All you photographic requirments are captured prior to the event to ensure your day goes as smoothly as possible and you get the photographs you want.

Your photographs are displayed in a professionally printed hard back album which is yours to keep.

Andy is available throughout Ipswich, Suffolk, Norfolk and essex.

You can vistit his website here -

Wedding Photographer Ipswich

Anyone else heard anything about this? Please comment…

$descriptionSmall = substr($description, 0, 200);

I used the substr function to limit the text to the first 200 characters. This was fine until I changed the $description variable to contain a string of HTML. The would break the application as the 200th character may be in the middle of an open HTML tag. It also doesn’t look too elegant in some cases as the 200th character may be in the middle of a word.

The solution:

preg_match('/^([^.!?\s]*[\.!?\s]+){0,50}/', strip_tags($description), $descriptionSmall);

This strips out any HTML tags from the string to only leave the text and them limits it to only 50 words!

<meta name=”description” content=”Shmoo web design, helping small businesses on the web with useful information and advice on improving your web presence.”>

This Line of code is very important for search engines to identify web pages and their content. Most search engines will use this content as the page description in their listings (see below).

If a page does not have a meta description the search engine will use text from the page that may nor correctly describe what the page is about or be out of context and therefore may deter a prospective visitor to your site from clicking on your link.

It is quite common that many websites use the same general meta description on every page of a website. This is not good practice as search engines individual Meta Descriptions to be unique to better help identify the page and subsequently help it rank better.

If you use a CMS (content management system) for your website you should be able to change these yourself. If not speak to your web designer.

First thing you should do is talk to like minded people, friends or business contacts about their experiences with web design companies.

Once you have gathered a few names together research them online. Visit their websites, see if they have experience in your sector, if you like their style of design, if they meet your technical requirements.

Also see where they appear in Google for ‘web design in your locality e.g. ‘web design in Suffolk‘ if they don’t rank well for their own website they probably won’t be able to optimise your site that well.

Once you have whittled the options down to two or three arrange to meet with them. You are not going to be using them for a one off service you are going to be entering into an ongoing business relationship so it’s import to be able to communicate well with them.

Costs are always a concern and the price of a website can vary greatly. The larger the company you are dealing with the more a website may cost due to larger overheads, but you are also getting greater security. Having said that freelance designers can do just as good a job at a fraction of the cost.

Here are some UK web design directories that may be of some help…

www.web-design-directory-uk.co.uk

www.web-designers.velnetdesigns.co.uk

www.web-design-directory.org.uk

www.design2go.co.uk

Uk Web design Association

Here are some of the best…

Sales Force

Basic usage starts at £17/user/month with a 14 day free trial.

Infusionsoft

Basic usage starts at $199/Month with a 15 free trial. Includes CRM, Email Marketing and Automatic Follow-up Engine.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM has a free edition edition for up to 3 users. The professional edition starts at $ 12 / User / Month.

More to come…

MailChimp allows user to build mailing lists, design email campaigns, send and analyse the results from on online console. OK so there lots of products that are doing the same but these guys seem to be leading the way.

MailChimp is also free up 500 subscribers and 3000 emails per month.

For Worpress users you can install the Mailchip plugin and quickly and easily add your MailChimp signup form to your site!

CMS or content management system are software systems that allow website owners to update the content of their website without needing any technical knowledge.

I am going to try and give my reviews from a Web designers and an end users point of view.

So the contenders so far are…

WordPress

WordPress started out just as a blogging tool but now people are realising it can be a powerful CMS. Lots of designers are using it to deploy small/medium websites.

As a designer I find it quite time consuming to implement complex designs into the templating system.

As an end user if you are not using the blogging tools they overly complicate the administration.

Joomla

In essence a powerful and robust Content Management System.

The first time I installed Joomla to try it out I went straight in and tried to add some content to the home page of the site, I couldn’t figure it out in twenty minutes so I gave up. Some may say I should have read the instruction, but, in my opinion if I can’t figure it out I would not be happy about passing it on to a client.

Frog CMS

A relative newcomer to this debate but a great little CMS none the less. Easy to implement designs into the template system and a very easy to use backend.

The built in blogging system needs to be improved. More pluggins needed. Generally it needs more people supporting it.

More to come…

The trend see them moving more and more towards Software as a service (SaaS) applications.

What is basically means is that instead of buying a software license outright it is licensed on a demand basis usually online. The most common SaaS applications are licensed on a monthly basis in the form of a web based application. There are lots of these SaaS web applications out there now, most prominently Customer Relationship Managers (CRM), Online Billing, Email Marketing and of course Content Mangement Systems.

These systems have great benefits:

As there is not the massive initial outlay, instead small monthly payments which help with cash flow and Tax.

There is no painful upgrading procedures as they are all taken care of for you online.

You can cease the service on a monthly basis.

As they are web based you can access them from any ware some even from your mobile.

I will detail some of the best SaaS application in detail in future posts.

This is the called the ‘most wanted response’ (MWR). We see it all the time on ecommerce sites, with ‘buy now’ and ‘add to basket’ everywhere your look. On brochure/service based sites, however, calls to action are often over looked. This may not be the fault of the web designer. The client supplies the content and they add it to a page. If the content of the page is enough to engage the user your want a response from them without them having to break concentration and go look for the ‘contact us’ link in the main navigation. You want to make the user experience as smooth as possible and at the same as getting your most wanted response.

Calls to action don’t have to be hard sell, garish buttons. Simple text links at the bottom of an article can work just as well e.g. ‘Click here to get in touch’.

It’s a no brainer, get some calls to action.