Possibly the best software service I've ever used

I look after our company accounts - invoicing, purchase ordering, etc - and for a year or so we've been using this awesome online accounting software from a company called Kashflow.

It's not often I have the time or inclination to spend time doing a write-up about something as mundane as accounts software, but I feel the need to express my satisfaction for the benefit of any other small / medium sized business-people out there who might also have use for such a thing.

We actually used to use Sage for our accounts - mainly because it is largely considered the 'industry standard' accounting software - but unless you are a qualified accountant yourself, it's tough to master. When I came across the Kashflow system, quite by accident, I was bowled over by how it made such a simple job of all the accounting tasks I do each day.

What impresses me most, beyond the simplicity of use, is its continuous - almost daily - improvement and development. It seems it's operated by a team of developers who must test, take feedback suggestions from clients - and improve the system constantly. So many times I've thought to myself "wouldn't it be better if it worked this way"... only for a week later, to see an announcement that they've made an improvement that solved that very problem. What's more, I've used their 'feedback' channel to make a few suggestions of my own - and have been shocked to actually find they've been implemented shortly after.

Anyway, anyone looking for accounting software for a small or medium sized business needs to try it - a brilliant service and better than any other accounting solution I've ever tried before: http://www.kashflow.co.uk

A 15% increase in consumer spending in the middle of the credit crunch...

British consumers spent £4.8 billion on internet purchases during September, according to new figures.This represented a 14.8 per cent increase compared with the same month in 2007, statistics from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index showed.

Despite the economic gloom, evidence suggests that UK consumers will turn to the internet in an attempt to search out lower prices in the run-up to Christmas, IMRG said."Online retailers will need to ensure that they are prepared and ready to meet their customers' requirements by providing good product display and availability, with easy to follow payment and delivery information," advised Jo Evans, managing director of IMRG.A

ccording to the latest IMRG e-Customer Service Index, more than two-thirds of online consumers say they are more likely to purchase Christmas gifts over the internet in 2008 compared with last year.

The importance of inbound links

David Andrews Internet Services Ltd provide a variety of search-engine optimisation services – including the optimisation of website code and content to improve a website’s rankings in Google and other search engines – and link-building / submission work to further boost a website’s ‘page rank’ with Google. This document deals with the latter of these services – i.e. the building up of links to your website from other, external websites – how it works and why it is so important…

The importance of ‘inbound’ links to your website

Most people know that the vast majority of visitors to any website originate from searches done on Google. As such, trying to manipulate Google’s search results pages to include your website on the first page has become a top priority for virtually any business with a website. Unfortunately Google treats its exact methods of ordering its search-results as one of the world’s most closely-guarded secrets – however, there are a number of bits of key information they do release publicly on how their ranking methods work – and how website owners can build their sites in such a way as to have the best shot at appearing at the top of its search-results listings.

The Google PageRank System

At the heart of how Google operates is its patented ‘PageRank’ technology. PageRank is the overall ‘score’ – out of ten – that Google gives a web page based on over 200, mainly secret, factors. By far the most-significant of these factors is the number of other websites that link to your website – so-called inbound links. It is important to note the difference between inbound and outbound links: An outbound link is a link on your site to another one – something that’s easily done by you or your webmaster, as it’s on your site, which you control. An inbound link is a link from a totally separate, external website that, when clicked, takes the user from that website on to yours. That is something only the other website owner can do – and something you have very little control over.

At the heart of Google’s PageRank technique is this rating based on the number of other websites linking to your site. The theory being that a site with many other links to it from other websites must be a useful, important, relevant website – otherwise no-one would link to it. A link to a website is seen as a ‘vote’ for the quality and usefulness of that website. Put simply, the more links pointing to your site, the more votes it has – and the better Google will treat it in the search results.

An example…

Take, as an example, the BBC website (www.bbc.co.uk). Time and again, when doing a search on Google for almost any subject, somewhere near the top will be the BBC website. Whether you search for ‘property prices’, ‘coal mining’, ‘gardening’… you will almost always find the BBC website featured in the magical top ten results. The BBC website has millions of pages of content and information on a variety of subjects and is seen as an ‘authority’ on most of them.
If I run a web design company – and see a news item on the BBC website talking about the importance of website usability testing – I might well want to link to that article from my own site, as it backs up what I often tell my clients. I put the link to the article on our website – and the BBC site has just had one ‘vote’ from me in the form of that link. Likewise, my next-door-neighbour, who is the head of the village gardening club, sees an article on how to treat black-spot in roses on the BBC gardening website. She thinks it’s useful to her members – so adds a link to the article from the gardening club website. Another vote for the usefulness of the BBC website…

And so this process continues on thousands of other websites across the internet. A useful, informative, authority website builds up many links to it across the web. Then, each month, along comes the Google ‘spider’ – an automated programme that scans virtually every website on the internet – indexing its content and detecting how many links exist to a particular website. It detects that the BBC site has 100,000 other sites linking to it. It must therefore be a great site – so it gets a page-rank of 9/10 – and suddenly every search you do on Google starts showing page from bbc.co.uk.

Getting a piece of this linking action for your own website

Of course, very few companies have the resources to develop a website like the BBC – so there aren’t many websites out there with a PageRank score of nine or 10 out of 10 that appear for virtually every search term in Google. The important thing is to start to develop a PageRank of your own, that gives you the same sort of advantage on a smaller scale. Build up more links to your site than your competitors, and your site will naturally drift above them in the search results pages. You don’t need 100,000 other sites linking to you – as few as 10 or 20 can have a radical effect, compared to a site with none or just a few. As a very general rule of thumb, if you can achieve a Google PageRank score of 4/10 or more, your site is off to a pretty good head-start in the search listings – and this sort of score is realistically achievable for most websites.

How do I know my website’s PageRank?

An essential tool for anyone with an interest in their website’s performance is the Google Toolbar. It’s a simple bit of software, provided free by Google. Download and install it on your machine and it sits at the top of Internet Explorer (or whichever browser you use) – enabling you to carry out a variety of Google-related activities directly from your computer and without needing to go directly to the Google website itself. The best part, is that it displays a PageRank ‘bar’ indicating the PageRank of whatever website you happen to be looking at at the time. Get the Google Toolbar from: http://toolbar.google.com (note how, when this document gets added to our own website, that will be another link – i.e. a vote – for the Google toolbar).

Quality over quantity

There is another factor Google throws in to the mix, just to complicate life further for webmasters (but consequently improve life for those doing searches – the whole point of its existence). Different websites – and types of websites – that link to yours can have a more positive effect than some others. It’s largely related to the relevance and quality of the ‘link neighbourhood’ of your website.

Imagine the example again of the BBC gardening website. The next-door-neighbour (Margaret) with the gardening club website, puts a link on her site to the BBC gardening site. Google is sophisticated enough to automatically ‘know’ the subject of one particular website – and how it relates to the subject of the site it links to. Google knows that Margaret’s site is about gardening – and it’s linking to the BBC site about gardening. Therefore, that counts as a ‘relevant’ link for the BBC site.

If I link to the BBC gardening site from our web design site – it’s still a vote for that site – but not quite as powerful a vote as Margaret’s one – because she knows about gardening, her site is about that subject – so her link is more valuable to the BBC site than mine. Likewise, if she – and five other people in her gardening club – put links on their websites to my web-design site, I’d be grateful, yes, and Google would see it favourably – but Google would look far more favourably upon one link to our site from the UK Web Designer Association – because it’s from a site on a more relevant subject to the content of our site. It’s not just about the number of links you build up, it’s about their relevance to the subject of your site too.

And it goes further…

And it’s not just relevance of the sites linking to yours either – another great factor is the PageRank – or perceived importance – of those sites with the links to yours. If you get a link to your website from one with an already high PageRank of its own, that site’s PageRank ‘rubs off’ on your site. Imagine the BBC decided to link to Margaret’s gardening club website. The BBC site has PageRank of eight or nine out of ten. For a site of that importance to link to Margaret’s site – to actually make a recommendation that its readers leave its own site to go and see Margaret’s; well, Margaret must have something pretty special on her site – and Google would promote it accordingly. She may go the whole year picking up links from her friends and colleague’s websites – all with PageRanks of one or two – and see comparatively slow improvement in her own site’s performance in the Google search listings. But shortly after getting linked to from the BBC site, her own site’s PageRank goes up a notch or two – and suddenly she’s showing up in the Google top ten for all sorts of searches. Visits to her site go up, club membership numbers rise… all as a result of the ‘vote’ her site got from a ‘big hitter’ website with a higher PageRank than her own.

The importance of ‘anchor text’

Another essential part of link-building is the matter of what the link to your website ‘says’. You are probably familiar with links on websites – very often appearing within text on a web page, usually a different colour and underlined to show the text has been made in to a ‘link’ which, if clicked, will take you to another web page or site. More often than not, it is the word ‘click here’ that is the link – i.e. the ‘anchor text’ and is what the link itself says. However, ‘click here’ – that most common of phrases on the web – is beginning to disappear, because of Google’s favouring of descriptive anchor text – that is, link text which describes and is relevant to the page that is being linked to.

Here is an example of a piece of text that might appear on a website linking to Margaret’s gardening club site. The text in blue is the ‘link’ bit, which would be the clickable part taking the user to her site…

…. Another excellent site we found with some useful information on treating
Black Spot in garden roses is the Bursledon village gardening club website.

Compare this with the following example…

…. Another excellent site we found with some useful information on treating
Black Spot in garden roses is the Bursledon village gardening club website.
Click here to visit the site

Note the descriptive anchor text in the first example, compared to the non-descript ‘click here to visit the site’ text in the second. If Margaret wants her website to appear high up in Google for the search terms ‘treating Black Spot’ and ‘gardening club website’ - she would be delighted to see that first example appear on another site – but less pleased with the second. If you can build your desired key words and phrases in to the link text itself, your search engine performance will be greatly enhanced. This also applies to the ‘title text’ that is coded in to the html of the link (and is seen in a yellow box that pops up when you hover your mouse over a link on a web page).

The flip-side of the link-building approach…

Anyone in the web industry knows all about the PageRank system and the importance of building inbound links – and as a result, a whole industry has grown around trying to influence Google by enhancing websites’ PageRank.

Google didn’t get where it is now by not keeping somewhat ahead of the game. They understand the general clamour around the web to build links and improve listings – and they know the techniques some people use to gain such links artificially. The mission of Google is to ensure that when a user types a search query in to its engine, the results it returns are relevant, useful, quality websites. If they are, that user will go back to it time and again – and won’t bother thinking about its lesser rivals – like Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, etc. It therefore does not take kindly when an owner of a poor quality, irrelevant website suddenly has a high PageRank and starts showing up all over its listings – despite not containing information relevant to its users. But how did that poor website get its high PageRank in the first place?

Someone going on a link-building ‘spree’ – suddenly getting 50 new links in to their site in one day, by posting spam comments on a load of forum sites, paying for links on directory sites, setting up ‘bogus’ websites of their own purely for the purposes of linking to another… So-called ‘black hat’ techniques used to build up a link network falsely and give a website a PageRank it doesn’t really deserve. In theory, I could set up a gardening website this-evening and build 50 links in this manner tomorrow morning. Suddenly I’ve got a PageRank of 4/10 and I’m beating Margaret’s site in the search results hands-down, even though I know nothing about gardening, my site is hopelessly bad quality and contains a lot of misleading and made-up information…
When this sort of thing started happening, Google swiftly clamped down, building in mechanisms to its indexing to detect these techniques and penalise – even ban – websites in its listings. Any sort of un-natural sudden growth in the number of links to a site, or a lot of links appearing on other bad quality sites, can have a negative effect on PageRank and see your site suddenly disappear from the search results altogether. It is therefore important to be careful that any link-building attempts appear natural and ethical and do not have a negative effect on your site.

The death of the ‘link exchange’ programme

One final point to note, related to those above about negative link-building, is the increasingly futile nature of ‘link exchanges’. In the past, website owners would busily approach other site owners requesting links on their site in return for a reciprocal one on their own site. Both webmasters knew the benefit, so would happily ‘trade links’ between themselves. Of course, Google became wise to this – and has built in a further mechanism to its algorithms to dampen the effect of reciprocal linking.

If Google sees a link to my web design site appear on Margaret’s gardening site, that’s great – our site gets another notch on the PageRank score. But then, on visiting our site, Google sees a link back to Margaret’s site. It detects the ‘two way’ link, suspects we’ve colluded between ourselves over the garden fence to try to influence its rankings - and the effect of the linking is dampened. Note that the effect is not completely cancelled out – a reciprocal link is better than no link – just not as good as a link that is one-way – i.e. not returned.

Bringing this all together for your benefit

So how can you use this information – and this undoubted technique for improving website listings in Google to your site’s benefit? There’s no doubt about it, it’s a tough job to do. Getting other websites to link back to yours is hard enough – add to this the fact that you want similar sites to your own doing it - and for those sites to be high-quality – and to not link back to them in return for the favour… Oh, and you’ve got to ensure the rate at which the links build up is not ‘un-natural’ and that Google doesn’t suspect anything untoward going on – and that the anchor text is relevant and appropriate… To do this effectively can be a full-time, long-term job.

It’s important to start taking every opportunity possible to get links from other websites to yours. Techniques for doing this include offering a ‘testimonial’ to your suppliers in return for a link on their site to yours, finding ‘blogs’ on subjects relevant to your industry and leaving comments with a link to your site, posting on forum sites with a link to your site where possible, submitting to directories like Dmoz and Splut, simply requesting friends, family, colleagues and associates link to your website from theirs… The benefits of proper link-building are enormous and can result in a rapid rise in your website’s rankings in Google – particularly if you can beat your nearest competitors’ PageRank scores.

It’s important to note, however, that it is not completely clear cut. Very often you will find a PageRank 3 site way above a PageRank 6 site for a particular search term. Unfortunately this is the unpredictable nature of Google – and although link-popularity is well-known and Google releases the information in to the public domain, there are many other factors in its calculation - most that we will never know and can do nothing about. The fact that link popularity makes up about 60% of the factors influencing Google’s search results means it cannot be ignored by anyone serious about improving their site’s performance.

How we can help...

You won't be surprised to see that we offer a fully-managed link-building service as part of our overall search engine optimisation offering. Click here for details or call 0845 1651 039 for more information

Telecoms company recommendation

We like to use this blog whenever possible to make recommendations of suppliers or services we've used and are happy with. One such company we've been dealing with recently has really excelled itself and is worthy of a mention.

Our telephone system had, over the years, become a complete disaster area. Several office moves, plus remote-working staff and a desire to keep the same phone-number throughout had equalled a real mess of call diversions and multiple telephone accounts with different providers. All attempts to resolve the situation with the previous telephone companies ended in pointless, frustrating conversations and mix-ups with clueless call-centre operators who had little interest in what we needed and the problems we were having.

Then, through the South-East-Hampshire Chamber of Commerce, we were introduced to Uniworld Communications. Based near to our head-office in Southampton, they were able to send an account manager out to see us, assess our situation and make recommendations for how we should sort it. An immediate improvement on the situation you get with the big providers like BT, etc. They had a variety of business telecoms solutions - and we signed up to the best one for us.

The quality of their service became apparent when things started to go wrong with the transfer of numbers from our old providers over to them. Three times it all went wrong and we were left without any phone system at all for a day each time. Hardly cause for a recommendation - but it wasn't their fault - and very often the true test of 'customer service' is not the avoidance of problems, but how they respond when something does go wrong. These guys were on the ball the whole time. We had one single account manager dealing with us the whole time - not a different voice in a call-centre each time. She went way beyond the call of duty in sorting our account and systems out - and now we have an awesome business telecoms set up, perfectly tailored to our needs - and saving us a great deal of money to boot. If you need any sort of business telephony solution, give them a try: http://www.uniworldcomms.co.uk/

Economic downturn and how it affects us

The news today is full of yet more doom and gloom about the economy and inevitability of recession. As a small-to-medium business ourselves, working primarily with other SMEs, we could be pretty exposed to the damage a recession or slowdown can do - and we've been watching the state of affairs closely over the last year or so that it's been brewing.

One thing we're struck by is the difficulty in getting a realistic view of things. What is clear is that the constant obsession by the media with the economy puts a huge downward force on economic confidence. Remove the media coverage over the last six-months and it's unlikely anyone would feel any different about their job security, their sales figures or their house prices. As a company director, ultimately in charge of our marketing budget, it's difficult to read such stories in the news and then happily sign off £xx,000 in marketing spend for the year - when you're feeling scare-mongered in to locking that money away in the bank for the inevitable rainy day/months/years ahead. It's this pressure that knocks on from one company to the next - in the business and consumer worlds - and perpetuates the downward economic spiral.

From our point of view, we have always kept low overheads - and thankfully have a good backlog of work from before the good-times started to go bad to see us through any major drying up of clients and their online budgets. The other benefit to a company like ours is that we primarily offer our services as a cost-saving and sales-increasing one. A high street store seeing a reduction in customers coming through the door can open up their trade to the whole world with a new e-commerce website for instance. A company experiencing a reduction in trade can bring in thousands of new sales leads simply through having a better-optimised website and higher listings in Google.

At the moment, online sales and activity seems to be the only area of the economy that is actually growing - and doing so at a phenomenal rate. Consumers looking to save money turn to the web with its unbeatable capacity to enable them to shop around. Being part of this industry and current boom, we're happy to turn the economic situation to our advantage - and find ways we can shore up our clients' sales revenues using the web.

Of course, most business managers know that to cut back on marketing spends at a time when clients or customers are getting thinner on the ground is the quickest way to oblivion for their companies - so for our part, we'll resist the scare-mongering and maintain our own spending plans. No company ever really saves their way in to profit and growth - that only happens through smart and reasonable spending and investment - something we'll be focusing on helping our clients do with us - and we'll be doing with our own suppliers; the quickest way to bring the economic cycle back in the right direction.

Image utility inside the right-click menu

You often find, working at a computer all day long, that there are loads of little tasks you repeat over and over again. One of them, in this line of work anyway, is image re-sizing and converting. There's plenty of ways of doing this in bulk - batch jobs in Photoshop, Windows Powertoys, etc - but as a one-off thing, it's usually opening the file in Photoshop and doing it that way.

This useful application sits in the right-click context menu and lets you re-size and convert an image with one click from within Windows Explorer. Need a JPG turned in to a GIF? One click of the menu does the job. Very useful.

There's a variety of other tools too - like preview within the context menu itself, image size/file data instantly displayed. For anyone working with images day in day out, it's a really useful tool.

Mobile Broadband

The mobile phone networks have all recently been moving in to the 'mobile broadband' game - offering USB modems that just plug in to your laptop and supposedly give broadband-speed internet wherever you are, via 3G. Having used a 3G phone as a bluetooth modem on a laptop before, I've not been convinced of their usefulness - as my previous experience has been frankly rubbish.

We were offered a test-run of the Three mobile broadband, so gave it a whirl and it's a completely different kettle of fish. My main uncertainty - connection speed - has been totally blown out the water. Very little difference in use to our office broadband connection.

It's not something we use often - but is very useful now and again, whether it's in getting a broadband connection at a client's premises, or just working on a train, in the car, etc. We've signed up for a batch of them for all David Andrews staff. So far, basic web-browsing and e-mail is a total breeze. We've even managed some pretty heavy FTP usage and SQL Server administration - all via laptop, connected to the web just by the little white modem plugged in to the USB. Really useful especially for a business like ours, where we try and build in as much freedom and flexibility to work hours/location, etc as possible.

If you're thinking of signing up for a mobile broadband plan, we can vouch for it being pretty much as good as a home PC fixed-line broadband connection. A few mobile networks are offering it, but the one we've tested and are using is here:

File / PC Encryption Software

This is an awesome way to secure all the data on any sort of hard-drive, be it a PC hard-disk, an entire server of data, a USB memory stick / external hard-drive etc...

Any person or organisation with sensitive data stored electronically needs to think hard about data protection and security. If you had a break-in and had PCs / memory cards stolen - what sort of information would the thief have access to? If it's details and information relating in any way to your customers/clients, you're in big trouble - not just with them but probably the law too.

We use this great bit of software to encrypt everything on any of our electronic storage media. It effectively enables you to create a secure virtual 'drive' within your actual drive - which your PC will treat exactly like a mapped network drive. The difference being, everything inside it is encrypted and, when you 'dismount' the drive from the software, it becomes a useless text file totally inaccessible without the passwords. Really simple, military-grade encryption - and best of all, it's free open-source software.

We have a few reservations - like the fact it's so good, that if the password was forgotten, you'd lose all the data inside it. That's highly unlikely though.

Because it turns everything inside the encrypted drive in to a single file, there's the worry that it might get corrupted - again losing everything. We've been using it for over a year though and no problems have occurred as yet. Needless to say, we have a pretty rigorous backup procedure so are covered if the worst happened.

It's the type of software every organisation should use. Just ask the Inland Revenue. Something as simple as this could've saved a heck of a lot of trouble for them. If you have any kind of sensitive information stored anywhere - at home or work - give this a try: http://www.truecrypt.org

Drop Down Navigation Menus

We generally don't advocate these kind of drop-down / fly-out type menus - not great for browser compatibility/web standards/SEO etc - but if the client demands it, despite your advice to the contrary, they've got to have it.

This is a good one we've found. Very simple, making more prominent use of CSS as opposed to Javascript, easily customisable...

We've seen a few full CSS versions around, which are better in theory, but lack some of the sort of features demanded, due to the inherent limitations of CSS in this sort of application. Anyone found a decent full-CSS drop-down/fly-out menu, let us know.

Hosting Provider - Host-it Internet Solutions

This post is about: Hosting company recommendation

As a web design company with a couple of hundred websites on our books, we were outgrowing our previous hosting provider and needed a new dedicated server and associated hosting services.


Hosting is obviously a vital part of a web agency's business - and it took a good three months research of a variety of different solutions before we eventually found what I think is the right one. We looked at a variety of different options including Rackspace, who were ultimately too costly and offered limited support on the software side of things. We're only a small company and needed a partner who we could rely on to support software and hardware on our servers, rather than just pure hardware configuration.

We tried a company called Flinthosts, who re-sell dedicated hosting - and who, crucially for us, offer full ColdFusion 8 support. Unfortunately their technical support left a lot to be desired with simple requests going un-answered for several days - and no response by telephone. We swiftly cancelled the account with them during our test period.

Eventually we came across Host-it Internet Solutions, who offer a rare mix of fully dedicated servers with 'managed' support (i.e. they will assist with software issues, configurations, installations, etc. as well as just hardware support). They are also reasonably priced (not cheap, but certainly competitive on pricing considering the service they provide).

Having spent a month trialling a fully dedicated server with them we have been immensely impressed with the level of support from them. They have even assisted with coding-related issues which go way beyond the call of duty for server maintenance and support. Support requests are responded to within minutes rather than hours - and they have been completely flexible and reliable so far.

What's also important, is that the company is a 'legitimate' and established one (it's easy to set up a hosting company from your own bedroom these days - which is not great if you decide to jack it in one day and leave all your clients in the lurch). These guys are well-staffed, have their own datacentres and appear, so far, to offer an awesome service. We're impressed - and anyone looking for a serious hosting parter with support for all the languages - including Coldfusion (hard to find in the UK) should give them a try.