Castorgray is now number 9 on google (UK) search for “brighton web design“.

This is great news. The reasons for the ranking are:

1. Ensure all links pointing to Castirgray, brighton web design contain that very phrase

2. Add blog categories and posts for “Brighton web design”

3.  Use “Brighton web design” in page titles and headers

4.  Use the words “Brighton web design” throughout the site

5. Use Google a lot! Link to Google, add Google Analytics, submit your site to Google, add your site to Google businesses, use Google sitemaps - Go Google crazy

Seems simple enough and has great results. What’s more, none of it cost a penny.

Google have released a Beta of their new browser, Google Chrome. This is an interesting development in the ‘browser wars’ and I wonder what effect it will have on my favourite browser Mozilla Firefox.

You can find out more about Google Chrome here.

The logo looks very similar to the old Simon electronic game of the 70s.

The Opera browser is not underrated but it is underused. It’s a great piece of software and has led the way with loads of innovative features that all browsers now contain. I wish it was used more as I do feel for this underdog. It’s really fast, looks slick and does everything better than than you would expect.

Download it and try it for yourself.

The new Firefox is ready. Firefox 3 is supposed to have more than 15,000 improvements, be faster, safer and smarter than ever before. Seems much the same to me but that’s not a problem. Expect new plugins, a tweaked interface and much improved address bar dubbed the ‘awe bar’

Download it and see what you think.

The Brighton web design SEO experiment was rudely interrupted by a hosting issue which ‘destroyed’ a great number of my blog posts.

Apologies to anyone with comments and threads that were affected. I will restore the posts that are most missed.

Hmm, a new Internet Explorer…

The first major update to Internet Explorer in five years - worth the wait? It has tabbed browsing now (just like Opera and Firefox), page zooming and an integrated search box (it took them a while to sort that out didn’t it?). It’s still not standards compliant but it’s much better than IE6. Is it better than Opera? Firefox? Err.. No. It is not. Loads of people will be using it and it will be the de facto standard browser never the less.

I am starting a new blog category for Brighton Web Design.

This is partly because there are a lot of web agencies in Brighton and it will be interesting to see start to compare them and their progress in this competitive market. And it is partly to see how the effect of the additional Web Design Brighton category and posts affect SEO. Let’s see.

StumbleUpon is a smart browsing application for finding great websites you’ll like.

The system works by recording user submitted websites against pre-defined categories. Each user specifies the categories of their interest and relevant sites are served to these users along with the ability to rate the site. This process means that the users of the system share their recommendations and qualitatively review them before they get to you.

This new way of finding and sharing interesting sites is fast and extremely entertaining. It has certainly changed the way I use the Internet.

Oringinally, the system worked on Firefox only and was, for a while, one of the best reasons to use the Firefox browser. It is now also available for IE7, allowing more people to participate.

This great 2D physics sandbox application would have made a lot of school physics lessons a lot more interesting.

You can find out more about the system here.

A lot of people complain about Open Office. These people just haven’t spent the few hours required to untrain themselves from the Microsoft Office way of working. There is actually very little difference between the two and, if cost is taken into account, there is only one option.

Open Office has been around for quite a while now and is obviously a very mature and professional tool. “But everyone else uses Microsoft Office! We won’t be compatible!”, is shouted an awful lot. Here are some very simple instructions to make that problem disappear:

1. Launch any OpenOffice.org application such as OpenOffice Writer.
2. Click on Tools and then Options.
3. Expand the Load/Save section in the left pane by clicking the + (plus sign).
4. Click on General under the Load/Save section.
5. In the area labeled as “Default file format” near the bottom of the dialog window, select the type of document you want, for example, Text Document for Writer files, in the Document Type drop-down list.
6. To the right dropdown list labeled as “Always save as”, change or select the format as “Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP”.
7. Repeat the above 2 steps for other documents such as spreadsheets or presentations that you want to save in Microsoft Office file format, and select the appropriate default save as format for them.
8. Click OK to save the settings.
9. From now on, whenever you want to save a document, the default format will be .doc, .xls or .ppt and other Microsoft Office file formats

If you want to thank me, send some of the money you saved in not buying MS Office!