"The Factory Episode 1 Who Needs An ERP System Anyway?"
First of all I feel I need to share some important information with you…this video "The Factory Episode 1 Who Needs An ERP System Anyway?" which has been produced by PushON for K3 is brilliant, take a look! It’s very funny especially if you’re a fan of The Office and Ricky Gervais like me.
Exploring Firefox's Add-ons
This week I worked with Katrina PushON’s online marketing manager who introduced me to Firefox’s Add-ons. Once you have signed up to Firefox you can have access to all the different widgets they have to offer- there are hundreds! Some of the ones I learnt to use this week were the ‘British English Dictionary’ which is quite self explanatory, ‘SenSEO’ which helps you check pages for search engine optimisation features such as Meta data, page titles and page content and last but not least I also installed the ‘Total Validator’ widget which validates external, internal or local web pages. Once these were installed onto the computer I got cracking with another web page analysis this time it was a web page which focused on selling cooking products and offering recipes to adults and children.
I found that Firefox's Add-ons are a really useful feature and I’d recommend anyone to sign up and start using them!
I found that Firefox's Add-ons are a really useful feature and I’d recommend anyone to sign up and start using them!
Website analysis
This week at PushON the team had the brilliant idea for me to start recording what work I’ve completed so far. I started by signing onto here and exploring all the different layouts and designs it has to offer. After choosing one that I liked the look of I got cracking and started jotting down all of the things I’ve been up to so far. So from now on my blogs will be up to date and I will be sure to record my progress after each week. There will also be some informative bits of writing about any new ‘crazes’ that are knocking about the info comms community. Hopefully I’ll be educating myself and you guys at the same time!
This week I was also introduced to a very valuable feature which PushON offers (free of charge) to any company who owns a website. The Website Analysis, also know as a website M.O.T., is a tool which looks at a websites features and individual elements throughout the site to see what needs to be done to optimise the website performance. Improving various aspects of a website can improve its ranking within search engines. This is important, if a search engine can’t find you because of the way your sight is designed, people probably cant either thus resulting in your company losing potential customers.
This whole feature was new to me, so with the help of Mark Mayne (another one of PushON’s hard workers) I started analysing my first website.
Here are some examples:
This week I was also introduced to a very valuable feature which PushON offers (free of charge) to any company who owns a website. The Website Analysis, also know as a website M.O.T., is a tool which looks at a websites features and individual elements throughout the site to see what needs to be done to optimise the website performance. Improving various aspects of a website can improve its ranking within search engines. This is important, if a search engine can’t find you because of the way your sight is designed, people probably cant either thus resulting in your company losing potential customers.
This whole feature was new to me, so with the help of Mark Mayne (another one of PushON’s hard workers) I started analysing my first website.
Here are some examples:
- As well as CSS, JavaScript needs to be kept in an external folder as well.
- You shouldn't use images as links because Google can’t read these.
- Your sitemap should be a XML sitemap as this shows search engines that links are present. This is useful because ideally you want all your links to be indexed.
- It’s important to always have a personalised ‘custom 404 page’. If you don’t and a user enters incorrect characters when using your web page they will be taken to a standard 404 page, instead of a page explaining what's gone wrong. This could cause confusion/annoyance and the user might leave your site.
- You should avoid using frames. They’re an old fashioned way of designing web pages but also because not everyone’s software can read frames so some people could have problems navigating around your site- use CSS instead.
- Make sure your URL doesn't contain numbers- use keywords. Ensure your page title is under 60 characters. PushON have an excellent tool which can check this for you. Amongst other nifty tools they also offer a String Length Tool which shows the length of your meta tags as you type them and a Header Checker which makes sure your pages are being redirected easily.
I left feeling like I'd learnt a huge amount and was really looking forward to the coming weeks.
Week One
The first time I met Simon Wharton, the managing director of PushON , was when he came to my lecture at MMU as a guest lecturer to talk about good web page design. He discussed how to develop search engine rankings, covered topics such as high accessibility in search engine optimisation and talked about improving usability.
Following this presentation I was intrigued and organised an interview to hopefully gain some work experience.
After our initial chat and a discussion about what I wanted to get out of the work experience and what I could do to help PushON as a business, we decided on a start date.
Following this presentation I was intrigued and organised an interview to hopefully gain some work experience.
After our initial chat and a discussion about what I wanted to get out of the work experience and what I could do to help PushON as a business, we decided on a start date.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
