Our first all-french website has gone live. Eaux les Bains uses a french inferface version of Wordpress to drive the CMS. Unfortunatley there is no such thing as a French template file yet - so we’ve had to do a little bit of tweaking.
Here’s hoping the site does it’s job and pulls in the punters for the tour. I’ll certainly be going. The show is a comedy ’sans parole’ - which means it is a predominantly visual affair, so there’s no need to know much French.
Perhaps we should do an English version of the site too?
A fancy little update to the Ice Factor website for this seasons festivities.
The new splash page involves some Penguins larking about. Built in 3D and published using php-streaming.
Here’s a site we recently provided the information design and layout work for. Many Thanks to the team at Littlehampton Book Services for making it happen, and of course to Hachette Children’s for their confidence in us. [visit website]
The unfortunate thing about registering your details in the ‘Who is’ database, which is required by international law should you own a domain name, is that certain companies will use your details to send you junk.
One guilty party to this extent is the Domain Registry of America . These cowboys send mail (that is hard copy - snail mail post) to domain owners just before their domain is about to expire. At first glance the mailing appears to indicate that they are simply offerring a renewal service. Not so. What they are actually try to do is get you to change registrar (to Domain registry of America) and pay some five-times the going rate for the prvilage. One doubts whether this corporate scam is legal - but it is difficult to be sure.
What this demonstrates is that if you register a domain name with your personal details - you are making that information available to the entire world. If you value your privacy - better to do it through a third party. Beware!
Remarkably there are many small firms still out there whose marketing activities are either non-existant or entirely paper-based. Parvalux UK used to be one of those firms, but having recently realised that their return on investment (ROI) for trade advertising was unquantifiable while at the same time [relatively] expensive; they have opted to move ahead with a significant e-marketing programme (with our help). Web and email activites that will not only give them a quanifiable ROI, but also are incredibly cheap to set up and run. Seemingly - not a lot of people know that.
As the amount of content on the internet grows exponentially it is becoming increasingly difficult to search for and find information. I am becoming increasingly disillusioned with Google’s search engine, the results it posts are rarely as reliable as they once were - back in 2000.
Microsoft has just launched it’s rival product - Live - to try and demonstrate that there is still a choice when it comes to selecting a search engine. However, Live’s index is by no means as comprehensive as that of Google’s, so although you may indeed get different results using Live - this may simply be down to what has or has not been indexed.
Thus, in what many people are referring to as Web2.0, content ‘tagging’ is becoming a mandatory activity for all content creators and providers. Tagging enables a plethora of search engines to index your site content far more accurately than they would do by simple content searching. While I doubt whether Google nor Live put much weighting upon content tags at the moment, it seems very likely that in the near future - tagging will be viewed as the most reliable way of identifying content.
So if youhaven’t already done so - it’s time to start tagging!
Now, those of you have no grasp of French can relax, I have posted below an English translation of my last news item. This comes care of Worldlingo - the free online text translation service.
Although Worldlingo has it’s shortcomings (as you will see) it is a fantastic tool for translating short phrases and words into any one of 14 different languages - which is ideal if you want to set up a multilingual website but have no grasp of anything but your mother tongue.
I see that Wordpress is available for the French-speaking community. Very good. They say:
“WordPress is what it is done of better as regards engine of blog. Free, ergonomic, respectful of the standards, it is also fast to install, simple to personalize and benefits from many extensions and a very active community. Thanks to a dynamic and opened development, WordPress is a protected software. Complete and very accessible, it will answer waitings of the bloggeurs, but also with those of the professional sites, thanks to his system of dynamic pagesâ€
And I agree. [visit the site here]
Be warned though, auto-translating blocks of text like this - could make your website look decidedly amateurish, and you - downright illiterate!
Je vois que le Wordpress est disponible pour la communauté francophone. Très bon.
Ils disent:
“WordPress est ce qu’il se fait de mieux en matière de moteur de blog.
Libre, ergonomique, respectueux des standards, il est également rapide à installer, simple à personnaliser et profite de nombreuses extensions et d’une communauté très active.
Grâce à un développement dynamique et ouvert, WordPress est un logiciel sécurisé. Complet et très accessible, il répondra aux attentes des bloggeurs, mais également à celles des sites professionnels, grâce à son système de pages dynamiques”
Et je suis d’accord. [visitez le site ici]
I have a contact at IBM who has had the chance to install and use the new Microsoft operating system. So I didn’t pass up the opportunity to gauge his thoughts on the supposed successor to Windows XP. “Well - it looks nicer” he said.
The myth of the web still persists. There are managers and CEO’s out there who still believe it is necessary to spend vast quantities of cash in order to obtain the internet presence they desire. While they might be able to accept that the price of a techie gadget, such as a memory-stick, will half in value every six months or so - it seems they are still unable to accept the same of web-based products and services.
The problem is everyone wants ‘the final solution’. i.e. they want to make this their last expenditure on a website - so better make it a big one. €20,000 should do it - right? Wrong! No-one can predict the future, and so committing to one product or another for the long term is risky. A content management system that claims to ‘do everything’ today - may well only meet half of your requirements in six months time.
Unfortunately mis-selling is nothing new when it comes to technology. While most suppliers expect a certain amount of ignorance from their customers, some, in order make some serious cash, rely upon it. So if you are planning to spend €20,000 with your web supplier this year - expect to do the same again in a year or so’s time.
If you’d rather not throw good money after bad - do your research, or call in someone you can trust.
