As some of our customers know, earlier this week we had to invoke our website hosting disaster recovery plan. We have performed several rehearsals for this contingency - but this time it was for real.

I've finally got my hands on the new iPhone 4. I'm not usually an early adopter but since stupidly falling asleep and leaving my old iPhone in a minicab (a long story) I've been obsessively using the stock updater (on O2's website) to hunt one down.

Having a high bounce rate is normally a cause for concern. But sometimes this metric can be misleading, as we've recently discovered with one client's website.

I managed to get my hands on an iPad a day early, Apple finally deciding we had waited long enough and started allowing the pre-orders to be delivered.

This week Google has started to show brand suggestions within its search results! I read about this yesterday and wanted to share it with you because it directly relates to the article I posted last month about the "importance of brand within search marketing".

We are receiving more and more enquiries from businesses who are trying to rank in Google for extremely broad sets of keywords - they have even bought domains which are composites of keywords! There is a perception that this will somehow make their website appear at the top of the rankings.

I received another letter recently from a company called the "Domain Renewal Group" which notified me of a domain name we own that's due to expire. I must stress, the letter may not be a scam, however it could appear to be misleading.

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.

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.

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.

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.