Ever wondered what the most popular UK websites are? Well wonder no more.

Below is a list of the 20 most popular websites (according to Hitwise) for the week ending 10/7/2010.

Interesting reading, I am sure you will agree.

Here are some very interesting figures released last week

According to The Daily Telegraph ‘An extra million Britons aged 50 or over have gone online for the first time in the past year, as older people become more confident with the internet.’ So internet users continue to grow.

It’s important to remember that every user if different, but we will start to see trends (in this age range) that will show an increase in search traffic relevant to the over 50’s.

Do you want to tap into this market and is it relevant to your business?

You do, great. So how do you tap into this market?

I would advise the following.

First, what are you looking to achieve. Perhaps you would like to increase your revenue, or are you looking to provide useful information to the over 50’s.

Second, how are you going to go about achieving your goals?
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If you are looking to sell products, it is important that you identify the relevant search terms. Terms that will be used by the over 50’s. Then you need to position yourself at the top of the search engines (Google etc) for the search terms relevant to the products you sell.

Perhaps you are looking to provide quality information to the Masses? One element that can help is Viral Marketing. This can assist in getting your message out there, by encouraging others to spread your words.

These are just a couple of online marketing tips showing how to get the most out of the internet. So, if you are looking to increase sales, or increase brand reputation, the internet can help. But have a structured plan, or speak to someone who can help with your online marketing….

…like Miromedia.

Have you ever wanted to redirect your index.php page to yourroot domain? So this:

http://www.mysite.co.uk/index.php

Automatically redirects to this:

http://www.mysite.co.uk/

You have… excellent! Well with the following code snippet for the .htaccess file you can now achieve this:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.mysite.co.uk/ [R=301,L]

Published in the Telegraph on the 13th May, the below article highlights the importance of the internet - particularly in the retail sector. Comet reported sales across the group fell by 1.2pc whilst sales over the internet soared by 23.8pc.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/7716123/Poor-weather-cast-shadow-over-Comet.html

Morning all.

It is the end of another week and time for some more of the best blogs we’ve been reading this week.

The first is from Woorkup and gives Best practices and tips for developing websites for the iPhone. This has been handy for me personally as I’ve been working on an iPhone version of Miromedia’s site which we are planning for launch in Q1 of this year.

Next up is a post from makeuseof.com. This one gives a very clear breakdown of the steps for creating RSS feeds for your site. I used this to create the Miromedia News Feed so it does work.

This post about the influence of the Swiss Style on web design is very interesting and covers a number of aspects where the Swiss Style impacts the modern web site from layout and colour to font styles. Although the post itself may look quite long there are a large number of images to illustrate the various points made in the text and give examples of some of the artists work.

Ever wanted to setup new shops in Magento? Why not read this article about how to setup multiple Magento shops.

SEOmoz are putting together a set of Search Engine Optimisation Best Practice guides. These are currently up for peer review and will be added to over the coming months.

Here’s an interesting website performance post from dynaTrace which is definitely worth a look

Away from work and with the imminent return of Herr Schumacher to Formula 1, I came across this old, bit interesting YouTube clip analysing the Schumacher driving style. For me he is up there as a potential champion for 2010, despite being the oldest on the grid his talent is unquestionable and in the 3 years since his retirement I don’t believe he will have lost any of his edge or aggressiveness.

Ok, so the children aren’t quite singing in Christian rhyme but we’re almost there.
Read the rest of this entry »

Here are a couple of useful links that we’ve come across whilst building our latest Magento installation:

Removing Product Comparison - Some pointers for PHP developers to remove the product comparison block from a Magento installation.

Magento SEO - This one is very interesting giving useful advice for maximising the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) performance for a Magento site.

Be Search Friendly
What is the point of having a great site if no one ever sees it? None of course!
Before creating your content do you keyword research, what terms your audience or users to your site are likely to search upon, and what keywords they will use. Build the structure of your content around your search engine optimisation with these keywords and keyphrases.
Read the rest of this entry »

The challenge was to increase Outline Skincare’s online presence to increase web traffic, generate sales and increase ROI, while actually driving down overall marketing spend.

Miromedia were recommended to Outline as specialists in search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, email broadcasting, link building, online PR, and social media

The solution was an online marketing strategy which included removing programming issues, managing and adding keyword strategies, content creation and restructure of page layout.

Benefits Since working with Outline when compared to the same previous year period, we have achieved:

• 46% increase in turnover when compared to this time last year
• 60% decrease in marketing spend

And most importantly this was all achieved during a recession!

To download the Outline Case Study please click here.

Permanent or semi permanent make up, as it is sometimes called, is an exciting, revolutionary treatment to enhance facial features. It is a highly skilled, state of the art form of cosmetic tattooing also known as Micro-pigmentation or intradermal cosmetics. Annalou is one of the UK’s leading clinics and with a quickly expanding client base they called upon Miromedia to design and build a new site complete with easy to use CMS and a powerful SEO redesign.

Utilising the new Miromanager 2 Content Management System for the new Annalou site, Miromedia where able to create a faultless and intuitive backdoor solution for Annalou. It is a CMS that will serve Annalou for the foreseeable future, allowing for effortless updates and image changes. Along with the search engine optimisation redesign, which is due to begin this week, Miromedia have also added a Facebook portal to keep fans of Annalou up to date with company and industry developments and gossip.