What's up! The Silkstream blog

If your website contains event information, reviews, people / company profiles then last weeks news that Google has announced support for microdata for use in rich snippets should be music to your ears.

You can hire the best SEOs in the world and have more website traffic than you can shake a stick at, but if your visitors are not converting into sales, then something needs to be done. Here's our top 10 tips for improving your website conversion rates:

So you want to try Google AdWords or similar Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising programme? You may have even received your £50 voucher from Google tempting you to dive in!? Well before you get started I strongly recommend you firstly assess your website's overall effectives, to save you from potential disaster.

I'm not normally one to rant about trivial things :), but I recently had a meeting with one of our clients in Dubai and I was using one of their computers to show some examples of some current design and data-capture techniques. All of their computers were running IE6; a browser that's over 8 years old[1] - that's older than most of the offices in Dubai! The problem was their browser wasn't capable of understanding and displaying some of the advances in web development. Advances that would allow them to create a website that was cutting edge and would out-perform their competitors.

We have been invited by the master photographer's association (MPA) to give an informal talk on the 20th January about marketing your website and general good practice of website design.

It's been long overdue, but we've finally launched our new website. The site will be in a Beta (testing) version for a short period, enough to monitor and receive your feedback, positive, negative and all inbetween.

Before you can use Outlook Express to send and receive e-mail, you need to set up an account. You can have more than one account—for business, online shopping, and so on—and each person who uses your computer may have their own, completely separate account. Outlook Express gracefully handles it all.

To Set Up Your E-mail Account in Microsoft Outlook 1. In Microsoft Outlook, select Tools > E-mail Accounts. 2. On the E-mail Accounts wizard window, select "Add a new e-mail account" and click Next. 3. For your server type, select "POP3" and click Next.

If people are unsubscribing from your mailing list chances are you've not quite got the content or design right. Unfortunately we can't ask people why they've unsubscribed but editing the content and layout will increase your open rate and reduce the number of unsubscribers.

Launching a new website is exciting stuff: a re-designed, re-structured, compliant, search engine friendly website that unleashes a richer user experience upon your existing (and hopefully new) customers. This takes a lot of hard work! But just before you replace the old site with the new one, consider all the old site's pages that have already been indexed by Google, Yahoo et al. And don't forget about those all-important in-bound links!

Too many companies have ignored this problem for too long. Accurate, reliable and up-to-date management information is the lifeblood of any successful business, yet most companies do a poor job of making sure the flow of critical data doesn't dry up.