Blog | Kyan

Paul Sturgess
October 19, 2010

Why are Google developing cars that drive themselves?

Did you know that Google engineers have tested a self-driving car on the streets of California? According to their recent announcement they’ve clocked up over 140,000 miles.

Paul Sturgess
February 19, 2010

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.

Paul Sturgess
October 09, 2009

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.

Paul Sturgess
August 12, 2009

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.

Paul Sturgess
April 27, 2009

SEO success

Our article about optimising websites for search engines has now achieved number one status in Google for the term “Number one in Google” (View screenshot).

Read all about our SEO approach.

Paul Sturgess
February 25, 2009

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.

Paul Sturgess
January 20, 2009

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!