Replicated on this website, I’ve moved away from the dated strapline (‘computer scientist and IT professional’) in order to better reflect my career path, hobbies and passion. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m proud to present:

John Alexander Rowley – Computer specialist and online marketing professional’.

So maybe a strap-line launch party would be a bit much, but I thought I’d take this time to go through the new lines added to the new cards – coming to a wallet near you soon.

computer and technology specialism

Ok, number one. I think the first few words are pretty obvious (especially to those reading articles on this site). The vast subject of computing and even broader area of technology is fundamental to my education, career and hobbies.

My grandfather used to say “There’s no such thing as a specialist”, and I tend to agree. However, the definition for ‘specialist’ over at ‘the free dictionary’ is pretty accurate to what I’m trying to convey. ‘One who is devoted to a particular occupation or branch of study or research’. Add something about pastime into the mix, and we’re just about there.

online marketing strategy development

This is much more accurate to my career path than the previous ‘IT Professional’. Whilst I hope I remain professional, I definitely don’t work in IT. I’m sure there is thousands of online marketers across the country that get as wound up as I do when approached with the line “Oh, you’re in IT then, right?”.

Online marketing is another massive and complex area, covering campaign analysis, brand promotion and online presence management, to name but a few. Add email & social marketing, search engine optimization and Pay-Per-Click analysis and you’ll hopefully have an overview of what this sentence is attempting to define.

website production and analysis

Half way through now. Phew. The keyword ‘production’ caused some concern. Attempting to summarise ‘design and development’ (as per previous business cards), website production covers the whole journey of a website: initial graphical mock-ups, structure design, coding, maintenance, updating and migration. Not to mention database management and server setup / migration.

The ‘analysis’ postfix was added to identify the overlap between online marketing and website production. As mentioned SEO and PPC, as well as SERP supervision and keyword investigation are all integral to producing a successful website.

business information management

My final point relates to my final year and experience in the industry in an effort to depict my business comprehension. With one third of my final university year being business orientated (as well as a twelve month placement the previous year) I feel this is justified as I continue to develop my personal credentials.

Studying and actively engaging in elements such as project management, KPI production and business analysis assists me in fine-tuning my knowledge of organisation’s critical information. Handling and analysing this data is defined as the process of ‘business information management’.

Skill Set #1: Design

First things first – You need a good design. The attractiveness of a webpage can affect the users perception of credibility, the read rate and of cause, overall bounce rate. Here Photoshop is your greatest ally, quickly (a relative term at best!) mocking up several designs at (again relatively) little cost.

This skill set is as much about prior experience as it is intuitive design ideas – although the two do generally go hand in hand. Knowing what your audience likes is, perhaps, a skill of it’s own – ‘Monitoring’. Being able to take ideas from thought to paper (or canvas, in the case of Photoshop) is another paramount feature of designing.

Skill Set #2: Development

Phase two – The area that most ‘Website Developers’ are associated with. And with good reason. This code orientated skill set is based on taking the designs (from oneself, in a self sufficient methodology) and converting them to a functional structure. This often includes the knowledge of HTML, with DIV’s being the favored method for website structure.

CSS, a styling method, is also a must know language for development. The method in which a self sufficient developer does this is up to the individual; either opting for the quicker inline technique, or the more structured style sheet approach.

Skill Set #3: Content

This is the area that many, including myself, find most challenging. When done well it seems effortless and can definitely be the difference between a successful website and a struggling domain. But creating content for a page is a lot harder than it may seem from an outsiders perspective. Text is the key to most websites, and can change rapidly with altering trends. It does seem, for now at least, that the whole ‘Web 2.0′ friendly and personal approach is here and in full swing.

Text is only the start of it: There is images to contend with too!

Skill Set #4: Marketing

Often overlooked, this is probably the most important factor to producing a successful website (along with content, which is king, of cause). AdWords, Search Engine Optimization and all those other online marketing tools are essential for getting the word out to your potential readers / customers.

Managing your search engine result position (SERPs) with your chosen keywords is a fun and ongoing battle. SEO isn’t a one-time action: It takes constant maintenance (within reason) to ensure your audience keeps on flowing to your site (and converting, if that’s how you roll!).

Skill Set #5: Analyzing

The final piece to the self sufficient puzzle, analyzing those visits to the site is important in order to identify your strongest areas, possible pages of improvement and generally keep track of how you’re performing on the web.

You can track your performance against others, too. Competitors, friends or similar websites. Analyzing a developed website doesn’t mean that you’re finished: A good (proactive) self sufficient web developer will continuously use these individual skill sets in parallel to get the best results.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to my timeline Facebook profile (annotations to follow!)

Iv’e blacked out the parts of the profile which remain (pretty much) the same, and highlighted four new / highly altered page areas.

When you see the new layout for the first time, it’s quite shocking. Not much has remained the same. I think a lot of people will be put off by such a large change at first. Anyway, that’s not what I’m here to talk about… So let’s get onto the four annotations.

Firstly, there’s the all new “cover” for your profile. This is a banner across the top of the profile, which users can customize by uploading their own images. Note that I’ve already been playing with mine, to incorporate the profile picture (which lays over the top of the cover). The introduction of these “covers” is a huge step for brand awareness via Facebook pages, as I’ll discuss in a minute!

The second alteration is the timeline. Contrary to previous speculation (including my own previous article) the timeline takes a vertical approach, rather than a horizontal one. The “horizontal rumors”, as we shall call them, were imagined with the possibility of reducing the amount of content under the fold of a typical profile. The ATFC (Above The Fold Content) has been addressed with annotation four, however!

Annotation number three comes in the form of conglomeration. Friends, Photos, GeoTagging, Likes, Music and much more are now accumulated in respective groups (almost like Folders) which can be expanded independently. This generally tidies the profile (in my opinion) and leaves more room for the all important “wall”.

The final point is the wall itself. Facebook have divided the area into two columns (4″ to 9″ wall, for those in the building trade?!) to maximize on space saving. This works well, especially with a blue timeline running down the middle to show when individual posts were added.

It’s a good looking, next generation profile layout (and it’ll look lovely if replicated for Facebook’s iPad app!).

What does this mean for Brand Awareness and Online Marketing?

Ok, so that’s an introduction to some of the new features of Facebook timeline profiles, but what does this mean in terms of online advertising?

Well, for starters the cover (as aforementioned) provides a huge amount of screen space for getting brand identity out there. Take the space as a free 850 x 315 billboard! It’s the first thing customers will see, and it makes a big impact if done well. Grab their attention – check!

Take, for example, the RedBull Facebok profile. It’s clever use of the cover really stands out, and accompanied with the custom background (I’ve not looked into this yet, but I think it may only be for pages rather than profiles) and clever display picture gives a great aspect of brand identity. You’re not going to confuse this page for “Monster: Energy Drink” anytime soon! RedBull have a large online marketing presence, and some of their campaigns have been added to the wall; Including a video and imagery.

Similarly, McDonalds have produced a great looking cover, and let the profile picture do the explaining. That’s fine for a globally recognized brand, but smaller organisations may have to do a little more explaining in their banners! Anyway, so McDonalds have promoted their Free WiFi with a lovely large promotional image and used the “about” information (below the profile picture) to describe their service (not that they particularly need to!)

To conclude, the new Facebook interface brings much more customization and a greater identifiable page to the profiles. Remember the day of totally custom MySpace profiles? Well, it’s not quite THAT changeable, but it’s a perfect blend of standard format layout and unique profile content!

The new Facebook layout will give a new slant on Facebook based marketing, and I think we will see more and more organisations taking to social media advertising as this new layout is rolled out.

First off there is the revamp of the Facebook profile pages, up until now laid out somewhat uniform, with the profile picture on the left, paragraph of information at the top, stream of tagged photos parallel and the wall below. It seems, however, that this is soon to change; In favor of a timeline approach style! This new style will (probably) conglomerate tagged pictures, status updates and activity on the social networking site, to eliminate (or at least reduce) the amount of content hidden beneath the fold (beyond the view-able screen without scrolling).

Secondly, as discovered a while ago, the iPad Facebook application is “launching soon” according to a 9to5 Mac article. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if it launched alongside the Facebook UI updates!

So, this change again will inevitably cause a current of opinions in the world of Social Media… With everyone holding their own thoughts (and most posting/tweeting their feelings) be prepared (Social Sandbags?) for the next wave of “I love/hate the new Facebook layout” status’.

I leave you with this famous quote from Winston Churchill;

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

Now, after a little digging, it became apparent that WordPress Dashboards are notorious for having slow loading times. The hunt began to resolve this issue, if possible with a WP-Plugin (after all, it was WordPress’ fault to begin with!).

Along came a cheeky little plugin called WP-Cache is;

an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database.

It works quite well. It’s made the dashboard a lot more responsive, and I’m starting to cut down on the amount of hair-pulling!

And what is the number one characteristic of SEO? Content! I’m sure iv’e mentioned it in previous blog articles, but key word rich, media rich, unique content is probably the most important element to a high ranking website.

So, how to keep things running smoothly?

SEO isn’t a one time thing; It takes constant tweaking, improvement and analysis to make the most! The last couple of days iv’e been revamping johnalexanderrowley.com with a whirlwind of new information. The result? Google robots scanning and searching this valuable new data to place me in the ranking system. It’s a bit of an experiment, if nothing else, replacing content in some cases, but replacing entire pages in others.

However, i’m already seeing some good improvement in Analytics and numbers; There has been a steady increase in unique and returning visitors over the last six months, and it’s climbing more rapidly than ever right now. That’s not to say it won’t peek and return to previous numbers, but for the mean time, at least, i’m enjoying soaring numbers.

Moral of the story? Do some SEO Spring Cleaning and see if you can improve your site visits too!?

WordPress changes the .htaccess file depending on the permalink style you choose. There are two ways to solve the 404 error problem;

Option A – Change your permalink style to the default, and then back again.

Option B - For the more webDev savy, go to your .htacess and add the following code;

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

That should fix it!

Now, I’m not saying that I write the perfect content – Far from it – But I like to think I put a degree of effort into my articles and have a style of writing which people can at least relate to. Now, talking about ‘computer things’ (as my mom would put it) doesn’t require a specifically sophisticated level of vocabulary. Technical, yes. But not sophisticated.

On the other hand talking about some subjects (namely food and film) are two which are generally associated with understandable, well constructed English.

Why the rant, you may be asking yourself?
Well, because recently one of my house-mates has decided to take it upon himself to ‘review’ (and I use that term loosely) both aforementioned topics. His self-confessed “not good at English” approach makes reading anything hard, and is particularly annoying when coupled with a lack of basic knowledge to base his ‘reviews’ upon. I’m talking more about food than film, as he does visit the cinema quite regularly.

But food!? It’s something I have a genuine passion about. I buy British, in season top quality foods. Comparatively, said house-mate buys cheap, fake, processed battered ‘food’ from god-knows-where. Is this OK? Can his food articles be justified with any sort of background knowledge? Sure, go ahead and review KFC, but not the best sandwich shop in the city!?

So, yes I’m laying into one particular a little bit – But it’s really quite frustrating when I spend so much time trying to get an article, blog and general website looking/reading well, only to have some badly worded, unjustified, poorly designed excuse of a blog knocked up in 10 minutes.

Again, I don’t know why its bothered me so much; bloggers pride, perhaps?

So, what elements should one strive to patch into a website to get the most out of their efforts? Well, it’s just that which makes a good blog; Effort. If you put a lot of effort into your blogs, being thoughtful in what you do (or sometimes don’t) say, provoking the reader to fire up a conversation via comments, then mission accomplished.

There are no magic rules for creating a good blog, but personally I like to read from a page which has a professional looking interface; Not specifically corporate, but looks like it’s been done by someone who gives a damn. If the aim is to look amateur with a sense of cartography, make it look that way, but lets see a degree of effort in the design to make it look like that!

Effort shouldn’t stop with design though. Each article should be clear and as mentioned, provoke a response from the reader. The style here doesn’t matter that much, but how it’s wrote does! No body will read something that’s been hashed together in 5 minutes with little thought, bad grammar, spelling mistakes and general lack of attention to detail. Adding images (fit for the style of the blog) can do wonders too; breaking up text blocks and adding a thousand words!

Of cause, it’s just my opinion, but if your reading this odds on you read the whole article, so I must be on the right lines, aren’t I?

The automatic renewal took place, and charged, on top of the usual hosting fee, a renewal fee of £13. It’s not a great amount, but if this automatic renewal happened to the long list of domains I own we could be talking some serious money! Bad times – Something to look out for! Put a note in your diary/phone/whatever to make sure your on top of this when it roll’s around!

Hosting providers WILL just renew, and make you pay for it. Mine even stated in their T&C’s that there will be further ‘admin’ charges if the amount isn’t paid within 28 days.