Axon Birch

Stockport Business Awards

axonbirch — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:14:49 +0000

Save the date! October 4th 2012 will see the first Stockport Business Awards ceremony.

Axon Birch are delighted to be working with the Stockport Business Awards team to develop and implement their website for this prestigious event. We look forward to the launch on 26th January at Adidas in Stockport.

http://www.stockportbusinessawards.co.uk/

Love High Speed

axonbirch — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 10:52:09 +0000

What they wanted

The talented team at Love High Speed were referred to us by a mutual colleague in the Media Industry as they needed a new website to reflect their specialist services and expertise

What we did

We developed and implemented a content managed site and built them a sophisticated bespoke piece of software called “preview theatre” to allow them to approve media clips while on the move, on an iPad/Blackberry/iPhone. We also provide hosting services for both the website and application.

www.lovehighspeed.com

Aim Legal Expenses

axonbirch — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 10:11:40 +0000

What they wanted

Aim Legal Expenses needed a fresh new look for their site, and a content managed system.

What we did

We worked closely with the staff and team at Aim to meet their requirements to deliver a professional WordPress website to promote their comprehensive services

www.aimlegalexpenses.co.uk

Growing Stronger

Rachel — Wed, 25 May 2011 13:37:37 +0000

Article taken from the MEN – Greater Manchester Business week. May 2011

Website and software development specialist Axon Birch is one of the many firms to have started up in Salford over the past decade and continued to grow. The company, based in Salford Quays, is celebrating its 10th birthday with a 30% increase in sales. Its team of 5 at its office, in The Pie Factory based at MediaCity UK, provides web hosting services.

Axon Birch develops bespoke software for businesses operating in a variety of sectors- from the creative and media industry, wholesale and distribution companies through to the engineering and local governments. Stockport brewery – Frederic Robinson, (Manchester based) television post-production company Sumners and the Salford Roman Catholic Diocese among its clients.

Director Julie Finch says: “This year is a milestone for Axon Birch and it is testament to the hard work of all the team that the company has grown by 30% over the past year.

“There have been plenty of challenges over the past decade but the last 12 months have been the busiest we’ve ever had. We offer a great deal of flexible packages and thats one of the reason we’ve continued winning clients.

“We regularly receive feedback from clients saying that our website and software has made a huge difference to their business.”

Quick overview of really useful Design Patterns

chris — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 15:49:47 +0000

Design Patterns capture a common combination of computer code; code that creates things, code that’s in a certain structure or code that behaves in a certain way. These Design Patterns help to solve common problems in similar structured ways, enabling programmers to get to a solution faster, communicate their ideas with other programmers quicker and write code that is more easily recognised and understand by others. So here are a few of the well known design patterns that we commonly use.

Observer / Observable (structural pattern)

The best example is the spreadsheet. Think of all the cells and calculations as business logic and data (the model) – this is the observable bit. A line graph, a pie chart or a pivot table all subscribe to the Observable model as Observers. When the model changes, it goes through it’s list of Observers and tells them it’s been updated.

Observable { addObserver(), notifyObservers() },

Observer { notify() }

To extend this to Model View Controller (MVC), think of a GUI interface. Windows, OSX etc. have, as part of their operating system, a windows and pointer interface. The OS acts as a controller, intercepting any mouse clicks or other mouse events (over, move etc.) and then deciding which part of the model is to be given the mouse event, e.g. which application is in the foreground. The application (model) updates itself and then notifies when it’s complete and it’s windowed display updates.

Struts and Spring MVC are also implementations of Observer / Observable, with the extra controller bit. The web request comes in and (in Spring’s and Struts’ cases) a servlet is used to dispatch the requested to a delegated controller (spring) or action (struts). The controller should do very little except marshall any data from the request and then call the appropriate model method. Upon the model’s return, a view can be rendered, usually only one. In this respect, MVC breaks the Observable idea because the controller is responsible for deciding which view to return, rather than ALL views being updated because the model has changed. This is mainly due to the single thread of I/O between a web client and web server. However, the view type is decided during the request and a html, PDF, excel, video etc. view can be returned.

Singleton (creational pattern)

It has a private constructor, so it can’t be instantiated directly. Instead, a static method creates the object. This static method first checks to see if a static variable already has an instance of the object, if so it returns it, if not, it creates the object, sets it in the static, then returns it. Ensuring only one object of that class can ever be created in the application.

Factory (creational)

The factory pattern normally consists of a Creator interface and a concreteCreator implementation. It’s often used if you want to create the same sort of things but in different ways. The Creator interface will have one or more methods that create objects, E.g. CreditProcessorCreator has methods createLoanProcessor() (returns a LoanProcessor object), createOverdraftProcessor() (returns an OverdraftProcessor object) – A concrete instance of Creator can then be used to produce these objects but they might be configured in different ways or the actual objects might be subclasses. E.g. WebRequestCreditProcessorCreator produces objects that are created and listen to incoming web requests for their data. MessagingCreditProcessorCreator produces objects that are configured instead to listen to data from a messaging queue.

Builder (creational)

Another creational pattern that’s used to construct complex objects. In a reporting application that generates overnight survey result summaries, a Builder is used to create the different bits of a PDF document. For example, a PageBuilder, with methods: buildTitle(), buildChart(), buildSummary(), buildKeyResults(). This means that a PDFPageBuilder creates and builds a PDF document. There could also be a HTMLPageBuilder that does the same but creates HTML output instead of PDF. There’s a ReportDirector that doesn’t care about HTML or PDF, it just needs the appropriate builder to be passed in and the report data needed by the builder methods.

Composite (structural)

Very important one this. It’s a pattern for “belongs to” relationships. For example, an employee has a manager, who in turn has a manager etc. This can be put into a single table in a database, with an employe table having a foreign key to another employee row (the manager). However, Hibernate (an Object to Relational Database Mapping System) doesn’t allow for any mappings that refer to itself. It can’t be done. The composite pattern provides a neat way of getting around this.

Using a shop as an example, there are categories, sub-categories, sub-sub-categories etc. and products that belong to a category. Categories are the Composite and products are the Leaves.

Both the product (leaf) and the category (composite) has a shared super class, Component. In our shop, we call this an Item. So the product is a type of item and the category is also a type of item. Our category (composite) maintains a set of Items (components). This makes our outputting our shop contents very easy because every item has a title, description and an image. So for any given category (composite), we can get it’s set of Items and display them. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a product or a category.

In the database, we have an Item table and a product table, with a foreign key to item and a 0 or 1 relationship. In the category table, we have a foreign key to the item, with a 0 or 1 relationship AND another foreign key to Item with a 0 or many relationship. So the tables don’t refer to themselves and we don’t have the hibernate self-referncing problem. It’s a bit more complicated but we get to distinguish between Products and Categories very nicely too.

Strategy (behavioural pattern)

Using the same interface to process objects in a different ways, for example, in orderProcessing, you might wish to process pre-orders, orders-in-progress and completed orders in a different way, but they’re all orders.

We can setup an OrderProcessStrategy interface with it’s method, processOrder(), then create implementing classes of PreOrderProcessStrategy, InProgressOrderProcessStrategy etc.

The context that the strategy will be used in, therefore, is passed in at runtime. An OrderProcessor object may have a method: processOrders(OrderProcessStrategy) – this method will fetch all orders but use the strategy to process them. This makes it easy to report on orders in different ways and add new reports.

Decorator (structural)

A useful pattern for providing sub-classing without actually doing sub-classing. I use this all the time, very handy. The Eclipse development environment even has a menu option to create decorator methods. For example, if I want to create a specialised kind of collection. I might create an object called MyCollection implements List and set an instance variable in it: ArrayList list = null; I can then highlight my “list” variable in eclipse and from the refactor menu, choose Delegate. This will then (like getters and setters) create all the methods that arrayList has thus satisfying the implementation of the List interface. MyCollection now behaves just like an ArrayList would. However, I can now override each method with any special behaviour.

This is especially useful if you find you need to sub-class a class declared as Final. It’s also good if you find yourself breaking the Liskov substitution principal.

Facade (structural)

Kind of like decorator but pulls together many objects and puts most of their methods in one place. It means that someone programming to a complex API with hundreds of objects can just use a simple, single object interface to do all the work.

Our Anti-Spam Email Service

chris — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 12:34:22 +0000

A client recently contacted us complaining about the amount of spam he was getting, upon investigation, he was actually getting lots of marketing emails from legitimate web sites (play.com, gumtree.com etc.) but was finding them a nuisance. To reassure him, I sent a description of how we process email to combat spam and thought I’d share that with all our customers here.

As a mail service provider, we’re doing everything possible to stop spam and viruses reaching clients WITHOUT any false positives. We don’t want to block any mail that you might want to receive. So we do err on the side of caution.

The things we have in place to combat spam are

Reverse DNS lookups. Connecting Mail Transfer Agents (MTA, the external mail server trying to send our mail server an email) are checked out, to see if the IP address has a real domain name – if it doesn’t it is likely to be a virus infected computer on an adsl connection and we will disconnect the MTA without receiving any part of the email.
CBL check. The Composite Block List is a check on the connecting IP address of a mail server sending mail, if the IP address is in the CBL then we refuse to accept the mail. For more on the CBL, see http://cbl.abuseat.org – essentially, it’s a constantly updated list of internet locations that are known to be sending a lot of spam.
Grey list check. We check the email sender address to see if they’ve sent the recipient an email once before, if so, we deliver the mail. If not, we temporarily store the mail senders address and tell the sending mail server that we’re too busy to process it’s email. A legitimate mail server will resend the mail in the next 5 minutes or so. Most spam email is never resent, so the mail is dropped. This is the most effective anti-spam measure we’ve ever implemented.
Spam content database. Our mail server checks a database of known spam emails, if the email being sent to us is on there, we drop it.
Spam Assassin. This is software that uses heuristics to calculate the likelihood of email being spam. Various factors taking into account all aspects of mail (technical and content) produce a spam probability. A high probability means we drop the mail. Medium means we deliver the mail but add headers that say we think it’s spam (these are used by mail clients). A low probability means we will deliver the mail.
Virus checks. Any attachments that could cause problems or are known viruses are dropped.
Phishing checks. Links in emails are checked to make sure the link text actually does go to the URL that people see. Email scams often try and disguise bogus links to look like legitimate bank or ecommerce links.

If the email passes all the checks above, then it’s delivered to the mail box.

You should never rely on our mail service or any other to fully protect you from spam and viruses. Please research and buy a good virus and spam checking program for your computer. Whilst I am proud of how well our mail server works, I personally still get around 50 spam emails a day but my spam detector on my Macbook (part of Apple’s Mail program) puts them all in my junk folder. Every now and again, I check the folder and one or two emails are legitimate marketing emails I’ve signed up for, allowing me to mark them as “not junk”.

Three things you can do to reduce your spam count

If your email is already getting lots of spam, change your email address. Don’t pick short common names such as john@ jane@ or info@ as spammers will just guess these. Use full names, e.g. jane.p.doe@ or customer.services@ – far less likely to be guessed.
Don’t use display your email address in any public forum, twitter, blog post or other medium where internet robot spiders can scrape that email address straight from the screen. For example, if you’d like to email me, use “c” followed by “birch” at the domain of this web site. A human being will manage that but an internet robot won’t see it as an email address.
If you don’t trust someone that’s demanding your email for a service, create an alias. Services such as gmail, hotmail, yahoo and others will allow you to create an email alias, e.g. mydodgyemail@gmailer.com – then if you start to receive spam from that email address, simply delete the alias.

Concept Legal Expenses

amber — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:39:10 +0000

What they wanted

Concept Legal Expenses wanted a small content managed site that they could easily update themselves.

What we did

We worked within their defined budget and came up with a good looking, clean WordPress backed site that they are very pleased with. We trained Alex Pilling, the Administration Manager in how to use the WordPress Admin Interface and supported him along the way with any queries he had.

Client Testimonial

“Having worked with Axon Birch on several other projects, they were the natural choice for our online software provider. From inception to release and beyond, Axon Birch’s service levels and professionalism are second to none”

Alex Pilling, Concept Legal Expenses – http://www.conceptlegalexpenses.co.uk

How to setup Outlook 2003 to use our mail server

chris — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 10:45:40 +0000

This picture tutorial will show you how to setup Outlook 2003 to connect to your email hosted at Axon Birch. If you are setting up a different email client, it will be very similar.

NOTE: We only create your email domains for clients that have bought a hosting package from us. You will need the domain name information and email user names and passwords from us before you can setup up your email client software.

Step 1:

From the “Tools” menu, select “Email Accounts”

Step 2:

Select “Add a new email account”, and click “Next” .

Step 3:

Select “POP3″, and click “Next”. Note that we also support IMAP connections, but this tutorial is for POP3.

Step 3:

All text boxes on this screen must be completed.

Your Name: Enter the name you want displayed with your emails.
Email Address: A valid email address on your domain.
POP3 Server: The format is “mail.” + your domain (ie: “mail.abc.com” ).
SMTP Server: The format is “mail.” + your domain (ie: “mail.abc.com” ).
User name: Your user name is your full email address (ie: “bsmith@abc.com” ).

After completing the boxes, click “More Settings”.

Step 4:

You clicked “More Settings” which has opened the Properties pages. Click the “Outgoing Server” tab.

Check the box for “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication”, and the radio button for “Use same as my incoming mail server”.

Step 5:

Your email account has a limited amount of space. To prevent your mailbox from filling up which will then cause you to stop getting email until you clean out your mailbox, you should make sure the check box isUNCHECKED. If don’t follow this advice, then you will need to login regularly via webmail, and clean your mailboxes out.

About mailbox size limits.

It is important to keep your mailboxes file space below the amount that is allotted for your account. If your domain exceeds the file space that is alloted, the domain administrator for your domain will receive a warning email automatically from the email system. Incoming email will not be allowed into your account if you have exceed your space. This is easily corrected by cleaning your mailboxes.

To clean out your mailbox:

Login to webmail. Go through your inbox and delete the emails that you don’t need to save. You may also have a “Deleted” folder. The emails in this folder are also using your allotted disk space. You set your email to be purged instead of sent to the “Deleted” folder as follows:

Login to webmail.
Click “Settings | My Settings”.
In the list box for “When messages are deleted”, select “Delete message and purge folder”.
Click “Save” at the top of the screen.

This must be done for each email user account.

Lime Pictures

axonbirch — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 13:19:19 +0000

What they wanted

Lime Pictures wanted to be able to view all projects/ clips online and for Channel 4 executives to see rushes, rough cuts, offline edits and transmission edits from anywhere in the world.

What we did

We created the ‘Preview Theatre’ web application for Lime Pictures so that they could have controlled access to rushes, edits and transmissions for viewing over the internet as streaming files or downloads in various formats.

Spring Java Web Application Tutorial – Part 1

chris — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:23:38 +0000

This post is a tutorial that shows how to create a new Spring based Java Web Application using the Spring Source Tool Suite (STS) application (a variant of Eclipse), creating a simple application and test it using the STS built-in tomcat application server.

This is the first of 3 parts that form a complete tutorial for a fully fledged Spring based contact form application. This first part shows how to setup an initial project using Spring STS. The second part shows how to add Spring dependencies to the project and have a user post some data and the web server send a response. The third part shows how Spring’s dependency injection can be used to create email templates that send a reply to the user and a notification to the web site administrator.

If you don’t already have STS you can download the Spring Source Tool Suite for free. Once it’s installed, launch STS and from the File menu, choose NEW -> Project… Scroll to the end of the choices and choose Dynamic Web Module.

Click on next and give your project a name, ensure the settings for Target Runtime etc. are as per the image below, then click on next.

At this point we need to create the source and build folders in the preferred Maven structure. Remove the default source folder and add the folders as per the image below, then change the default output folder to “target/classes” and click the “next” button.

The dialogue will change to show the contents below. The context root field will display your project name, this will be at the root of your appliction URL so I like to change this to something shorter (less typing). Ensure you change the content directory to point to the actual web application directory, as per the path in the image below. Leave the “generate web.xml” ticked and then click on Finish.

A project and directory structure will be created for you, including the correct structure for a Java Servlet Web Application project in the src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml path.

Now we need to enable Maven dependencies on this project, right click on the root project folder in your projects or navigator window, then choose Maven -> Enable Dependency Management as per the image below.

Another dialogue will open (see below), leave everything as it is except for the “packaging” option which you should change to “war” then click on Finish.

The next step ensures that our project uses the Maven jar libraries from Maven’s repository rather than the ones in the WEB-INF library folder. Right click on the project and choose “properties”, scroll down the list to “Java EE Module Dependencies” and tick the “Maven Dependencies” option, then click OK. See image below.

Sometimes, enabling Maven dependencies makes my projects in STS forget that they’re Java Web Applications – this means that the Java EE Module Dependencies isn’t listed in the property options for the project (as above). If this happens, open the .settings folder and double click the org.eclipse.wst.common.project.facet.core.xml file which should open in an editor window. Ensure it has the same (or similar) attributes as the image below.

Save the file. Errors will still be showing on the project, to get rid of them, right-click the project and choose “Close Project”. After it’s closed, right-click the project again and choose “Open Project”. Hey-presto, the errors are gone.

Now open the src/main/webapp folder in the project. Right-click the webapp folder and choose New -> File. Call the file index.jsp and then enter some simple HTML as per the image below.

Save the JSP.

In the Servers window (usually bottom left corner of STS), right-click “Spring Source tc Server 6.0″ and choose “Add and Remove…”

In the dialogue that opens, select your project and click add.

You should see your application move to the right hand side list, then click on Finish.

In the Servers window (bottom left) click on the Play button. If you view the STS console, you should see the application startup. Once it’s started, go to your browser and (in my example above), enter http://localhost:8080/lg/ and you should see the JSP you created displayed.

Congratulations, you’ve just create a Dynamic Web Application with Maven Dependencies.

In my next post, I’ll show you how to add Maven controlled java libraries and we’ll create a simple application that submits some contact form data and emails a response.

What’s the point of twitter in business?

chris — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 15:17:33 +0000

It seems that everyone has heard of Twitter. Even my dad was asking me about twitter and he’s a technology dinosaur, in fact my Dad said yesterday, “If the internet comes anywhere near me, I’m going to hit it with my walking stick.” I understand it’s now the law to follow Stephen Fry on twitter and discuss the interesting facts and links he turns up. Twitter seems to be a good way of sharing information. However, our customers ask, “how can Twitter get us more customers? How can it help our business?”

Why should people follow you on Twitter?

First, setup a Twitter account if you haven’t already done so. Second, start following people you know, your friends and even customers. Following someone means you’ll receive any tweets they send. What will get people to follow you? As a business, what can you do with Twitter? Twitter is all about sharing useful, funny or interesting information. Do that and you’ll get people to follow you, eventually they’ll buy from you too.

Can Twitter get you more customers?

Probably. Just as web sites have become a useful part of doing business, they are not a panacea. Being on Twitter is not going to instantly attract followers and cause floods of people to start buying from you.

If you are an online or offline retailer, use twitter to broadcast a discount code, if it’s a good discount, other twitter uses will forward it on, or “retweet” the offer. If you’re a pub, restaurant or hotel, tweet about events you have on and how people can take part, offer them an incentive. E.g. On a Wednesday afternoon whilst people are still at work, tweet, “Man Utd vs. Man City tonight, free half-time interval food”.

The important thing here is to think about how you will use twitter. In the example above, a pub can successfully entice people to it’s establishment, this is much more likely to work for city centre pubs than for rural or village pubs. Every time a pint is served customers should be encouraged to find out more about twitter, perhaps by asking if they have got this weeks twitter discount code?

You can also search Twitter for any mentions of your business name and contact your customers directly or take part in discussions about your business. You can also search for the brand names or models of products you sell, you can then take part in those online discussions too, possibly offering a better deal or service than your fellow Twitter users are currently getting. Be careful with this approach, random messaging will just make you a spammer and users will just block you from contacting them. Done carefully and in a constructive way, as part of the dialogue will capture more followers and potential customers.

Can Twitter improve customer service?

If you’re a retailer and you capture customer information, as well as getting their email address, get their twitter account too. Once you have that, follow your customers. This way you can see if they mention your products or services and address any complaints they broadcast on twitter directly. If they say something nice about you, perhaps you’d like to reward them in some way. Use a tool like TweetDeck and you can setup searches for your business name or other related keywords and engage with your actual and potential customers directly. Some Airlines, like Finnair, have successfully used this strategy to engage customers when there have been problems with flights, especially over the recent volcanic problems in Europe. Customers got better, more timely, information via Twitter than they did via airport staff.

Should you have a communications strategy?

Every business should have a business plan. Ours is now written down but it spent years just knocking around in Julie’s head and mine, desperately trying to escape and make our business better. Even if your business plan is just in your head, you’ll have thought about your marketing and how you reach customers. I’m sure you’ll have considered how often you could email them or the frequency of your telesales cycle. That’s a communication strategy. Twitter should form a similar part of that strategy. Decide how you want to use Twitter, how often you’ll use it to broadcast a message and always ensure your business messages are valuable. Your tweets should contain valuable information, offer discounts or demonstrate world-class customer service. Your strategy may be to have different Twitter accounts, you might have an account for announcing special offers, another account for general comment and information about your business or industry.

How do you know if Twitter works for your business?

Simple. Like anything in business, if you want to know how well you’re doing, you’ll measure it. Social media marketing types will throw all sorts of fancy terms at you and want to generate all sorts of reports to show your “Social Currency”. You can ignore all that. If your sales are growing year on year by 5% before you start using Twitter, then grow by 20% after you’re using Twitter, you can be confident that it’s working for you.

What can Axon Birch do for you?

We’re always full of ideas. So please talk to us, you’re welcome to these ideas, we have a million of them a day. The hard bit is making the ideas happen!

We’re on hand to help you manage your social media technology. We’re technologists, not marketing or PR people. We use computers to make your life easier, so we can help and advise on technology to aid your Twitter strategy. For example, integrating your blog directly to Twitter, Facebook and Linked In so you only publish once to lots of destinations. Tracking discount codes to ensure they’re used in a certain time-limit or that they are unique to certain individuals. For example, provide personalised discount codes to existing Twitter followers, then track those codes if they forwarded or “retweeted” to others, offer a greater reward to those people that get the most referrals.

If you are thinking about engaging someone to help with your Twitter strategy, please “10 Questions to ask a Social Media Expert“.

Probably the best online beer shop in the world?

chris — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 17:06:37 +0000

Not probably… but actually the best beer in the world, Old Tom, can now be bought online. Stockport based family brewery, Frederic Robinson, have just launch their own online shop, designed and built by us.The shop sells award winning bottled real ales, brewed in Stockport, as well as one or two other imported ales with more coming soon. You can also buy Robinsons branded clothing and gifts, there’s sure to be a gift that the real ale drinkers in your family would like for Christmas!

Using ecommerce software the we have developed in-house allowed us to customise the way the shop looks and works to meet the very specific brief we were given. The shop back-end is also tightly integrated with Robinsons back office stores, so orders can be dispatched within 24 hours if the product is in stock.

If you like to learn more about how we can help your business sell on the web, please call us on 0161 486 3325 and ask for Chris, or contact us using our contact form.

Link building spam can harm your web site rankings

chris — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:44:45 +0000

Have you ever received an email like this?

Hello,

I am Ryan the website manager for Acme Corp, we’re a great company. I was searching the web for valuable industry resources and came across your website. I think our customers would enjoy reading your site for new information and have added a link to you on our website.

It would be great if you would be able to add a link back to us. All you have to do is put the following code on your links page.

Keyword

Thank you for your time

Ryan

So why did this get my back up? Firstly, they think my web site is a, “valuable resource,” and they think their customers would, “enjoy reading the information” (I happen to agree with this). However, if it’s so valuable and enjoyable why haven’t they mentioned our web address? Why haven’t they mentioned who their customers are and why they’d be interested? Of course, it’s just spam – in this case it’s real spam with company name changed to be generic.

The email was probably sent to tens of thousands of email addresses and the author knows that if only a small percentage add the link, he’s laughing all the way to the top of google rankings.

Or is he?

Link Building was a legitimate strategy of search engine marketing in the past. It works because Google sees links from external web sites to your web site as a vote for the quality of your web content. The higher quality the web content, the higher it should appear on Google. This approach has meant that some companies have managed to get their poor web sites to the top of search engines because they’ve manage to amass a lot of links.

Google know that most people only check the first 30 results or so for a search, if you’re on the first 3 pages for common search terms, you can be certain that someone in Google is taking a look at your site and checking the content quality. This has led Google to implement technology that checks for generic Link Building strategies on web sites. Those sites that rank highly because of their link strategies alone are blacklisted. High ranking, link building strategy web sites, that have good content, often just have weighting applied to pull them back down the rankings.

What harm could adding the link to my site do? Google tries to work out what your web site is an authority on, if it sees outbound links on vastly different topics, that confuses Google and it will never work out which keywords are important. This also applies to inbound links, the links you want should come from the same industry or related web sites, allowing Google to easily work out what you are and what you do.

Link building has a place in search engine optimisation but content is king. If you have great, engaging, interesting, informative content, then the web will link to you. Social networks will discuss your articles and rankings in Google will slowly but surely increase.

Photoshop Design Resources

amber — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:44:17 +0000

These are a few of the main design resources I use on a weekly basis at Axon Birch:

http://www.psdtuts.com
http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/
http://designinstruct.com/
http://design.creativefan.com/
http://www.psdvault.com/
http://www.tutorial9.net/
http://www.photoshoplady.com/
http://www.ps-garage.com/
http://www.behance.net/
http://www.psdburn.com/
http://abduzeedo.com/

Come on in

axonbirch — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 17:18:06 +0000

Welcome to our new web site.

We’d certainly welcome any comments on the new site and the new logo. We’re particularly keen to know if it’s easy to understand what we do and find out about the services we offer. Are those services explained clearly and easy to understand? Your comments will be appreciated.

Frederic Robinson

amber — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 13:34:12 +0000

What they wanted

Frederic Robinson’s required a system to manage and update pubs and vacancies on their website, which people can access easily and enables them to find vacancies, which pubs are near them and what ameneties they have. Due to a re-branding of the company, part of the project included a re-design of their website.

What we did

We developed a ‘pubs’ and ‘vacancies’ database functionality and inputed data entry to incorporate new ameneties, as well as re-designing their website. We regularly update their site, whether its adding new vacancies or editing pub contact details. This is an ongoing project which started in November 2006.

www.frederic-robinson.co.uk

Salford RC Diocese

amber — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 10:59:43 +0000

What they wanted:

Salford Roman Catholic Diocese manage the capital budgets of 200 primary and secondary schools, they were using spreadsheets but were worried about the integrity of the data; human error, spreadsheets being accidentally deleted or mistakes introduced by incorrect formulas. The Diocese wanted an application that would meet their data integrity needs but that could also be used by the schools themselves, in order to cut down on the number of budget enquiries the Diocese handled.

Their current spreadsheet system also requires a large amount of individual effort copying and pasting data, creating statements for schools, education authorities & the government department for education, answering queries about the current state of budgets and producing statutory reports.

What we are doing for them

The new system we have created for Salford Diocese will reduce the administrative overhead in maintaining the budget data, allow schools to make their own ad-hoc enquiries via secure online access, automatically produce statements and reporting data, maintain an audit trail of data updates and backup data to secure, offsite storage. The estimated time saving for the proposed system (in person days) is; 52 days per year on ad-hoc reporting for schools, 20 days producing quarterly school reports, 20 days creating the Partnership for Schools Annual Report and 104 days duplicating data entry on invoicing and bank reconciliations. That’s 196 working days that can be spent much more productively making decisions and providing support to schools instead of performing clerical tasks. This will allow the 3 staff managing this to creatively support school building projects and spend more time applying for grants and other sources of funds.

Sumners

chris — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:43:00 +0000

What they wanted

Sumners wanted to provide a new service to existing clients and extend their market reach. Initially they were driven by pressure from their existing customers – independent TV companies & BBC – to have a secure online facility to view edits and make legal checks, as the time taken to bike tapes to London & elsewhere was too costly & time consuming.

What we did

We created the ‘Preview Theatre’ web application for Sumners so that their clients can keep track of their project’s progress wherever in the world they are. This new facility has enabled them to provide an exceptional service to their clients and has brought an increase in new clients within areas they couldn’t have reached before. We also created sound effects software, so that one machine can be used to search through all the sounds effects for the different editing suites.

Client Testimonial

“The Preview Theatre shrinks the country, executives in London would see edits four hours after they’re done, now they can see them instantly.”

Brian Hardman, General Manager

Parsley Pie

axonbirch — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 12:25:58 +0000

What they wanted

Jenny Bent already had a wordpress site but wanted it to be refreshed and modernised

She wanted a new look and feel based on her new logo she had commissioned. On her previous site, some information was hard to find or deeply nested and the pages were too long. We used the colours from her logo to shape the style of the new blog, and various handwritten elements to tie in with the artistic theme.

What we did

We met with Jenny at her studio and discussed the project. Her clear passion for teaching and art was obvious and she wanted a website to reflect this. We came up with a bespoke layout and design based on her requirements. We then integrated the site into WordPress. Jenny is really happy with the site and is very confident at editing it/adding content using the WordPress interface.

www.parsleypie.com

British Council

amber — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 09:45:21 +0000

What they wanted

An online self report system to capture current overseas student numbers in the UK Higher Education and Further Education sectors allowing secure, protected access to ad-hoc data mining.

To meet the needs of their members, the British Council have decided to implement a system to allow the institutions to add their own student data in a timely manner and then perform queries based on the aggregation of data from all HE and FE institutions.

The British Council