How to take a Print Screen

On Windows
1 First press the “Print Screen” button located on the top right of your keyboard (pictured right). Make sure you have exactly what you are wanting to capture opened at the time. Note: For best aesthetical results, press the F11 button before doing step one when in a web browser. This will make the web brower appear in the “full screen” mode.
2 Open the Start bar and click on “All Programs”. Then navigate to the “Accessories” folder and click on the program called “Paint”. (pictured right)
3 Once in Paint, click “Edit” located at the top of the screen, and click “Paste”. This should paste the screen shot you took in step 1.
4 Now click File > Save As. Pick an appropriate place to save the file, like your Desktop. Now, pick a suitable file name, and finally make sure the “Save as type” has “JPEG” selected (!Important!). Please note, if you are planning to email the screen shot, picking anything other than JPEG could result in a large file and take a long time to send (and to receive at the other end!)	Click to Enlarge
5 Your screen shot is now ready to be attached to an email, uploaded online, posted on a form, or used in a variety of ways. Enjoy!
On a Mac Mac has a lot more functionally when taking a screen shot. There are ways to take a shot of only the window you are in, or manually select with the mouse what area you would like to take a shot of. But for this article I will show you the plainest, easier way to do this.
1 Simply hold down Command + Shift + Option + 8. This will take a full screenshot and save it to your desktop.
2 Your screen shot is now ready to be attached to an email, uploaded online, posted on a form, or used in a variety of ways.

What is ‘Search Engine Friendly’ web design?

Search engine friendly web design is web design that is planned around known search engine optimization principles. If ranking well in the search engines is important to you then the first step towards this goal should be a search engine friendly web design. Fortunately, search engines like much the same things that users do - great content, clean layouts, easy navigation - so it’s well worth the time it takes to carefully plan your website page by page.

A ‘Search Engine Friendly’ website is one that search engines can easily scan and understand; it allows search engines to easily jump from page to page of the website, read content, determine what keywords are relevant, and then deliver search results accordingly. Although there are other factors that will affect the search engine success of a website (in particular, link popularity) - search engine friendly web design is a very important element of search engine optimisation.

Some of the points below contain some technical details that your web developer should be able to take care of for you.

How to achieve a search engine friendly web design:

1. Well structured and keyword rich content
   As you’ve probably heard time and time again, content is king. There’s nothing more important than content. Just like users, search engines like useful heading tags, bullet points, highlighted words and keyword rich content. Here are some tips to writing good web copy.
2. Make sure all title tags are unique
   Title tags should uniquely identify the content on any given page - title tags give search engines the first clue as to what a page is about. With ecommerce websites, every single product page should have a unique title tag, it can make a big difference to ranking well for individual product names (ask your web developer to have these generated automatically for you based on the product and category names).
3. Avoid keyword cannibalization
   Following on from the 2 points above, when structuring content make sure you target different keyword combinations on each page. Keyword cannilbalization is when the same keywords are targeted on many different pages of a website. This dilutes the value of the keywords on any one page and makes it harder for search engines to decide which page to display in search results.
4. Update often
   It’s worthwhile investing in a CMS (content management system) or asking your web developer to setup a blog for you (WordPress is fantastic, and free!). There are many of benefits to updating your content often, including:
   • Keyword Count
     It boosts your keyword count and the potential for getting found via web searches for an ever increasing number of keyword combinations (long tail searches: search phrases that are typically longer and more specific than normal)
   • Natural way of building links
     Every time you add relevant content to your website you increase the likelihood that other websites will link to yours, thereby increaseing your link popularity. There is nothing more powerful from a search engine optimisation perspective than incoming links, particularly if they come from relevant and/or valuable sources. Why not get involved in some related forums and other social media avenues (facebook, twitter etc) and announce to your audience each time you release new content along with a link straight to it!
   • Search engines will pay regular visits
     The more often you update, the more often search engines will visit your website to check for new and upated content.
5. Clean layouts work best
   The cleaner the coding of your website, the easier it is for search engines to access the website content. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) should be used for design implementation and all scripts should be contained within external files.
6. Easy navigation
   Navigation should be obvious (near the top of the page) and clean (avoid flash menus or javascript for hover effects, use css instead). Search engines (as well as website visitors) need to be able to easily navigate from page to page of your website. If your website has a lot of deeper level pages then make sure you setup a sitemap and link to this from your home page so so that search engines can them.
7. Meaningful directory and file names
   Something like: www.clothes.com/jeans/levis/ is a lot more meaningful to search engines than www.clothes.com/index.php?cat=10&subcat=12. Your keywords should be included in directory and file names wherever possible.
8. Avoid the excessive use of FLASH.
   There are many obstacles to achieving search engine friendliness in Flash websites, so use it sparingly. Flash can be great for creating some eye-catching ads or dynamic flair to your website but should not be heavily used.
9. Avoid embedding text in images
   Search engines can’t read text that appears in an image - so you’re better off displaying your content in real text wherever possible. When it is necessary to embed text in images then ALT tags can be used to describe the content to search engines
10. Link to your domain, not index.html (.asp, .php etc)
    Every-time you display a link to your home page, you should link to your full domain, not the file name. The number of pages linking to your home page (both external and internal) is an imporant element of seo, you don’t want to divide the total number of incoming links to your home page between 2 different links! You can read more about link popularity here.

Been cutting any chilli’s up recently? Can’t get rid of that awful burn? I hope this article can help!

Before I start, I realise we are a Web Development company, and this post may seem a little random, but we at Kintek love our chilli. The standard lunch time conversation can usually find its way to some sort of chilli story. Our staff grow everything from your standard bird’s eye, to your Habanero, all to way to the Naga Jolokia (the worlds hottest chilli!). We pride ourselves on our homemade chilli sauces and chutneys.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can get started. For avid Chilli eaters, this article may save you some grief. As some of you may know, chillis contain Capsaicin, which is the main ingredient in pepper spray. When this comes into contact with sensitive parts of your body, it can cause a very uncomfortable burn, or wonderful, depending when where it ends up ;).

Below are a few known treatments to help stop the burn, and ease the pain.

Remedies for Preventing Chilli burn

• The first, fool proof way of prevent chilli burn is wear gloves! If you’re cutting up a whole bunch of them, get some disposable gloves. Obviously, be careful not to rub your eye when they’re on, and throw them out when you’re done.
• If you don’t have gloves, try washing your hands with an oil based substance straight after you finish cutting / de-seeding; olive oil works well. The fat in the oil helps dissolve the chemical that causes the burn.

Remedies for Relieving Chilli burn

• Lime with Lemon Juice both work very well, especially when mixed together; The Citric Acid cuts through the chilli burn. If you don’t have either of them, try another acidic fruit like a Grapefruit. Allegedly Vinegar works well too.
• As said above, oil based substances like Olive Oil should help ease the pain.
• Oil + an acidic liquid: Try combining a mixture of the suggested remedies!
• Alcohol works well too! Beer works well, but generally the more alcoholic the beverage, the better the relief. Spirits work particularly well.
• Butter Milk is said to work very well on the skin.
• Lastly, try rubbing some salt into your skin and leave it for a few minutes before rinsing it off. I have no personally tried this, but I have heard it works for some people.

So there you have it, if you have any other success stories please post here and let others know!

Google Analytics - An Overview

Back in April, 2005, Google acquired “Urchin Software Corp” a company renowned for it’s web analytics software. Since then, Google has continued developing and expanding upon the software, which comes to you today in the form of  “Google Analytics”.  Google analytics is powerful software, it’s free of charge, and it produces comprehensive statistics about the visitors to your website, making it an important marketing tool.

Google Analytics can track how someone has found your site, whether they’ve come from a link on another website, whether they’ve come from an online add, what search engine they have used, the keyword phrase they typed into the search engine to find your site and much more. It’s a fantastic marketing tool because you can use it to really measure results on your website. You can find out what pages are most popular, what keywords are bringing in the traffic, what pages visitors are leaving your site from, how long they are spending on each page and so much more.

Another great thing about Google Analytics is that although there are many features, and some very in-depth day by day reports, the main points are displayed in a user friendly “Dashboard”. The Dashboard is great for beginners to the program, as seen below it displays the main points someone would want to know about the traffic to a website. From there, you can view detailed reports, see which links are being used the most, and more useful tips like that. Note that all these sections have a “View Report” section, which is far more information.

How can you get Google Analytics for your website? All you need is a google account, and some tracking code placed on your website pages. Contact us if you would like help setting this up.

Note: Most actual stats and percentages have blanked out.

A Tutorial for uploading images

Without getting technical and looking at this from a web developers perspective, there are numerous ways to display pictures on your website, or personal page (ie. Myspace, Facebook, etc). There are websites out there that allow free hosting, and are relatively easy to use. If you are dealing with photos directly off a digital camera, I would strongly advise you to first resize the photos. Read this tutorial for a quick and easy way to resize all your images at once.

Please keep in mind there are hundreds of websites that provide the same service, and a simple search in Google with key words like “Free image hosting” will provide you with a long list of potential sites.

So without further ado, here is a little tutorial for a well known website called ImageShack, which supports single as well as multiple uploads, videos and more.

Visit the Image Shack website

Select whether you want to upload an image, video, url, or multiple files. Then click the browse button.

This will take you too a new screen, browse through your files and select the photo/photos you wish to upload. Once you have selected the right file, select “Open”. This will now take you back to the main Imageshack Page, where you can now choose to have your picture resized automatically. If you do not wish that to happen uncheck that opetion and click “Host It”.

This will now take you to the final step in uploading your photo. Select which link you wish to use, wether it is a link too a forum, a website (Myspace / Facebook etc), or you just generally want to show some friends.