At the BRAND New 2010 Conference and Awards, Belfast Telegraph owner Independent News and Media picked up an award for marketing excellence in the services sector. Additionally INM received a highly commended in the best online marketing programme. Visual Script congratulates Independent News and Media on their success!

We at Visual Script have contributed modestly to Independent News and media’s online success at these awards, as we provide ongoing technical, SEO, social media marketing, Google Adwords, and email marketing consulting and execution to the Belfast Telegraph and its network of sites.

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph)

In 2008 Jonathan Zittrain, in his powerful book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, envisioned the ‘appification’ of the Internet. Instead of using our web browsers to visit different websites to perform various tasks, we are switching to apps to do these things.

Everything from downloading music to booking flights, from reading news to connecting with friends, it’s all being appified. Users are abandoning the clunky and difficult experience of websites and replacing it with smooth easy-to-use applications on our mobile phones and tablet PCs.

A few weeks ago Wired authors Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff chimed in on this issue as well in their article The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.

As Anderson states, “over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.”

Where Zittrain sees this trend away from open web standards to closed apps as a bad thing – stifling innovation and handing control of the Internet to the corporate giants that control the app platforms – Anderson isn’t so negative about it. He sees great opportunities for businesses to monetise the appified Internet, where many struggle making money off of the open world wide web.

Especially for media companies an appified Internet seems to be a Godsend. Wired magazine itself eagerly embraced the iPad with a very good paid app, enabling them to make money off of their content online where previously their wired.com website was (and still is) essentially a loss-making enterprise.

For newspapers the rise of apps is perhaps a true lifeline, a beacon of hope for the future where previously all forecasts were naught but doom and gloom.

By selling news apps with advanced features a newspaper can distinguish itself from news websites, be it their own site or that of their rivals. Especially for regional newspapers such as the Belfast Telegraph tapping in to the geo-location functionality inherent in smartphones and tablet PCs can open up a whole new way for readers to interact with the news, and can become a cornerstone of a digital revenue model.

Apps present a business model with much greater revenue potential than a website. An appified Internet, for all its drawbacks, may just present the salvation of professional journalism.

Barry Adams is online marketing specialist at Visual Script, a Belfast-based full service digital agency. He’s never bought an Apple product in his life (and probably never will).

Our SEO guy Barry was invited to join the SEO Dojo fellas for their weekly radio podcast, to talk about linkbuilding and SEO for Google News. It was a great show with a good discussion on linkbuilding and the various aspects of SEO for Google News. You can stream or download the podcast here (Barry’s contribution starts 40 minutes in):

» SEO Dojo Radio Episode 4
“In the second part of the show today we’re having Barry Adams from Visual Script in Belfast. He deals with some major newspapers and as such we’ll be asking him about his (extensive) knowledge of Google News.”

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph)

The Northern Irish online technology industry is thriving. There are dozens of successful online companies, from developers to online marketers, from web designers to CMS-builders.

There is no greater testament to the strength of NI’s web industry than the Build conference.

Going in to its second year, Build is a “boutique design conference” held in the Waterfront in Belfast, attracting big name speakers and visitors from all over the world.

Organised by local webhead Andy McMillan and building on the success of last year’s inaugural edition, this year’s Build conference features the likes of Tim Van Damme, Frank Chimero, and Tim Brown.

And Northern Ireland’s own web design guru’s the Standardistas are present as well, with a special pub quiz where the use of online devices is actually encouraged.

Aside from talks from these leading design and typography heroes, Build is also expanding in to workshops which allow you to learn directly at the feet of the masters.

When the discounted ‘Early Bird’ tickets for the conference went for sale, they were sold out in 18 minutes.

There are still tickets available at regular price for both the conference and the workshops, and if you are at all involved with any aspect of web design, I can’t recommend a better way to spend your money.

Build is a conference whose appeal and relevance extends far beyond Northern Ireland’s borders, and it’s good to see how this wee country punches well above its weight in the crowded sphere of web design.

Find out more at http://buildconf.com.

Sitemaps are a crucial aspect of a successful website. First, let’s make it clear what we mean with a sitemap. There are two types of sitemaps: one meant for visitors of your website, and one for search engine spiders.

Sitemaps for Visitors
The first type of sitemap is probably very familiar to you. It’s a webpage that shows an overview of all the content on a website. You can see an example here of our own Visual Script sitemap.

This type of sitemap is very useful as it allows your visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for without having to go through your website’s navigation. Especially for large websites it’s recommended to have a well-structured sitemap that is linked from every page on your site, for example in your website’s footer.

Sitemaps for Search Engines
The second type of sitemap is a so-called XML sitemap. This type of sitemap is specifically intended for search engines, and it does roughly the same: allowing search engines to find all the content on your website quickly and easily.

Why bother with an XML sitemap then, if it’s the same as a normal sitemap? Because an XML sitemap allows you to include extra information about the content on your site, such as:

• when a webpage was last updated
• how often a webpage is usually updated
• what the priority of a webpage is relative to other pages on your site
• what type of content a webage contains (text, video, etc)

An XML sitemap allows a search engine to quickly and efficiently index all the content on your website, making sure your site is fully spidered and all your content is part of a search engine’s index.

Google recommends every site includes an XML sitemap. You can create an XML sitemap yourself manually, or you could have one generated automatically – ask your site’s web developer about it, or look at Google’s sitemap help pages here.

For larger websites it’s recommended to have a sitemap created automatically, so that whenever you create a new page or update an existing page your sitemap is automatically updated as well.

You can tell Google you have a sitemap by submitting it manually in Google’s Webmaster Tools, or you can include a sitemap reference in your robots.txt file. The second option is always recommended as this way other search engines such as Bing can also find your sitemap.

Need help with sitemaps or other aspects of your website? Get in touch with us at Visual Script, an experienced Belfast Web Design and Development company that can help you with all aspects of your online adventure.

Our search engine guy Barry gave a talk last month at the Barcamp Belfast conference. The talk was about some technical SEO mistakes web developers occasionally make when building websites, that result in the site being significantly less search engine friendly than it should be.

If you missed the talk or want to absorb its content some more, here are the slides: