LS Digital Media

Add a Background Image to Google Search Page

LS Digital Media — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 09:37:28 +0000

Today, June 10th, Google are highlighting a new feature whereby you can upload your own image to serve as the backdrop for your Google search page.

If you want to change the image to one of your own choosing, you can click on the link in the bottom left corner of the screen – provided you are logged in with a Google account. If you do not have one you can set one up here: Google Accounts. Otherwise, our understanding is that the homepage will return to normal tomorrow. Whether the link will still be there remains to be seen.

This initiative to make the classically simple Google interface more colourful and ‘homely’ (to use their words) can be seen, I believe, as a direct response to Bing’s popular use of imagery in its homepage. Google’s pared down, minimalist even, user interface was a breath of fresh air when it first arrived and has had a good run of it. But, one must ask the question, and it seems that Google are doing so themselves, as to whether people are starting to tire a little bit of it?

For me the answer is yes, and I am looking forward to being able to upload my own images and to choose from a tasteful selection in the Picasa user gallery. Empowering users to make their own choice as to whether they prefer the classic look of Google or if they wish to customise it with an image of their choosing, Google will soon know the answer one way or the other.

Seven Tips for Staying Safe on Facebook

LS Digital Media — Fri, 21 May 2010 11:18:51 +0000

The virtual world can be a dangerous one. Follow our seven simple steps to ensure you stay safe on Facebook.

1. Hide yourself from the public

This isn’t as straightforward as you might think and many people are under the impression that they are already hidden. But if you don’t apply these settings in multiple categories, other people will still be able to see your information. This is especially important for children’s Facebook accounts. To protect yourself, click Account > Privacy settings > Profile information. Adjust your privacy settings for all 12 categories. Then click Back to Privacy > Contact information. Adjust your privacy settings for all 9 categories.

2. Don’t let search engines find you

To help prevent strangers from accessing your page, go to Account > Privacy settings > Search. Select ‘Only friends’ for Facebook search results. Make sure the box for public search results isn’t checked either.

3. Don’t allow Facebook to hand over your details to other companies

Unless you tell them not to, Facebook will give companies access to your profiles for research and advertising purposes. They can even use your details in the adverts themselves. To stop Facebook from handing over your details, click Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and websites. Next to ‘Instant Personalisation Pilot Program’ click ‘Edit setting’. Make sure the box is not ticked at the bottom of the screen. To make sure you don’t appear in any adverts, go to Account > Account Settings > Facebook Adverts. Select ‘no one’ on ‘Allow ads on platform pages to show my information to’ and ‘Show my social actions in Facebook ads to’.

4. Make sure nobody else is using your account

This is a new feature which was rolled out by Facebook last week. It allows you to monitor which devices are being used to access your account.

Go to Account > Account settings > Account security. Click ‘Would you like to receive notifications for logins from new devices?’ and then click ‘Yes’ below.

Log out and log back in. You will be asked to name the device you are using. Then it will send you an email. Do this with each device you use to access your Facebook account. From now on, if anyone logs in to your account from a device you don’t use, you’ll receive an email telling you. If this happens, change your password straight away and report it to Facebook via the Help Centre.

5. Don’t put your full date of birth in your profile

It’s an ideal target for identity thieves, who could use it to obtain more information about you and potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account. If you’ve already entered a birth date, go to your profile page and click on the ‘Info’ tab, then on ‘Edit Information’. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.

6. Protect yourself from your friends

When your Facebook friends use applications they may be inadvertently sharing your details with third parties. To protect yourself, click Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and websites > What your friends can share about you. Untick all of the boxes and then save your changes.

7. Don’t advertise your home

You should make sure you never post your full address on Facebook and certainly don’t put it under your ‘Info’ section. If you’re going away on holiday, although tempting, it’s best not to advertise it on your Facebook page, or even to mention it on your friends’ pages. This is especially crucial if you or your friends’ profiles can be accessed by people not listed as friends. There have been numerous instances where people have gone away and returned to an empty home, just because they shared too much information on social media.

Ladies Love Lace Site Goes Live!

LS Digital Media — Sun, 09 May 2010 16:40:57 +0000

We have just gone live with the new website for our client Ladies Love Lace.

The project was based on WordPress as the CMS but the design was 100% bespoke and included much advanced functionality.

LS Digital Media also contributed SEO advice, hosting and consultancy.

Please have a look at the site and tell us what you think!

5 Low Cost Internet Marketing Strategies

LS Digital Media — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 19:23:25 +0000

There are many possibilities where internet marketing is concerned. If youíre new to the world of e-commerce and internet business, then you’re undoubtedly searching for ways to promote your website, products, and services. If you’re not new, but are seeking for ways to bring in more traffic to your site, then these tips can give you some ideas.

Internet marketing doesn’t have to cost a fortune. There are ways you can bring traffic in to your website for free or cheap. No, these methods require no spamming. Itís possible to promote your website in inexpensive ways without having to resort to spam. They are as follows:

Article Marketing

Distributing articles to ezine directories along with a resource box containing your siteís link is a great way to get your business out there in front of a large, targeted audience. If professional and informative enough, your articles can also be picked up by blogs and newsletters that will also link to your site.

Search Engine Optimisation

What important keywords will someone have to search for at Google in order to find a site such as yours? Think about this and try optimizing your site with those keywords. This requires more than simple meta tags. You need to place those keywords in content throughout your site.

Social marketing and networking

Do you have a Myspace, Facebook, or Twitter account? Why not create a profile for your business as well? Use these social websites, as well as others, to connect with a target audience and to establish yourself as an expert.

Directory Listings

While Dmoz is one of the most popular free directories out there, there are others as well. Submit your website to free directories. Some of them rank really high, and by having your link added to them, your own siteís rank can increase!

Forum and Blog Marketing

If you don’t already have a blog, you need to do so. Create a blog to go along with your site. Update it often with useful information. You can also visit other blogs similar to your own and leave interesting comments (not spam), and sometimes blog owners will allow you to place your link with your comments. As far as forum marketing goes, you need participate often and exchange ideas with other posters. Have your site’s link as your signature line.

These are just a few of the most popular, low-cost methods of internet marketing. No matter which one(s) you choose to try, you need to be consistent. Spend as much time as you can, at least a couple of hours a day, working on one or more of these methods. In the long run, you and your site will be more popular, and youíll begin making all the money youíve ever wanted (or something like that).

How to Block Facebook Activities Sharing Your Activities

LS Digital Media — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:09:15 +0000

With Facebook’s recent update and changes to their privacy settings, it seems that keeping in control of what information is shared with your friends is becoming more difficult. Perhaps you don’t want to tell all your friends about every single group you join? Perhaps you don’t want everyone to know about an event you are attending? Do you want everyone to see whenever you are tagged in an embarrassing photograph?

Well now is your chance to regain some control with this excellent video which goes over the new privacy settings in Facebook – and where to find them. Enjoy.

Google AdWords Conversion Tracking Using WordPress

LS Digital Media — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:31:22 +0000

So… you want to insert some tracking code into the body of your WordPress blog / website page to track conversions? Simple, surely?

Think again!

The first option that I tried was using the custom fields on the page to insert the code. Unfortunately though, this inserts the code into the header of the page – not the body where it needs to be – so that’s not going to work for us.

If you Google the subject, the top result is this post by Ozone Marketing. This looks promising as it is based on a WordPress plugin and these are generally good for the not-so-technical amongst us in terms of adding functionality to the mighty WordPress. However, having tried this I have got to admit that it did not actually work for me. The reason is that the solution was based on a Google Website Optimizer Plugin for WordPress and this plugin has now been updated which renders this approach unworkable. I might be wrong about that and if I am I would love to hear!

Next up is this post from the Google Adwords Forum. Unfortunately the best that they could come up with was somebody suggesting checking the plugins available for WordPress – surely somebody must have written one… Well – sorry – they haven’t!

The last post of note is this one from ‘Internet Megaphone’. I would say this is a very well researched and written post by somebody who obviously knows what they’re talking about. The problem with this is really that it involved downloading and editing PHP pages and, frankly, this scares me.

So.. what we really need (and urgently) is a WordPress plugin specifically dedicated to this one issue – that is, adding AdWords tracking code to one specific page of a WordPress blog. If anybody knows of one I would love to hear about it. If, as I suspect, there isn’t one, then coders – I suggest you get cracking!

Google’s Had It With China

LS Digital Media — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:09:02 +0000

A very recent announcement on the official Google blog entitled ‘A New Approach to China’ seems to suggest that Google have now lost their patience with the Chinese government’s human rights abuses. Of course the post does not say this directly but, if one reads between the lines, the message is clear.

What the blog post does say explicitly is that the company was “no longer willing to continue censoring our results” on their Chinese search engine Google.cn. The company seems to have taken particular issue with the fact that “we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.”

LS Digital Media applauds Google for taking the moral high ground, for putting principles before profit. Okay, Google aren’t perfect but at least they are trying to do good and there are a very many companies, organisations and governments that could take a leaf out of their book. Well done the Big G!

Image Editing in WordPress 2.9

LS Digital Media — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:44:31 +0000

This is a great new feature in the latest upgrade to WordPress – version 2.9. It’s here – you can now edit images directly from within WordPress.

The functionality is basic for the time being but it does allow you to scale, crop and rotate images within the CMS.

Personally, I am sure that even this simple amount of functionality is going to save quite some time. Rather than needing to edit images in an external editor such as Photoshop and then upload them again to the media library – none of this will be necessary any longer. And that’s great!

Are Apps More Important than Mobile Sites?

LS Digital Media — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:31:33 +0000

A debate was held earlier this week at the IAB with the very intention of coming up with a definitive answer to the question “Are apps more important than mobile sites?” The article on the IAB website can be found here.

Well, to summarise the findings… At the start of the debate 58% disagreed with the motion and by the end of the debate that figure had risen to 87%. However I do think that the wording made this an inherently pointless debate as the findings were, quite obviously, that you should have both.

A much more interesting debate would have been “which of the two channels is more important?” That way you would have had to choose one or the other, and my money would have been on apps quite frankly. I would be interested to see what the panel thought of this.

Some of the statistics are staggering. Jon Mew, head of mobile at the IAB, introduced the proceedings by outlining some key statistics to highlight the popularity of iPhone apps in particular. Mew pointed out that there are now 115,000 iPhone apps for sale in the Apple app store and 2.4bn have been downloaded, meaning that more people have downloaded an app than own a TV. And, citing figures from acrossair, they demonstrated that the iPhone is the fastest growing technology product ever!

New Walshaw Lodge Site Goes Live

LS Digital Media — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:14:09 +0000

We are happy to announce our latest site – Walshaw Lodge – Luxury Group Accommodation has now gone live.

Walshaw Lodge is a unique country retreat set in the absolutely stunning countryside of the Pennine Moors in West Yorkshire. It is the perfect venue for large gatherings of family and friends, or for residential courses and workshops. It is also an original and inspiring setting for business meetings and corporate events.