yadabyte Websites or anyone else to optimize it).

The Long and The Crawl of It

Much of the work that search engines do is looking at the internet with Spider Vision. They do it do it constantly in what are called Crawls.The way a Crawl works is like this:

The search engine has a list of websites. It gets these from the internet's Domain Name Servers (Google has its own DNS) as well as from its own historical database.
When it crawls it will start off on a website - or tens of thousands at once - look at it with spider vision and save what it finds in its database (more on this later). It will then follow any links into and out of the site to other web pages and record what it finds at each one of those. This creates an explosion of searching spiders. Its an explosion you want your sight caught up in as many times and from as many directions as possible.

In an ideal world the internet would be searched like this constantly and simultaneously, but the computational power and internet bandwidth isn't available for this at the current time. So short-cuts are taken. We will discuss this in a later, more advanced section, of the series, Crawl Frequency and Depth..

So, we have the idea of this spider that reads web pages by crawling across the internet, but that's only part of the search engine; most of the really clever and innovative stuff happens after the spider has saved what it sees into the search engine database.

The Search Engine Database

All the text-based data that the spiders find is saved in the search engine company's big database. This is composed of essentially two parts: the data and the software. The data is the index and the page content - all the stuff the spider finds. The software is the absolutely crazily complex algorithms and functions that are made on the data. As a professional software architect, I can assure you, in case you didn't already know, what goes on in the engines houses of Google is some of the most sophisticated programming ever.

What's a real paradigm shift in how this software works is that it is dynamic in both directions. The search engine process and results change with what's on the web, and they change depending upon who, where and when the search is made. The reality of a search engine is that nobody, not even the people at Google or MSN, can say what any results could be.

Where we are in this series.

So far we have seen the framework of what it's all about from an SEO point of view.
We have seen what web presence is and how to get an idea of your site's web presence.
We have seen how traffic entails a good search result and how good search results entail traffic.
And in this last section we have seen how a search engine works in a conceptual, and, I hope, useful way.

The conclusion to this part of the series is that the web is so huge and complex, as are the search engine databases and softwares that represent the web, that nobody, not even Larry and Serge, can guarantee the results of any search. It's like the weather.

The rest of this series is about how to predict the weather better and, with a little effort, get a little more sunshine on your little patch of the internet. One thing's for sure, there will be more over-stretched metaphors.

SEO Primer Part 5 will be published shortly

Yadabyte SEO Primer 3: Traffic

2007-03-22T17:25:00.000Z

We have some sites that we use for testing (or that we bought and never used) that are not connected to the internet. They sit there, not getting any traffic except yadabyte traffic. Google doesn't know about them. Nor yahoo. Nobody does really. These sites have zero web presence. That's what a new site is like.

So.. lets suppose you have a new website. Its built, its beautiful and it works exactly how you want it. If you now do nothing, your site will stay with zero web presence. It will have no visitors. It will not be found by google or yahoo. It will languish in a lonely internet solitude. Your new site nmeeds traffic.

You or someone needs to get it traffic because, as said, it wont happen by its self. Its pretty daunting with a virgin site... or just a quiet site to answer the question, "How can I get traffic?". And in essence this is what this series is all about; getting traffic to generate web presence so you can get more traffic.

I think a good vantage point to look at traffic is from a distance. Looking from here there are three ways traffic can come to your website:

The Three Types of Traffic

Search Engines - Most successful sites get most of their traffic from search engines. This is an irrefutable fact of the internet right now. Your site will need to generate search engine traffic.
Hyperlinks - Hyperlinks made the internet possible and they are still its prime matter. Hyperlinks not only allow people to come to your site from another site, but as we saw in the last section, they largely determine a site's web presence.
Address Bar Traffic - This is where someone enters your website's domain name in their browser and visit the site. That much is simple, but tehre are endless reasons why they might have done this. maybe they saw your ad in the paper, on tv, maybe a happy customer wrote it down on a beer mat. Maybe they saw your car decals. Some sites have lots of Address Bar Traffic (www.yadabytewebsites.com) others get hardly any (www.yadabyte.com).

Thats it.

There is no other way (I count email based links as hyperlinks) to get traffic to your site.

In the next post in this SEO Primer we will look at search engines as "things" so that you can understand their workings without much mystery. Following that we start to get into the mud and muck of search engine optimization, link building and, if we have time, how to get to the top slot in Google for the search phrase "yadabyte SEO primer".

Yadabyte SEO Primer 4: Mommy, what's a search engine? will be published shortly.

Yadabyte SEO Primer 2: Web Presence

2007-03-19T18:57:00.000Z

The internet is the most complex and massive system of information ever built. You may have a website for your little holiday cottage on Orkney but its sitting in a vast... web... of connections and these connections are governed by hundreds of thousands of automatic process, human decisions and a fair dollop of chance. You need to know about your site's web presence, if you don't you are managing your website critically in the dark.

Although the notion of Web Presence is very abstract, there are a number of metrics available that can give you a very good idea of your site - or any site's - web presence. We will go through some of the following in posts all to themselves later in this series, but for now:

Google Page Rank - Unless your selling porn or BNP merchandise your website's Google Page Rank, or PR is, I think, the most important metric for web presence. Page Rank is a number between 1 and 10, simply put: the higher a site's PR the more important Google thinks that site is.
Alexa rank - Alexia is a subsidiary of Amazon and - for the last decade or so - it has been monitoring web traffic via its toolbar and other means. New sites wont have an Alexa rank but as a guide line, our www.tomeraider.com has a rank under half a million, Yahoo is 1 and Google is 3.
Backlinks - Backlinks are links from websites to your website. The quality of these links is important as if they come from "bad" sites then your site may be penalized in SEO terms.
Other Search Engines - Like it or hate it, right now Google is by far the most important search engine for UK websites and web users. Nonetheless, its always worth increasing your web presences by having your site optimized for other search engines.
Sundries - There are a bunch of other factors, like mentions in the blogosphere, forums, Usenet, email lists..... All of these factors can add, or detract in some cases, from a site's web presence. Some sundries, like getting a mention on a social news site such as digg.com can be worth an absolute fortune in terms relative value.

If you or your company owns a website, any website, then you need to get clued up with the website's web presence. It will take you 2 mins a week to do and is invaluable in so many ways. Its also totally non-teccy (Unlike, say webstats or Google Analytics) - my mum could find out this information - and make sense of it - whenever she wanted.

Know your Web Presence

There are a zillion tools and websites available to monitor all kinds of things to do with web site metrics. But lets start simple and use the free Tool Url at http://www.toolurl.com/

Visit this site, enter your website address in the box provided. You will instantly be told:

The Site's Google Page Rank
The Site's Alexa Rank
The quantity and source of Backlinks from varied search engines

If I was you I would date and write down these numbers (If your site is very new you might not have much to write down). And get into the habit of checking them regularly as they are so so important if you are serious and professional about your website.

Not knowing them is like being a stock broker who never checks the stock market.

SEO Primer 3: Traffic, will be published shortly.

Yadabyte SEO Primer 1: Kicking Up Trouble, a Confession and an Introduction

2007-03-18T11:00:00.001Z

In the late mid 90s we were selling the first version of our TomeRaider Ebook software for the Psion Handheld. This was before Google, virals and mainstream SEO. There were various forums online for the Psion. In one of them, I got into a bit of a slanging match with a guy or guys. I can't remember what it was about (you would be amazed at what techies are prepared to tiff over), but what we noticed was that this forum argument had a direct correlation to downloads, and thus sales, of TomeRaider. If we let the tiff die down in the forum you could see sales and downloads slump. So, staying maximally friendly and equally antagonistic, we kept these arguments rolling and reaped the benefit of the traffic for a good while. Nobody got hurt.

You couldn't do that now, people are way too clued up. You would be branded a spammer and a flamer and in the long run your web presence would suffer. Since those "days of thunder" everything has changed. The internet crashed, Google arrived, social networks and blogs form the dominating substrata of the net, and there is a morality about what you can and can't do online. But one thing hasn't changed:

if your website is going to be a success, it needs good traffic.

Good traffic isn't just lots of traffic. Good traffic is visitors who want to be on your website. It's visitors who might need what you are offering.

This is the first part of a series I am writing on Web Presence, Traffic and Search Engine Optimisation. If you own a website and you're not an SEO Pro it might be worth reading. I want to achieve three key things with this SEO Primer:

To provide a clear no-nonsense and easy-to-understand account of the philosophy and practice of SEO. Something the reader can take away, for free, and make use of in tangible ways. Well, tangible for the internet at least - there is nothing in these posts that you shouldn't be able to do.
To show the myths of SEO - A lot of people make a lot of money from SEO, and often all they are selling is myth and ignorance. If I can prevent one person spending a bunch of cash on an SEO Company that merely carpet bombs the net with link farm submissions and SEO Spam then hey, my work here is done.
To get new SEO Clients. Although Yadabyte Websites have been improving our own site's web presence for years, we are now feeling confident enough that we can do beneficial SEO for our clients. Thoughtful, bespoke, holistic SEO that will work. So, if what you learn in this series sounds clear but you don't have the time or inclination to implement it, then feel free to hire Yadabyte Websites to manage your SEO.

SEO is a often punted as a "dark art". It isn't. Subscribe to this blog and see the light.

SEO Primer 2: Web Presence, will be published shortly.

Site launch: Burrows Estate Agents

2007-03-16T12:13:00.000Z

We have just launched our latest website, www.burrowsestateagents.co.uk , an estate agent based in St Austell, Cornwall.

We did an estate agents site last year at www.duckworthpotter.co.uk and liked what we did on that one. Estate agent sites are notoriously hard to get right, and most estate agents seem to not really understand what their website is for, especially with the ubiquitous reliance on rightmove.

With both sites we wanted to get the visitors browsing houses in the shortest amount of time, without any sign up, distraction, or that all important "eye meandering."

With the www.burrowsestateagents.co.uk site we programmed a brand new control using AJAX that we call the "Show me" control, its pretty nifty. You select an option and in close to real time it displays a list of all the properties that match that option. Then when you select another option the list is filtered again but dependent upon your first option. it means visitors to the sight can hone in an what they are looking for really quickly and simply. The client loves it, so do we:)

In our original design we just had the blue sky on load, which looked dramatic and modern but, the client wanted to have the "about text" on the main page, so we did.

Meh, everyone is happy and thats all good.

Server Attack and Salt

2007-03-16T10:27:00.000Z

We have three servers at the moment for the websites we host, both our sites and client sites. Two in the UK and one in the USA.

So... yesterday we found out that our main UK root server had been attacked. The hackers had installed a port scanner which was sniffing out the internet in an attempt to find some open ports on peoples PCs so it could then attack them.

We had no idea how they had managed to do this, and priding ourselves in our understanding of security concepts and principles, we were a bit shocked they had got through. In many years of running web servers, this was a first.

The mistake we made was a simple one, and its one most people will have made. One of our staff had set up a test site on the server to try something out, as we often do. An innocuous little site sitting unconnected to the internet. He chose the password "test123" and there was the mistake - the password was just weak.

We now know that it was guessed by a brute force attack from some automated bot that searches the net. Once that password was guessed the hacker could get into the system. (Note to any hosting clients, this would not have effected your site).

The problem is solved and we have learned our lesson, but it does go to show how you always have to be on your guard and how you really should use strong passwords.

Add some salt to your passwords

Incidentally one way to really strengthen your passwords against such attacks is to use what cryptographers call a "salt". In its simplest sense this is an "unusual" phrase that you can prefix of suffix to your passwords to increase their strength without making them impossible to remember.

EG

password="paris67"
salt="tenred45!"

Actual password=tenred45!pasris67

So you might have ten passwords that are strengthened by one salt.

by the way if you do have lots of passwords check out our free and portable Yadabyte Passwords. It allows you to store an unlimited number of passwords on a USB key, ipod, PC and even your Pocket PC. Its very very secure using AES encryption and its very easy to use.

Download Yadabyte Passwords for free from Yadabyte.com

Another blog!

2007-03-16T10:25:00.000Z

So I have started another blog. I think that makes about 500 I have now. Some for work, some for fun and some secret ones documenting secret things that nobody must even know exits. Soon I will need a blog about the blog I have. It's getting complex.

So this blog is about Yadabyte Websites. I''m not sure what we will put on it but the first post will be about our main server being attacked this week. It is going to be exciting!

Maybe.