Our widescreen TV’s, credit cards, and field of vision are some of the manifestations of this ratio that we all know too well.  Come to think of it, I’d bet the last half bottle of Asahi I’m drinking now, that the smile of a beautiful woman on a glorious summer’s day, also conforms to this ratio.  My wife’s smile, of course.

We don’t need to work it out for ourselves, we get the math done for us with this cool golden ratio tool.

There is a bit of a movement on at the moment – with a lot of bloggers wanting to remove the no-follow from links on their blogs.  I’m not quite sure what the stats are at the moment – I presume most WordPress blogs are still no-follow, seeing as that’s how it comes out of the box.

What was the internet all about to start with?  Let me think here a minute…yeah, linking to other sources of information!  That was it!

PR sculpting and blog spam are regularly cited as a couple of the major reasons most blogs and bloggers started using no-follow.  I haven’t noticed any let up in spam with no-follow applied – I don’t suppose spammers check for this….and most of us would probably have more luck with an ice sculpture than attempting PR sculpting…

Down with no-follow, I say.

We’ve been using Akismet on our blog now for some time, and it does exactly what they proclaim.  It stops spam.  If you’re into web design or blogging online, and have your own blog, or run one for your company, this is a great time-saver.

Fed up of having to manually delete all the comment spam from your blog?  Akismet is your guard-dog, and a pretty loyal one at that.  Down in (not so sunny today) Bournemouth we’ve had this little puppy guarding our web design blog comments for a couple of months – and not a lot gets past it to be honest.

It’s dead easy to install on your blog – see the Akismet anti-spam website for more details.

Now, while he didn’t know what “SEO” meant or how it could help his business in Bournemouth when we first started talking, it only took a moment for him to learn that search engine optimisation is the process of getting a website noticed in the search engines.  There has been a big turnaround in the last few years – this chap actually asked me about his website – nowadays I’m not so shocked, but a few years back in this part of the world, you couldn’t have given free websites away with a case of beer to most skilled tradesmen & women!  They just would not have been interested.  Now, most people in the area have an idea at least of what a website is, what a search engine is, and have at least heard of search engine optimisation and/or online marketing.

And of course, anyone out there with the time, and the inclination, can now find a wealth of resources out there to help distil the years of seo-juice into concentrated seo-fuel!  Google Webmaster tools are provided by the guys over at the big G to try to clarify what to do, and what not to do when optimising your website.  Some good pointers here, and a great place to start if you’ve done a little web design and online marketing.

Also the guys over at SEOmoz have been pumping out some sweet SEO resources for a long time now.   This blog is updated regularly with articles and resources covering a wide range of search engine optimization topics.  They also run the odd seminar too if you like to get your geeky-butt out once in a while to meet ‘real people’!

Another place it seems daft not to check out from time to time is Matt Cutts’ seo blog – this is for many people the human face of google – while other employees at google do publish (for example see Greg Grothaus video or presentation on the implications for duplicate content related to seo) the guy that people are most familiar with is Monsiuer Cutts.  He’s been running outreach from Google for donkeys years now, and there is a ton of information over there on his blog.  While he won’t tell you how to a top search engine position in Google tomorrow, he will tell you the ‘stoopid-stuff’ to avoid, the best practices that Google and other search engines like to see, and how to avoid getting kicked out of Google for bad seo.

Very little done to the graphic design of the website over the last week or so – we’ve got to the point now where we’re reasonably happy with the graphic theme, so it’s just been tightening up here and there, and losing what isn’t needed to prepare for the fresh content to be uploaded soon.

The blog itself has had a little customisation done now to the header image, individual page formats, tags and categories shown etc.  We need a bit more tweaking here yet, but it’s coming on nicely so far, and is starting to mirror the bournemouth web design well, while still maintaining a different, ‘bloggy’ feel.

The tweaks to the website and the blog should be ready by the end of this week for us to upload some more fresh content for the website and start online marketing in earnest!

Well, customisation has started on the Pure & Simple Web Design Blog, based here in sunny Bournemouth.  It may be a little while coming, but by Jove it will be worth it!  With a little work, we should tie in nicely with the main Bournemouth web design website in the coming weeks!