Fiona Lockhart is a massage therapist and bodyworker, who will travel to your home and office, and make you and your body feel better!

She offers a very professional service and therefore needed a website to communicate that, she is also quite individual so a template website would just not reflect her personality!

Fiona Lockhart’s website

One important factor was that it needed to work well on a mobile phone, so this is a “responsive” website. What does that mean? It means when viewed on your mobile phone you don’t have to keep moving the screen about to read all the copy, you just keep scrolling up.

Fiona is very pleased, what do you think? www.fionalockhart.co.uk

One of our customers, whose website has been up and running for a while, sent us some lovely comments the other day.

This was from Steve Traill, of Cornish Leaf and Coil Club, which is a club that meets up once a month to go off-roading in the most atrocious driving conditions, and seem to like nothing more than being knee deep in mud!

The Website is doing everything we wanted it to and membership & participation at events has grown by about 60% since it’s been up & running.  Time is, as ever, in short supply but thanks again for everything you have done for our Club.

We are delighted that we  helped the Club expand.

Nowadays a lot of people focus on getting good results on Search Engines, but the most important function of your website is to keep your customer, or potential customer satisfied. That may include telling them small snippets of information. Here is a example.

My friend Di and I always go off out for the day to celebrate our birthdays, and we have always fancied going to the Smugglers Cottage Tea Room at Tolverne. So before our chosen day we hunted high and low to find their website and relevant information, it wasn’t easy but we found it. Yes it was all settled we knew how we were going to get there and even decided what we would have to eat. Apparently they do a yummy cream tea.

The morning of our trip we again checked the website, all was fine and off we set, travelling via the King Harry Ferry and ready to walk alongside the side of the River Fal, in a bid to burn a few calories ready for that cream tea. However we happened to notice, as we got off the Ferry, a blackboard telling us that Smugglers Cottage Tea Room was going to be closed that day due to a Wedding!!! We were both annoyed and upset, had we known this information beforehand we were had gone elsewhere, surely it would have been quite simple to have put on their website that it would be closed due to a private function.

However it was bizarre because we ended up in Mylor where we had our cream tea (although served in a mug), but there was a wedding taking place, yes you have guessed it, they got on a boat and had their reception at said Tea Room!

A lot of websites nowadays have a Content Management System (CMS), this means you can edit your website easily, and in your own time. However do you compress your photos before uploading them onto your website?

Nowadays the resolution of Digital Cameras and Mobile Phones means the quality of your photographs can be very good but produce large files sizes, which is very good for print but not so good for websites.

Most CMS systems will have a compression facility to reduce your photos, but the original file sizes are still stored in your web space and can also have an impact on how quickly your website page loads.

So my easy tip?

Go into iPhoto, click on the photo you want to upload, then go to “Share”, and select “Email”, iPhoto will then scrunch it ready to email and open it up as a message, grab the image onto your desktop ready to upload. The image above was originally 3.5mb, it is now 250kb and more than adequate for any website.

To conform with EU Law On 26th May 2012, all UK websites will need to comply with the new EU E-Privacy Directive 2009/136/EC. Cookies are only a small part of this directive, and whilst you are still allowed to use cookies on a website, it must be made clear to visitors to your site that cookies are being used.  A message or warning must be displayed so that the visitor is aware of them.

What this means to you.

Most websites have a cookie installed on it called Google Analytics which gives you information on the number of people visiting your site, which country they are from and the browser they use to view your site.   To collect this information a small file of letters or numbers (a cookie) is installed on the viewer’s computer, which relays information to Google to collect this data. Other cookies store  information that make browsing a site easier especially on another occasion as it will remember your details from a previous visit.

If you find this information useful and wish to continue using cookies then you must inform each visitor that these cookies will be downloaded to their computer and they must be given the option to refuse or accept.  Along with this acceptance a page must be included detailing the policy regarding cookies on your site.

You are responsible to ensure that this directive is implemented on your own site and failure to do so can result in a fine of up to £500,000.

We have used two options  which can be viewed:

1st option at  www.janehooper.com
2nd option at www.hoopergraphics.co.uk

If you do not require Google Analytics or use any other cookies then they can be removed and this directive will not apply.

For more information on cookies read the following from the BBC

To date the Government is gong to miss the 26th May deadline in updating all their websites!!!

I found this really good article today by Hewlett Packard all about Strong Passwords. It gives some excellent advice about how to make a password both memorable (in other words you don’t write it down anywhere), and also not easy for hackers to guess.

I have lots of different passwords for lots of different uses, so I will definitely be taking this advice on board.