Author archive Paul Sturgess

Paul Sturgess

An online education

As web developers we really have to keep on our toes. The pace of change on the web is ever quickening and we must embrace new technologies, frameworks and ideas nearly every day.

Whilst it’s what makes the job very challenging it’s also, at least for me, what keeps it really interesting.

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Tags: screencasts, ruby

Paul Sturgess

Web Meet Guildford Spring Edition

Wow so it’s already been 2 months since our last meet up. The sunshine is here and we’re well overdue a good catch up and a refreshing drink or two.

Please do come along this Thursday, March 31st. As usual we’ll be a running a tab behind the bar upstairs, from 6pm, in the 3 Pigeon’s pub on Guildford High Street.

The turnout at our first two events has certainly exceeded our expectations. It really has been great to meet and socialise with such a wide range of web professionals in the local area. Thanks to everyone that’s come along and made it a success.

As always we’d love to see some new faces though. So if you haven’t been before please come and introduce yourself.

You can let us know if you’ll be dropping in by leaving a comment here or on Twitter via @kyanmedia

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Tags: guildford, wmg

Paul Sturgess

Web Meet Guildford is back

After the resounding success of the first Web Meet Guildford (WMG) we’re excited to announce that we’ll be hosting another meetup later this month.

So if you make websites and you live or work in the Guildford area, please do join us in the 3 Pigeon’s pub on Guildford High Street for a drink on the 27th January from 6pm.

People at WMG 01

As per last time, we have hired out the upstairs of the pub and will have a tab behind the bar to start the evening off.

The turnout back in November was excellent and with the fresh new year and renewed enthusiasm after the Christmas break we’re already looking forward to meeting everyone.

Please spread the word and you can let us know if you’ll be popping along by leaving a comment here on our blog or on Twitter via @kyanmedia.

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Tags: twitter, guildford, meetup, wmg

Paul Sturgess

Web Meet Guildford is live

Last night saw the launch of the first Web Meet Guildford (WMG) held at the 3 Pigeon’s pub in Guildford and judging by the turnout, the general atmosphere and the positive reaction from Twitter I think we can consider the evening an outright success.

It was refreshing to see a real mixture of web professionals in attendance. From developers and designers to SEO gurus, project managers and social media experts.

We’ll certainly be organising another one; we’ll announce details of it here on our blog and on our Twitter account @kyanmedia.

Thanks to everyone that came along and we look forward to seeing you all at the next one.

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Tags: twitter, guildford, meetup, wmg

Paul Sturgess

Web Meet Guildford, join us for a drink

It’s been over a year now since we moved to Guildford and we’re really feeling settled in our new home on the High Street. We’ve got our artwork on the walls, an arcade machine setup and we’ve even hosted a live gig. However, one thing we haven’t done yet is meet our fellow web designing neighbours.

We figure there must be quite a few ‘like minded’ agencies and freelancers around that we have a lot in common with. This got us thinking, wouldn’t it be great for the Guildford web community to meet, mix, and socialise in a relaxed and informal setting, i.e. lets all have a drink down the pub.

So we announce the first…

Web Meet Guildford

If you make websites and you live and/or work in the Guildford area we’d love for you to join us at 6pm on Thursday 4th November for a cheeky after work drink in the 3 Pigeon’s pub on Guildford High Street.

We’ve reserved the upstairs area and will have a tab behind the bar to get the evening rolling.

Please let us know if you’re interested, even if you can’t make this date. Leave a comment or contact us on Twitter @kyanmedia. Feel free to spread the word and we look forward to meeting you.

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Tags: guildford, meetup, beer, wmg

Paul Sturgess

Google quietly changes the SEO game

Since we moved offices to the centre of Guildford we’ve been upping our efforts to optimise our website for particular search terms and with some success, most notably for ‘web design surrey’.

We started way back on page 9 of Google’s search results and today we reached the heady heights of number 2, or so we thought…

Curiously our listing in Google varies from computer to computer and even between different browsers on the same computer. We have seen this before, however, it has always been attributed to whether you are signed into Google or not as Google has been offering personalised search results to signed-in users for some years now. However, we were still getting different results even though we were not signed-in.

After some investigation it turns out that only last week Google made a significant change to the way personalised search works. Google now presents personalised search results to signed-out users worldwide. Search results will be customised for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.

You can tell if your results are being customised as a “View customizations” link that will appear on the top right of the search results page. You can actually turn off the customisations or temporarily view the uncustomised results.

So where do we come in the uncustomised results for ‘web design surrey’? Page 2, which is still a decent improvement but clearly there is work still to be done.

What does this change by Google mean for SEO? Well, if everyone is shown personalised results then you can’t really ever claim to be “number one in Google”.

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Tags: google, seo

Paul Sturgess

Search engine crawler bots feeding frenzy

One of the darker sides of web development is down time. The site owners don’t want it, the site developers don’t want it and most importantly the site users don’t want it. Unfortunately, however, it will happen. This is not a defeatist view or an excuse, it’s realistic.

An experienced software development team will know this and rather than bury their heads in the sand, they will be well prepared to deal with the consequences. It’s all about having the problem solving skills, tools and the right approach to solving the root cause of the problem.

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Tags: google, seo, search, indexing, crawlers, bots

Paul Sturgess

Google does not use the keywords meta tag

The majority of the web industry had, over time, come to the consensus that the keywords meta tag is not used by Google in ranking web search results. However, we’d never heard it from Google itself; that is until now.

Recently on the official Google blog they posted an article on just this issue and clearly stated that they do not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.

It’s worth pointing out that while this is only Google and other search engines may well use the meta keyword tags, it only serves to enforce our own approach to search engine optimisation that meaningful content is key.

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Tags: google, seo, search

Paul Sturgess

How do you rate?

I’ve posted recently about our office jukebox and the music we play on it. What I didn’t mention, however, is that the most hotly contested aspect surrounding it is not the music that gets played, but the way in which we can all vote on the tracks. Well if Pete’s going to be dropping Christmas covers in October then we all need to let him know it’s not right!

Recently I came across an article on the Youtube official blog that detailed some interesting insight into the way users vote for videos on their site. In a nutshell Youtube has a 1-5 rating system in which overwhelming majority of videos have a rating of 5 stars, some do get 1 star but there’s not much inbetween. Their conclusion…

“When it comes to ratings it’s pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference.”

We actually started off with a system much like the Youtube rating model, but we quickly found the same pattern emerged. So we dropped it for a simple thumbs up/down and we’ve never looked back.

It’s interesting debate though as rating systems are often contentious issues when building websites but when a site like Youtube, with that many users, publishes those kind of results you have to consider if it’s the definitive word on the matter.

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Tags: jukebox, youtube

Paul Sturgess

No longer number one in Google but we are number 1 in Google.

Strange how our SEO blog post that achieved number one in Google for that very search term has now dropped completely off the search results.

Certainly we’re not within the first 6 pages returned. It makes us wonder if the article has somehow been blacklisted for that particular term.

Even more strange is that we are number one for the term “number 1 in Google” – we didn’t even try to optimise for that search term. View screenshot.

Update (12/10/09)

It would appear that our article has been re-instated at the number one position. Amusingly above a new website that has appeared since I first wrote the original article with the domain name ‘numberoneingoogle.co.uk’

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Tags: google, seo, blog

Paul Sturgess

The Kyan soundtrack

Like any office there are a wide variety of musical tastes represented amongst us here at Kyan.

Through our communal jukebox these tastes come together to form a musical backdrop to our time spent working in the office.

A few months back we created a last.fm account, hooked up the Jukebox with the last.fm api and now we are recording a full history of our playlist with some 10,000+ tracks ‘scrobbled’ so far.

Here’s the top 5 artists we’ve been playing the last few months…
1. Lone
2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3. Florence + The Machine
4. Little Dragon
5. Gorillaz

Our current top 5 artists of all time are…
1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
2. Lone
3. Mr Scruff
4. The Beatles
5. Röyksopp

That top 5 artists list changes quite regularly, but it’s an interesting snapshot.

Those artists have certainly been helping us drown out the constant drilling from the building work going on over the road from us on Guildford High Street.

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Tags: music, jukebox

Paul Sturgess

New website design for Rokeby School

With the new school year underway, we’ve just launched a brand new look and feel for Rokeby School.

We first developed the Rokeby School website back in 2006 and it’s served them well. In fact, under the hood it hasn’t changed a great deal, we’ve just given it a fresh new face. Our design team have gone for a more open and magazine-style layout utilising more screen real estate that modern screen resolutions allow us and we also created a matching email newsletter template that uses the brilliant Campaign Monitor emailing system.

Over the years we’ve worked with quite a few Schools, Educational trusts and local authorities. Read more about our websites for schools.

http://www.rokebyschool.co.uk

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Tags: school, campaignmonitor

Paul Sturgess

Optimising for local business searches on Google

Location based searching is a hot topic at the moment with ‘location-aware’ browsing now implemented in Firefox and safari on the iPhone.

Whilst our old residence was beautifully hidden amongst the Surrey hills surrounding Cranleigh, it certainly wasn’t the most obvious place for potential clients to go looking for a cutting edge web agency. Even if it did proudly claim to be “England’s largest village”.

Now that Kyan has relocated to the busy town centre of Guildford we are up against a lot stiffer competition, with numerous other agencies now immediately surrounding us all competing to be top of the listing for terms like “Web design Guildford” and “Web development Guildford”.

Obviously we’re new in town so there’s a lot of work to be done, but a great place to start for any business that wants to show up in location based results is the free Google Local Business Centre (LBC).

Entry into Google’s LBC means that your business listing will show up in search results on google maps.

With the increasing popularity of location-aware mobile devices and desktop browsers utlising Google’s Location Services, optimising for local searches is more important than ever.

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Tags: google, seo, search, geolocation, iphone

Paul Sturgess

The Flip Mino

Time for another random gadget review, the flip mino, it’s a tiny video camera and that’s it and that’s the beauty of it.

Image of the flip mino

It fires up in seconds, you press the big red button to start recording and press it again to stop. So simple, so good. It’s light and will easily fit in your pocket.

You can’t replace the storage, it’s built in. You can’t adjust any recording settings like white-balance, contrast etc. You can only connect & charge via usb – but that means no external cables are required.

There are plenty of reviews out there from people who point to their digital cameras and mobile phones that already have video recording functionality. But they’re missing the point, try giving your phone or point & shoot to your tech illiterate friend and see if they can record video with it…

Kyan has recently invested in the brand new HD version so expect a Vimeo (or another video site) channel to spark into life in the near future featuring our shenanigans.

This is the epitome of a feature-less product that does one thing and it does it really well.

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Tags: flip, mino, camera, vimeo, video

Paul Sturgess

Number one in Google

Good listings across multiple search engines can make or break a website, at Kyan we believe there are no real secrets to search engine optimisation (SEO).

Transparency with our clients is key, we don’t keep our techniques behind lock and key as we believe SEO is not just the responsibility of the web developers, but also of the content creators & writers.

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Tags: google, seo, search, optimisation, number, one, in

Paul Sturgess

Cooliris and the 3D wall.

Cooliris (formerly known as PicLens) is described by it’s developers as a “lightening fast ‘3D wall’ that lets you browse thousands of images, videos and more with ease.”

Cooliris is installed as a browser add-on for Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer and it works all over the web, including on google image searches, facebook, flickr, ffffound and numerous other websites.

Recently we implemented Cooliris into a stock image management system we’re building for a client.

They required an easy and quick way of viewing multiple images on the screen that supplemented the basic website view. Cooliris provided exactly that and wasn’t complicated to implement at all.

It essentially works by using an xml version of the page you are viewing. Cooliris can then automatically detect the feed via a simple rss link. That’s all there is to it!

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Tags: flickr, google, image, search, rss, cooliris, ffffound, xml, 3d, facebook

Paul Sturgess

The Kyan Christmas do!

Tuesday December 9th. We all arrived at the office as usual but this was no ordinary day. The Kyan Christmas do, 2008 edition, had arrived. Perhaps a little early and on a school night no less, but we were ready.

The activities of the day ahead had been kept secret with only three clues drawn out of Piers in the days previous. They were:

Latin, Shouting & Cross-dressing.

Some of us were excited, others were nervous.

The day before it had been revealed that we would be heading to Camden Town, London. A slap up meal was booked at the extravegant Gilgamesh restuarant.

Extravagant because, and I quote, “Every chair, every table has been hand carved to precision to tell the story of Gilgamesh. The marble pillars are covered in inlaid with Lapis and mother of pearl…”

It was quite something. Especially with celebrity chef Ian Pengelley providing his acclaimed Pan-Asian cuisine.

After dinner the main event was revealed…

Little did we know that the Lucha Libre were in town for their last night in London at Camden’s famous Roundhouse.

Luch Libre, as if you didn’t know, is essentially the Mexican version of America’s WWE wrestling but with midgets and transvestites. I’m not joking.

Mexican wrestler

The highlight of the evening was probably not the wrestling however. That honour has to go to a certain Steven Wake for wearing the wrestling mask we all chipped in to buy him for the entire night. Including the full tube and train journey home to Guildford at the end of the evening.

What a legend.

More photos of our antics can be found in the Kyan Flickr Pool.

Steve and Gav

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Tags: mexican, wrestling, camden, roundhouse, christmas

Paul Sturgess

Search Engine Paranoia

Google alerts is a simple service that allows you to receive alerts on any Google search you want, whenever it is updated.

So when a new result is returned for your search, you’ll know about it without having to lift a finger.

Until just recently the alert was only available in the form of an email, fortunately however, Google have now syndicated the alerts into an rss feed.

The problem with the emails was that should you want to monitor a popular search term, with regular changes to the Google search listings, you’d be buried under an avalanche of emails.

The utilisation of RSS feeds is certainly a welcome change to Google alerts. Now we can all get back to monitoring Google for our favourite Search Engine Optimisation terms.

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Tags: google, seo, search, engine, optimisation, rss, email

Paul Sturgess

How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference

Recently I finished reading the book ‘The Tipping Point’, it was a fantastic read. I picked it after it was recommended by Jeremy Keith at this year’s d.Construct conference.

The book explores the reasons behind wide spread adoption of fashions and trends that happen once they’ve reached that mysterious ‘tipping point’.

Why do people adopt certain ideas and not others?

It is a must read for any budding entrepreneurs, launching a new product, service or even say, a new web application.

The author explains his ideas with a wide range of intriguing stories that make his concepts sound so logical and at the same time make it hugely entertaining.

Even though it was published back in 2002, the ideas are relevant today, particularly for anyone looking to harness the power of the community and social networking.

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Tags: dconstruct, book, networking, social

Paul Sturgess

Google to launch new web browser

The web is buzzing with the news that Google have officially announced their own web browser and it will be released (in beta) today.

‘Google Chrome’, as it will be known, has been built from scratch, is free and is open source.

Google’s has said it’s intentions for the browser are for it to ‘drive innovation on the web’.

Highlights include:

  • JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8 (faster javascript – open source)
  • A process for each tab (So if one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t crash & better management of memory)
  • Task manager to view processes (Allows you to see which website is using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and abusing your cpu)
  • ‘Speed dial’ home page comprising of your most visited pages
  • Google Gears is built in
  • Smart search directly in the address bar (aka Omnibox)
  • Uses a ‘Chrome bot’ on the google crawling infrastructure to test it works against the most popular sites on the web
  • The browser runs inside a ‘sandbox’ with restricted permissions to make it really secure (It cannot effect your machine or it’s processes)
  • Private browsing mode
  • Automatically checks against known phishing websites (These are available in an open api)

For the full low down I highly recommend you checkout Google’s comic they released.

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Tags: api, google, opensource, browser, web

Paul Sturgess

Amazon's Simple Storage Solution (S3)

Amazon is undoubtedly one of the web’s most successful online shops, a global brand, with operations all over the world. However, it’s not just selling products anymore.

Just one of the growing pains Amazon has faced over the years was the requirement for a scalable storage infrastructure.

Amazon invested in building their own solution and with their experience and expertise in this area they realised a business opportunity was there to be had and released their Simple Store Solution (S3) to the web industry.

S3 offers unlimited storage with high availability, low latency and low costs.

Recently at Kyan we’ve been increasingly taking advantage of S3 in our projects. Amazon’s storage is redundant and unlimited which makes it perfect for backups.

It also allows businesses that work with large amounts of collateral to concentrate on their core competencies and not waste resources implementing and managing a storage infrastructure.

Amazing really when you think Amazon started back in 1995 as a simple on-line book store.

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Tags: amazon, s3, storage, services, web

Paul Sturgess

Free The Airwaves!

As the U.S. TV broadcasters switch over to digital tranmissions a great debate is just starting out…

Who gets to use the fuzzy white noise that’s left behind?

Google are campaigning for the redundant spectrum to be put to good use.

Most notably for WiFi 2.0

A longer-range wireless technology that wouldn’t be owned by any one company. WiFi 2.0 offers the possibility of, to quote Google, “Affordable, ubiquitous, high-speed Internet connections to all Americans, anywhere, at any time.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will soon decide on the future of the spectrum and whether it will be opened up. Google have started a petition and are encouraging everyone to spread the word via their YouTube channel.

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Tags: tv, google, wifi, youtube, web

Paul Sturgess

Garmin Forerunner 405

The Garmin Forerunner 405 is a GPS running watch that actually looks like a normal watch.

But it’s not the looks that make this a runner’s best friend.

The GPS technology means it will track your run and tell you where to turn to stay on course.

Set a ‘virtual training partner’ to run against and it will tell you how far behind or infront you are.

Monitor your pace, your average pace and how many calories you’re burning.

When you’re back home it will wirelessly transmit your run data onto your pc (mac not supported yet unfortunately) allowing you to analyse to your heart’s content.

This is where Garmin have outdone themselves.

The watch can send and receive information just by by plugging in a small usb stick into your computer.

Most important though is that it’s all in a standard format and this allows for integration into various services and mashups gallore.

View where you ran on a Google map or import it into Google earth.

Create courses on websites like mapmyrun.com.

This means you can share your couses with friends and then run against the times they’ve set.

GPS is a very fashionable technology right now and Garmin are taking full advantage of it.

Read more | 2 comments
Tags: standards, gps, garmin, watch, forerunner, mashups, google

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