Jan
09
Written by Lee | Filed under General | 2 Comments
IWasRight - The iPhone lives! It was only yesterday that Adam, Juliette and myself were discussing Apples ‘iPhone’ and the trouble Apple was in with the naming of its new mobile phone.
36 Hours on and after checking BBC News I see that Apple have launched the Iphone. So behind the scenes a deal has been made, the red faces of the Apple team can regain colour after they have been able to save the whole marketing strategy of Apple the ‘i’ saga can go on.
After seeing the announcement I went straight to Google to perform a search for ‘iPhone’. Sure enough the Google results were still displaying the details of the original iPhone.com, but lurking beyond the click was apple.com/iphone. Hijacked - I wanted to find out about the iPhone VOIP service, not another Apple product that will sell by the truck load. So you have to wonder how much did Apple pay for the domain?
The previous owner of the domain will be puffing on the finest Cuban cigar tonight as he/she celebrates this windfall, which in all fairness was always going to happen.I said as much as yesterday, there was no way that Apple was going to release a mobile phone unless it was called iPhone. I’m no mystic Meg, but in fairness any fool could have called it.
Being nosey I thought I would take a look at the cached version of iPhone.com, just so I could see the site in its glory before the sell-out has occurred. Even the cached version was stripped of graphics, style and its soul.
Personally I don’t buy into the whole Apple concept, I haven’t got an iPod, I’ve never had the slightest inclination to swap my miserable temperamental PC for an Apple Mac, and even Adam’s shiny new Apple Notebook never really tempted me too jump on the Apple bandwagon. I’m not really bothered about the iPhone, its all hype, Apple needed to counter the likes of Sony and Nokia who have serious pieces of kit for music storage.The iPod is a fantastic phenomena, it has sold by the bucket load, in fact thinking about, I must be the only person in the office who has not got one and that includes the dogs.It won’t take long for Google to get across and update it’s cache, and I would be very surprised if by the time I login tomorrow if iPhone VOIP has been erased from Google existence.
And the moral of the story - if you purchased a domain prefixed with an ‘i’, keep wishing that the boffins at Apple bring out a product where they will offer you silly amounts of cash for the domain!
Jan
05
Written by Adam Stafford | Filed under General | 1 Comment
We have had a few customers ask for Flash splash / intro pages to their websites. Fresh Egg DO NOT recommend the use of them! Here are a few pointers as to why not:
(Juliette said)
* Reduces usability on the page
* Prevents spiders from properly searching the page and entering the site
* Very bandwidth heavy
* Very often causes problems for browsers
* Slows customer access to information they came to the site for
* More likely have slow load times than a typical page making to more likely for a prospective client to leave (4 sec wait time is the average)
* Lack of content on page leave bots with little to give to the SE after spidering making it less relevant in SERPS
* Little or no updates make content stale and discourages spiders from returning
(Val said)
* Your readers come to your site to enter it and a splash page prevents that.
* Many readers don’t like splash pages - and in some studies 25% of visitors left a site right after seeing a splash page.
* Splash pages break search engines. Since many splash pages only include a flash animation there isn’t a lot for a search engine to optimize on. And if you add content to the page in comments you can be penalized for spamdexing.
* The animation can be repetitive. Readers who have seen the flash don’t often want to sit through it again, but if you forget to include a “skip” option they will have to.
* While the flash movie or fancy animation may look really nice, the impression they make may be one of pretentiousness rather than detailing your skills.
* If you submit your splash page to a search engine, the JavaScript codes that move customers to the next page may prevent the search engine from adding any page on the site.
Jan
05
Written by Lee | Filed under General | No Comments
I’ve been noticing a trend in my normal morning reading material, which has been quite beneficial to me in my work currently. I’m the copywriter at FE (you can tell this from the length of my posts) and I’ve been doing a lot of work for National Guarantee, the mortgage company, since I started. This has necessitated a lot of research on remortgages and different types of mortgages to make sure I know what their products are actually about. I’m not a financial writer by training so I needed to fill the gap in my knowledge. This is one of the greatest things about my job, the different industries our clients are part of gives me a chance to write on an array of different topics.
Once I finished my initial research I figured I needed to keep up with what is going on since things seem to keep changing. For this purpose, as well as general knowledge, I started picking up the Metro paper every morning. Ever since late last year I have seen a major increase in the number of articles about mortgages and property. I also tend to get some great ideas for different articles to write since inspiration on the direction to take can sometimes be a little lacking.
I don’t know if they have been appearing as regularly before that, or if it’s a recent development. I read the Metro every morning and since I started researching loans and mortgages I’ve seen that there’s at least one article a day on those topics. I wouldn’t be surprised if the frequency had only just struck me, but if they’re only starting to crop up now then I wonder why now?
I know that the beginning of the New Year is a rough time for most people, financially. It’s the cold, hard reality after all the spending excesses of Christmas and New Year, so it could just be that. Although I’m sure more advanced warning before the fact would make for much better reading than warnings after the problems. It could also be that by providing more facts about debt, mortgages and similar financial aspects could help reduce future financial problems. If it’s that the financial trends are getting so bad that people are compelled to keep trying to highlight the problem, then we’re all likely to be in a bit of trouble.
Today’s Metro article was: ‘New mortgages at a 3-year high‘, which makes the sort of inevitable sense given the current property boom. There was also a little inset about first time home buyers, which lends reason to the article. If first time buyers are willing to borrow more to get a home then it means they need to repay more to their lender. If they have higher repayments, then they are more likely get themselves into financial difficulties and debt. This in turn leads to a greater need to leverage their greatest asset, the home they’ve just bought. This all builds up the reasons for what the main piece is saying about the increase in mortgages being taken out.
The article also mentions the increase in the number of people who are remortgaging their homes, which again makes sense. Since the property boom is currently pushing house prices to some of the highest levels ever, the value of houses is increasing. This is being spurred on in less popular areas by the leaps and bounds that property prices are taking in the most popular areas. Increases in popular areas, especially those of the magnitude we are seeing currently, will affect the rest of the country. This increase in value gives the owners additional equity to leverage a loan against, thereby leading to the increased number of remortgages being taken out by homeowners.
National Guarantee is reputable financial institution that is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. They specialise in Remortgages, Bad Credit Mortgages, CCJ Remortgages as well as Adverse Credit, Self Cert Mortgages and Homeowner Loans. For further information visit: http://www.nationalguarantee.co.uk/
