At Silverchip we have written some software to interact with a piece hardware which is used to generate True Random Numbers (For those that are interested, computer software cannot generate true random numbers more info on this over at http://www.random.org/randomness/)

The device we use is entropykey (Have a look on the entropy key website if you are interested in the science behind this).

Everyone that entered the competition has been loaded into our program, all 1116 of you. Due to the fact we have ran competitions before the ticket ID’s start from a higher number (987 in this case). The data we had was randomly shuffled and then a number allocated to each. When we run the draw on Friday we will pick a number between the range of entries and the wining ticket will be notified on our Facebook page and we will also drop them an email.

Once we confirm the winner is happy to be mentioned on the page we will let everyone know. We also hope to get some shots of us handing over the prize but this will depend on where the winner is located.

Have any questions? Add a comment below.

In the past, certain search queries have often churned out results of pages with low quality, generic content that may accurate match the query, but is of such a low level of quality that nobody wants to read it. One example search, ‘ how to organise your desktop’, came out with 9 links to pages that had been generated by content farms, in the top 10 results. Content farms are website that churn out lots of low quality content just so that they get clicks through to the website, so that they can make money from advertising. Pages from content farms are absolutely not what people want to see when they are searching, which is why it’s a good thing that search engines have been trying to put a stop to this.

To put the effectiveness of the search engines’ efforts to the test, www.newsscientist.com asked computer scientist Richard McCreadie of the University of Glasgow to take a look at the situation. It was found that what search engines have been trying to do has actually worked. In order to test how effective Google and Microsoft have been, McCreadie tried 50 search queries that have been known to be a target for content farmers. One example of the 50 search queries is ‘how to train for a marathon’. The search queries were made in March ’11 and August ’11. Participants were then paid to review the pages that had turned up in the search results, and judge whether the content was good and useful or poor, low quality content that is being used to attract people to the page so that adverts can be displayed.

In the ‘how to train for a marathon example’ , the top 10 results in March ’11 were basically lists of very generic tips such as ‘invest in a good pair of running shoes’ and general low quality content. Amazingly, the same search in August ’11 turned up 10 completely different results, that were determined to be high quality information sources such as Runner’s World Magazine. A similar trend to this was found for all of the 50 search queries that were investigated. The findings suggest quite an impressive effort from search engines to get rid of low quality content from there high search results.

The biggest change that was made in an effort to cull low quality search results was the Panda update from Google. This improved Google search results by actually being able to distinguish between content that was low quality and content that would actually be good to read for people. Interestingly enough, a number of large organisations were caught out by this update, including Seed (a project from AOL) and eHow (a Demand Media website). Both organisations were said to have been getting large quantities of fairly generic content written for their sites so that they would rank higher in the Google search results, which was sniffed out by the Panda update and both sites were penalised for, having a significant negative impact on traffic to both sites.

In relation to SEO, this is another example of how good quality content is becoming increasingly important and how websites that are releasing low quality, repetitive and generic content are being punished. Overall search is definitely improving for the user, and it’s an important element of SEO to understand this.

For original article see: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228436.200-inside-search-engines-war-on-bad-results.html

One of the best things about custom web design is the potential for individuality. If you want something completely unique that has never been done before on the web, it has to be bespoke. Every business wants something different to offer their customers and clients because it’s the thing that will separate them from their competition, and eventually determine their level of success.

Offering something on your website that will make it stand out from the countless others in your industry will keep visitors coming back. And with the huge amount of competition on the web, getting visitors to return to your website is very important.

Plus, having a unique selling point is one of the most basic rules for a successful business. Bespoke web design gives you the opportunity to abide by that rule and increase the success of your business online.

2. Tailored

Another huge benefit to bespoke web design is the fact that it is tailored to meet your exact specifications. There is a significant difference between getting something close to what you want, and getting something that is exactly what you want. But so often, people settle for getting something close to what they want. That means that they have to work around the little things that are missing from their site that would make things run so much better. When the website design meets your exact requirements, it makes life much easier and will probably save you money in the amount of time that it saves your business.

When a website is designed to meet your exact specifications, there is also an element of familiarity that you get with the website, because it is based on your own ideas. This can even save time in learning your way around the admin section of a website. At Silverchip, we pride ourselves in creating user-friendly interfaces for the admin sections of our website, because we know how important it is that our clients find them easy to use.

3. Freedom

Freedom of creativity in web design is very important, as it allows you to create a look and feel that is unique to your business. That means that if you get a custom designed website, you have the option to put your own business identity on the website, like a stamp that provides instant familiarity with your customers. It would also make the website stand out, so that people know when they are on your website, they are dealing with your brand. That’s very important when trying to get return visitors to a website. If they have a clear memory of the brand, and had a good experience on the website, it seriously increases the chances that they will return to it.

4. Adaptable/Future-proof

At Silverchip we say that we make our website future-proof. That’s because no matter how your business might change in the future, we can always do something with your website to meet those changes. We have seen countless examples of open source systems that have tried to expand with an ever growing business, and things just end up in a general mess, leaving the business with a system that is very difficult to use and costs a lot in time. Custom web design solves this problem, and allows for as much expansion or change to a website as is needed, which can also save time and money in the future.

5. SEO Friendly

Although there are some pieces of open source that are said to be SEO friendly, they are no match for our SEO friendly custom web design. The first reason why the websites that we design are more SEO friendly is because of the quality of code that is written in them. When it comes down to it, Google likes good quality code, and so rewards website that meet those high standards. The second reason is that our web design team collaborates with our SEO team on every project to make sure that all the relevant SEO boxes are checked when developing a website. This gives the websites that we design a head-start against most of the competition before an SEO campaign is even underway.

The Better Option

It’s no surprise that we advocate custom web design, but we really can’t deny our passion for it. If you ask anyone here, you will always get the same answer…

“Bespoke web design is the better option, by far!”

We were tasked with developing and sending a Christmas email for The Brand Nursery to promote their choice that this year they would take the money that they would normally spend on Christmas cards and donate it to Oxfam. A great idea and a great cause, we at Silverchip are really happy to be involved and very pleased to be working with The Brand Nursery

Here is what they had to say,

"Silverchip ensured our Christmas emailer was delivered seamlessly, with no hassle and to great affect. Christmas is a crucial time for communicating with our clients and we wanted to ensure everybody received our festive wishes and news of our charitable donation instead of the traditional Christmas card. Liam and the team ensured we had absolutely no worries that everybody we wanted would receive our message."

We are looking forward to a long lasting business relationship with The Brand Nursery and look forward to working with them on future projects.

If you want your website to have a good chance at ranking well in the Google search pages, then on-page SEO is very important, and is usually a good starting point. If you go straight to off-page SEO and skip out the on-page SEO, then the work will be partly wasted because the website is never going to reach its full potential for search.

When looking at on-page SEO, the navigation architecture of the site is hugely important. Simple things like the optimisation of title tags, meta tags and making sure that canonical URLs are in use can make a difference when trying to rank a website highly. The better your website is at telling Google what it is about, and the better it is for Google to navigate it, the easier it will be to rank your website using off-page SEO.

Improve usability

Once the basics have been optimised, you can then move onto more in-depth on-page optimisation, which is all about improving user experience. The core issues here are the speed of the site, the content, and how it is displayed to Google.

The speed of a site is an important ranking factor for Google, so in order to undergo effective SEO, it is a good idea to try and increase site speed, if it isn’t already at a good standard. This can usually be dealt with by using a better hosting provider, and making sure that there isn’t too much heavy content on each page (e.g. flash, images, javascript, etc.). Poor code can also have a negative impact on the speed of a website, which is why you should make sure that all of your code is as squeaky clean as possible.

The actual content of a website is another important thing to consider when undertaking SEO. The reason for Google’s Panda update, at a basic level, was to remove any content that it didn’t deem useful to users. This was to prevent poorly written content from holding value on website. Now there is a huge focus on having good quality content that people actually want to read on your website. Making sure that your website is continuously updated with fresh, good quality content is a very good SEO tactic, and can have a big impact on rankings.

How the content of a website is displayed to Google is also something that should be taken very seriously when doing SEO. All of the content on your website should have the relevant html tags, so that Google knows exactly what it is indexing and how relevant it is to each section of the website. If this is done properly it can have a very positive effect on rankings.

Once you have used SEO to make the best of your website, then it’s time to start off-page SEO. If all of the on-page factors are ticked off and fully optimised, then this will increase the potential of off-page SEO by a huge amount.

Text:

Slide 1

In order to provide us with good search results, search engines needs to know absolutely everything that is on the World Wide Web.

Slide 2

A search engine must be able to scour the internet, reading through every last bit of information available.

Slide 3

It then needs to make connections between all of the data, and understand how different websites relate to one another.

Slide 4

The search engine then uses an algorithm process the vast amount of information that it needs to absorb. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithm to keep in line with advances that they make in online search.

Slide 5

The algorithm determines which websites will appear for a given search, and in what order they will be ranked. SEO is all about optimising your website, in line with the algorithms, so that it ranks highly on search results pages.

Slide 6

In having an understanding of search engine algorithms, we are able to tick all of the relevant boxes to make sure that your website will rank more highly on results pages.

The video is a Bearded Dragon, which isn’t too special, until it starts to play the game ‘Ant Crusher’ on a touchscreen phone. It’s definitely a see it to believe it moment so without further ado, here’s the video in question.

It’s a humorous video and quite amazing, but it also makes you wonder how long it will be until entertainment technologies are made for other animals on the planet as there are already games for cats on the iPad.

For now it’s time to get back to training our office rock to play Angry Birds, we haven’t had much progress and he’s already broken a phone but it looks promising so far.

What do you think?

"Deck The Screens" (@DeckTheScreens) is a fun little holiday app from the folks at Deeplocal. It lets you string holiday lights between all of your screens. Just create a new set of lights, share your code with some friends or co-workers (it works best if everyone is in the same physical location), and watch the lights go. We put this together in a hurry as a fun excuse to play with some new technologies so if you run into any trouble, bear with us. You know how these lights are, one light can mess up the whole thing. Or, if you like what you see and want to know more about us, definitely let us know.”

Now they have even more reason to take the statement seriously, as the huge information technology company Atos bans internal email. Atos CEO, Thierry Breton, said that just 10% of the approximated 200 emails received by employees each day were actually useful. And as much as 18% of those emails are spam. According to Breton, emails are “just time-wasting noise.”

The idea is that by communicating via instant messenger and a Facebook-like interface, a huge amount of time will be saved. With a company as big as Atos, who have over 74,000 employees, even if each employee could save 5 minutes each day by not needing to trawl through there inbox to find the important emails, that would be a combined saving of more than 6000 hours every day! Based on those figures, there is definitely something to be said about the logic behind this plan.

The strategy has, so far, been in place for 6 months, and internal emails have since been reduced by 20%. Caroline Crouch, a spokeswoman for the company, said that the change in communication had been taken positively with a “strong take up of alternative tools” by the employees. Breton says that he hasn’t sent an email in 3 years, suggesting that he feels very strongly about the strategy.

Opinion about email is definitely changing, and much more significantly in the younger generation. This is important to a lot of companies, as if email is not popular among their next generation of employees, there could be some serious issues, which would mean that it would be better to change with the times rather than remain tied down to the one method of communication. The chart below shows a year on year comparison (2011 vs. 2010) on email usage, split into age groups.

Despite the possibility that cutting internal emails, and putting other forms of internal communication in place may work great. It does not offer a solution for external emails as of yet. And I can’t imagine people wanting to have all of their professional associates as friends on their Facebook!

Either way, the big drops in usage for 12-24 year olds are definitely something for the big email providers to take note of. And it offers up some interesting possibilities for where digital communication could end up in the future.

(Source – http://www.mediacityuk.co.uk/)