5 years ago, the only considerations web designers really had to deal with when designing for different users were cross browser testing and different screen resolutions.
Today (and forevermore!), to ensure that your website istruly accessible to all of your users, you have to make sure that your design works for a huge range of mobile devices – iPhones, iPads, Blackberries etc etc… all with different browsers and screen resolutions (many of which are now in ‘portrait’ orientation, as opposed to the traditional ‘landscape’ web browser)
One way of doing this is to design a different version of your site for every device – however that’s a lot of work.
Enter Responsive Web Design..
What is Responsive Web Design?
Responsive Web design is an approach to web design that ensures that your site responds to your user’s environment, and to their behaviour, based on a range of variables including screen size, platform and orientation.
Rather than create multiple versions of a site for each device – ONE website design will be suitable for all users, by using flexible layouts, images and CSS techniques including media queries. The website adjusts itself to the user – rather than the other way round.
HTML5 and CSS3 are an important part of responsive web design, and as more and more browsers begin to support these technologies responsive websites will become more popular.
How to Comply with UK Health and Safety Legislation
Regardless of complying with Health and Safety laws, providing Health and Safety Training for your staff is something that all businesses should seriously consider.
Sending staff on accredited Health and Safety courses provide a wide range of benefits including reductions in insurancecosts, increased productivity and profitability and an enhanced reputation for your organisation.
In addition – all businesses should take some simple steps to ensure you are compliant with HSE (health and safety executive) regulations.
To be fully compliant in terms of training – we’d recommend sending managers on an accredited course – the IOSH Managing Safely Course is available with us here in Brighton.
However here are our 10 Health and Safety tips to ensure that your organisation is compliant in the eyes of the HSE
Top 10 Health & Safety Tips
How to Comply with HSE Health and Safety Regulations
Conduct a Risk Assessment for your workplace and document it – you need to think about what could cause harm, and what precautions you will take to prevent it.
Any business with employees (so everyone except one-man-bands!) needs to take out Employers Liability Compulsory Insurance – you should display a copy of the certificate somewhere in your office.
Write down how Health and Safety is managed in your business in the form of a Health and Safety Policy (this is compulsory if you employ more than 5 people)
You need to have a person or people available in your organisation to provide Health and Safety advice to employees so that they can meet their responsibilities. This could be someone within your business who has received training, or an external consultant.
You should frequently consult employees on health and safety to ensure that they understand any responsibilities that they have and are happy with the measures you have in place.
Provide Health and Safety training for employees so that they are aware of the hazards and risks in the workplace and are equipped to manage them. The IOSH Managing Safely training course is a useful programme for all line managers to attend as it leads to a recognised health and safety qualification.
Provide basic health, safety and welfare needs for all employees. This includes access to toilets, washing facilities and drinking water. These facilities must be suitable for any employees with disabilities.
Provide Health and Safety Law information for employees to reference. This should take the form of a poster or leaflet displayed publicly in your workplace.
By law, there are some work related accidents and diseases that you must reportif they occur. More details on these can be found on the HSE website
All businesses that deal with hazardous substances (e.g. explosives, asbestos etc…) or operate in an inherently hazardous industry (like construction) must register with the HSE
Hopefully your business already does all of the above.
If not, and you need some Health and Safety training or advice – please feel free to call us on 01273 622272 or e-mail info@siliconbeachtraining.co.uk
There are many different ways to draw maps - including photographic techniques and of course old fashioned hand drawing. However if have some Adobe Illustrator skills, using its vector drawing tools is a great option, as it means your maps will be fully scalable – you could blow it up to A0 size without losing any quality. Within Illustrator there are many different methods to gain a similar result. This tutorial introduces beginners to many useful techniques in a goal-focused way.
FANTASTIC Illustrator Time saving tips found – HERE
An Illustrator map will provide artwork which is razor sharp, scalable, supporting industry standard colours such as Pantone for print and HTML for web.
Illustrator Tutorial: Drawing a Scalable Map in Illustrator CS5
Output Formats
The final format you should export your document in is .EPS for print or GIF for the web. To insert the map into PowerPoint, you might export the map as a JPG at high to maximum quality.
Here is an example of our finished map
As you can see it does not pretend to have any cartographic or scale accuracy but it is very clear to read and can be simplified to clearly show the way to an office or point of interest, etc.
Tracing over a scan
If one wanted to preserve the accuracy of a previously drawn map, one would need to open a photographic version of another map (a screen grab or a scan), define the layer as a template layer, create a new layer for the new artwork and draw over the scan, keeping the curvature of the roads perfectly accurate. This will be the subject of a further lesson.
N.B. Scanning a map requires permission from the copyright holder.
If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you’ll know that we’ve been championing the use of Social Media in business marketing for a LONG time! We were among the first in the UK to offer a Social Media Training course, and we’ve written extensively about how important Social Media is in the modern marketplace right here!
Social Media is important for 2 reasons -well, it’s actually important for LOADS of reasons, but my two for today are:
It provides a platform for businesses to speak directly to your customers
It’s really good for SEO
Most people agree on number 1. Many people are still quite sceptical about number 2, and argue that ‘traditional SEO’ – i.e. link building, on page optimisation etc… still have more effect than Social Media.
However – it’s hard to ignore the fact that the major search engines are investing a lot of time and money in Social, and that their algorithms appear to be placing more emphasis on Social Media in their SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages)
However a lot of people won’t believe that Social Media has an effect on SEO without seeing clear proof. It was therefore refreshing to see at the recent BrightonSEO conference, a presentation by Paul Chaloner of Fresh Egg which summarised some tests he had done using Twitter providing exactly that. He showed that using Twitter alone, without any other promotion, can push your pages up the rankings (and even on to the front page). Paul called this TweetSERPing. A video and summary of the presentation are below…
Using Twitter for SEO – #BrightonSEO Video
What is TweetSERPing?
Very simply – TweetSERPing is using Twitter to improve web ranking (and is a term I believe invented for this presentation – lets see if it catches on!) Paul’s presentation described two tests that he ran on separate blog posts, where he used TweetSERPing exclusively to improve ranking. Check out the video… a summary is below.
Paul started by asserting that EVERYTHING is a social network. Whenever we interact with anyone, whether that be online, in the pub, at the office, wherever – we are ‘social networking’. Social Media marketing, whilst using modern technology, is just an extension of things that have been going on for years (people recommending things to each other!).
Update: Applications for the Leadership and Management Advisory Service training grant has now closed. We will make sure we announce the arrival of any similar schemes in the future.
£1000 Training Grants
Businesses who employ between 2 and 249 people can apply for up to £1,000 of matched funding towards any training courses that will help to develop their organisation’s people management skills. The new Leadership and Management Advisory Service (LMAS) is designed to help eligible employers fund training and development opportunities for their senior leaders.
If you are interested in applying and would like to discuss the courses we have available, please call us on 01273 622272 or emailinfo@siliconbeachtraining.co.uk
Is my Organisation Eligible for a Leadership & Management Training Grant?
The Leadership & Management Training Grants are open to any organisation which:
has 2 to 249 full time equivalent employees
can display the potential for high or fast growth, defined as:
if trading for more than 12 months have the potential to increase turnover by 20% each year for three years
if trading for less than 12 months have the potential to achieve a turnover of £500,000 within three years of trading
How Can I Apply for a Training Grant Towards a Course at Silicon Beach Training?
1) Identify Suitable Training
Identify the training course or courses that you would like to attend – remember, the courses must help you to increase your organisation’s people management skills – so the following courses would be applicable:
Since writing this we have attended Brighton SEO 2011, click the link to see our first blog post of the morning session and stay tuned for more to come.
Writing or blogging about trending topics can be a great way to generate traffic (and links) to your site, provided that your content is high quality and that you pick the right keywords to optimise on.
The second half of that equation can be the difference between loads of traffic and very little, so identifying what people want to read about (and more importantly, exactly what they are typing in to Google right now) is paramount. If you can be among the first to blog on a trending topic you can get your site on the front page of Google quickly, and bag the traffic (what’s more if you’re the first, you’re more likely to stay on the front page longer).
So – “how can I find trending topics?” At Friday’s BrightonSEO conference Malcolm Coles gave a very informative (and highly entertaining) presentation about how he used a variety of tools to discover trending topics when working on the celebrity news site HolyMoly, including some very interesting data on the searching habits of the Great British male!
Here are our video highlights from his presentation, along with a summary of the tools discussed (more information can also be found on Malcolm’s site here)….
News Search Tools: How to Find Trending Topics
We’ve split the video of Malcolm’s presentation in to two parts – the first summarises the News Search Tools used to identify Trending Topics. The second, which I couldn’t resist adding, is an example of how HolyMoly used these tools to exploit the search term ‘Karen Gillan Underwear‘, which reveals some interesting (and very amusing) trends in men’s searching patterns after they’ve watched Doctor Who!
#BrightonSEO Video: News Search Tools Summary
A summary of the News Search Tools mentioned is provided below, but do watch the video as Malcolm puts them nicely in to context with examples…
News Search Tools Summary:
Which of these tools you use will depend largely on the sort of content you publish…
So – you’ve set up a new blog and you’ve got loads of great ideas about interesting blog posts to write? But how is anyone ever going to know your blog exists?! Elsewhere on this blog we’ve explored how to use Social Media to promote individual blog posts – however there are some other steps you can take to make sure that your blog gets indexed as fast as possible – which we explore in more detail here.
If you’re new to blogging, we have a wide range of courses here at Silicon Beach that we run here in Brighton, Sussex that could help you, including our 1-day Blogging Training course, our WordPress Training and Advanced WordPress Training courses, and not to forget our Social Media Training and SEO Training courses to help you to promote your content.
As anyone who knows anything about SEO and Social Media will tell you – CONTENT IS KING – so the biggest favour you can do yourself it to write brilliant content on your blog that everyone will want to link to, thereby raising your profile.
However in addition to writing amazing content – there are some other simple things you can do to make sure you get found more easily…
Lots of businesses use Facebook Fan pages to promote their products and services. In addition to the standard page tabs (Wall, Photos, Links, Videos etc…) Facebook had its own markup language called FBML that allowed you to easily create your own custom tabs. This was really handy for creating custom landing pages and special pages for promotions – we have an FBML page for our Photography Competition.
On 10 March 2011 Facebook withdrew FBML (the spoilsports!), so you can no longer add FBML custom tabs to your Facebook Fan page (if you already have an FBML page it will continue to work though – phew!).
HOWEVER - there’s a new way to create custom tabs for Facebook pages – enter Facebook iFrame Apps! With an iFrame App, you can create normal web-pages using good old fashioned HTML & CSS, and embed them in new tabs on your Facebook Fan Page – sweet!
To use iFrame Apps you’ll need to know some HTML and CSS, and also be able to upload content to an FTP server (which if you have your a website shouldn’t be a problem!).
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves! In this tutorial we’re going to cover how to use Facebook iFrame Apps to create simple HTML page tabs in Facebook Fan Pages
If you have a Facebook Fan Page – find out how to optimize it for SEO here
How to create a custom tab in Fan pages with Facebook iFrame Apps
How to Comply with UK Health and Safety Legislation
There are many different ways to draw maps - including photographic techniques and of course old fashioned hand drawing. However if have some Adobe Illustrator skills, using its vector drawing tools is a great option, as it means your maps will be fully scalable – you could blow it up to A0 size without losing any quality. Within Illustrator there are many different methods to gain a similar result. This tutorial introduces beginners to many useful techniques in a goal-focused way.
efore you start – you will need:
