Earlier this year Sony stopped selling the disks in most international markets due to dwindling demand and competition from other storage formats.

The slow death of the ‘floppy’ or ‘diskette’ began in 1998 when Apple decided to not include a floppy drive in its G3 iMac computer. Since then various other firms have stopped support for floppy disks, including computer giant Dell in 2003. Computing store PC World stopped selling them in 2007.

However, Sony has continued to sell the disks, and continues to ship them in the millions. But, the firm – which claims to have produced the first 3.5in (9cm) disks in 1981, has decided to halt sales completely faced with competition from online storage and portable USB drives.

RIP Floppy!

What’s Wrong with IE6?

It was designed when few international web standards existed and the capabilities required to deliver on-screen web content were fairly limited and easy to achieve with a dominant browser solution.

In addition, IE6 is more susceptible to security problems which were not envisaged when the browser was first designed.

Since 1995 web standards have been developed and new browsers have come to market. These browsers have converged to follow international web standards which benefits both consumers of web information and web developers who struggle to deliver rich content on a browser that is not up to the task.

Finally, later browsers provide better internet security features than IE6.

Why should I Upgrade?

Recent security breaches, well reported in the press, had the French and German governments recommending to their citizens not to use IE6.

Additionally, there is a growing movement of businesses and web application developers who are dropping IE6 support. This is because IE6 can no longer deliver the browsing experience expected by visitors because of shortcomings in available functionality and compatibility with other modern browsers.

Which Browser Should I Choose?

There are choices but all of them will give a better and more reliable browsing experience than IE6.

The dominant browser (although becoming less so) from Microsoft is IE8. The next most popular browser is Firefox, followed by Google Chrome, Safari and Opera.

All are available as free downloads with automatic updates as new releases are published.

The question is, how to determine what these should be to make it easy for a visitor to find your blog post?

Why categorise and tag blog posts?

Simply to enable visitors to quickly get to the blog post which interests them and answers their question.

In addition to adding categories and tags, posts can also be date/time coded. Using these three approaches (category, tag and date/time) allows postings to be ‘sliced and diced’ so that your visitor can get to the relevant blog post quickly.

How to identify categories and tags?

This is known as designing the blog taxonomy – identifying unique categories and tags that will be used for all blog posts.

There are two things to consider:

• The greater the number of categories and tags the finer grained it will be possible to set each blog post.
• Too many categories and tags can result in blog post subject overlaps which can easily results in too many low quality visitor search matches.

So the best approach is to start off with a small number of categories. These could be the main goods or services you provide or main subjects that you will blog about. It is worth recording these.

Next, create some initial blogs and categorise them. When this is done identify an initial set of tags and tag these blogs.

Finally, review how the blog categories and tags are distributed and make any changes.

Thereafter, as you create new blogs try to use these blog categories and tags unless there is a good reason not to.

NTL (now Virgin Media) installed the first broadband connection in the UK in 2000. Since then the number of connections in the UK has grown to 18.3 million.

In the last 10 years broadband has changed the way we live and work be it shopping, holidays, home working and everything in between.

The next challenge for broadband providers to increase network speeds. Today only people who live in high density conurbations enjoy high-speed internet access. The rest are stuck in the internet slow lane, particularly those who live in rural areas or a distance from their local telephone exchange.

Over 2.75 million homes cannot get broadband of a minimum of 2Mbit/s. Next-generation broadband holds out the promise of even more revolutionary ways of doing things so the imperative is for network providers to deliver high speed internet access to everybody who needs it.

As people increasingly expect ‘always on’ availability to information businesses need to consider how they will respond to the challenge of meeting information consumers demands and doing business 24/7/365.

It’s where people look for information about your business before making contact. It extends your marketing reach and increases business opportunities.

A website is a key tool in marketing your business

• Customers. It may be the first point of contact many people have with your business.
• Marketing. It extends your business marketing reach and allows you to compete with larger businesses on equal terms.
• Business growth. No website represents loss of business opportunities.

Key Points

• It’s where people look for information about your business. It informs them about you, your products and services.
• It engages with clients or customers. It supports your sales by allowing people to engage with you informally before making contact.
• It maintains business focus. It clarifies your business drivers. Underlying a successful website is a clear vision of where your business is now and how it will develop in the future.
• It’s a cost effective marketing investment. You can connect with clients and customers when and where they want.
• It has measurable benefits. Through website traffic analysis, it’s easy to identify which pages or goods and services are popular and what people are searching for.

In the race for new business is your website a competitor or a spectator?

Your website has to deliver 4 things

1. Attract and retain visitors. Through creating search friendly results that promote visits.
2. Display and navigation. Display correctly on popular web browsers and with intuitive site navigation.
3. Content. Content must be interesting and relevant.
4. Call to action! Encourage visitors to undertake a transaction – to buy or contact you.

Consider the following in relation to your website

• What is your website doing? Is it actively promoting your business?
• Is it current? Like traditional marketing material, websites require regular updates to reflect both changes in your business and buying trends.
• Are you converting visitors on your website? Every visitor to your website is an opportunity for a transaction. Is this happening?
• Where do you appear in search engine results? Search engines constantly improve their search algorithms and your competitors improve their websites. Where do you appear?

1985

In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in dotcom. That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon.

1997

It took until 1997, well into the internet boom, before the one millionth dotcom was registered.

2010

Today 668,000 dotcom sites are registered every month and the internet is part of the fabric of everyday life where people shop, connect with friends, book holidays, be entertained, learn new things and exchange ideas.

An estimated 1.7 billion people, one quarter of the world’s population, now use the internet. There are 53 billion requests for websites, not just dotcoms, every day, about the same number handled for all of 1995.

2020

By 2020 that figure is expected to grow to somewhere between three and four quadrillion.

Why Invest in a Website?

As has been said before, if you’re a business and you don’t have an internet presence you effectively don’t exist because it’s where people go first to find out about you.

Business marketing messages, information, products and services shape a website structure. Identifying the information architecture is the process whereby all these elements are brought together. The process identifies the major web pages and how the site will be navigated for intuitive browsing (website usability).

To design the information architecture requires a knowledge of the business. Business First is the process to gain knowledge and understanding thus ensuring the published website reflects the business marketing aims.

Large Websites

The larger the website the more important it is to review the information architecture to ensure information is placed logically within it, and to ensure there is room to expand without significant website redesign.

Reflecting Your Business

One important point worth noting is that the website information architecture should reflect the way visitors see your business from the outside, and not how your business in structured internally.

Simply, a website that has a set of administration pages that allow you to change the site’s content via the same web browser you are using to view this site. CMS and WCMS are generic names for all websites that have this type of administration interface. It is found on services websites (such as this), eCommerce websites and blogging websites to name a few.

CMS Administration and Updating

You administer the site through a web interface; adding, deleting, and changing content, together with adding new web pages and menu items.

No special software is required on your PC to manage your website, and the website management tools are easy to learn.

Finally, you can update your site from anywhere on the planet, providing that is, you have an internet connection!

Blogs fall into two basic categories; personal and business.

The aim of of a blog is twofold; to build an on-line community to give and receive information and secondly, to enhance your web presence as search engines love blogs because they represent active content.

Blog websites can be installed either standalone or integrated with a business CMS website solution (like this one).

For a professional installation, the ‘look and feel’ of the blog site should be consistent with the main website so that switching between the two is seamless for the visitor.

Business Blogs

A business blog is an informal way of marketing your business, ideas, goods, and services.

It allow you to inform visitors about new business developments, create a buzz, and seek feedback on ideas for new products and services.

Blogs are often run in parallel with other social media routes to market, for example, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Personal Blogs

Typically an informal on-line diary used to express your thoughts and gain feedback from others.