Fashion Freelancers can now beat the credit crunch with a new Jobsite designed & developed by Totally Communications.

'Totally Communications have completely surpassed my expectations, they have been outstanding right from beginning with their friendly service. I am extremely happy with the finished website. The team were always available to update me day or night, and the whole process was very smooth. For a fully bespoke site their price was very competitive.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them in the highest possible way'
Esra Young, TheRagTrader


Official Press Release

TheRagTrader.com Launches Website For Fashion Designers


TheRagTrader.com is pleased to announce the launch of its London based website on the 5th of December. Esra Young, the company's founder and CEO, obtained her fashion design degree from London's prestigious Central St Martins School of Art & Design and has worked as a designer right across the industry from luxury brands to suppliers. Married and with two young daughters, Esra was inspired to create a site for freelance fashion designers, that like her, want to spend more time with their families, work from home, and form their own working schedules. Modern technology has granted us the capability to be upwardly mobile and the freedom to perform our jobs in new, convenient and efficient ways. Ultimately, TheRagTrader.com is a unique tool that will revolutionize how designers worldwide can obtain competitive and exciting new opportunities without relocating and without recruitment agencies.

Free Online Portfolio

Through TheRagTrader.com, designers are able to create a profile page that allows them to upload up to 5 copies of work [ hand drawings, cads, etc. ], a brief description of themselves and their area of expertise as well as a listing of the last 10 companies they worked for. They can even upload their portrait and any other pertaining information that would attract companies to choose them when "bidding" commences. The designer is in control of their profile page and nothing is mandatory. Some designers, for example, might need to approach their project search in confidentiality and might choose not to post their photo and job history. The website allows designers to create usernames for additional discretion. These profiles, or online portfolios, can only be seen by companies that designer are "bidding" for.

Our Simple System

Companies worldwide looking for freelance creative individuals will be able to post their job listings and may include additional details such as background information, a brief description of the project available, how much they are willing to pay up to, deadlines, etc.

Designers who are signed up to the site can then "bid" to undertake the job. They may ask as many questions as possible before bidding to ensure the project is something they want to undertake. They might decide to charge less than the price the companies are willing to pay in order to secure the project. After a determined period of time, the job listing ends and the company makes a decision on who gets the project.

This system of employment has proven extremely successful in other creative fields of work such as web and graphic design. TheRagTrader.com is the first company to bring this concept to the fashion industry. Like other prominent websites, TheRagTrader.com considers its feedback system a very important and valuable asset. Designers and employers will be able to rate each others' performances. Positive feedback will bring more work for designers while positive feedback for companies will attract more designers willing to bid for the job listings.

"At our London based company, we are all fashion designers with a minimum of 10 years experience in the industry. We are part of a larger group of talented individuals that often miss out on potential and exciting possibilities that are stifled by recruitment agencies. The way the current system works you only get to hear about a job if the agency decides to put you forward for an interview. TheRagTrader.com aims to change this. There is no reason why everybody shouldn't have a fair shot at getting a job. TheRagTrader.com is not an agency. It provides a meeting point for all designers and fashion companies," states Esra Young.

TheRagTrader.com will provide new possibilities to the future of the fashion business and radically change its structure all over the globe. New methods of employment might be the perfect antidote to the present economical crisis. There might be a time where companies in the near future will no longer need a fulltime design team in place. A creative director might delegate projects using TheRagTrader.com to create an entire collection. TheRagTrader.com is a positive and radical approach to a rapidly changing work force.

TheRagTrader.com is aiming to sign up 500 talented & experienced designers and register 200 companies by the end of 2009 from all over the world.

For additional information, please do not hesitate to contact Hiroky Nakaya: hiroky@theragtrader.com

You may think that as a web designer, you don't play too large a role in saving the environment and making the world a better place for future generations to come.

But just as every little drop of water adds up to make the mighty oceans, every small green thing you do helps to make our planet more sustainable and livable. So if you're interested in contributing your mite, here are 10 ways in which you can help save the environment:

1. Work from home:
You save the earth from the emission of fossil fuels that you would burn during your commute to and from work.

2. Use less paper:
You don't have to print out your designs to see how they look; and even if you do have to use paper, invest in the recycled kind and make sure you use both sides.

3. Turn off your computer when you're not using it:
Even systems on standby or those that are hibernating consume a certain amount of power, so make sure you shut down your computer when you're not going to use it for some length of time.

4. Use alternative power:
Rather than hook up to regular electricity to power your devices, try investing in solar or wind power sources.

5. Email your clients instead of sending them mail through the regular post:
Use email to send your clients marketing and promotional offers and for other communication needs instead of wasting paper by sending messages through regular mail.

6. Don't keep buying new gadgets:
It's not that you need to save yourself some money, it's just that you need to be concerned with the way your old electronic gadgets will be disposed. Most parts are not recyclable, and the more new stuff you buy, the higher the pile of junk grows.

7. Use LCD monitors:
It's a well-known fact that LCD monitors consume less than half the power that traditional CRT monitors do.

8. Invest in a notebook computer:
A laptop computer uses much less power than a regular desktop.

9. Make your meetings virtual:
Rather than drive to and from locations or have your clients do the same for meetings, use teleconferencing facilities, or simpler still, just use the telephone.

10. Work during the day:
When you're a night bug, you have to consume more electricity because of the lights that you have to keep on. So switch to daylight, and make a world of difference.

This article is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the topic of web design schools. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com.

We've all been there haven't we? You're given a huge undocumented legacy code base and told that the client wants new features A and B added. I doubt there are many PHP developers out there that don't spend at least a certain amount of their work time maintaining or upgrading old code.

Even if you wrote the original code yourself a few years ago, the chances are you will have become a much better programmer during that time and will look at your previous efforts in disgust and think 'God, did I really write that? What a horrible way of solving a problem!' or 'Why on earth did I not write any documentation?'. Do not fear brave coder, here's are a few tips to make you and your colleagues lives a bit easier when it comes to the dreaded legacy maintenance.

1) Don't be daunted
It's very easy when looking at a large legacy code base for the first time to feel like any work on it is going to be an uphill struggle (especially if it's written in non-object oriented code). A lot of legacy code often looks a lot worse than it actually is and once you get your head around it you'll soon understand what the original developers were trying to achieve. If you plug away at it you'll soon get it. It's like those magic eye pictures ... you just have to look at them for long enough to see the sailboat.

2) Don't refactor everything
The temptation is always there when working on legacy code to refactor. Don't! If you've got to add a feature or make a change to old code then the likelihood is that the code is still working fine and people are using it. Sure, it might not be pretty OO code or follow that cool new design pattern you learned last week but if it's not broken, don't fix it. Save all your new ideas for new projects and don't introduce unnecessary bugs to already stable code. I often find the best approach is to follow the style that the code is written in, even if it differs quite significantly from your current way of coding.

3) Write some basic documentation as you go
If the code you are working on hasn't been documented, another member of your team is going to come along a few months after you and have exactly the same problems figuring out what's going on. Take some time to create some simple work flow diagrams with notes about which main classes each process uses. Writing proper documentation for these kind of projects is far too time consuming if all you need to do is add a few small features but adding some guidelines and notes will come in really handy for others (and yourself if you ever have to come back to the code at a later date).

4) Auto-generate Entity Relationship diagrams
There's nothing worse than trying to figure out how a database works by tracking keys across tables and writing SQL to gain an understanding of how everything ties together. Reverse engineering the database into an entity relationship diagram will automatically make it easier to understand. Most of the popular databases have either their own or 3rd party tools to create ER diagrams. Oracle has the Data Dictionary and 3rd party tools, open-source databases such as MySQL and Postgres have plenty of third party options to choose from and SQL Server has ER modelling built in. It's well worth documenting large databases and sticking them up on the wall near your desk for quick reference.

Hopefully in the future these issues will be less relevant due to the advances in the way PHP is written. Object orientated code, MVC Frameworks, PHPDoc, etc all help to keep the code cleaner and easier to maintain but for the time being a lot of us are still required to maintain legacy code and I'm sure will have to for a long time to come.

Happy coding!

This being my first real blog I decided to scan through the past 6/7 months of other Blogs written by some of my colleagues here at TotallyCommunications just to get an idea on how Blogs are written.

What I found was a repository filled with compelling and mentally stimulating articles. Each of which containing detailed descriptions/guides/reviews on almost anything one would find in the newspaper, except the subjects were usually computer related.

After spending a short period of time thinking what I should write about, I decided to write on something which I had often wondered about.

At this moment in time, as I write this article, my browser is open and running Firefox 3.0. Like all machines running a Windows operating system it comes with Internet Explorer loaded already, but like less than half of internet users I chose to take the initiative and downloaded Mozilla Firefox. Something I have absolutely no regrets about. The reasons for this are numerous but will have to wait until my next blog post.

The much anticipated launch day for Firefox 3.0 had 1 million users click on and download it in the first 24 hours alone. For something that is so widely used it makes sense to me that they put so much effort into their project. Firefox has made its owners over $74 million in the past year. But where does this money come from because I certainly didn't pay to download the product, and have thus far used it on a daily basis and never paid a thing. A lot of it comes from development grants and advertising revenue, however where does the rest of it come from?

The question can be solved by looking at the way that Firefox 3.0 is presented. What is it inside the browser that could make Firefox money? The answer is a found inside the browser itself.

ALL Firefox 3.0 browsers come equipped with a Google search bar in the top right hand corner. This cannot be removed or edited easily. For AdSense Referral publishers , Google pays $1 per referral (every person who installs Google Toolbar TO their Firefox) or per conversion (a conversion occurs when someone successfully installs Firefox WITH the Google Toolbar). This does not sound like much but considering that almost two thirds of ALL UK residence are on the internet, and almost 50% of this number uses Firefox, even in the UK alone the number of Firefox users is staggering*.

The ease of using this search bar also means that I will not even have to visit the Google homepage and do a search from there.

But the Google search bar has more functionality then it appears. If I was to click on the Google G image. A list of other sites appears to me. These include Amazon, Wikipedia, eBay. Almost all the sites which I would do a search in. This removes the hassle of having to go to the site each time I wanted to perform a search. Search engines can be easily added and removed allowing the user to take control of their search bar. A very neat little function indeed.

Some of you may have seen an advert on Television a few days ago which ended with the instruction to Google search "Mother Lay-by".

Well its taken me until now to try this search term and it takes you to an interactive YouTube advert for a new Dido album. Anyway I just thought I would try a little SEO experiment and see if I could get this page to rank somewhere close.

Without doing any indepth analysis the term it doesn't look that competitive although YouTube is of course an authority site, the sites directly below it refer to a mum giving birth.

So here goes with phase one of the experiment - The Blog Post.

There is no good reason for me doing this other than perhaps testing the robustness of eager marketing executives. Either way I applaud them for thinking outside of the box so far and just wish I had done this 6 days ago!

If anyone fancies giving me a helping hand with a subtle, optimised back link it would be much appreciated.

P.S I have purposefully not linked out from this post because I don't want to pass any link juice to the YouTube page (so no need to email me Kelvin)

Working with dates often involves some unavoidable complexity. Fortunately Zend_Date provides a simple API for some common localization issues. Unfortunately it doesn't provide the same level of support for common comparison calculations.

I've recently started playing about with the Zend_Date API to see what it offered compared with PHP's native date and time functions. Working with dates often involves some unavoidable complexity especially when considering localization and internationalization. Fortunately Zend_Date provides a simple API for handling various timezones and daylight savings, locales (such as mm/dd/yyyy vs dd/mm/yyyy), internationalization and functions for sunrise and sunset times. To get started I recommend checking out the reference guide. Don't expect a tutorial with useful working examples (something many Zend Framework components sorely need) but instead a simple reference to complement the API documentation.

Zend_Date handles the common task of comparing two dates with the compare() function. e.g.

$today = new Zend_Date();
$temp = new Zend_Date();
$tomorrow = $temp->addDay('1');
if($tomorrow->compare($today)){
echo "Tomorrow is after today. Duh!";
}

$today = new Zend_Date(null, 'dd/MM/YYYY');
$xmas = new Zend_Date('25/12/2007', 'dd/MM/YYYY');
$dateDiff = $today->subDate($xmas);
echo $dateDiff;

$diffTs = $today->get(Zend_Date::TIMESTAMP) - $xmas->get(Zend_Date::TIMESTAMP);
$tsInDays = floor((($diffTs / 60) / 60) / 24);

It seems that every time I get to grips with a new content management system someone always comes along and says 'yeah but have you tried....'. They seem to be sprouting up everywhere, each offering new must-have features and simpler levels of use. It probably says everything about the web that no-one can really agree exactly the best way to build a CMS. Each one works a different way and despite all the claims of how easy they are to setup and use, I find it always takes at least a day of playing about with it before the site shows the first signs of any structure. Then there is always the momentary wondering of whether I could have spent the day building my own cruder user backend.

Out of the box CMS systems have become very popular with developers seeking a swift solution to handing over control of website content to their client. Yet despite reading up on the features and capabilities of many I had only really become used to Joomla. That is until recently when here at Totally we were asked to build a site in ModX. So therefore I thought I'd offer up my thoughts on the two systems which illustrate very well the many different approaches that developers take when building a CMS.

First off for those who like to get to grips with coding Joomla is not really built for you in mind, unless you want to build dedicated add-ons which can then be shared with the rest of the ever expanding Joomla community. The principle is simple with Joomla. The emphasis is on ease of use. Just plug things in, set a few parameters and it's good to go. This makes adding forums, directories, online shops, newsletters... in fact just about any web application you want, an absolute breeze. There is even a dedicated installer in the backend which installs the extension from the downloaded zip file. There are three types of these extensions: Component s -- which are the main web apps. Modules -- which often fit alongside components, and are placed in and around the site. And Plugins (Mambots in Joomla 1.0) which allow extra features to be added to content in order to include non-static content on certain pages.

ModX is not as fully-featured as Joomla but it's simplicity is to its advantage allowing developers the freedom to incorporate their own application code. It's simple to navigate via the backend as well and includes features such as SEO friendly urls built in, whereas with Joomla you have to install an external module. The use of CSS in menus is also more intuitive with ModX. Again a separate module is required in order to get DHTML operating effectively within Joomla. ModX uses different templates for each page while Joomla has one site template making sites with many different page layouts tricky to create. Heavy use of tables and lack of control over class and id names means Joomla isn't the most CSS friendly system either.

Further to this, AJAX integration with ModX is pretty painless, while in Joomla some users have reported it to have crashed their website. The fact that, through the use of scripts, snippets and chunks, ModX allows a developer to actually include their own PHP code might have something to do with this. In Joomla PHP code can be added (you guessed it) by installing a module. I have yet to try this but it's hard to imagine it being as pleasant an experience as it is with ModX.

Going into more detail ModX offers unlimited user types, Joomla is restricted to four. ModX allows searching of the whole website, Joomla requires a great degree of fiddling to acheive this and in order to search content from a component, use of an extra plugin is almost always required. The rigid site framework in Joomla does it no favours with just three levels -- Sections, Categories and Articles. In ModX you can easily define the site structure using the tree layout on the left-hand side. It also has its faults but still offers far greater flexibility than Joomla can.

There are similarities though. Both systems use TinyMCE as the default HTML editor. But yet again ModX adds greater functionality by allowing links to specific pages via a dropdown menu. In Joomla you have to copy and paste the links in which, when they are query strings by default, can be a frustrating experience.

Of course there is plenty to Joomla, and that's its main advantage. If you need a website to do something it's likely you can find what you looking for on the Joomla website. The shear wealth of resources available are something to behold. Don't like the photogallery you installed? No problem try another -- maybe one with Flash? ModX simply cannot compete. You'll probably have to start from scratch to achieve what you want.

So in conclusion it's not for the likes of me to laud one over the other. They are two very different beasts. The one conclusion I have come to having used both is that they will appear to different types of web builders. As with those who prefer design mode in Dreamweaver and those who prefer the code mode. Or perhaps more accurately for those who use still use Dreamweaver against those who junked it for Eclipse long ago. The web is a many and varied place and so it's perhaps right that there are CMS systems to cater for everyone.

Google announced yesterday a week of "link information straight from the source". While this will be in the majority quite obviously to most SEO fans I am also hoping they slip in a couple of tasty topics for discussion.

Day 2: Internal links (I guess Day 1 was the announcement)
Google Synopsis - Internal linking (also known as link architecture) is important because it's a major factor in how easily visitors can navigate your site. Additionally, internal linking contributes to your site's "crawlability" -- how easily a spider can reach your pages. More in Day 2 of links week.

Nothing much to report here. Doesn't look like they are going to be re-inventing the wheel in day one.

Day 3: Outbound links
Google Synopsis - Outbound links allow us to surf the web -- they're a big reason why the web is so exciting and collaborative. Without outbound links, your site can seem isolated from the community because each page becomes "brochure-ware." Most sites include outbound links naturally and it shouldn't be a big concern. If you still have questions, we'll be covering outbound linking in more detail on Day 3.

Hmmm. We all know the debate about outbound links, good, bad, ugly sad? Follow, Nofollow, linking to authority sites etc. etc. Could Google be insinuating that having no outbound links is a bad thing. Seems obvious I guess but good to hear it from the horse's mouth

Day 4: Inbound links
Google Synopsis - Inbound links are external sites linking to you. There are many webmasters who (rightfully) aren't preoccupied by the subject of inbound links. So why do some webmasters care? It's likely because merit-based or volunteered inbound links may seem like a quick way to increase rankings and traffic. Answers to your questions like, "Are there no-cost methods to maximize my merit-based links?" are provided on Day 4.

Wow. "Webmasters who (rightfully) aren't preoccupied". This smells of something. Of course we shouldn't be spending 25 hours a day worrying about inbound links but surely every webmaster should be a little "preoccupied". After all you can't have outbound links that "allow us to surf the web" without an inbound link somewhere. Anyway maybe I am fussing about nothing but Day 4 may well provide a talking point or two.

I hope so

Google Webmasters Blog - Links Straight from the Source

A blank screen. A designer's worst nightmare. There are some things that even coffee can't cure. Inspiration doesn't come easy, sadly, and it's only on the rarest of occasions, when the brief is really good, really clear, that the light bulb just clicks on in your head. When it doesn't, sometimes it's best just to get up and walk away for a while.

I think I do some of my most important work when I'm miles away from my Mac. The more you look at a screen, the more you stare at the walls, the more frustrated you get and that's not the right frame of mind to work in. Distract yourself from the matter in hand. I go to the gym a lot, I seem to think well when I'm exercising. I don't know what it is, but it just gets the creative juices flowing. Maybe it's just because it's an unbroken hour of thinking away from the office

Absolutely anything can inspire you to fill that blank screen. Go to art galleries, read books, flick through magazines. Sometimes even film trailers or adverts can make you see things a little differently. As a designer you need to always be thinking, always looking for something new. It might sound silly, but even something like clouds may have something to offer the process...
Shapes, sizes, forms. Sometimes you just need to open your eyes and look.
Inspiration is everywhere.

When you've got your idea, it's back to the Mac and away. I personally prefer projects with long deadlines, so that I can spend the time making sure that everything is perfect, but it has its downsides. More time means more chance that the client will want to change things. Sometimes, you can stare at that screen for so long, that you'll want to change things as well. There is such a thing as over-designing.

Once in "the zone", iTunes can be as important as Photoshop. You can quickly find yourself immersed in your own little bubble to work. Choice of music seems to depend on the progress of the project. If everything is going well, if everything is flowing, then it's something upbeat like The Rolling Stones. If struggling and just can't settle in then it's usually something more mournful to fit the mood...like Radiohead (yes, it can get that bad!)

You need your breaks when you're staring at a screen, it's vital. But when the clock is ticking and the deadline is looming in, you just have to push through regardless. We've all been there. It's stressful. But more often then not, the finished product makes all those uncomfortable hours worth it.

I love being a designer. I love the whole process. I love putting down my ideas in my little red sketch book and seeing them grow and develop onto the screen. Yes, it can be a struggle and, yes, it can be frustrating, but there's nothing quite like it. That feeling you get when you sit back from what was once a blank screen and take in what you've created ...that's the best feeling of all.

Well, It's my turn to post again but unfortunately not with what many would call an "Interesting" subject, but for what they lack on that front they make up in usefulness, versatility and just pure genius! In fact I can honestly say that I've used them every day at work since learning how they worked; you guessed what they are yet? REGULAR EXPRESSIONS!

Excuse my sad excitement when I mention the name, but I have seriously grown to appreciate the enormous power these things have and the amount of time and frustration they can alleviate.

Having looked at regular expressions for the past 2 years, with only a rudimentary knowledge of what they were or how they worked, I finally decided to bite the bullet and learn how to use them, and can only say that I haven't regretted it since. The only disappointment is that I had not got around to learning them sooner; because I imagine the amount of time they could have saved me would probably have worked out to a millennia.

I suppose I should finally get around to explaining what regular expressions are; putting it into the simplest way possible a regular expression is an "advanced search".

When you search for a file on your computer or a word in a word document, what do you do? You go to the search tool, type in what you want to find and click search; fairly simple I'd say, but what if I'm searching in my word document for a particular pattern of words and letters i.e. an email address, I in fact want to find all the email addresses in my word document; using the search tool in the usual way would mean I have to type in each email address in into the search tool and click search, then enter the next one into the search box, click search, and so on.

Its at times like this that can get you very frustrated and think there must be an easier and less time consuming way to do this. Well there is, a regular expression allows you to search for the pattern that makes up an email address using special character sequences, so instead of typing into the search box:

'someone@anemailaddress.com'

I would type in:
^[A-Z0-9._%-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+.[A-Z]{2,4}$

This may look like gobbledygook but it's a regular expression, and it will find nearly every email address in my document. Click here here for an detailed explanation of how it works

In most advanced text editors such as Eclipse or EditPlus you can use this type of search just as long as the regular expression tick box checked (if you have a regular expression tick box! Otherwise find another editor to search in which has it, or use the the command line with commands like grep and egrep).

Regular expressions even have the ability to remember what results it picked up with the patterns you entered so you can use them later.

The regular Expression Tutorial is a good place to go if you want to learn how to use regular expressions properly. As you can see my explaining it here would be too much for me and you. I can't think of how much time this would have saved me in school, university and work.

Definitely worth learning and don't put it off like I did!

A very quick note to mention that only 2 months have passed since the last one but it looks like another Page Rank tool bar update has taken place over the weekend.

We have finally got back to our original ranking after our TLC change so we are now a PR 5. I know it really doesnt mean that much but its nice to look at!

Special mention has to go to our new website launch Treating Autism, who knicked in just in time and have gone up to a PR6 on their new treatingautism.co.uk domain. That was also achieved without a 301 redirect on their old domain (dont ask!) so pretty impressive stuff.

We havent noticed any drops across our portfolio which is obviously good news, but equally nothing unusual to shout about.

Totally Communications has been awarded the Outstanding Achievement in Web Development for the website we designed and developed for World Jewish Relief.

The prestigious accolade was presented by the Web Marketing Assocation and previous winners include the creators of a Disney site and also makers of the film Knocked Up.

Entries were judged on a number of points including the interactivity and ease of use.

"We are delighted that our work has been recognised yet again by industry experts as a cut above the rest" said Project Manager Toby Mason

"As a team we strive to add value at every corner and we were very proud of the WJR website even before we won this award"

This is the second award winning website by Totally Communications this year. In May we received Best in Class at the Interactive Media Awards for our work on this site.

To see the award winning website visit www.wjr.org.uk

Hello everybody. My name is Craig and I am the newest member of the TotallyCommunications team.

I have only been here for four days but already feel as though I am in the company of passionate people who have a very high level of skill in different computing areas.

Leaving University in Manchester only 4 months ago (after receiving a BSc Honours Degree in Applied Computing) it became clear to me that any job I managed to find would quickly become another excuse to go back to University. However the attitude in the office is very good and the work being presented to me is not only challenging but interesting as well. I feel the urge to follow things up and help people. I am learning so much here and slowly making use of my I.T skills as well as improving on them.

I am aware that I have only been here 4 days, but if the next year goes even half as well as the first 4 days then I hope I am here for a long time to come.

Some of you may have noticed that the pace of the blog posts has slowed somewhat in the past few weeks. I blame this completely on Jamie, our now part-time Junior Developer as he heads to Birmingham to "further his education".

The fact that Jamie was only in his gap year while working for us emphasises what an amazing job he did for us and we are delighted that he is going to continue to work for us in what hours and holidays he will have spare. That means all of them Jamie.

On the other hand Jamie's proficiency meant we depended on him a lot and finding a suitable replacement was quite a task... until our prayers were answered and in walked Mr. Craig Taub.

I will let Craig write his own introductions another time but so far he has taken like a duck to water (that's been thrown in at the deep end) and I have no doubt he will be a invaluable addition to the team.

Apparently he's a bit of a break dancer which will certainly make us a bit more street. I am sure we can persuade him to example some for us at our welcoming knees up on Friday!

Anyway, see you soon Jamie and welcome Craig.

Its been pretty busy down here at Totally Communications not least becasue last week we launched three high profile websites within 24 hours of each other.

We therefore proudly present websites for:

Treating Autism - www.treatingautism.co.uk
A charity website that offers advice and invaluable resources to parents with children diagnosed with Autism. The website also has online booking and payment facilities for membership, donations and their annual conference in Bournemouth. We are already in phase two of this project and you will see lots more incredible content added very soon.

Power Television - www.powcorp.com
The Power website itself is only half the story. Behind the scenes is a sophisticated bespoke extranet allowing users to access associated media, artwork and imagery associated with each production.

Resolution Financial Services - www.resolution.co.uk
Resolution, founded by Clive Cowdery, has been creating quite a stir recently. The brief for this site was that we had to have something up and running in time for the companies launch to the press. The timescale was 48 hours. So after a couple of late night the site was launched and we have now moved into phase 2 of the project.

That was a day in the life of Totally Communications, and we were pretty pleased with it.

Its been a month of off site work and I resisted the urge to check on progress until now, so I am quite anxious as I write this to find out how we've done!

Before I check the results myself a useful tool for you. It can be painful searching Google over and over for your website for all your targeted keywords so instead install "Rank Checker" from "SEO Tools". It works only as a plugin to Firefox but it stores all your keywords and will report on them at a click of a button. So thanks to Rank Checker!

Anyway, to this months results:

Managed Offices London n/a
Managed Offices Soho 9 (+51)
London Serviced Offices n/a
Serviced Office London n/a
Serviced Office North London 132 (-43)
Office Space London Central 138 (new)
Flexible Office Space London 45 (+93)
Flexible offices London 3 (+52)

Some pretty big movers in there! Not least "Managed Offices Soho" and "Flexible offices London". Very pleased to have achieved Top ten rankings already. This goes to show what a few well placed links can do to a websites profile. I will definitely be concentrating on those relationships in the coming months. Disappointing however not to see placement on some of the keyphrases but I am sure they will come good next month. Serviced Office London is pretty competitive but I still would have hoped to have been ranked.

One other big change we made this month to the website was the introduction of a blog. Google loves dynamic content, so not only does a blog give you a forum to discuss your industry (and your keywords!) it also sucks Google back again and again to index the site. This blog, for instance, is indexed within a few hours of the posting going live.

That's about for this month so please come again in 4 weeks time.

Did I mention, that for all your office space needs in London and Soho do not hesitate to visit Reflex Office Solutions!

At the beginning of last month I wrote a little piece on what Google calls sitelinks. Well a few things have happened in the past 4 weeks and not all of them make sense.

As I mentioned in the post Google Sitelinks: What are they? Google had selected 8 shortcut links to various pages on our website.

Out of the 8 I chose to only block one as I deemed it irrelevant to our websites audience and would therefore add no value to the search results.

I left them alone for a few weeks only checking back a few days ago. To my surprise the majority of the links had changed and this time the selection was a lot poorer. I have had to block most of them as they were to specific client pages on the site therefore all we are left with now is:

Websites
About Us
Contact Us
Marketing

What's happened to the ones I decided to keep? Where's the useful link to our blog? What's going on!

Anyway all is not lost the four that are left seem reasonable, but that's not the end of it. If you type Totally Communications into Google 3 of the sitelinks I blocked 5 days ago are still showing. I can understand not having any power over the choice of sitelinks but surely blocking them should take effect immediately. Well obviously not.

Sitelinks is obviously something I need to pay moer attnetion to, I didnt realise they could tempt me with some links and then whip them away from under my nose. I want them back!

Every now and again you may see links underneath the first result in the Google search results. Google call these "sitelinks" but there is not much more we know about them. What are they and how do you get them.

These links usually only appear when your website "owns" the keywords or brand you are typing in to Google. For an example of what I mean try typing "MSN" (link). Notice how there are eight "quick links" under the MSN result.

We used to have them for this site until launching our new (award winning) website design about 4 months ago. I was intrigued to see when these would come back and more intrigued to see what Google would deem important enough to allocate a link to.

Finally, quite soon after the page rank update (maybe a correlation there?) I noticed in the Google Webmaster Tools that 8 sitelinks have now been allocated. According to a few blogs it may take a couple of months for these to actually start showing in the search results, watch this space.

Within the Webmaster tools you have the option to block any of the chosen sitelinks if you do not want them to show. I have actually decided to block one link that pointed to a specific website in our portfolio. Its not that I'm not proud of that site, I just dont think its relevant to our prosepcts. Google will then allocate a new link to takes its place.

Other sitelinks Google chose are:
Contact Us
Charity
Development
Online Dating Software
Blog
Case Studies
Consulting

Even though they wouldnt be my first choice I'm going to keep these ones. I think these give a good insight into the broad range of our business and will help potential vistors to the site. However I am slightly bemused as to why one of the links is tagged "Development" rather than "Web Development" and really confused as to why our most popular website section "Web Designers" is not there at all.

The jury is still out as to how Google chooses these links.

Google says they choose links if they "think they'll be useful to the user". How do they determine that?

Some say its to do with website traffic, others say its down to your backlink strategy. All I know for sure is that its not as simple as that. The links show neither our most popular pages or our most linked pages and I have yet to find anything conrete by analyzing the web statistics either.

I would very much link to see "web design" there soon though, after all it's a pretty big part of what we do what we do!

We have made a really good start and the site is actually performing better than hoped considering that most of this month was taken up doing onsite work.

Here are the positions as of 4 weeks into the campaign:

Managed Offices London n/a
Managed Offices Soho 60
London Serviced Offices n/a
Serviced Office London n/a
Serviced Office North London 89
Office Space London Central n/a
Flexible Office Space London 138
Flexible offices London 55

As discussed in Month One of the SEO Case Study these results are purely based on changes made to the website itself so they are really encouraging.

This coming month we start in earnest on the offsite and link building. The important thing for progressing a link campaign is to build good realtionships with those in the industy you are targeting. You will be amazed at the blog and article sites out there that will be more than happy to host a well throught out article or paper with plenty of backlinks.

Directory submissions are important, but they tend to carry a lot less weight than industry blogs so its important to use the time wisely. Even though a lot more effort may go into writing a blog post about office space and befriending the bloggers to host it the results and reaction to the links will be much more impressive.

We can look forward to the next month. Google is always the hardest nut to crack but we have made really good headway on our targeted key phrases as well as with some periphery keywords such as "flexible offices soho" (position 16)

Check back in a month for part three of SEO Case Study.

Firefox have released an alpha of the new 3.1 web browser called Shiretoko which is promising to have some really great features. I don't normally bother with alpha releases past reading the occasional preview but this looked interesting enough to install and have a play with. So what better way to get a feel for it than to write my first blog post for Totally and do a bit of testing with the latest browser technology?

One of the best things about the new browser is the continued HTML5 support. I'm still not sure if this is a blessing or a curse for those of us in the web development industry. But the new standards will be a much needed upgrade from HTML4 which is nearly 11 years old now. I just hope the new standards will go hand in hand with concepts like 'best before' dates for all browsers. This could be a huge step forward for both security and standards.

I knocked up a quick test based on the W3 guide and A List Apart's HTML5 article to see how it looks and it's pretty good. Have a look at the source code here and the screenshot below of how it renders in Shiretoko (as well as some other current browsers). It instantly looks more manageable as the XML-style syntax allows you to name containers without the div and span tags. If you combine this with a template engine or your favourite framework it should make templating and managing views a lot easier than in previous versions of HTML.



This is just the tip of the iceberg for the next generation of browsers. I'm sure we'll notice huge improvements in CSS and Javascript support in the next few years, not to mention the complete overhaul in how audio and video media is displayed. There's also lots of nifty features like the canvas tag that are due to be widely implemented. I'm not sure how far Firefox have taken their HTML5 support in this release as it's not even a concrete standard yet (and probably won't be for some time) but I'll be looking into the media objects and CSS features in future posts.

There's been a few improvements on the new Firefox 3 'awesome bar' too. You can now use wild card characters to filter history searches to either specific domains or page titles. One of the main issues users had with the new URL bar was it often bought back a lot of irrelevant results due to searching the page names as well as the addresses. This has gone some way to fixing that.

Another new feature is the tab switcher. Rather than just skipping to the next tab when you CTRL + Tab, Shiretoko has a nice little preview box allowing you to quickly scan though you tabs until you find the one you want. It's a nice little bit of eye candy even if the underlying functionality hasn't changed much.



So there you go, a lot of progress and some exciting features. It's not really practical to use for daily tasks at the moment as the most useful extensions such as Firebug and the Developers Toolbar haven't been upgraded. HTML5 is also only in the draft stages but the browser companies are already chomping at the bit to cater for it. Hopefully this kind of interest will speed up the W3 publication process a bit and we can have a nice new standard in the next few years.