If you have been skiing before then you may already have a resort that you go to every year, have you considered some of the other great options available to you? Below is a list of some of the resorts that are available across Europe.

The usual resorts that most visit in France are Chamonix, Morzine, Val D’Isere and Courchevel, but you may not have considered visiting Montgenèvre on the Italian border, Vaujany, Meribel and even La Tania. As part of larger ski areas they all have access to some awesome slopes and terrain close to home.

Switzerland offers some great resorts, the main ones visited by holiday goers are Verbier, Zermatt or St Moritz but there are some real gems available such as like Saas-Fee, Gstaad Les Crosets and Klosters. Switzerland can be a little more expensive that France, but the ambience, chocolate box villages and the fondue are well worth the extra money.

Austria is by far the best location for a party ski holiday, with the towns of of Mayrhofen, St Anton am Arlberg and Ischgl leading the way whenever you hear the words après ski!

The above is just a snapshot of the great ski resorts to consider for your next winter holiday, it’s always worth doing your own research for your holidays on websites like www.goski.co.uk, they offer reviews, slope ratings, information on the resorts and the night life in the local area.

Searchable.co.uk provides SEO, PR and Domain Brokering and a service helping you out with your social network profile. I’ve used several of the services and have found everything has been done to the highest standard possible, and my dealings with Adam Grunweg the company owner have always been pleasant.

Getting the right help with the promotion of your site via the SERPs and Social Media is what will make your site;  Getting not just traffic but the right traffic to your website is going to help with the conversion of advertising, natural promotion of your content from your site users and returning visitors.

It’s always best to find a good SEO Agency and for my current projects Searchable Media Agency are the people for me!

Over the last few months I’ve been using http://ImageSource.com, they provide high quality stock images sold for advertising & publishing; I’ve found great images that don’t necessarily have that `stock` feel to the images, this has given me the chance to make the websites I’ve been working on look more unique, more professional and generally better looking for the users of the website.

The ImageSource website has a modern design and is very easily to navigate; It has a power search engine that very quickly returns hundreds of images from a search result providing me with a wide choice of images for a specific search. Not only do they provide stock images, they also provide competitively priced HD video footage covering a huge amount of subjects.

The advantage of a site Like ImageSource.com is that once you purchase your royalty free photos you are then free to use them as many times as you like for a one off payment, allowing you to use the same image across a network of sites without the need for a payment each time you use it.

I’d strongly recommend giving them a try, a few well placed stock images can make a piece of content or a site homepage look a lot better.

I think I’ll be adding some more content to the site over the next week or two, and possibly re writing some of the existing content with the aim of freshening things up for the next time Google decides to index some pages.

The site made £19.06 last month on adsense, but that doesn’t include a full month in my adsense account, so a better representation will be able to be worked out at the end of February. In terms of traffic  from the 24th January – 30st January the site got 221 unique visitors which included 6 visitors from Google, 73 visits from Bing and 73 visits from yahoo to name a few.

In comparison from 31st January – 6th February the site got 189 unique visitors, 62 visits from bing, 46 visits from yahoo and most importantly the visits from Google had gone up to 34, so even though over the seven day period the traffic had dropped slightly the large increase in visits from google were a good sign.

• Domain Name
• Tag
• Created Date
• Expiry Date
• Suspension Date
• Updated Date
• Drop Date
• Status (Registered/Suspended)
• Registrant

The tool is free to use and only requires you to register for free on the dbCatch drop catching website, more tools are currently being developed and I look forward to you trying them out.

No real increase in statistics as of yet, it’s currently getting around 30 unique visitors a day and making about £1.00/£2.00 a day on Adsense earnings.

Webmaster tools isn’t showing any errors and no warning messages have been sent to me as of yet unlike the previous domain, I’m interested to see over the next week or two if the pages will get indexed in a similar position to where they were before, of they are any better or worse.

Google’s crawl rate is up a lot over the last day or two so hoping to see some proper indexed pages over the next few days, Fingers crossed this can recover to the site it was previously.

More to follow…

I’ve moved the site to  a new address, changed the content that was duped online elsewhere and moved it from a static site to a wordpress blog. This has enabled me to perform some on site SEO tasks easier and move the adverts around the page along with generating up to date sitemaps.

The site post Google is getting around 15-25 unique visitors a day and on the old address wasn’t even indexed in google let alone ranking. Today I’ve resubmited the site with the new content, domain and layout and 301′ed the old domain to the new one, Looking forward to seeing if Google even attempts to re index it or if it get’s shunned again.

I’ve also written a couple of new pages of content myself, I’m not a content writer by any stretch of the imagination but anything extra I can add I will do, the site address is http://www.designsoftwareinc.com for anyone that is interested in taking a look.

The actual drop down is quite large and changes on the fly as you type in different things, what you see above is there by default; I clicked “Restaurants nearby” and was greeted with a page of restaurants, a map of the restaurants and a series of drop down boxes where I could select if my friends had visited, if it was near to me and the type of restaurant it is. It actually works better than I thought it would and in practice has a use; This is an ideal way of using geo location to find specific businesses or restaurants in this case in and around your local area.

You can type different phrases into the search box, an example we tried was “people that live nearby”. And as I’d mentioned in a previous post this all feels a bit “datey”, you can narrow down your search by gender, relationship, age range, employer. If there was ever a time to make as much as you can private on Facebook, this is it!

The actual results weren’t really that great, out of the top 20 results only one lived within 40 miles of me, and it failed to mention the 50 odd friends that I have who all live in the local area (I don’t use Facebook hence the 50 friends, although in all honesty I have considerably less in the real world!).

To recap, I love the business search side of things and think this could really benefit local businesses, the extreme amount of detail you can put into searching for people can only encourage people to go trolling round Facebook harassing people they don’t know; Something people up to this point have regularly been banned from Facebook for.

All looks very much like a early 2000′s dating website to me!

With Facebook’s connections with Bing I’d thought at some point in the near future there would be a more direct involvement with searching the world wide web; The current offering seems to flip the Facebook model on it’s head. I always presumed Facebook was built for people to connect with people that they knew, friends, families and colleagues…This however seems to push people towards meeting new people by searching based on your interests, relationship status and if you are a fan of Star Wars films.

It does seem to have some minor positives like searching for restaurants and other businesses that your friends and family have visited, I can’t help feel all this has been done to death by multiple applications across multiple platforms already over the last few years.

What are your thoughts on Facebook’s latest offerings?

According to an article at StockLogos.com, the BBC paid $1.8 million dollars in 1997 for a simple three squared logo with the BBC written within; I always thought this was a silly amount of money to spend on a design of a logo, but it’s all about branding and seeing that logo reminds you instantly that you are watching the BBC, the new ITV logo doesn’t really do that for me.

Check the logo out above, and the video released by ITV below and make your own mind up.

Natalie (my wife) is doing great and we are both enjoying parenthood A LOT, It’s surprised me how rewarding it is. We are both looking forward to watching her develop over the coming months and years, taking embarrassing photos all along the way to get out on her eighteenth birthday!

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To solve the issues simply load up the DNS settings for each domain and insert the following TXT DNS records:

(Replace website.co.uk with your domain name, and replace mail.website.co.uk with your mail server address). In Plesk 11 you can either set these up one by one or define and update in the global DNS records template.)

Once you’ve done this simply hit save and update the DNS settings, you should then be able to send forwarded emails to google mail without issue.

With the champions league now in full swing along with the Carling Cup and the Europa League, most Tuesdays,Wednesdays and Thursdays are peaking above 120 unique visitors with Saturday and Sunday between 250 and 300 unique visitors. I’m now just trying to work out the best way of converting the traffic into some decent revenue.

Below is a screenshot of the drastic change in statistics.

If the site ranked number one for the term I’d expect maybe 500/600 searches per month, however in forth doesn’t quite match up! Now to convert them visitors into some ££.

Do you still use the Keyword Tool? If you do what do you do with it?

When reading online it’s mostly large portfolio holders of domains that seem to have the main issue with this and I can see why they are slightly annoyed about this, say Mr. Bloggs owns 5,000 .co.uk domain names, if the .uk domains were to come into action, instead of people finding his names via type in’s or the search engines and paying a premium for them they could simply go onto a domain registrars site and find the same name available for £20. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve held a small portfolio of domain names for sale in this way since I started in the domain industry but I don’t feel this gives me a right to register the .uk before anyone else, infact I feel like If I’ve spent the last two years sitting on the name in the hope to sell it and haven’t and had no intention to develop then it gives me no right at all to the domain name.

The problem I’ve discussed with people at length and that can not be agreed upon is how they determine who get’s what names at what stage, The suggestion is that trademark holders would get first “dibs” on the names, this would normally be fine, and worked well during the LL.co.uk domain name auctions, the problem with such a vast amount of trademarks registered and such a wide array of domains available is it as simple as saying the trademark holder gets the right to a generic term.

An example of this problem would be the trademark registered for the term “tickets”, As you would think I imagine companies like ticket master, see tickets and ticket line would love to have a chance at getting this name, however with the current discussions going on, the trademark holder of “tickets” for the class of “scented candles” in the British Virgin Islands would have the first opportunity to the name. For me the major problem is the broadness of the names, and the differing situations, be it large portfolio holders parking names for sale, small portfolio holders with a set of names in development or Joe Bloggs down the high street with his shoe shop.

I’m torn between the .uk and .co.uk situation, I develop websites for a UK based company that own several premium .co.uk domain names all in the same sector, all of these are due for development and three of them have been launched or redeveloped recently. I’d hope that we could apply and be in with a shot at the .uk equivalent domain names. I’ve discussed with a colleague whether the .uk  would effect our .co.uk brand, He this that it would have a pretty big effect and I’m not so sure, I just don’t think the general public are as aware of things of this nature as we are and I don’t think they are as quick to learn, I’d go as most “non techy” people probably already think .uk exists.

I’m of the thinking that if your ranking for the terms you want to rank for, and pushing the site socially yourself then people are going to visit YOUR SITE whether its on the .co.uk or .uk domain name, people more often that not only visit your site from the search engines (where they couldn’t get the domain names confused), from links you’ve provided via email or social media (where they couldn’t get the domain names confused) or from a bookmark (….you can see where I’m going).

I’d probably have to welcome .uk domain names being released as I believe there is money to be made from the domain names, talking to people they are concerned about their own .co.uk domain names that are developed or their undeveloped portfolios may be devalued or their brand being reduced by the .uk introduction, for me the fact that people are concerned shows that people think the names have potential and could be a challenger to the .co.uk domain market place. I missed out on the original boom when the majority of the large domain name holders registered their names, is this a chance for a new domain portfolio holders?

However, there is a cost to the use of generic domains. In monetary terms with quality generics regularly fetching five and even six figure sums on the reseller market which could otherwise be used to market a domain. In marketing brand retention falls and brand protection becomes difficult, as Hotels.com found when they took their trademark application (warning, pdf link) all the way to the US Court of Appeals and failed.

One company actively using brand domains is Treacle, who have been retailing mobile phone insurance online under the trademark TalkCover, and have recently launched GizCover, a retailer of gadget insurance. I’ll watch their development with interest.

This time however I had to look for another company, i searched around online and found mottestcentres.co.uk, they have a large selection of MOT Test Centres in my local area along with the rest of the country. The site offers a search function that lets you find an MOT Test Centre within a set mileage from your current location.

In the end I found a garage for my MOT, Luckily for me the car went through the MOT without any problems, I’d happily use mottestcentres.co.uk again if my usual garage is fully booked.

Overall I feel it went quite well, The system caught a fair few names however looking at the “bad” month catching I had in September I made more money selling one of the names I caught that I got from the total revenue that the public back order system used. I’ll probably be going back to catching for myself from the 1st November.

Which means I’ve got a near on fully automated public booking system complete with custom coded drop script sitting around doing nothing, everything has a price!

For the same client I’ve also been working on a horoscopes website over at horoscopes.org.uk, It has a fully functional custom back end, which features a content management panel, a horoscope editing panel and a template and settings section giving the user full control over every aspect of the site.

If you need any development work completed then don’t hesitate to contact me via the contact form.