Internet Blackout – SOPA and Protect IP

It’s an incredibly busy start to the year for us here at frag.co.uk; but we’ve just got time to make you aware of an important event on today, 18th January. There will be an INTERNET BLACKOUT on many websites. Wikipedia, Reddit and many other sites may be unavailable. These sites (along with ourselves) are campaigning … Read more

Legal Bank Robbery

Our sincere apologies for a lack of content these last few weeks; but as usual, with the run-up to Christmas we’re quite busy with client requests and preparing for the new year. However, in the meantime; we’ve found a recent post of BoingBoing that may be of interest to our readers: Eminent neuroscientist Moran Cerf … Read more

Ten More Algorithm Changes from Google

Google make around 500 changes to its search system each year; some are minor changes, but some have huge impacts on your sites’ search position. Possibly one of the most important changes is a focus on fresh content; something that has been featured in the Official Google Blog; As we announced just over a week … Read more

The Evolution of the frag.co.uk Snow Screensaver

frag.co.uk Snow 2011 screenshot

In November, approximately 16 years ago, I gave myself the challenge to write a screensaver in time for Christmas. It gave the effect of falling snow over the desktop, at varying speeds and including wind and various speed settings. Each snow particle was to be stored individually, and contain it’s speed, colour and trajectory. It … Read more

ZenCart, Magento and poor SEO – solving the issues

Pixel Ovenmitts from JustMustard.com

We’ve been working with JustMustard.com on a very special project involving ZenCart eCommerce software. JustMustard is an online retailer and wholesaler of a variety of very strange and very awesome gifts and presents. We really enjoy working with them. Plus we really want some Pixel Oven-gloves. However, ZenCart is viewed with both praise and disdain … Read more

Good Marketing Strategies and Techniques vs the Bad

All websites aim for a high conversion ratio; and if you have a high number of visitors but a low take-up rate or high bounce rate; it may be time to review your marketing techniques. The wiki site, Dark Patterns, discusses the different techniques used in marketing – focusing on the bad, but also giving … Read more

Best Practice for Next/Previous Pagination in Search Engines

Most developers will come across a need for paged content; perhaps for products on a website, or for long articles; but how is this best done for search? Google have recently announced more support for previous/next pages, and have offered two options; Using the <link> tag in the <head> container, to ‘Canonicalise‘ the individual pages … Read more

Googles changes the operators

Screenshot of Google error - replaced the plus operator with quote marks

If you’re a regular user of Google, I’m sure you’re familiar with the plus operator. It’s used as a tool by power users to narrow down results to ensure words will be in the search results. If not, you’re probably familiar with Google rewriting your query to try and help your results; most commonly this … Read more

SSL Google won’t be sending you queries

In a fairly unexpected report, Google have announced that SSL will be enabled for a number of users by default. Along with GMail, secured by default last year, and Twitter and Facebook providing secure versions as an option, Google will be introducing secure searches to users over the coming weeks. Google have provided a secure … Read more