Dcruize

Thanks for the feedback - I missed a little off my original post. He wants to use Mailchimp to send the email with the reply to address as his gmail. I really wish I didn't have to be dealing with this, it's a very valuable account yet he is a nightmare! I think the best thing I can do is to leave him to it. The mailshot is already written and ready to launch, I'll explain the dilemma and legal issue - if he wants to login to the account and hit send it's not my responsibility!

I have a client who is married to an MP - I manage their Mailchimp account and they have a distribution list of about 5000 email accounts. The husband wants to use this distribution list to send out a personal email (in his name) discussing his political views. His physical address and phone number will be shown (suicidal in my eyes...) and it would come from his personal email account. Firstly, is this spam? He's sending it as himself not as a business. Secondly, if I was to agree and it turned out this was spam, would I be held legally responsible? Thanks in advance.

The first image on your company's homepage looks remarkably familiar, why didn't you hire a photographer? Assuming businesses who use stock images are not taking their online presence seriously (akin to using a high school student) feels a bit elitist. Of course it is best to use a real photographer whenever possible but there are times when it's not practical to do so (especially when dealing with non-tangible services). Blog posts/news items are perfect examples - you need a quick decorate skyline image to accompany an article, do you a) send a photographer up in a helicopter or b ) grab a stock image? You could argue for "c) neither, if it's not needed don't include it" but that's a different discussion altogether!

Many thanks Jane, I'll give them a try if I can't convince clients to go down the real photographer route! For added laughs make the following change; "On a serious note I think Ill get myself a decant camera phone in the future and get real photos."

Totally! Especially for unusual topics such as wig-making

I agree it's better to use a photographer, but what do you use when the client is selling non-tangible services? :/ Personally I think editorial-style images on websites are over-rated, I hate the way the web is moving towards video content and slideshow crap like this http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_are_all_questions_answered_in_a_slideshow?#slide=1 .

The alternative they suggested to the right-click disabling is to cover 33% of the image with text. I'm amazed they can get away with such vague and unenforcible nonsense. Define 'text', can I theoretically cover 33% of the image with text done as an overlay blend at 1% opacity? I've wasted half a day going through all my clients sites and adding a pointless right-click blocker to stock images, I think I'll start spending more time trying to convince clients of the benefits of using a photographer (or stick to sxc.hu...). Are there any other decent free stock image sites people use? On the positive side it's given me something to blog about!

Hi all, is this common knowledge? I woke up feeling paranoid about stock images for some reason so I started reading through the Shutterstock license agreement. I've skimmed through it before but I must have missed the following; [uPDATE] After speaking with SS it appears as long as you ensure typical users can't download the images via right-click you'll be seen as adhering to the license agreement. Better get a quick bit of jQuery up and running...

Even though they gave me a quote over the phone, GoDaddy aren't offering .fr registration services anymore. I'll see what the client wants to do, other places are charging £60 a year for .fr admin-services - fr.domain.com suddenly sounds a lot more tempting.

Problem sorted, I've just got off the phone to GoDaddy who offer a trustee service free of charge for the Swedish, German and Spanish domains. The woman I spoke to thinks there's a fee for acting as an admin contact for French domains, which makes sense cause the French seem the most OTT with regards to domain registrations. The other two sites I found but didn't get around to using were http://link.net and http://comlaude.com. If anything goes wrong I'll whinge like hell in this thread - if anyone has the same query and finds this next year, no comments = it all went smoothly!

Hi everyone, I'm looking at registering Swedish, French, Spanish and German domains, but am being held back by the conditions of requiring a passport/registered business in the respective countries. I may be able to get around the French one (client has a prospective reseller lined up), but .FR, .SE and .ES will be problematic. Can anyone recommend an intermediary company who will be able to act as the 'local' admin contact? I've found one, EuroDNS, but I know nothing about them and am a bit cautious of using them. The last thing I want is a pile of invoices and a cancelled domain! Also, does anyone know how Google handles '.se.com' domains? Would it be treated as a Swedish domain, or does Google just see it as a .com? Thanks in advance!

The > indicates that there should only be a match when an element is the direct child of another element. It might be easier to explain the differences with a bit of code. <body> <div> <div> <p>Hello</p> </div> </div> </body> Here are four different lines of CSS and how they affect the output; body > div > p { color: red;} = Hello (no match, color not applied) body div p { color: red;} = Hello (it matches regardless of the second div before the p) body div div p {color: red;} = Hello body > div > div > p {color: red;} = Hello

Do you mean you're designing a site that will be either 960px or 890px wide?

Yep, embedded adsense and a press announcement stating "we've decided that websites using Dart are generally better than ones that don't, so SERPs will reflect this".

Hi and welcome to the forum!

This was the scam, by opting for cheap postage from one of their promotion deals you're signing up for a voucher service. I especially like the damage-limitation comments they make on threads like this. I'd used them to get a branded t-shirt and some pens made for a friend's birthday and the quality was ok, but I haven't seen what their business cards are like.

lol brilliant. I've only had dealings with VistaPrint once (part of the infamous vistaprint scam where they took almost £600 before I realised and had to phone the Caribbean to get the money back) - I'm not exactly a fan of theirs, even if it felt like a bit of a windfall at the time!

Last week I did a massive restructuring of a site (using 301s) and have dropped from 1st page to #240 for regional searches. The only things I changed were the physical structure and link targets. Two days ago I appeared briefly at #8 then bombed back down to the 190s. So yep, restructures hurt even when you use 301s :/ As you said, it's just a matter of waiting for Google to catch up, but it can be pretty scary!

nofollow does seem to do something for SEO - I created a link on a random site with a made-up word as the anchor text. That site is now #1 for the word, with the site I linked to as #2. So Google does recognise the anchor text being relative to the linked site, but I have no idea what value it gives it. I'm guessing it will be a value so tiny that it's not worth the wear/tear on the keyboard to type your address, but perhaps Google are getting so good at spotting spam links/behaviour that they're beginning to feel confident in giving a value to non-spammy comments. I doubt it though, if a webmaster wants to link to a site without promoting it, surely they should have that control.

Nice... No, a huge part of having a successful site is seo AND cro. Of course you need to work on conversions, but how are you going to convert traffic if you're up against established competition that is forcing you into a page2 SERP? You're not getting any traffic! Get traffic to your site, THEN optimise for conversion. It's not like SEO and CRO are mutually exclusive. I'm about to start doing some work with a bridging loan company - PR1 site with a handful of backlinks and no social networking, who is failing to get into a top#50 SERP for their county. The site needs massive amounts of recoding, but the content/design seem good. They are up against serious competition from established, national companies. Currently, clients they get are through offline networking and recommendations, so they want to start getting clients online as well. Problem is, nobody appears to be visiting the site so we can't even look at bounce-rates etc. Do I; a ) panic about the low CR and work on a strategy of converting as many of the visiting spammers/bots into multi-million pound loan investors b ) recode the site, get social networking/backlinks going, THEN start looking at CRO (since GA will probably now show some stats we can look at!) My point is, you should pay a lot of attention to CRO when you have a site that people can actually find. At that point by all means stop playing with backlinks. For start-up companies or those moving online for the first time, you should pay a lot of attention to SEO and networking/backlinking, 'cause converting 100% of 0 visitors into customers is a lot worse than converting 1% of 1000 visitors a day. Surely that's the bigger picture that you talked about? I honestly can't believe that I've had to qualify my initial post of;

Agreed, but whether or not your site inspires trust and confidence isn't directly related to the method you used to hit #1, especially if you're promoting a new business vs established competition. Sorry if I'm not putting my point across clearly, I'm really not part of the camp that thinks good SERP is all you need. Sites should be optimised for search engines as well as people (ie good organic SEO, brilliant content etc) - SEO+PO perhaps? You could create the greatest site in the world for your niche, but in my eyes, until you've established a reputation or marketed heavily offline, people won't find you without a good SERP, which makes it harder to get that reputation :/

Why would the visitors not buy the products? They haven't followed a backlink - they've performed a search and clicked the site at the top.

Who cares as long as Google sees them as trustworthy links and increases your SERP? I don't see why you think so little of SERP when it has such a massive impact on traffic coming from search queries.

*Edit* Please delete, not in the mood to argue

Can't really rely on getting visitors to turn off HTTP1.1 each time they visit the website in IE4. It's some sort of redirect issue I guess, the site works fine on a webfusion VPS and in WAMP, so a PHP conf issue perhaps?