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Well, perhaps they have no time to think about a website if they are growing fast, either way they are missing out on potential business and the benefits a website can bring by streamlining business processes and generating new sales.

The research by BT Business analysed the websites of the Real Business Hot 100 and found that almost half of businesses are losing potential customers through missing webpages 404 errors.

Overall less than 4% of the firms had optimised their website for search – seo, and over 40% had poor use of meta tags (title, description, keywords), if so few high growth firms have optimised their website, this might give you some idea of the opportunity available. Use optimisation to get top listings and trump competitors. A relatively small monthly investment in optimisation and social networking can pay very good returns and increase web traffic significantly.

Rubber Dragon offer a selection of search optimisation packages for businesses including keyword and traffic analysis, copywriting for search, domain setup, meta tag amends, social networking, online promotion and link building. We can pretty much guarantee to increase traffic to your website based on previous experience and track record, checkout some of our other posts about online promotion to see case studies.

The research was carried out for BT Business by Latitude and covered the websites of the Real Business Hot 100, a list of the UK’s fastest growing private companies from realbusiness.co.uk.

Excellent Defence of WikiLeaks Afghan War Logs

Julian Assange responds to increasing US government attacks on WikiLeaks in this interview on Democracy Now! Well worth listening to. WikiLeaks recently released the Afghan War Logs 2004 – 2010, they provide a devastating picture of the failing war in Afghanistan where hundreds of civilians have been killed by coalition troops. See also the Guardian investigation into the Afghan War Logs.

Visit the Stop the War Campaign to take action against the war in the UK.

swindon brunelTop Ten Swindon websites you should register with to improve your local online presence.

Whatever you might be looking for the chances are you are looking locally, and connecting with local customers is key for most businesses too, which is why local online advertising is so important.
With a thriving economy, Swindon has more than it’s fair share of online news websites and directories offering a host of online advertising opportunities for local webmasters. It’s also worth remembering that the big search engines, Google, Yahoo, and Bing all display local search results and allow website managers to add listings for free.

The Swindon Advertiser includes a trade directory but the free listing includes only a company name and telephone number. Weblink (together with description, address and service listing) is available for £156.

Swindon Link Magazine, offers free text link ads and placement in their business directory to advertisers, banner adverts currently available for £20 per month.

OpenSwindon.co.uk offers free weblinks, banner advertising starts at £50 for one year.

Swindon Web, £180 a year for a link in the A-Z directory, banner advertising from £420 a year or £35 a month.

Swindon Business News, targets business users in particular, banner placement available.

Swindon Directory at swindon-directory.com offers free links and free banner advertising for a short time and The Swindon Directory at theswindondirectory.co.uk also offers free listings, though the interface is a bit clunky.

Gumtree Swindon, probably the best place for local classifieds, and is also handy for link building.

Touch Local and The Best of Swindon are really nationwide websites with a focus on local search.

So, off to work now, prepare your website details and try to visit as many of the above websites as possible to start improving your search traffic. Oh, any websites we’ve missed? Do please let us know!
Photo at the top features Brunel who helped put Swindon on the map when the town featured as a major junction between Bristol and London along the Great Western Railway.

HostingRails.com offer some very good hosting packages at excellent rates, but unfortunately their technical and support team seems to be challenged by Reverse DNS issues.
Reverse DNS is sometimes used by email servers to verify that an email is being sent from a real address, if the reverse DNS doesn’t match up with the correct domain name / ip address, the server assumes that the email is spam and rejects it.

Reverse DNS Email Error – An Example
www.polandtrips.co.uk is hosted on the HostingRails.com server.
When sending emails from somebody@polandtrips.co.uk, some of the emails bounce and we get the following message from the Mail Deliver System: The message has not yet been delivered to some@emailaddress.com, Delay reason: SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM: : host smtp1a.netintelligence.com [62.128.193.98]: 451 4.1.8 Possibly forged hostname for 74.63.12.156

Why is the Email Rejected?
We aren’t exactly sure and still looking into this issue, but …
polandtrips.co.uk is hosted at 74.63.12.156,
reverse dns ptr for 74.63.12.156 = finney.hostingrails.com
but the DNS A record for finney.hostingrails.com is 74.63.12.189, possibly that’s the source of the problem, the fact that those IP addresses don’t match up.

Response from HostingRails.com
We have sent multiple support tickets regarding this issue. At the beginning of April they wrote, “The reverse dns is not something we can change… In any case we are upgrading/moving everyone to new servers in the next few weeks so this should stop being an issue when that happens.”
22.04 they wrote that a ticket had been submitted to the DNS team to further investigate the matter, but we didn’t hear back from the DNS team.
30.04 the web server was down for a few hours : / apparently they were switching servers.
19.05 they are saying that the VPS (virtual private server) is different from shared hosting and that’s why the reverse DNS isn’t working.
20.05 HostingRails.com have confirmed that they do not offer reverse DNS services on the VPS. However, they have offered us the prospect that it may be working soon, another migration to new VPS software apparently next week! Fingers crossed, watch this space!

Cool DNS Tools
MX and DNS Lookup Tools at www.mxtoolbox.com
Excellent DNS tools and article on how Reverse DNS works available at www.dnsstuff.com

HostingRails.com Ownership Change?
Seems there are further reports of difficulties with HostingRails.com services. See this report,
http://osdir.com/ml/RubyonRailsTalk/2010-05/msg00531.html

Have been over this issue a number of times so decided to do some research and lot depends here on the fuel used and the quality of the stove, but the fact is that wood burning stoves can greatly reduce your fossil fuel emissions and they can save you money at the same time most depending on the source of the wood fuel.burning wood
If you are able to source wood from sustainable source, like managed woodland, then the amount of carbon dioxide emitted is the same as that which was absorbed during the trees growth, so the process is sustainable. Even better if you have access to waste wood.
Additionally, many wood burning stoves available today have special systems to reduce emissions.
Is a Wood Burning Stove for Me?
If you are thinking of installing a stove, there are a few things to consider, you need dry space to store the wood, you should have a flue and chimney with sufficient air movement and you need to comply with building regulations and smokeless zone regulations.
Potential Savings
With cost of a standalone stove together with installation starting at around £3000 (without any major building alterations) a saving of £500 per year (feasible if you have a good source of wood fuel) can cover the cost of the installation in just 6 years.

Beautiful Sunny Day Cycling in the Park

country park cycling
It was a beautiful sunny day, we are out on our bikes to a country park playing frisbee by the lake, taking photographs and not taking anything seriously : ) carefree, like the first day of summer.

After a good few years and a number of reincarnations, our online tshirt shop has finally been put live at www.wickedtshirts.co.uk offering original unusual tshirt designs, genuine fair trade tshirts. At launch we have just 27 designs available in three categories of tshirt, tattoo tshirts, fruit tshirts and asymetric tshirts (whatever that means).tattoo tshirts
The response has been muted, of course some of the designs are liked when we have asked people, but without any whauuu, we’ve had no response from web users and still waiting for our first sale, but traffic has risen from next to nothing to an estimated 200+ visitors this month. I’m still not sure on the design, would like to make some changes (actual tshirt icons along the bottom), navigation isn’t obviously intuitive and we should do some photo shoots showing the tshirts in action.
We aren’t running Wicked Tshirts as a business yet, it’s more an experiment to illustrate how we can build interesting, functional and effective websites. Wicked Tshirts uses our photo gallery solution and plugs into online payment so it’s easy to use for displaying products and selling them.
Apart from the website interface, we need to get some better tshirts done, I’m thinking some mismatch colour patches with elements of gold and silver, calling it colour kitsch, something completely unusual and different, but it’s massive market out there, hundreds of established online tshirt shops already in the game.

It's Not Money that Makes Us Happy

A while ago a good friend of mine gave me a book, The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton, in it there was a piece about Epicurus, a greek philosopher who proclaimed (already over 2000 years ago) that it isn’t money which makes us happy, but that the key things to happiness are Friends, Freedom, Time for Reflection and the Basics.

Was reading a blog today by Mark Boyle, the founder of The Freeconomy Community, seems they are implementing some of these ideas today, worth taking a look at.

Rubber Dragon goes Twitter

Our Twitter account finally comes alive. Testing it out to see how it works as an online promotion tool. http://twitter.com/rubberdragon

Thinking in Education

One would think that thinking in education is something that goes without saying, but of course there are different approaches to thinking and learning about how we think and using tools to help us think is a whole field of science in itself. Kestrel Education are a consultancy offering training, support and guidance to enable schools to build a culture that supports quality thinking and independent learning. The website was designed in cooperation with another designer and built with a content management system to allow an administrator to easily edit content and add new workshops, training events and locations.

Kestrel offer a ground breaking approach to teaching thinking tools and strategies to students.Visit the website to find out more about thinking skills.

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