Our web site framework is search engine optimised and has been ranked on the first page of Google in just 2 weeks for three key phrases. VSI-thinking have also offered advice on how the website can be Search Engine Optimised. The site appears 6th when searching for Bristol Serviced Lets, Bristol Serviced Letting and Bristol Serviced Lettings. Having appeared so high on such influential keywords, the team are very pleased and have already taken their first booking.

Robert Dennehy of Bristol Serviced Lettings said, "Having approached VSI-thinking about the website for our business we were very niave to the whole thing, particularly about the PPC-advertising and how to produce a friendly, but also competitive website. It wasn't long before their encouraging words educated us and our website was produced. Throughout the whole process it's been extremely easy, with fantastic communication between VSI-thinking and ourselves. Having been taught how to use the website and make our own admendments to it, James proved a good teacher with the assitance of how to use their website programme."

He continued, "Having gained a few ideas of what we wanted, we told VSI-thinking and they produced a website that was exactly what we originally hoped for. Furthermore, it looks great, provides us with the image we wanted our business to be portayed as, is easy for us and customers to venture round, and our advertising is already proving highly successful, as we appear up high on google just days into launching the site!"

Its a difficult time for business, having a good website to promote their gorgeous food would have been a way for them to further to promote their breakfast jumbos. With businesses dissapearing so quickly in this current economic climate, it is essential to stay ahead of the game.

VSI-thinking could have helped them to promote the company, with an easy to use Content Management Solution, meaning that they could have had their menu available on their website, so that it was easier for you to phone through your orders. We also include contact forms so that you can contact the team via e-mail and could have paid your compliments to the chef(they didn't need a suggestions box). The site would have also been search engine optimised so that even if you were on the verge of starvation, a quick type into google would have returned your favourite restaurant along with the heavenly phone number.

We hope that Gorge with George is simply taking a break, as here at VSI-thinking, we are really missing our breakfast jumbos.

The search engine optimisation techniques can be seen all across the site, with a domain name and home page being created to help the search engines index individual properties. Each property now has it's own individual page name to further the search engine optimisation. The page name now includes the region as well as the phrase Properties in France. The domain name further supports the search engine ranking using the keywords customers would use to search.

With so many estate agents offering property abroad, Richard Immobilier have taken to advertising their properties on other websites such as French Entrée. For French Entrée to be able to grab the properties from the website, an XML file was produced from the Richard Immobilier site. The XML file is a list of all the properties on the Richard Immobilier site, formatted in such a way that it can be read by the French Entrée website. VSI-thinking has produced such systems in the past for Newtown Motors, with feeds being produced for Autotrader and Network Q.

With this improvement to their website, the team at Richard Immobilier are now effectively promoting their business in the search engines, a prominent and cheap place to advertise around the world.

Ian Pearson, the science and innovation minister, will tell a business conference in Leeds that too few firms see design as a priority, with only 16% seeing it as critical to their success. The minister will say: "Design is vital to a prosperous Britain... My ambition is for businesses to think of design from start-up... and through expansion and consolidation."

A poll of these firms found that for every pound spent on design at least £14 was returned in increased sales.

To see the article in full click here.

The implications of the credit crunch for web developers:

"UK consumers are increasingly turning to search engines and price comparison websites to help deal with the credit crunch and economic downturns. According to Marc Summers, a pioneer of internet applications in business and commerce, businesses whose websites do not appear on the front page of Google will miss out on this opportunity"
Roberta Murray, smeweb.com 2008  Full Article

At VSI-thinking, we will tailor and program your website so that it should appear above your competition when consumers search for keywords that relate to your; business, location, products, services you offer etc. In the search engines, our clients’ websites have ranked highly on the first page and have even been given Google Sitelinks status, whereby the entry results are expanded, to further promote their website. Furthermore, your company listing will be included in online directories such as Google Maps and Yahoo! Local, and when 86% of local searches are carried out online (The Kelsey Group 2008), this is more important than ever!

A Design Council (2008) survey demonstrates a link between design expenditure and economic performance; with studies showing that for every £100 a business spends on design increases turnover by £225. However, it is also clear that many companies, especially UK-based SMEs, are missing the huge opportunity that design creativity can offer and this is where VSI-thinking can help:

We have developed a wealth of web services and applications that can be used to inform, engage and entertain visitors to your website, such as: blogs, opinion polls, marketing databases, news and events pages, e-Commerce, interactive maps and e-mailshots, to name but a few.

and the evidence to support the importance of good design is growing all the time...

"A business that increases its investment in design is more than twice as likely to see its turnover grow as a business that does not do so".

"Two thirds of companies who ignore design have to compete mainly on price. In companies where design is integral, just one third do so".

"The more businesses use design, the more successful they're likely to be"

(Source: Design Council 2008)
For more information see: http://designcouncil.org.uk/en/About-Design/Research/Value-of-Design-Factfinder/

Is the content on your website up to date? Does it follow your current branding, and are all the facts true?

We at VSI-thinking believe in creating a website to suit your needs. Our in-house design team are happy to help you with suggestions for the design of your website and will inform you of current trends, and how to keep your website looking modern.

We don't only concentrate on design here at VSI-thinking. We also feel that it is important for you to play a big role in your website. If your business is fast moving, why not take advantage of our Content Management Solution which will enable you to update your website whenever you need to.

If you have regular business news, such as new contracts coming in and new products being added, why not consider a blog as part of your website? Our thinkingBlog module will allow you to keep your employees and clients up to date with your business. If the blog is used in the correct manner, with postings being added weekly, your site will have better rankings in the search engines.

All of our sites come with search engine optimisation as standard so that your website will have an excellent standing in the search engines from the start. Our content management solution enables you to tweak the keywords and description associated with each page, enabling you to tailor your site to particular search queries. If you want some advice on Search Engine Optimisation we are only a phone call or an e-mail away.

Our support line not only offers advice on search engine optimisation but are happy to help you with any questions regarding your website. If you have our Content Management Solution we will give you advice and help you put content in your website.

At VSI-thinking we do what is best for your business and can offer you the services on the internet to be successful. If you have any further queries, please contact us.

At VSI-thinking we have release a new version of their fully featured Content Management Solution so that you are in control of more of your website. If you want to make an update to your website tomorrow, you can place it in your website in as little as 3 clicks. Something which is perceived as being complicated and time consuming is made simple with our Content Management Solution.

Our Content Management Solution is not only limited to text, why not place a picture of your latest product on the website so that your customers will want to see your products and maybe purchase more than you were expecting. With our system you do not need to call us to place the photo there for you. Insert the photo into the Content Management Solution and manipulate its size and position just as you can in MS Word.

The only time you might need to call us is if you want some advice on how to place content in your website. We will be more than happy to help you with your website, giving you tips on content as well as search engine optimisation.

Many web development and design companies are promoting SEO otherwise known as Search Engine Optimisation. Search engine optimisation is the practice of trying to make your site top of the search rankings with big search engines such as Yahoo! and Google. At VSI-thinking we believe that this should be a simple a task as any, and we want our customers to be top of the search ranking for strong keywords in their field. The Manor in Crickhowell, part of the Taste Inn Wales group have recently used one of our Content Management Systems in a major redevelopment of their site. The team at the Manor are able to associate keywords and descriptions to their hotel, so if we do a quick Google UK search for "The Manor" their hotel returns as the 1st result. There are many sites in the UK associated with the keywords "The Manor", but through the ability to place in keywords, using the Content Management System, the team have managed to make their hotel top of the search engine rankings.

If you have a site which hasn't been updated since the dawn of the internet or feel that you're site is not a true reflection of your business, please contact us.

With the focus being on search engine optimisation, we set about our task by implementing the following points:

• Tables to divs
  Although this will not make an outstanding impact to the average user, this change makes a drastic improvement to your search engine rankings. When the site was originally built, the layout used tables, with each section of the table holding a certain amount of text. Many search engines have decided that tables should only hold information intended for tables, for example, pricing details at a hotel. Instead of using tables search engines have promoted the use of the div tag. Div elements are containers designed for text, tables and images, and can be placed wherever they are needed within the site, meaning that they are a lot more flexible.
• Page naming convention
  Search engines not only read the text in the page, but also the actual filename of the page. To improve their search engine rankings, we've renamed the actual filenames so that they contain the keywords commercial and kitchens. What we have done is taken the page name and appended commercial kitchens, and subsituted any spaces for a hyphen, so the news.asp page has become commercial-kitchens-news.asp.
• Title Tags
  Page title tags place the name of the page as the window name for the browser and are used to search engine optimise the page. What is placed in the title tags for the window is important. In addition to having title tags for the page, all links also have title tags. This not only improves search engine optimisation but also accessibility, as screen readers and other such software can pick up any purpose for the link. The title also display when you hover over the link. With the link title tags, we've placed commercial kitchens in each one to promote important keywords. We've also placed title tags on images so that they can also be read by search engines and by screen readers.
• Style Sheet Changes
  By making certain tweeks to the style sheet, we've improved the search engine optimisation of the site. The style sheet controls how the page looks when it is viewed through a web browser, and can have a great effect on how your site is perceived. VSI-thinking have changed all the attributes used for styling to use class instead of id. IDs are used by languages such as Javascript to control a certain element, whereas classes are intended to be used to control the styling.
• Accessibility Improvements
  VSI-thinking have also improved the accessibility of the site by making sure that all fonts scale in accordance with the accessibility guidelines. This means that if you are visually impaired, if you zoom in to read a piece of text, then the text will zoom accordingly. We've also placed alt tags on images so that they can be read by screen readers and improve the page ranking of the site.

We have also changed their gallery, with increasing the search engine optimisation on an important section of their website. Shine has provided us with a number of images of their high quality kitchens, and we have built a gallery to display all their master works.

I was actually quite pleased when I fried my motherboard recently attempting to overclock the CPU and RAM. Perhaps I should grow up and just buy a faster computer, but then I would have had to re-install all my software and I like my desktop as it is. I am  grown up enough, however, to have extensive backups so when I fried the board I just need a new platform and could restore from the day before.

For backups we use Maxtor Network Storage, the Shared Storage II to be precise, which is only the size of a house brick and can backup a small network of PC’s. They are ideal for businesses because they are so cheap, circa. £200.00, so we use two of them on rotation, both set-up in the same way, with one always off site for disaster recovery.

The first item on which to decide was the motherboard and this was easy. Buy a motherboard with a half decent integrated graphic chipset. You can check out the chipsets with sites like techreport.com for detailed specifications. As long as you have a plethora of ports (USB, Firewire, Card Readers) and the front side bus is above 500Mhz, the platform will be fast enough for WinXP along with web developement tools.

Selecting a processor is such a difficult task. There is rarely a time when the processor market pauses for breath. Now is a particularly busy period with Intel’s quad core supremacy being challenged by AMD. Intel look set to hit back early next year so the only advice in buying a processor is fix your price point and buy the best value. The PCPro performance/cost graph illustrates the best processors for a particular price bracket.

When buying RAM it is important that you double check you motherboard / RAM compatibility. A site like ValueRAM is invaluable in establishing the necessary choice of product. Once you have the correct type you simply need to decide on speed. A recent comparison test by PCPro showed very little difference between RAM speeds in benchmark tests. In terms of real world performance you would notice no discernable difference.

Finally you need a fast hard drive. Personally I have no affiliation to any drive manufacturer. Therefore, all you need to know is buy a drive with a spin speed of 7200rpm or above. And that is it, apart from a few hours to assemble the bits and install drivers and download updates. I just wish I had more time to do this more often.

Whilst Philip is a serious golfer, the rest of the party are all best described as enthusiasts. Except for Dom however, who played some magnificent shots worthy of a handicap a lot less than the stated 28. We played the Roman Road course and lost surprisingly few balls considering this was the course for the Wales Open until last year. Nigel also played some sterling golf but the day was won by Dom scoring 31 under Stapleford rules.

The clubs house at the Celtic Manor championship course is a great place to relax, where we took some lunch and looked out over the Severn estuary. The weather making the view so clear you could see across to England. The party finished the day with a tour of the Ryder Cup 2010 club house. Everyone was impressed with the decor and facilities, together with the amazing view of the course and Usk valley. Those lucky enough to play a round here will spend more time looking at the scenery than the course, it is a terrific setting.