Freeride Snowboards Freeride Snowboards stock an extensive range of boards, boots, bindings and clothing from all of the top brands in the snowboarding industry. All product information is fully synchronized with an in-store EPOS till system.

Solway Dory sailing canoes provide exhilarating sailing, yet are still easy to paddle when the wind drops. We created this beautiful brochure website where you can learn about the canoes available.

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  Pooley Bridge Inn is a traditional family run inn at Ullswater, featuring open fires, original timber ceilings and fine selection of real ales, wines and spirits.
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  Hayes First Aid Training provide bespoke industry and environment-specific first aid courses. We created this attractive, yet simple 2 page website to showcase the courses available.
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  Bracken Crag offers holiday accommodation in the heart of Bowness-on-Windermere. A tour of the private apartment is shown online on this gallery website.
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  Bike-Eye is a unique bicycle mirror enabling you to be more aware of traffic approaching from the rear. The ecommerce website we provide allows the Bike-Eye to be purchased all around the globe.
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  Active Outdoor offer Outdoor Clothing and Camping Equipment to buy online, with product details and stock levels synchronized daily with their in-store EPOS till system.
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  Cushions Online provide first quality end-of-line soft furnishings, manufactured from a selection imported fabrics, faux fur and faux suede materials.
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  Kings Mill Antiques is an interesting day out in Lancashire, where you will find an extensive range of antique, vintage and contemporary design pieces to complement any home.
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  Hest Bank Physiotherapy Lancaster are a team of experienced Chartered Physiotherapists who specialise in the assessment, treatment and prevention of a wide range of musculoskeletal problems.

1. Senior creative web designer
2. Experienced PHP developer & Linux sysadmin
3. UPDATE: We also require a ASP.NET & C# Developer

For more information, please see our recruitment page.

Please apply directly to Chris or Rob using the details given, no agencies please.

What you need to be mindful of however is the fact that your website will have been crawled by search engine robots and its pages indexed accordingly. These pages will have a rank in the search engine results and could well be driving quality traffic and visitors to your site. Providing these visitors find what they are looking for then a conversion will be made and you will make money.

Moving these pages without planning ahead will likely result in one of two scenarios:

1. Your website may still show up in the search engine rankings but when viewed, return a 404 page not found error (because you have moved the page and it can no longer be found).
2. Your rankings for those pages may disappear completely from the search engines, which means potentially missing out on business.

Click to enlarge

Although turbulence within the results is inevitable, to help cause minimal disruption to your website rankings, planning ahead can make all the difference. Here are our tips on what to do before moving that page…

301 Redirects

• Ensure that a 301 redirect is issued for any page/section that is going to be moved. This means that should a visitor arrive at the old page, they will be automatically taken to the new version.

Custom 404s

• If it is not possible to issue 301s for every page that has been moved then creating a custom 404 page that gives the visitor an option to find the correct page may be an alternative.

Inbound Links

• Other external websites may have placed links to pages that you are preparing to move. In these situations, it is best wherever possible to contact those websites and ask them to update their links accordingly.

Internal Links

• Similarly, any internal links within your site that point to pages being moved should also be updated to minimise the issuing of a 404 page. Creating an up to date sitemap may also help ensure that the newly organised pages are indexed correctly.

Click to enlarge

If you are considering re-ordering the pages of your website why not get in touch. We can discuss what steps to take, how to take them and can even do the hard work for you. Give us a call on 015295 64580 and find out how we can help.

We would therefore advise that you check the customer experience on your own web site using Internet Explorer 8. If you feel that you are experiencing these display exceptions, please contact us and we will investigate further and advise accordingly.

In the meantime, simply press the new Compatibility View button if you see display problems on a website. It’s located next to the Refresh button on the Address Bar.

Despite campaigns recently to increase awareness about the need for secure passwords in the UK, many web users leave use themselves open to hackers by choosing easy to guess and insecure passwords. A survey by Visa Europe found that “over three-quarters choose passwords relating to friends, family and memorable dates” whilst following a recent phishing attack on the website MySpace it was found that “the five most common passwords are: password1, abc123, myspace1, password and blink182 (a band).”

A recent UK Government report carried out as part of the Get Safe Online campaign found the following information:

• 66% of users use the same password for more than one website
• 46% of users use the same 2 to 3 passwords for every website they access
• 45% of users use passwords made up only of dictionary words or names (the most easily cracked)

The lack of proper password security is one of the factors contributing to the ongoing problem of online fraud in the UK. The UK Cybercrime report identified the following worrying statistics:

• It is estimated that there were 84,700 cases of online identity fraud during 2007. It remains the case that around 40% of all identity frauds are facilitated online.
• It is estimated that there were 255,800 cases on online financial fraud in 2007 (up 24% from 2006).
• Around 830,000 businesses in the UK suffered an online/computer related security incident in 2007/08.

Do’s and don’ts

So how can you help keep your identity online more secure? These 5 points provided a guide to the do’s and don’ts for using passwords online

1. Don’t use the same password for many websites

Using the same password for many, or worse all websites, is like putting all of your eggs in one basket; should one website be compromised, all other accounts are open too. Quite often, if one password becomes available to a hacker, they will try this password on many other major websites – eBay, PayPal, your online banking etc. A hacker will use automated tools to do this, so can try many websites very quickly.

Using a password management tool allows you to store and access many passwords very easily.

2. Do use strong, long, unique passwords

A password that includes a dictionary word or a name can be broken very easily. Password lists are circulated around the internet and are freely available; these not only include names and whole dictionaries, but also common passwords revealed when websites are broken into (such as the MySpace example mentioned earlier in this article).

Using automated tools, short passwords are easily broken too. The website “lockdown” publishes the following examples*:

• 5 character password – 11.8 Million combinations - Instantly broken
• 6 character password – 308.9 Million combinations – 3 seconds to break
• 7 character password – 8 Billion combinations – 1.25 mins to break
• 8 character password – 200 Billion combinations – 35 mins to break
• 9 character password – 5.4 Trillion combinations – 15 hours to break

*Passwords use alphabetical characters, in a single case. Automated software runs on a modern desktop machine.

It is important that your password is as unique as possible. Strong, memorable passwords can be created in many ways; one example is to use a mnemonic. “Richard of York gave battle in vain” could be used to remember the password “RoYgbiv”. To make it more secure you should add numbers and upper/lowercase characters too, maybe replacing letters with numbers, e.g. swapping “g” for “9″ or an “i” for “1″. You could make the phrase personal to help remember; “I love my fat cat Tibbles, she loves her food too” – “1lmfcTslhf2″.

3. Don’t rely on your browser to store passwords

Modern browsers include password storing features for your convenience. Making use of these features is a bad idea for a number of reasons:

1. Almost all browsers have known security flaws which leave your passwords open to hackers and phishing attacks, even recent versions.
2. More often than not, the password managers inside the browsers do not require a master password themselves, so are open to anyone who has access to your computer.
3. There is no easy backup facility, so you can lose passwords if you change computer or have a hardware failure.

4. Do use a password management tool

A password management tool provides many helpful functions to help your security online; storing log in details for different websites, automating the log-in process, creating secure passwords and more. These details are stored in one very secure encrypted file, meaning you will only need to remember one password from now on. Make it a good password however; long, with both letters and numbers (see point 2) and always make a backup of the encrypted file and keep it safe.

KeePass is a free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager. There are versions for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and mobile devices. For a portable solution you can take anywhere, you can even run it on a USB stick!

Password management tools are also built into some security packages, like Norton 360 from Symantec, and often into laptops too.

5. Do change your passwords

A good security policy is to change passwords regularly; in fact in high-security applications (such as the Government) passwords are only allowed to be used once before a new one is issued. Although this is a little excessive for most businesses, changing your password maybe every few months might be a good idea. Using a password management package also means that you’ll never have to rely on remembering these either.

If any of your passwords fail on the points above, change them now.

If you forget your BF Internet passwords

If you forget your password for accessing your email, website statistics or online shop, you will need to contact us by email or phone.

For security reasons we can only issue new passwords (rather than tell you what they were), and will require proof of ID, which we will discuss at the time.

Many of you will already know (or at least have an idea) about what Search Engine Optimisation is but for those of you that are not sure, this section aims to outline exactly what it is.

So, what exactly is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? Well, essentially, it is the process of increasing the amount of quality traffic to your website by improving your organic rankings in the search engines and overall online presence. By organic rankings, we mean the natural listings as oppose to the sponsored listings that can be seen beside search engine results.

Anyone who has their own website wants it to be able to be found by friends, peers or in the case of a business, potential customers. When it comes to potential customers being able to find you on their favourite search engine, many of them will put more trust in the organic listings over the sponsored ones because quite simply, organic listings appear more trustworthy and relevant. This is largely because sponsored listings have to be paid for where the organic ones do not.

It is also a fact that the majority of people do not venture past the first few pages of the search engines results making it imperative to get the best rankings possible. This is where SEO will help. A website that has been correctly optimised is much more likely to rank significantly higher than one that has not.

How is this achieved? SEO can be a lengthy process and should never be seen as a quick fix. It can take over twelve months to see the full effects of any optimisation work and should always be seen as an ongoing process. Should you need results in the short term, get in touch to discuss Pay Per Click options.

It has also been suggested that of those Internet users, around 80% use search engines to find what they are looking for. This is why it is imperative to ensure that your website ranks well within them because not doing so could result in you missing a lot of traffic. To help you achieve better traffic, SEO will provide the answer.

There is no escaping the fact that we are experiencing a credit crunch presently and people are nervous about how much money they are spending on their marketing strategies.  It has been suggested by various sources that online marketing techniques such as SEO are the most cost effective methods of marketing available at the moment.

Top Rank conducted a study, where they asked around  400 businesses what methods of online marketing techniques they were looking to implement.  A whopping 36% of them said Search Engine Optimisation and another 33% said the use of blogs.

Speaking recently, David Teague, managing director of Prospects & Profits Business consultants commented that any business that did not have an online presence and could be found easily, would be at a distinct disadvantage. He added, “If your customers can’t find you within a minute on the internet, your business is going to languish on the sidelines, whilst your competitors gain the edge”.

It has also been predicted by PricewaterhouseCoopers that by 2013, a third of all advertising spending would be used online. The Government too, is set to encourage more Britons to get online and is spending £12 million to help achieve it.

This can be seen in the US as well, where in a survey by Reardon Smith Whittaker; it was shown that 9% said they were spending significantly more on online marketing in 2009. 23% stated that their spend was going to be somewhat higher.

When it comes to offering SEO services, we at Big Fish understand that no two customers are the same. This is why we offer a bespoke service that caters for each client individually. One of the very first things we do when we start working with a client on a search engine optimisation project is perform a head to toe site analysis. In fact, more often than not, we won’t actually even quote a price for SEO unless we’ve already done an analysis.

The reasons for that are three-fold. First, every website is different. Second, we have no idea what we’re dealing with just by glancing at a site and its competition. Lastly, and most importantly, we spend a large amount of time performing the analysis because it’s such an important part of putting together a plan for a site’s SEO project.

Once completed we will be able to target any specific areas that need attention and help to build your website into one that performs better and ranks higher within the search engines. Some of the services we offer includes:

• Providing recommendations on your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript/Flash
• On and offsite content development and syndication
• Managing online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• Link building
• Meta Tag creation/optimisation

We also offer telephone and email support to provide answers to any queries and we will provide advice, ranking reports and traffic analysis as applicable. Our SEO services are available on both 6 and 12 monthly schemes, although we recommend that any project spans a 12 month period since it can take this long to see the true benefit of any SEO work.

We will be happy to discuss how we can help to improve your website visibility online. If you would like to learn more about the SEO services we offer, get in touch now.

Google was just an idea in 1996 – a research project by Larry Page – and Yahoo! was king of the search engines. When you searched for a site on Yahoo!, you searched a directory of websites that was built by real humans; Yahoo! employees would painstakingly review submissions and rank them manually.

1996 is also when BF Internet was born – originally as Big Fish internet. A bit like looking fondly through old computer games of the 80’s, we take a look through the websites of 1996 and marvel at how far we’ve all come:

To coincide with the new release of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) this month, this article provides an overview as to what a browser is, and why you should upgrade to the latest version.

The Browser

A browser is a piece of software designed to view information on the internet, in the same way that Microsoft Outlook is designed to receive emails and Microsoft Word is designed to help create documents.

Statistics show that at the moment Internet Explorer 6 (released in 2002 and no longer supported by Microsoft) and is still used by 34% of people accessing the Internet (Feb 09, www.thecounter.com).

This is mainly because Microsoft includes Internet Explorer as the default browser in Windows XP and Vista.

How to find out which browser you are running

If you aren’t sure which browser you are currently using, you can click this link to find out which browser you are running

Reasons to upgrade your browser

Now that you know which browser you are running you might be thinking why should I change, or why do I need to update my browser? The simple answer is that you should always update on a regular basis. Some of the reasons are described below:

1. New versions are more secure

   As new threats and new ways to harm your computer via the browser become known, the developers of the browsers have to fix these to keep your computer secure. The only way they can do this is to include these via an update. If you do not update, you do not get a more secure browser leaving you open to attack.

2. New versions are faster

   With the new browser developers battling it out to get the upper hand and get you to use their product one area that has improved leaps and bounds, is the speed that they can process the page (loading the page due to broadband, but how the browser loads the page).

   We saw the most significant difference in page load times with the English-language Wikipedia home page and the MySpace home page. Chrome 2 Beta completed the job of loading Wikipedia in a mere 1.12 seconds, easily outpacing the competition. Internet Explorer 8 chugged to a second-place finish, loading the page in 2.24 seconds on average. Firefox 3.0.7 and Safari 4 Beta lagged behind, however, with average load times of 3.31 seconds and 3.38 seconds, respectively.

   As taken from PC World

3. Improved browsing experience

   As with the speed issues, browsers are competing with new styling features for webpages that allow designers (such as ourselves) to add elements that were not possible in older versions. An example of this is below, where on a modern browsers the webpage elements would have rounded corners, whereas on an older version such as IE6, they are square.

   

   Click to enlarge - Example of rounded corners and some browser differences. IE6 vs FF3.0.7

   Apple has really pushed the boat out with Safari 4 and has included no less than 150 new features such as: Full page-zoom, Animations, font embedding and more. It is expected to be released mid 2009.

4. Not all browsers render the page to look the same

   As all browsers handle the web page coding slightly differently, on some rare occasions the web page might look considerably different and may even appear to be broken. It is another good reason to update your browser to the latest version to get a full, rich web experience, shown in the way intended by the designer.

   In some cases, even newer browsers such as IE8 can render a page to look slightly different. Microsoft have included a button that will pull back the browser to handle as the version before. This is to safeguard in case the website appears broken, a user would hit this button.

   

   Click to enlarge

What options of browsers are there? What do they offer?

Ok so you have decided that you want to update your browser and want to know what options there are and what they offer? Here is a list of the options;

• Internet Explorer 8.

  Internet Explorer 8 is Microsoft’s new browser that has just been released, it has some revolutionary features such as Ebay visual search, Delicious Bookmarks, Suggested Sites, a new security mode called ‘InPrivate’ and ‘Accelerators’, which are a form of selection-based search. View a full feature list here

  Download Internet Explorer 8

• Firefox

  Firefox has grown in popularity in the last couple of years, due to its security, speed, advanced design features and popularity of add-ons that you can install to customise your browser.
  Firefox also boasts a strong feature set including; Smart location Bar, One-Click Bookmarking, Password manager and lots more. View a full feature list here.

  Download Mozilla Firefox

• Google Chrome

  Google Chrome is the youngest browser of the bunch, but it has hit the blocks running with an impressive feature set that includes; Application shortcuts, dynamic tabs, crash control, instant bookmarking and a lot more. View a full feature list here

  Download Google Chrome

• Safari

  Safari has been around for many years, initially on the Mac since 2003, then more recently available the Iphone, Ipod Touch and Windows.

  The soon to be released Safari 4 is leading the field with new and inventive features, such as a “Top Sites” tool to display the user’s most visited sites in a 3D world and Cover Flow, a feature of Mac OS X. For the Windows version, Safari adopted a native Windows theme, rather than the previous Mac OS look employed. Safari 4 is expected to be out in the middle of 2009, but the feature list is available here

  Download Safari 3

• Opera

  The Opera Software company claims that Opera is “the fastest browser on Earth.” Opera too has the best support for some advanced design features and also implements built-in tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, fraud protection, a download manager and BitTorrent client, a search bar, and a web feed aggregator. Opera comes with an e-mail client called Opera Mail and an IRC chat client built in, be sure to check it out
  Download Opera

The future for browsers

The browser developers are busy constantly working on new versions of the browsers and releasing them in to public.
Features you can expect to see and use;

• Improved accessibility
• Extended animation support by CSS
• Even more security features
• Text shadows
• Audio and full video support
• Even more plug-ins
• and more…

Conclusion

There has never been a better time to swap your browser to the latest version. They are more secure, faster and in some cases you get a better browsing experience. With new versions coming out every couple of months we are in for a good ride.

Please note BF Internet holds no responsibility for software installed on your machine and or any data lost due to the process.