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.

Tools like Twitter, Stumble, Digg and Facebook are no longer ignored as passing fads or fashions.  Youtube is up there heading towards Google traffic in terms ofvolume of searches, and Facebook is now reaching incredible numbers of website visitors around the world.  (Two of the guys who rowed in this year’s Cambridge / Oxford boat race certainly did quite nicely out of it!)

Social media certainly looks like it is here to stay, and the interactivity, which allows users to comment on, rate, and publish their own content instantly online makes this an extremely powerful medium.

I’ve heard a lot of things about a lot of social media recently, one of them being that Facebook will soon be approaching over 1 billion members.  Seems a big number to me!  Whether there is any truth in it or not, the fact is still the Facebook is now a massive part of people’s online experience.  A lot of people say that twitter is reaching the top of the curve and may even be on the downward slide, but it is still a huge part of what people do online every day, every hour and every minute.

Bearing all the above in mind, it certainly makes sense to provide as much interactivity as possible on your own website or blog.  There are many tools available to enable you to integrate these types of services on your own website with the minimum of technical knowledge.

A couple that I use on my own site and blog (Bournemouth Web Design) are:

1. add this-is a tool that with the minimum of setup allows you to place an icon on your website or blog, which will enable visitors to share your content via websites such as Digg, Facebook, twitter and buzz.
2. disqus -this is another kind of social media hub that I came across online, which allows you to pull commenting from your blog or website, and link to your Facebook, twitter and other social media accounts instantly.

the debate about whether social media is beneficial for any business website now seems to be a non-debate, it just seems to be a question of which particular social media is best for your particular business.

it’s not just a case of choosing the right colours, which complement each other.  You also need to think about whether colours should be in relation to each other on the screen.  There are a number of things you can do, that will help when it comes to selecting colours for your new web design.  Sometimes it’s just a case of trial and error to discover a combination that works well for the client you’re designing a website for.

If there is a primary colour that exists for an existing clients logo or current web design, then you’ll be able to use this colour as the primary colour and adjusted slightly, to give your secondary colour by making it darker or lighter.this is a very simple way to get started in terms of developing a colour theme or swatch.

there are a couple of websites that are particularly handy when it comes to choosing colours one is called colourschemer.com and the other is called templatemonster.com.  These are websites that I came across whilst watching a video on mlwebco.com.  This is also an excellent video with some very useful information with regards to choosing colour schemes and swatches for your web design.

see more details at our Edeli portfolio page.

I’ve had a few performance issues myself over the years (with my PC, with my PC…) and the following has helped me.  But let’s be realistic – I’m running a Windows 7 x64, quad-core PC with 6Gb Ram and 2.5 Tb of drive space Raided up.  Illustrator CS4 still takes 15 seconds to boot.  Read how I sped it up a little.

1. Check your hardware – if you’re running an old 486 with 500 Mb of hard drive, then it’s just a sit and wait (forever) game!  Illustrator CS4 has minimum requirements of 2Ghz Processor, 1Gb recommended Ram, and 2Gb drive space for installation alone.  You might get away with less, but it’s more likely to limp like a retired old Lassie with it’s teeth missing.  Read more on the Adobe site for Illustrator CS4 System Requirements.
2. Scratch disk – yes, you can set this up similar to Photoshop, if you have 2 drives, and it helps with speed.  Go Edit > Preferences > Plug-ins & Scratch Disks.  Set your Secondary to C:\ (or wherever you have Illustrator installed) and your Primary to your ‘spare’ hard drive.
3. Fonts – Now, I’m sure plenty of us have done it.  Trying to find a nice new font to use on a project, and we accidentally download 10,000 free fonts for Illustrator!  On my machine, Illustrator went from 15 seconds to about 5 minutes on boot.  You can revert your fonts to the standard, Windows-installed fonts.  Caution is required here though.  First I created a ‘Font_Backup’ directory on C:\, and copied all my fonts over from C:\Windows\Fonts.Then I went through C:\Windows\Fonts and selected (Ctrl & click for multiple selection) all the fonts I didn’t want, and hit delete.  If you make sure to do the backup copy first, you know you can get them back if you need them.  If you open Illustrator for one of your projects, and it complains about a font being missing, you know to got to C:\Font_Backup (or wherever you chose to copy them to) and copy the font back to the Windows Font folder.
4. Display – if you have your Display performance cranked up, and Illustrator’s limping, then you can crank it down in Edit > Preferences > Units & Display Performance.  Look for the ‘Hand Tool’ option, and slide it over towards ‘Faster Updates’ to improve performance when you’re dragging artwork around your workspace.
5. Thumbnails – in the Layer palette, thumbnails are used to make identifying Layers easier.  To increase performance, go to the flyout menu at the top right of your Layers Palette, and select Panel Options.  Then de-select Thumbnails for Layers, Groups or Objects as you see fit.

Any other comments or tricks about improving the performance of Illustrator are welcome here, so if you have your own, feel free to comment.

How to find a Bournemouth web design company?  There are the traditional options of  finding businesses: the Yellow Pages, Thomson Directory, calling the operator (now 118 118 etc) and asking for a web design company in Bournemouth.  You can also try asking around, friends or colleagues you know might have come across a company who have produced a web design in the Bournemouth area for them.  And recommendations always have been and always will be a great way to make new connections.  Of course, we’re looking for a web design company here, so you might even be able to find one by searching Google.  It’s a long shot, but it might just work.

We’ll be following up with a quick run through on the sort of qualities you might want to look for when choosing a web design company.