Blog posts written by Mike

Top ten SEO tips
Since we are always asked about SEO whenever we have a new website being built for a client, I thought we could share some top tips on what you can do which wont cost you anything and are simple to follow.
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To what extent is Brexit affecting our businesses?
Lets all just stay positive and keep busy with our own internal business improvements until a decision is made and we can all finally get on with our business lives!
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How green is IT
The industry is undergoing a dramatic growth spurt since the 2000 .com boom contributing about 0.3% of global CO2 emissions.
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Payment Service Directive AKA PSD2
Also known as the Payment Services Directive 1, it was a European Union directive designed to regulate payment services and payment service providers in all EU and EEA Member States.
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The importance of fresh content for your SEO
From the obvious like writing regular blog posts and articles to the not so usual like allowing comments on your pages it all goes towards making your site more popular in the eyes of the search engines.
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How speed affects your website
Google as well as the other search engines will take the loading speed of your site as a factor when ranking your website on their search engines.
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CYBERSECURITY But do you feel secure?
In a world with fast-growing advancements in technology (at an exponential rate) we find ourselves delving deep into the cavern of the cyber world.
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TRUSTPILOT RATING EXCELLENT!
Excellent 5 star TrustPilot multi award wining website design company, covering Central and North London areas for over 19 years
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Magento vs Shopify
Choosing the right solution for your own business needs is a daunting process to say the least. Everyone will give you their own opinion, which does not necessarily reflect your price and expectations of your individual online vision. So here are some questions to consider before taking the plunge.
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Is your WordPress website GDPR compliant?
Update your privacy policy page to include the latest requirements. Be sure to include a line stating that a user can request all of their personal data be removed/updated or a copy of what you hold on record a copy of which can be requested.
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What is an apprenticeship?
Tired of being stuck in a classroom? What is an apprenticeship you ask? Not sure if university is the right option for you? Not to worry! If you are age 16 or over there is the fantastic opportunity of gaining quality, practical and on the job experience in the working sector of your choice WHILE […]
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Long, Lost Logo Lookalikes
As more and more companies are becoming popular, more logos are being designed in the process. This has lead to some strangely-similar logo designs. Similar looking logos have been spotted from the book “The Alphabet in Design: Trademarks and Symbols of the World” (published in the late 1980s) and gained popularity through social media such […]
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IconBuffet – Free Icons, Stock Icons, Custom Icon Design
I was doing some spring cleaning in my folders and stumbled upon my old sets from iconbuffet, anyone remember iconbuffet? If not here is a brief explanation that was written after some research was done after the site died. …the once-popular social web site Iconbuffet.com dedicated to collecting and sharing web icons has been languishing […]
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45 Free fonts for graphic designers
This is another round-up of some of our current favourite free fonts. We present you with a nice and varied selection of free fonts. Including scripts, serifs, and a range of ligatures. These fonts will give you greater flexibility in your mockups, and add to your toolbox of typography. If you use them in a […]
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What’s it like to work within a web design team
Webdezign is more than just a company that makes fancy webpages or complex systems.
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Websites with Free Stock Photos
With cameras now being predominantly digital, everyone can take pictures and lots of people are happy to share those with others.
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Florian Csizmazia – das Junior Developer
Born in Vienna I started to develop my skills in web design and development in kindergarten. Building websites for Nike, Coca Cola and Starbucks at the age of five was not as thrilling as you might think and so I went for a bigger challenge...
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Using the new Google plus badges
I just wanted to download the Google+ badges and update the graphic on my site, not become a developer or learn how to connect my facebook login with the google+ hangout...
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Peter Persiel – Our guy at SAP
I’m Peter and I have worked for Webdezign in 2012 for about a month. My hometown Luneburg is located next to the lovely Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.
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New responsive website launched… finally!
Building your own website when you are a web design company is like the mechanic who drives about in an old and battered car that is for ever being scheduled to be fixed up, but never does.
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Florian Malapel – le French Resistance
I’m Florian Malapel, french dude born in the North of France in 1993, I always been interested by everything which concern computer science.
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Top 10 reasons why your web design should be responsive (RWD)
If you have heard or read about responsive websites, but don’t believe that your site needs to be updated in this manner, you may be missing out.
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Magento E-commerce For Fashion Retailers
Industry experts are in agreement that Magento has the ability to save time, allow you to offer a more engaging service to your client and it can help your firm to save money, due to the open source nature of the platform.
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10 Mac Apps/Utility tools to help with web design and development + windows
We all have our little gems that we use to save us time and minimise repetetive tasks in our day to day work.
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Matthias Knoll – Website Designer to Developer
To finish my course I had to do a one term internship. I always wanted to live abroad and this was my chance. I sent out about a 150 applications for internships and as luck would have it, Mike Yan from Active Webdezign replied and offered me a place.
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Web designers in London
Our team of web designers in London who founded Active Webdezign fifteen years ago have all been able to evolve and grow with the company thanks somewhat to its location.
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Ed The Intern doing work experience
What happens when you have a London lad and three web designers in the office while the boss is away? We had Edward visit for work experience a few weeks ago and we tasked him with creating a promo video for webdezign.
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Zsolt Hari – The Hungry one
I am Zsolt from Hungary, and no I am not hungry. :) I worked in London for 6 months in 2007 as a junior programmer.
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Andreas Paech – The english student, AKAI
My name is Andreas Paech. I was born in Berlin 1993, but grew up in the area of Lüneburg. I was (unfortunately) only in London for six weeks from March to Mid-April 2013.
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Lebinh Ngo – Our Food Taster
Hi I’m Lebinh Ngo, I am a multimedia designer born and raised in London. I have always been passionate about new media during my teens, mucking in and customising my social media pages. Creating fan sites, interactive CD roms...
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Alex Mardapittas – Our man in China
I'm Alexis Mardapittas. I worked at Webdezign for about 1yr? I've lost a lot of my memory since then.
Editors note: that was in fairness all the way back in 2003-2004.
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Luke Williams – The Young Gun
I'm Luke Williams, a North London-er born and bred, and I first joined Active Webdezign on a two-week work experience placement in 2006 when I was 16. I'd been making websites since I was 11 so it made sense to pursue...
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What lies beyond Webdezign?
I've decided to try and track down some of the web designers and web developers we have had at Webdezign over the years I've been here.
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How to Create an impressive WordPress Gallery on your site
Nowadays, there are countless websites out there ! Some websites clearly stand out and attract more and more visitors every day.
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How to setup your domain’s email in Gmail
We had a client in this afternoon who was wondering how to setup her email; hosted with ourselves, in some kind of email client. She found the webmail installed on the server hard to use, a very common complaint.
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Benefits of building your website in London
It has been fifteen years since Active Webdezign opened its doors and modem connection to the world of the Internet. Being a web design company based in London, we were fortunate enough to have clients come to us for our services right from the word go.
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We use WordPress
Wordpress is one of the biggest and most popular content management system in the world and it's available in 53 languages. It is an excellent software, initially made for blogging...
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We are utilising responsive design!
Instead of creating a new website version for every different device that exists, we can work on making the information itself to be flexible and not the outside form of the website. That is where responsive architecture comes in...
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Browser stats, Chrome has overtaken IE
Chrome has overtaken Internet explorer (5+ I assume) as the most popular browser in the world, ending Internet Explorers 13 year domination of the market. And gladly, IE 6 is down to 6 percent worldwide.
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The stupid EU cookie law in 2½ minutes
We have spoken about the new Cookie law in the past but today I stumbled upon a video by Oliver at Silktide explaining this problem in more detail.
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Internet Explorer has stopped working
We had one of those days here in the office! As massive fans of the 'officespace' movie we used a picture of Milton.
Please enjoy...
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Free ecommerce template using HTML5 and CSS3 animations
Christmas is over but I thought we would give away a little something even though it is mid January. I've created an ecommerce template in HTML5 and implemented quite a few CSS3 animations.
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Form CSS Free download
You know how you see all these great looking sleek UIs on websites giving away free PSDs.
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We are looking for a senior web developer in London
We are looking for a motivated developer to join our team. You will be working in a small team where you will get the opportunity to contribute beyond the boundaries of your role.
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Round navigation with overlapping CSS3 animations
I had some time to kill on friday afternoon so I decided to try if I could make a navigation that overlaps the neighbouring menu items.
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Steve Jobs RIP
It has been a difficult year for all of us as it is, and to top it all up Steve Jobs the co-founder of Apple Macintosh computers and our hero of tech has this week passed away.
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How to fix position:absolute disappearing in ie
If you've experienced this problem you are probably ready to pull your hair out. It is completely random, sometimes it disappears sometime it appears.
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Setting up an email account on your BlackBerry
The process of setting up an email account on your Blackberry is fairly easy.
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New cookie laws un-realistic within grace period
The 25th of May marks what could be a major turning point of the internet's privacy laws. This may change the way websites are developed forever.
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20 great free fonts, not the usual suspects
There is a myriad of great free fonts out there, we've all heard of League Gothic and Museo, but I wanted to list a few fonts that you may have missed.
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Webdezign joins the Annual Design Awards
When we were approached to join the Annual Design Awards by it's founder, we were delighted. These awards are truly a salute to originality, inspiration and excellence.
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Default search in Chrome – how to setup
We are not quite sure how you lost them in the first place but Mike managed to do so. So we thought someone else might misplace them and need some help.
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The Internet has 234 Million websites, Dec 2009
Put simply, if you are not online: You are most definetely missing out on potential clients/customers. Here is a video showing you the state of the internet (and this is 6 months ago):
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Google looked different this morning (testing)
As most of you will know, Google actively A/B tests a multitude of elements and pages at any given time. So why this blog post you ask, well lately I've been seing quite big changes, including the new logo.
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The common fonts of the web and why we use them
If your computer and browser does not support Verdana it will try and use Arial, if there is no support it will try Helvetica and if all else fails it will use your computers default sans serif font.
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YouTube is down – OMG
It was a big shock, but somewhat of a sobering revelation to see that YouTube website was down this morning.
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Free wordpress 2.9 theme – Bright lemon
Bright Lemon is a free template to use with the open source blog WordPress.
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Google to phase out support for IE6
rom the 1st of March 2010 Google are to phase out support for the Internet explorer 6, the so called week link in recent cyber attacks that compromised the Google itself.
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Free download – Glossy PSD buttons
We thought we would give away some free glassy buttons! They are made using Photoshop and each button is made up from 2 layers and a text-layer above, each in it's own group.
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Free HTML5 template
I've been playing around with some of the new HTML5 elements and ended up with a little template that I thought I would give away.
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Google is A/B testing image search
We have mentioned google A/B testing their homepage in the past and today we noticed they are up to exciting things on the image search page.
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Launch of the all new Back2 ecommerce website
We are proud to announce the most recent launch of the long established central London based ergonomic furniture company Back2.
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Google robots.txt defends itself on Halloween
Google has decided to add 3 lines into their robots.txt this Halloween
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(Yahoo) You nailed it, just a few tiny changes
Yes we are fully aware that this is viral marketing promoting Yahoo and it's brand, but to be honest; we don't care. This is to spot on not to share with you guys.
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Google is A/B testing their homepage
A few days ago we read about how google was experimenting with their homepage again.
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Google Chrome Themes by famous designers
The increasingly popular browser Google Chrome (3.0.195.3 and above only) has just launched a number of themes for their users.
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Pro bono work for local charity
Our London based web design and development team at Active Webdezign ltd. have been working hard on a charity website that we have donated to theWingate and Finchley football club as part of an ongoing commitment to help out local charities in need.
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Table Less Design is not the future it’s the past keep up!
In the world of web design, things have changed drastically since the early days of the internet when the online world was the exclusive property of coders and geeks alike. In those days, the aesthetic and graphical qualities of a website were a distant second in the hearts and minds of web users to the […]
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Team building day at the Go-Kart track
The summer has once again finaly arrived without any sign of a heatwave, but that can be expected in the UK, it's not unusual. Following a stronger 3rd quarter of trading we decided to treat ourselves with a day at the race track in Brewtwood.
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Cameron calls Twitts Twats, but what exactly was he implying?
What a fiasco..>!! David Cameron made a remark, which backfired on him.... Twat! (can i say that?)
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Broadband speeds not up to the mark?
It has finally emerged publicly that the speed at which our broadband connections actually operate at, compared with what we are actually paying for, is almost 50% slower on average.
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Reading Glasses Direct Launched
We recently embarked on an e-commerce project of our own, setting out to prove to ourselves that you can create a successful online retail website from just an idea, hard work and dedication.
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Logo not looking the same on screen?
No matter how happy you are with the colours and design of your company logo, when it comes to displaying it on screen or printing it out you will always find yourself at the mercy of technology. Unfortunately computers cannot see as humans do, and can only function in a mathematical rather than a logical […]
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Should I change my browser from Internet Explorer IE 6?
Internet Explorer IE is one of the oldest and best known web browsers in the world. This is largely thanks to the popularity of Microsoft software in general and the Windows operating system in particular, with which various versions of IE have been associated for years. However IE6, which was released in 2001 to coincide […]
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sIFR and What it Is
Update: sIFR is a thing of the past, see @sifr for more info. As broadband continues to improve, the internet is becoming ever more a multimedia platform. However, most commercial sites rely primarily on pure text in order to get the message across to users and search engines alike. Such text-based communication has its limitations, […]
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Team building extravanganza – crocodile burger BBQ and poker
This Friday we gathered the troops of webzign and invited some of our friends over for a barbeque and poker evening at the office. All went well until our barbeque captain went to answer the phone...
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How do I optimise images for Google?
“How do I optimise images” you ask. For companies with an online presence, attracting site visitors is largely about achieving the highest possible ranking position in search engine results through search engine optimisation (SEO). The classic trick of keyword management on-page is but the tip of the iceberg in the evolving world of search engine […]
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Safe Typography on the Web
Lets have a a talk about Typography on the Web. We have all seen websites that look as though they were created by someone with no sense of colour and on which some if not all of the text is barely legible. Most of us tend to spend very little time on such sites, hitting […]
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Website hosting in London
The Webdezign policy on hosting for our clients websites has always been to achieve the highest standard available in the market. Offering safe, reliable and up to date hosting co-located inside the most up do date facilities.
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Spam spam spam and more spam, where does it come from?
Spam Spam Spam and Spam... the only encounter I had of that phrase in past years was the famous Monty Python sketch (I have added the video below for fun and for those of you who have never seen it).
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So you got a creative brief, now what
We know it can seem a bit daunting with some of the questions but this process should be fun, and if you do it correctly; it really will be. We promise!
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Arbras Gallery new ecommerce development project
Webdezign are proud to have been chosen to take on the new ecommerce and web design project for one of our oldest returning clients.
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Domain Privacy Protection
Some people who own a domain name may already be aware that their personal details are openly available via the who-is database of domain registrants (e.g. www.whois-search.com). This is quite a worrying thought...
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Webdezign launches website 2.0.1
The team at Webdezign have been very busy building new websites for our clients during 2008. It was only down to the determination of the guys to use their own scarce moments of spare time, that we finally managed to go live on Thursday the 9th of January at around midnight.
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How big is the Pie?
Online retail sales to reach £25.5 Billion Pounds in 2009
With a recession looming the general consensus of opinion is ecommerce will benefit rather than be impacted by the recession.
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BetterJPEG Tutorial
Welcome to our series of tutorials on using the BetterJPEG software. Here you'll learn how to resize, crop and watermark images, as well as performing these operation in batch.
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Outlook Express: Setting up your email client on a PC
Follow the step by step guide on how to set up Outlook Express to use an existing email address:
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Setting up a POP3 account in Outlook 2007 on Windows XP
Our quick guide shows you how you can use the Outlook Express application to access an existing email address. This means you can keep organised using Outlook Express's calendar and contact list, but your clients can contact you via your personalised address.
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Outlook 2002-2003: Setting up a POP email account
This following article describes how to set up a POP email account for BT Business Email in Outlook 2002/2003
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How to resize your images using PIXresizer
Follow our step-by-step guide to resize images in bulk using the free software, PIXresizer. It's so easy that, whether you're a technical wizard or an online novice, you'll find it simple to resize all your images at once to fit your site.
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Anoushka G e-commerce site launched
As one of our most established clients, Anoushka G knew from experience that they could rely on Active Webdezign to revamp their website. After all, they instructed us to develop everything from their logo design to their brochures when they were starting out.
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