Rake Mark Website Design – Where Did Our Name Come From?

Rake Mark Website Design in Stafford - photography by Sarah Brassington

We have been asked recently where our company name came from, so we have uploaded a page on our main rakemark.com website but also thought a quick blog article would give you all a good insight to our brand and company.

Rake Mark is a website design company based in Stafford, Staffordshire and is owned by Philip and Sarah Brassington. The web company started out it’s days about five and a half years ago, trading under the name of ‘Sapientia Media’ (which is Latin for wisdom) but we soon discovered that the name was being used by other companies so we set about finding our very own brand and what was to become one of our USP’s (Unique Selling Points).

We had thrown around dozens of ideas but nothing had really made us think ‘Yes, that’s the one’, until that is, we visited the bottle nose dolphins of Florida. It was whilst on this holiday in early 2006 we were fortunate enough to swim with these creatures and where we found out about the “rake marks” on their skin.

So what exactly is a Rake Mark?

Rake Mark’s are sets of parallel scratches/scores in the skin of a dolphin; these arise when dolphins fight, play and flirt with each other and are common especially in wild adult male dolphins.
These marks are usually shallow enough to fade with time as new layers of skin grow, but show clear evidence that the dolphin’s are meeting and interacting with other dolphins.
As these marks are created by the scraping of teeth on skin they are not uniform in any way and each and every dolphin will carry a different set of marks, making them individual and unique.

Rake Mark Affordable Website Design

Individual and unique, is how we feel about our company and the services that we provide. We firmly believe that quality website design is achievable at an affordable cost to you, making it an effective part of your business marketing plan.

Yucca Lodge’s Content Managed Website: Six Months On

Yucca Lodge launched their new content managed website six months ago today. Rake Mark Web Design was proud to be the website developers and we were really proud to be launching this site with Barry and his team at Yucca Lodge

Website Design Brief for Yucca Lodge

Barry asked Rake Mark to create a website that showcased his key product lines, which are Yucca Plants, Cordyline Australis Plants and Indoor Palms. It was also highly desirable to rank on Google within the geographic location of Stafford and Cannock in Staffordshire for searches related to the business and products. Also ranking was requested for the mail order side of the business.
Using natural pale greens to highlight the fresh organic side to the business with woody green and brown colours from the provided logo, the Rake Mark team set to task with the website design. Rake Mark was also tasked with writing the website copy and to provide images from our extensive image library.
The copy required a number of meetings with Barry to fully understand the product range and potential search terms that users may put into Google. A list of pages was agreed and the type of content that these pages should contain.
The image requirement was particularly difficult to fulfil as there were limited images within the library of the different plants in a nursery section. There was insufficient budget to hire a photographer so it was decided that Rake Mark would take the images themselves.

Website Success? The Proof is in the Eating

The website was well received by the client, Yucca Lodge with very few design edits required. The copy was spotless and remained without edit. The site was built on the highly popular WordPress Blogging and Content Management System. Although this CMS may be seen as limited, but for ease of use it is very hard to beat.
Regarding Google Listing, below are some results taken manually from www.google.co.uk on 29th May 2011
Search term / Rank Yucca Lodge: 1 Mail Order Yucca: 1 Mail Order Yucca Plants: 2 Mail Order Cordyline: 1 Mail Order Cordyline Australis: 1 Mail Order Indoor Palms: 1 Mail Order Kentia Palm: 1 Mail Order Areca Palm: 8 Yucca Plants Stafford: 1 Yucca Plants Cannock: 1 Yucca Plants Staffordshire: 1 Cordyline Australis Stafford: 1 Cordyline Australis Cannock: 1 Cordyline Australis Staffordshire: 1 Indoor Palms Stafford: 6 Indoor Palms Cannock: 1 Indoor Palms Staffordshire: 1
There is still work to be done to maximise Barry’s site but apart from the well crafted copy on launch there has not been an ongoing Search Engine Optimisation project for this website. The results above have been created using Rake Marks approach to clean code, fast loading time and well crafted website content.
“The Yucca Lodge Website Design Project was exciting and interesting. The real challenge was to maximise the budget and deliver ranking in Google without an ongoing SEO project.” said Sarah Brassington, who led the team from Rake Mark. “The results of this web project that we have released today shows how small business website design doesn’t need to cost the earth to be very effective.”

Social Media Giant, Twitter, Buys Tweetdeck for $40 Million

The social media company, Twitter.com, has finalised the sale of Tweetdeck for $40 Million in a mix of cash and stock, According to reports from CNN. The deal is yet to be officially announced, but there has been speculation that this deal would be done for some months with reports from TechCrunch estimating the sale being between $40 Million and $50 Million

If this deal is confirmed then it will re-enforce Twitter’s new focus on either downplaying third party apps or owning them. They seem determined to own Twitter’s key interfaces and platforms and have, in the past, purchased iPhone application Tweetie and have partnered with photo add on TwitPic.

Twitter On the Verge of Social Media Explosion

Although Twitter are a social media giant and some larger businesses have manged to utilise the platform for social media marketing, smaller businesses have often struggled to genuinely raise awareness of their products and services using Twitter, even when Facebook has been utilised successfully. With each acquisition that Twitter makes it seems more likely that Twitter is more likely to become accessible to the marketing efforts of smaller businesses.

Recent personnel changes, with Jack Dorsey replacing Evan Williams as Twitter’s head of product, it seems that a sense of urgency is being adopted by Twitter to create a sustainable business plan and that will have to involve small business.

Rake Mark Director, Philip Brassington said, “$40 Million, if this reported amount is correct, is a high price for the app and demonstrates both the penetration that Tweetdeck has and also the determination of the Twitter management team to build a profitable business model.”

Twitter has effectively paid near double the amount bid by rivals Ubermedia, who reportedly offered $25 million in February for the popular tweet management system.

Search Engine Optimisation: Matt Cutts Advice Part 2

A couple of weeks ago Sarah posted an article about an old interview that Matt Cutts gave to USA today about search engine optimisation. In her post she highlighted the article as a great layman’s guide to SEO. It only struck me later that an interview about the ever changing world of SEO was just as relevant today as when it was given three years ago. How could this be?

Search Engine Optimisation: The Basics Just Don’t Change

For all the much publicised changes of the last few years to the Google algorithm (Caffeine last year and more recently, Panda) and for all the new methods that are written about improving your ranking, the basics just don’t change. New ideas on how to fool Google (known as black hat techniques) are written about all the time, but either they don’t work, or Google gets wind and updates the algorithm.

If you need convincing then read the original article and compare this advice to the advice that Google is advising on its webmaster blog and webmaster guidelines today. Not much if anything has changed. Things changed often in time gone by but Google is pretty stable in its recommendations and now has been for three years (at least).

There are loads of articles written on SEO all the time, so if there is nothing new to report are they all saying the same thing? No, (well some of them are) but blog articles on SEO tend to be about nuances or ideas to tweek your sites SEO rather than where to get started.

Other articles talk about black hat techniques, ways to fool Google into ranking your site higher than it otherwise would be. These ideas may work for a while, but sooner or later Google changes their algorithm and without any notice, your site disappears from Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) for ever.

So now is time to throw away your black hat google book, stop with idea of the month. Learn the solid SEO techniques, practise them well and climb the rankings.

Fab New e-Commerce Website Coming for Green Book Reseller

10p Books, the green second hand book reseller and recycler has announced it is to go online. They have selected Rake Mark, a Stafford based website design company, to build a new e-commerce websiteto help them grow their second hand book business.

10p books started out after one of its founders moved house and had boxes and boxes of books that they knew they would never read again but were in perfect condition. It seemed a waste to just throw them away into the landfill and decided to give them away.

They told us, “It was difficult to find anyone who wanted this volume of books, so we decided to set up a sort of business come community project where we store the books and then sell them either in person or via mail order from as little as just 10 pence each to cover the costs.”

The website is due to take four to six weeks for the full consultation, website design and development process. A decision on a go live date will be announced later but is expected to be late August.

Sarah Brassington from Rake Mark said, “We are really excited to be building this website. 10p books is more of a green community project than big business. Most of their books come from donations and are then sold for just 10p. A great idea we are looking froward to supporting”

Money for Nothing? Pet Care for Raptured Believers

A Christian Fundamentalist was reported saying the world was coming to an end over the weekend. It didn’t (phew) but the story on the BBC featured an enterprising guy and although I like to keep religion and politics well clear of my business life I had to share this with you.

You hear about claims like this all the time and this seemed no different, but the real point of interest in this article was the aforementioned guy who offered pet care to those believers who were to be ‘Raptured’ and wanted someone to look after their pets once they had been taken up to heaven.

According to the BBC article he charges $135 to look after those pets left behind and is reported as tell the Wall Street Journal that they would be disappointed twice, “Once because they weren’t raptured and again because I don’t do refunds.”

No matter what your beliefs, that is pretty funny and very enterprising. Why can’t I ever think of those kinds of ideas?

Transfering Domain Names

Over the years we have bought, transferred in and transferred away hundreds of domain names. While it is ridiculously simple, it does have to be done correctly and in a synchronised manner for a smooth successful transaction and this is often the downfall amongst the less experienced.

About Domain Names

A domain name is simply a user friendly ‘pointer’ for your website address, for example www.rakemark.com is the domain name for our blog but by typing in the IP Address [89.248.50.235] into the address bar will still get you there it’s just not easy to remember and a lot less pretty Domain transfer … as simple as ABC

A Transfer Away, The Push: To transfer your .co.uk .me.uk and .org.uk domain names away to another provider,
Log-in to the current registrar of your .uk domain name control panel (you may have to ask your provider to do this for you) select your domain name and manage. Go to the ‘Domain Transfers’ and change the IPS tag to [NEW IPS TAG], save and Checkout.
Done!

B Transfer in, The Pull: To transfer a domain name into an existing account, Log-in to your Control Panel and select Transfer Domain. Enter the domain name that you want to transfer in to your account and click transfer and checkout.
Done!

C Synchronise: Synchronise the push and pull. Once the current owner has updated the IPS tags then the new company should, within a reasonable length of time, request the name. Once the update of the tags occurs (the push) then the request (the pull) the transfer is complete.

Very Simple, All Done!

*A word of warning, if a change of IPS Tag is instigated and a request is not made for the domain by the new IPs, the domain name may become inaccessible to both companies.

A .com .net .org .info .name .biz transfer has a few more steps but don’t let it put you off, you just need to request from the current provider an ‘authorisation code’ to complete the transfer of the name. You will need the ‘authorisation code’ to complete the pull element of the transfer.

Remember to make sure that the domain is in an ‘Unlocked’ state, and you should keep all the emails to and from those involved in case an issue arises.

*these are based on 123 Reg transfer instructions however all name registrars are very similar and transfers work on the same basis of ‘Push & Pull’.

E-Commerce Websites: The ‘One Click Checkout’ Web Myth

I am a big fan of urban myths, Mythbusters and snopes.com, so when a friend told me a story about Amazon attempting to Patent ‘one click checkout’ I had to check it out. The story was as follows:

Amazon introduced a one click checkout system on their online stores. The system takes all the card details and address details of a customer and then when they are browsing the Amazon store they can simply press the one click checkout and the item is paid for and on its way.

Amazon decided that they ought to patent this idea. They filed all the paperwork and the patent was progressing and then the Internet community got wind and got very hot under the collar, the feeling being that this business process was too broad to be patented.

Then, as the protests grew, some bright spark noticed that others had already invented one click checkout before Amazon and once evidence was presented the Trade Mark was awarded to the other mystery person and Amazon was not allowed to use one click checkout anymore.

The Proof offered was that there is no one click checkout on Amazon.co.uk any more.

Investigating the Urban Myth

Obvious place to start, the Amazon.co.uk website. I seemed to remember that there had been one click checkout but I couldn’t remember seeing it recently (which is how this ended up on my radar). Unfortunately, the it was confirmed as a myth straight up. I had to log in to the secure server, but once I had one click checkout was there.

So where did this come from. I had to know, so I Google searched “one click checkout patent”

This threw up all kinds of interesting tidbits. The story seems to be that Amazon was using one click checkout and successfully applied for a patent in 1999. Straight after the patent was granted they sued a major US competitor, Barnes and Nobel. It was settled and Barnes and Nobel use the one click checkout system. Also Apple were the only other company that the one click system is licensed to.

Then our story takes a twist. In 2006 a New Zealand actor became annoyed at Amazon and their slow book delivery and decided to dish out some revenge. He dug up old patents that were filed before Amazon’s one click patent and applied for a re-examination at a cost of $2520 (an expensive way to show your displeasure in a delivery service).

In 2007 the broadest parts of the claim were rejected by the US patents office but other elements were confirmed. So a partial victory for both sides. A few years of legal stuff went on with revisions being filed by Amazon until the amened patent was confirmed by the US Patents office in March 2010.

So the Myth is partially confirmed, there was a legal challenge to the patent which led to a re-examination with previous work being cited as the reason for the challenge but Amazon do own a patent for one click checkout in the US. Amazon applied for Patents in Europe but they have never been granted.

What This Means to Your E-Commerce Store

I’m not aware of any e-commerce software that has a one click checkout feature, mostly due to the difficulty for smaller businesses in safely storing card details for any length of time. So if your are an SME then this will be the prohibitive factor.

On a wider scale of things, Amazon own the patent in the US for online stores that utilise a shopping cart system. This is quite normal for most stores, so these stores won’t be able to integrate one click checkout.

However, a mobile app that wants to allow users to press a button and buy, essentially make one click to buy, no other cart system will be in place and this will be permitted. This is the biggest key to the change, the future of mobile shopping.

Incidentally, talking of the future, the Patent runs out in 2017 anyway, so not that long until we can all use one click checkout if we want to.

Website and Facebook Scam: Osama Bin Laden Video is Bait

Rik Ferguson, director of security research at Trend Micro, has been writing on his blogabout the widespread use of fake Osama Bin Laden death footage as a new bait in an attempt to infect victims computers.

Since the Al Queda leader was shot there has been a number of scams being reported that begin with an opportunity to view the video of his death. The latest report from Mr Ferguson is directly related to infection via Facebook, the social media website’s Chat Application.

The chat message is “Watch the video of them killing Bin Laden” and is accompanied by a link. The link is to a website where you are invited to copy and paste a link into your web brower. The link is a piece of web scripting that calls a second scripting file.

Mr Ferguson writes, “The second file enumerates all your friends and sends them chat messages, creates an event to which all your friends are invited and continually updates your facebook status. Meaning that the video link is immediately posted to your facebook wall”

It is through this automated sending and posting that has sent the scam viral.

Facebook: Scam Central on the Web

Facebook is fast becoming the number one place for computers to become compromised. Where email was the number one place for viruses ten years ago, Facebook has picked up the mantle and is now carrying it forward.

The principle is the same as the old email scams. “The subject line of the email would entice the recipient to view an image of the latest celebrity in an uncompromising position. “ said Philip Brassington, Director of Rake Mark solutions. He continued “ The payload would be contained in the image or the link to an image and we have the same tactic here.”The offending JavaScript file in this instance even contains the line “var eventdesc = ‘Hey everyone, \n\ fb now lets you see who viewed your profile! to enable this feature, go here! -” suggesting that this represents nothing more than a rebaited trap.”

Mr Brassington said, “More and more companies are looking at filters to prevent employees from accessing Facebook at work. Not so much for the time spent on the Facebook website instead of working, but because of the security risks it poses.

Online Marketing Advice: Be Careful Who You Listen To

According to a sales rep from Yell I was talking to last week, you are “53 times more likely to be on the Google front page with a video than without”. And that is why you should commit additional money (about £1000 and £100 per year thereafter) to your Business Information Page (BIP) on the Yell.com directory website.

That is a direct quote, I wrote it word for word and then read it back to them so I could be sure that I had it right. As a uni grad my first question was, “What’s your reference?”, or in lay mans terms, how do you know that’s true. They didn’t know where it was from or why it was true, just that its true (not very helpful).

Exploring the Claim

A quick Google search will reveal a whole bunch of websites that use the claim but none of them actually use a quote or directly cite anything, they just attribute the “53 times more likely” claim to Forrester Research. One or two mention a blog post by Nate Elliot from Forrester, but this blog never makes a specific 53 times claim.

Since the person who made the claim didn’t know where it came from I decided to email Forrester directly and too my pleasant surprise, I got a very helpful reply.

Becky Anzalone, a citations specialist at Forrester research, told me in an email that the “53 times more likely” claim is based on research that is only available to clients. I found that it is available to purchase for $199. So, for me, if you didn’t buy the research you really shouldn’t be citing from it directly. And if you had bought it, you’d know where it came from

Furthermore, Forrester have an 18 month citation policy. What this basically means is if a published paper or blog article is more than 18 months old then they do not permit citation from it. This may be because the research they do is in a rapidly changing field, namely the Internet, the web and online marketing and the like) so once a paper is over 18 months old then the research may no longer be relevant.

The research that the “53 times more likely” claim is made is from November 2008, which is two and a half years ago. So even if we had the full research paper in front of us and we were persuaded by its data and its arguments, the relevance of this research will have depreciated so much over this time that even the authors don’t want it cited.

Ms Anzalone did kindly send me the quote but also asked that I did not cite it. I intend to keep my end of that bargain, so you’ll have to take it on blind faith that the quote with the “53 times more likely” claim in it that was sent does not prove it to be true and not something to base a £1000 purchase on.

If you don’t believe in blind faith, feel free to buy the article.