We’ve just completed another great site for Beamz and their amazing laser instrument that anyone can play. With WordPress content management this new e-commerce site features streamlined downloads, software and hardware purchases and follows the style that we created for their social Network site. Checkout Beamz’ new site at http://beamzmusic.com/

Fresh out of the studio this month is www.RightNow-TV.com featuring the first episodes of Hot Import Nights and Who’s the Host? before they air on TV! Hot Import Nights is the biggest automotive lifestyle tour and show in the world. Be the first to own HOT IMPORT NIGHTS commercial free tv episodes before they air! www.RightNow-TV.com offers exclusive premiers of the first of 10 new episodes of the Hot Import Nights TV series including HOT IMPORT NIGHTS episode one and WHOS THE HOST where Hot Models compete to be the host of HOT IMPORT NIGHTS! Watch as these Babes fight it out to win a spot on HOT IMPORT NIGHTS! Download your favorite HIN TV series episodes TODAY.

Checkout RightNow TV at http://rightnow-tv.com/

A site-makeover with a fresh new look for the music and film production house LoveCohen Group. This is a welcome return to working with LoveCohen whose corporate styling and “quickie” html website we designed last year.  The site is striking in design for it’s use of a self-hosted video on the home page, is smart-phone compatible and utilizes many new html5 features.

Our first foray into the food and beverage industry started with PoppinOlive. Cynthia’s Kitchen, the owner of the PoppinOlive Popcorn brand, came to SiliconStudio for help with package design for their retail product line. What they got, was a Brand Refresh, top to bottom retail package design and a new website to replace the old one! Cynthia’s Kitchen was most appreciative of SiliconStudio’s exceptional attention to detail and turn around time!

Before beginning any new project SiliconStudio performs a competitive analysis and market research, which is then integrated into a point scoring system whilst developing ideas leading into the eventual design. This is just one aspect of the many SiliconStudio strategies for creating successful project outcomes for our clients.

As we undertake more and more projects featuring HD motion video, we are proud to announce the opening of our new in-house motion image and post-production facility. SiliconStudio Founder Nick Broome says “Although we still undertake Flash based projects, the trend towards increased video integration with web projects has made it necessary to bring full A/V production and post production facilities in-house”. This is primarily due to the new HTML 5 standard and wider availability of Broadband. The new facility allows SiliconStudio to create ATSC HD, DVB, MPEG Transport and Program Streams, create Blu–ray in H.264, VC–1 or MPEG–2 with AC3 audio using Avid and Squeeze.

With special effects and titling in Adobe AfterEffects and multi-track audio recording we now offer more diverse multi-media project options for our clients. “The new facility streamlines the whole creative process and allows us to maintain control of all aspects of a project in-house. This brings substantial cost benefits to our clients” states Nick Broome.

Above: An example SiliconStudio website application featuring a 90 second header trailer created in our new facility using Avid DS and AfterEffects.

Much has been written about Search Engine Optimization and how to get a high Google page rank position.  There are some really good articles and some that are just plain wrong. If you’re like us, we receive a lot of spam mail from so called SEO experts and mostly their approach is not likely to achieve much, just your empty wallet. With a few years of SEO experience this is what works for our clients and always gets them good Google, Bing and Yahoo rankings.  There’s no mystery here but to achieve a good Search engine ranking does require work.

All SiliconStudio’s website designs incorporate a good SEO structure as basic but like many other things on the web, the goal posts keep moving, so you need to keep a check on your rankings, changing practises and your competitors.

In this article we are assuming that you are using the WordPress content management system but all of this article’s recommendations apply to any website. For WordPress users we strongly recommend that you install the excellent free All in One SEO Pack as opposed to using SEO built into a theme. The reason being is that if you change your WordPress theme you’ll probably loose all of your SEO data and will have to start your SEO over.

To ensure that page URLs are machine and human friendly, make sure that Permalinks are enabled so that your site has real names as the site’s URLs instead of a page number or post ID.

(1) Keywords;

Choosing the correct keywords that describe your site is the single most important thing you can do to get good SE rankings, so spend some time on this. These are the words that people type into their search engine to find you. If you choose a popular keyword or phrase then be sure to follow every SEO point below in detail. If your keywords are unique to your site then you can relax a bit.

Once you have a site with content and with some keywords in mind head over to Google Adwords and enter your keywords and your site URL to see how often they are searched globally and locally. Experiment with a few keyword changes until you’re happy with your choice. You might find a combination of words that few are using but you know will work for you. On the other hand your choice might be popular, so you know you have a lot of work to do to get good rankings.

(2) Choosing domain URLs;

Choose a domain extension that matches the territory that you do business in. Typically a .com suffix is for the US market and is also used for global businesses. If your sites business is exclusive to the UK for instance use a .co.uk suffix. If you own multiple domains don’t map them, 301 redirect them. A 301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine friendly method for webpage redirection. It’s not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it’s the safest option. The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”.

Make sure your domain is not set to expire shortly. Many spam sites use short term domain registrations and you might be penalized because of this.

(3) Title Tags;

Your page title can be seen on the top of your browser in the tab area or the browser top depending on which browser you are using.

Including your chosen keywords, from using Google Adwords, you now need to write a phrase which best describes your business and insert it into your site’s page title. Limit your text to no more than 64  characters as Google will cut-off all characters after this point. In writing, keep to the point and only use human readable characters.

On your homepage insert the following:

Plain English description of your site utilising your keywords │Your company name here

On any page one level below the home page

Page name │ Plain English description of this page utilising your keywords │Your company name here

On any page two or more levels below the home page

Page name │ Parent page name │Your company name here

Your page title tags must be unique to each page and the title tag words are also used in the page’s content.

(4) Site Structure;

Efficient website structure will always help your Google ranking and visitors navigating your site. Try to keep articles no more than 2 or 3 clicks away. If website sections are multi-page (post categories etc) over-ride WordPress’s inbuilt “older and newer page” with a numbered navigation such as the WordPress plugin WP-Page-Navi.

Enable page breadcrumbs. Again, it’s easier for a Search Engine spider to navigate your site.

(5) Header tags;

Google places great importance on correct use of header (H1, H2 etc), bold and italic tags, in that order. Don’t use the H1 tag more than once per page. Use H2 tags for the second most important header item(s) and so on. H2 to H5 tags can be used repeatedly on a single page within reason. You may use the bold tag inside an H1 to H5 tag to show that this word or phrase is more important than the other words inside the same tag. By adhering to this structure Google discovers the importance of a header and its following text.

(6) Homepage;

Especially relevant on your home page is the use the H1 tag incorporating your site title’s keywords. Make sure you use header tags and use them properly. This shows search engines the relevance of text. Limit tagged header text to no more than 8 words or else the search engines will not rank it as a header but pure text, wrongly used. Do not create a home page without H tags and make use of H1, H2 and H3 tags. Use the H1 tag once only. Don’t forget to include a “call to action” on the home page.

Common to a lot of WordPress sites are a slideshow on the home page. Don’t just show images but use images with html text overlaying the image and use H2 header tags for that text where relevant. Make sure to use alt and title tags for the actual slide images. Link slides to site content.

(7) Site Content;

Google ranks content big time, content really does rule. Work your keywords into your page’s content. Wherever relevant, hyperlink page text to other pages of your site and use keywords in your anchor text. This helps search engine spiders to index your website faster and also it helps your readers to navigate around your site.

Use external links in your content and base it on a few variations of keywords. If you persistently use the same keywords all then Google will mark you down as it appears that you are spamming your keywords. The more relevant links that direct back to your sites pages the better. Exchange links as much as possible, preferably with high-ranking and authoritative websites.

If your site was custom designed by a web developer, make sure that their credit link appears in the footer as this is likely to be a high value link because of who they link to.

In WordPress Admin, make sure that you enter keywords and a page description in your page’s or post’s SEO section so that they appear as meta tags for that page when crawled by search engines. Meta tags are less important today than they used to be but they are still used.

(8) Images;

Google cannot read images but it can read ALT tags; therefore it’s important that these tags exist on your site. In WordPress ALT tags can be edited in the Alternate Text field of every image in the Media Library or you can add them directly in your posts and pages.

(9) Missing pages;

Google will mark down your ranking if you have non-existent pages or broken links. To be certain you haven’t got any broken site links, check your site’s links with the W3C Link Checker.

(10) Compliancy;

W3C markup compliancy is not a major issue for Google but it helps and it’s just good practise to be standards compliant. To check for any compliancy issues run your website through the W3C Markup Validation Service. Since Google places a higher importance on text and headers (H tags) placed at the top of a page but if this means a design compromise then consider moving important items by using CSS. That way your headers can remain at the top of your code.

(11) Site Speed;

No one wants a long wait while a site loads so optimise your images file size before posting them. Some spiders might time-out and wont index your site properly. In JPG this is the compression settings. In PNG you might want to index the colors to 8 bit from 24 bit. Adobe Fireworks provides a lot of choices plus you can see your optimized image before you save it.

(12) Measure your website’s performance;

You need to be able to measure the marketing effectiveness of your website and your return on content (ROC). The 2 tools we regularly use are Google Analytics for historical data and Woopra WordPress plug-in for real-time analytics. Google Analytics JS code is usually placed in your site’s footer. Check analytics data often and adjust your site design, meta data or content as necessary. Remember that your competitors are probably doing this.

(12) Promotion;

Make sure that you are “out there” by including a back link to Twitter and Facebook at minimum. Use guest writer comments especially if they have a high ranked Google site. Enable comments. Use the ShareThis or similar plug-in. Also, check your Twitter grade (tweet.grader.com)

(13) Conversion:

Make sure your RSS feeds are working, including comment feeds if enabled. At minimum always include a contact form on your site.

(14) Sitemap:

Always include a sitemap on a page and put an sitemap.xml file in the root of your website. Some themes will have this built-in and there are many plugins available to do this. Search engines can spider your site far easier with a map.

(15) Mobile and Print:

Linking Mobile and Print style sheets (CSS) to your website header is good practice but not essential and will have minimal effect on your Google page rank. It does ensure that mobile users and printouts from your website is what you intend as standard screen CSS might not look correct.

Our WordPress e-commerce sites give site owners a choice of about 10 different payment gateways which is great news for our customers. Often the gateway that causes the most amount of confusion to our clients is the choice of the 3 types of PayPal gateways. Which type of PayPal gateway does what is explained below;

PayPal Express Checkout 2 : Is for customers that already have a PayPal account. When the Customer hits the Pay button they get taken to the PayPal site login screen and then they pay the usual way. When the transaction is complete it returns to the client’s site with confirmation of a successful or declined transaction. The client must have a PayPal Premier account. To set-up this gateway we need the API Username, API Password and API signature which the client obtains from PayPal.

PayPal Payments Standard 2:  Is for Credit Card customers and for customers that already have a PayPal account. When the Customer hits the Pay button they are taken to the PayPal site login screen and then they pay the usual way. When the transaction is complete it returns to the client’s site with confirmation of a successful or declined transaction. The client must have a PayPal Premier account. To set-up this gateway we need the client’s PayPal username only.

PayPal Pro 2: For clients who just want to take Credit Card payments using the PayPal gateway. The customer is unaware that they have left the site even though PayPal process the Credit Card payment. To accept PayPal Pro the site owner needs to have a PayPal Pro account, which is different from the more common PayPal Premier account. Site owners must apply for a PayPal Pro account and there is a monthly charge from $30 pm. To set-up this gateway we need the API Username, API Password and API signature which the client obtains from PayPal.

For testing any of these PayPal Gateways we use PayPal’s own test facility “PayPal Sandbox“. It behaves the same as a live PayPal account but real money is not used.

In conclusion, if our clients have a preference for PayPal the we recommend they use PayPal Express and PayPal Pro gateways in their checkout so their customers can pay using their PayPal account and transparently American Express, Visa, MasterCard and Discover cards.

For Dennis Publishing, a new website for the luxurious rental villa, Shogun. The website features a rental booking and confirmation system, WordPress content management and SiliconStudio designed theme, galleries and useful island information.

Overlooking the sparkling turquoise Caribbean Sea in the most coveted position on Mustique, Shogun is the ideal location for vacations, honeymoons and executive retreats. The site includes stunning views across the Island, Shoguns interiors and reservation system.

Visit ShogunMustique.com

A round-up of four more SiliconStudio designed content managed website projects delivered in January:

Buckinghamshire based The Better Sound Company offer a huge variety of A/V services, from basic home cinema installation and wall mounted displays to bespoke full-feature systems giving their customers complete control over music films and media, from anywhere in the home.

The Sold Short in America website is the in-depth background for a book based on the compelling and real-life story of one man’s fight against institutional corruption and injustice that led him to jail without charge and taking on the might of the United States Government.

Oregon based marketing and product vision company Marketing Engineers has just received a site makeover and brand refresh by SiliconStudio. Also included were e-commerce, 3D design and illustration.

The last site we completed this month was for distribution company The Distribution Network who represent many familiar and new hardware companies in the retail channel.

More details of these sites can be found here

Today SiliconStudio’s founder, Nick Broome, presented and discussed the Big Society Community Network, codenamed “LinNET” at the House of Commons, London. Designed by SiliconStudio, LinNET is a network unlike any other and is designed to empower individuals in small to medium size communities.

Created and designed by SiliconStudio, LinNET is a social networking system with a big difference; unlike Facebook or MySpace, LinNET networks are designed to be used by the residents of town and parish communities throughout the United Kingdom within the framework of David Cameron’s vision of “The Big Society”.

Residents will be able to securely vote on local issues, services and public expenditure. They can access a multitude of local voluntary services, public services such as Medical, Police, Post Office, Social Services and local businesses. The social networking part of LinNET provides a lot of interactive possibilities including free voice and video chat, messaging and activity stream. Also included are local groups, blogs, maps, video and photo libraries, community forums and events. Unlike other social networks, community members are not anonymous and the network has a public facing portal as well as the membership restricted network.

The first LinNET beta communities will be rolled-out in March 2012.  ”I’m extremely encouraged by the government’s opinions and feedback on LinNET. We’re now beyond the conceptual stage and currently developing the prototype for testing in November” said Nick.