Matt Cutts from Google has recently posted on Twitter saying Penguin 2.0 is coming in the next few weeks. https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/332917182990258176

Some websites perform better after updates and some worse, in most cases where a site performs better it is a useful, well coded and well written website, something that has good quality content and optimised for its visitors, no or little duplicate content on its own website and certainly no content pinched or copied from other websites!

Websites that take a hit seem to be in Google’s eyes poor or lesser quality

There are many other factors that Google consider over and above what we have mentioned above and it will be interesting to see what happens with the next update.

Our latest customer launched their new eCommerce website www.sportsgadgets.co.uk on the 29th March 2013. The new company is run by sports enthusiasts and professionals who can offer advice and provide quality guides, information and support for all their gadgets as well as health tips.

According to the Sports Gadgets Facebook page there will be over 60m Bluetooth enabled gadgets to ship worldwide between 2010 and 2015. This is key for Chris Keaney (Sports Gadgets Founder) and the team as the gadgets being sold are state of the art, Bluetooth devices linking to smartphones, tablets and PCs.

The team involved have a massive passion for the health and wellbeing of people as well as being gadgets freaks, Britain has a large proportion of inactive individuals and would love to make this change for the better!

If you have ever met somebody by chance and never swapped contact details then they may be having similar thoughts – why not check out this great new site as they may have posted their details allowing you to contact them.  Alternatively, you can register and post your own details and they may well come looking for you!

Interested, then read more …

Like all growing businesses, we are always looking for new customers.

Over the years we hope we have built a reputation of being honest and reliable and providing a professional service to both existing and new customers.

Most of our business comes via recommendations and repeat clients so we wanted to take this one stage further and reward anybody that refers *new customers to us.

So, if you refer a *new customer to us, we will reward you with a £50 voucher to spend at your choice of ‘Amazon’, ‘Next’, ‘Debenhams’ or ‘Play.com’ as a way of saying thank you.

In fact why not tell all of your friends and colleagues as this offer is open to anyone that refers a *new customer to us.

THERE ARE NO LIMITS TO THE AMOUNT OF VOUCHERS YOU CAN EARN,
MORE REFERRALS MEANS MORE VOUCHERS!

CLICK HERE TO ENTER YOUR REFERRAL DETAILS ONLINE
OR CALL US ON 01787 379907 / 01353 640003

*To qualify for a £50 voucher, your referred customer must buy one of our web design packages or services.  Vouchers will not be supplied for one-off support or website tweaks and will only be supplied once any work for a referral has been completed and fully invoiced.

]]> http://www.upshotmedia.co.uk/blog/company-news/upshot-media-launches-new-client-referral-scheme/feed/ 0 http://www.upshotmedia.co.uk/blog/company-news/upshot-media-take-on-work-experience/ http://www.upshotmedia.co.uk/blog/company-news/upshot-media-take-on-work-experience/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:37:48 +0000 adminups http://www.upshotmedia.co.uk/blog/?p=116 Upshot Media has agreed to take on Harry Gates for work experience between 6^th and 17^th June. Harry will be working with our design team, putting into practise some of his own photo shop skills and Dreamweaver HTML coding.
We will be pointing Harry in the right direction in terms of how he can improve his skills and knowledge and may even let him lose on a customer’s site!

Harry is a year 10 student at Great Cornard Upper School and Technology College and is studying 10 GCSE’s. His favorite subjects are ICT & Media, both of which are of great interest to Harry, which also means he wants to work in this field even more. At the moment in his ICT course, Harry is creating websites and is working at distinction standard.

At the end of year 11 Harry hopes to go Sixth form and get the qualifications to go on to University and study web design, after that his aspirations are to join a web design company.

Upshot Media hopes they help Harry not only gain knowledge in terms of website design but also an understanding of what is involved, from the actual design to managing clients, their expectations and project deadlines.

Jeffries of Bacton are an independent family run and owned business, they have been serving the community in and around Bacton since 1951.

Jeffries required a new website to showcase second hand cars and also link through to their Bacton Bears Website.

The website has a has a Content Management System (CMS) allowing their own staff to upate the used car details and amend both the text and images within the various pages of the website

Acton Playgroup is a charity-funded playgroup based in the village of Acton, Suffolk.

The playgroup is run by an experienced team of dedicated and well trained staff providing a safe and fun environment where your children can learn and develop their social skills.

Personally we don’t use TweetDeck but probably should as we have multiple twitter accounts and Facebook from one interface. TweetDeck a San Francisco based company is rumoured to have around 15 employees but has been according to The Wall street Journal has reported that TweetDeck has been recruiting in London with plans to open a UK office.

The TweetDeck application allows users to change the theme to view tweets in different columns, making it easier to view and interact with other users.

Throughout the pub there is lots of memorabelia on display for all to enjoy and learn about the history of this 500 year old building.

The Swann has a themed garden, music every Thursday night and Real ales for sale.
Click menu to download the latest menu and prices
Visit the website The Swann Inn at Alderton

The Brief
To provide a website to showcase the Indian Restaurant, Beer garden, What’s on Events and Accommodation. In addition a Google map of the location and information when using a Sat Nav and a contact page with address details, phone number and a contact form. The Website owner wanted to be able to update the web site easily and quickly.

The Solution
A 7 page website with text based pages and images for the Restaurant, Beer Garden, Accommodation. Google map included in the location page, a downloadable PDF Menu and contact page. Upshot media’s Content Management System (CMS) was included giving the ability to change text and images on all pages and upload new PDF Menu’s when they change

Full heating installation, boiler breakdowns and full bathroom suite installations as well as all other aspects of plumbing.

Mark and Rob at hot heating take pride in their work and believe that working with customers to achieve what they want at the right cost will keep their clients happy and build their business.

A no quibble guarantee is offered and most importantly they are on 24 hour call to all new and old customers to answer questions and queries.

They also undertake mild steel, stainless steel and aluminium welding to a coded standard. All their work is carried out in our well equipped modern facilities with very experienced engineers.

We’ve been busy in the office developing a unique app for Redfox Executive Selection and now you can enjoy our hard work live in the App Store. Download Here 

With over 300,000 third party apps now available in Apple’s store, businesses are realising the potential for showcasing their brand.  At Upshot Media we not only have the skill to build advanced apps but also the knowledge of how to design them effectively.  Redfox’s new iPhone app is the perfect example of how to create an app that is useful to users and expands your brands outreach.

Redfox are working in a niche field, recruiting for the International fresh produce industry, and reaching the right candidates is vital for their business.  By creating this app they are making industry news and the latest job postings available without a wifi connection. Clients and candidates had found that they did not have regular internet access but this app means they can keep up to date with just 3G. Redfox already have an active social media strategy in place using tools such Twitter , Linkedin and YouTube, adding an app is the next step for any business looking to strengthen their presence.

Coming up with a genius concept for your App can be difficult, in the case of Redfox there was a clear gap for them to become an information provider. Perhaps you have an idea that can solve a problem or even a game that can promote your business. Make sure your idea aligns with your company’s tone of voice; if you design kids toys make it colourful, if you are a solicitor keep it professional.

Positioning your business as industry experts is fast becoming a key marketing tool to gain valuable coverage. Blogs are now a regular addition to clients websites and we believe that having an app will become the same. With technology moving so quickly we have many clients that find the concept of creating an app daunting, especially the submission process to Apple. With businesses eager to be featured in the App Store Apple have strict regulations around content, especially if you are looking to provide news. In the case of Redfox’s app it was initially rejected as Apple believed that the news feed was aggregated from other sources. This of course wasn’t the case, so we settled down with a cup of tea and wrote a short essay to Apple explaining that the video content and news stories were all created at the expense of Redfox, by their marketing department.  A few days later and voila the App was approved and live on the App Store for all to enjoy. 

The app store hit 10 billion downloads in January, if you fancy a slice of that pie ping us a note  – Get a quote

Twitter is estimated to have over 175m registered users worldwide and there are over 95m tweets every day.

Twitter does not disclose its revenues but it is estimated to have around £45m in revenues last year but made a loss due to expansion, new server infrastructures, development costs for feature improvements and the hiring of staff.

In recent news Facebook raised $1.5bn of financing in a deal, valuing the massive social network at $50bn, so could be a serious contender for buying Twitter alongside Google and other companies.

Google and Facebook are believed to have discussed with twitter possible takeover bids in previous years. It is said that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had offered Twitter’s founders over $500m in Facebook stock back in 2008 but nothing ever materialized

Facebook say that the new pages will allow businesses better communication, including the ability to receive notification when someone “Likes” your page or leaves a comment, a news feed is is also available.

You can ee more details by clicking Facebook Pages 

If users want to upgrade their pages, they should visit this link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/status/ from here you can choose a preview or upgrade, choosing a preview allows you to run though a tour f the features before deciding if you should upgrade or not.

If you need help, there is a preview the new features. For more details and support, please visit the Facebook  Pages Guide in the Resource Center and Help Center.

“Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told BBC News was to “let people share things they wouldn’t have wanted to share with all their friends.”

There is lots of talk around about the negatives of the new feature, i.e. Groups are created and you can add anyone to a group, without asking them, if the group is public others can see your group and who is a in the group. One concern many have is that friends can add people to the group, so if you create a group and are in a group you have to be aware that it’s not only who you can add others to the group. A plus side is you can remove yourself from a group at anytime and if you remove yourself you can’t be added back by another member.

A solution some of the negatives would be an easy fix for Facebook, give users more control and give people the opportunity to say no thanks to a request to being added to a group. This is something that would show Facebook listens to its users concerns and earn them goodwill.

The new Facebook Groups started rolling out last week.  Other features that are being released are the ability to download all of your personal information, photos, videos, posts, etc in a zip file, and a dashboard for controlling and monitoring how third-party apps use your data.

It does appear that by default, groups are private, however the group names and the names of members can be seen by anyone on Facebook, groups appear have the option of keeping everything secret.

We have not yet set-up our own groups but we’ll be having a play and watching closely and if more news or feature changes occur we’ll post more details

The roll out of the design will start straight away but will be completed over a few weeks, so no need to fret if you don’t see it straight away.

Twitter facts: Twitter now has over 90m Tweets or posts every day and over 370,000 new users signing up every day

Want to see what others are saying, click #newtwitter to see

We’ll review the new Twitter design when it hits our screens and post our thoughts

There is already a lot of hype about the new service and how it will effect SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for websites and blogs, many saying SEO is dead.  We don’t believe SEO is dead, it simply means the way we optimise websites to achieve high rankings may need to change to take into consideration G’s latest implementation and search algorithm, search results are still displayed based on users queries.

You can view how Google Instant works in the video below

Video as seen on Google.com