123-reg.co.uk

Following on from the launch of our iGoogle domain name plug in to search for your domain name from your Google home page, we have now launched a domain name search bar widget for those of you who use the Microsoft Vista operating system to add to your sidebar.

Once you have downloaded the widget you can type in the domain name you are interested in with out having to open a web browser. You will then be taken to the 123-reg domain search results page where you can buy the domain or search for more.

We have also added a “New promotion alert” to the widget, whereby an envelope will appear on your widget when we start a new promotion. Click on it and a small pop out will appear with details on the latest offer we have running. Don’t worry, if you don’t click on it, it won’t bother you (-:

Click on this link to go to Microsoft’s official Vista widget download site and get your 123-reg domain name Vista widget

If you have any feedback or ideas for new features we could add either leave a comment or drop us an email at hosting-marketing@pipex.net

Thanks

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I’ve stumbled across a handy little website analyser called The Reaction Engine, which is worth checking out if you look after a website and are tasked with getting better search engine results.

It’s pretty cool, allowing you to enter the URL and find out how your website performs against key indicators such as download time, Page Rank, meta data etc., providing an overall rating. There’s loads of these sort of things around, but The Reaction Engine packages it all up nice and simply.

Whether your site gets a good or bad rating, there are a bunch of helpful suggestions to give ideas for improvement.

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Bebo has surprised me by being identified as the UK’s biggest social networking website, particularly since almost everyone I know is obsessed by Facebook right now.

According to a piece on Pocketlink , Bebo also picks up 63% of the European market, ahead of global leader MySpace.

ComScore figures for July show that Bebo got 10.7 million unique users in the UK just beating MySpace’s 10.1 million and Facebook’s 7.6 million.

I don’t think it’ll be long before Facebook overtakes the two market leaders though. Personally, it seems to be a bit more secure than some of the others and I can at least decide who sees what in my profile. But it’s still embarrassing turning down a friend request.

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After our defeat last week the Pipex Hosting 5 a side team has chalked up it’s first win of the season, winning 9-3. Going in at half time at 3-3, the second half was a different story as we put on a footballing display reminscent of Huddersfield Town’s slick attacking fluid play (If only!).

It was a good game played in the right spirit by both teams, and it was good to get some points on the board and pretty much everyone chipped in with at least one goal. We are going to be getting corporate sponsorship soon, so I’ll put a picture of the team online in our shiny new kits.

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Being patted on the back is always nice, so we are pleased to have been presented with the best UNIX/ LINUX hosting award from Web Host directory uk.

The award recognises…

“…exceptional power together with a wealth of great utilities to make your Web Hosting experience first rate. Armed with Perl, JAVA, PHP, Miva and a large array of other Web mastering tools, Unix Web Host plans offer a powerful line up of features”

Click here to find out more about our award winning Linux web hosting

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This week saw the return of the mighty Pipex Hosting 5 a side team after a summer break to recharge the batteries after a gruelling season in the spring. Unfortunately our first game back was against the top of the division, and our summer off had only resulted in a complete loss of fitness rather than the desired extra spring in our step. I’ll only be mentioning the score when we win (-:

Things look promising though and we are confident that after a couple of weeks we will be back to our old selves, firing on all cylinders. All we are missing is a recognised goalkeeper.

(As most of you will be are aware 123-reg is part of the Pipex group, which also consists of the web hosting companies WebFusion, Donhost and SupaNames.)

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We have recently launched a domain name search gadget for your iGoogle home page. To add it to your Google homepage simply click on the link above and scroll down to the 123-reg domain name search widget and click on ‘Add it now’. Now you can search for domain names directly from your personal Google home page. Fantastic!

If you haven’t set up a Google home page yet, it is really easy. Go to www.google.co.uk and click on the iGoogle link in the top right hand corner of your screen. You will be shown a generic example home page along with a link to get started. Once you have created your Google account you can start adding tools and widgets to your Google home page.

All feedback is welcome, so if you use it and have some great ideas on what we can add to it to make it even better leave a comment here or drop me an email at hosting-marketing@pipex.net

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So far we have gone through an introduction to using search engine pay per click advertising and looked at researching and choosing your keywords in more detail. Now we can start to look at writing your PPC adverts.

Writing an advert that attracts people’s attention and sells the idea of them clicking on it whilst competing with 19 other entries (paid and organic results) is quite a task, especially as your adverts have strict character limitations (including spaces).

For Google adwords you have:

• 25 characters for the title (Birthday cards £1.99)
• 35 characters for line 1 (Choose from 1000s of cards)
• 35 characters for line 2 (with free delivery to anywhere!)
• 35 characters for the display URL (www.websitename.com)
• 1024 characters for the destination URL (This is where the searcher is actually sent when clicking on the advert, so you can insert tracking or link the advert directly to a page within the site. This is not shown on the advert)

For Microsoft adCenter you have:

• 25 characters for the title
• 70 characters for the body of the advert. (Line breaks and ad size will vary depending upon the ad’s position on the webpage and the viewer’s browser settings.)
• 35 characters for the display URL
• 1022 characters for the destination URL

Read the rest of this entry »

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Thanks to all of you who took part in our survey and provided some great feedback and ideas. We are currently compiling all the responses and we will start by using your feedback to begin work on improving the parts that you are unhappy about and continue with the great work that keeps you happy. Thank you.
We will, of course, also soon let you know who won the Sony Playstation 3.

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A few of us from 123-reg have started going to a pub quiz on Thursdy nights and last night we got our usual trouncing , finishing rock bottom for the 2nd time in the six weeks we have been going. The sad thing is we really try.

One of the rounds was a themes based round where the answers all had something in common. We quickly worked out it was based around computers, great we thought, we should be experts! We were 100% sure on 9 out of the 10, but one totally flumaxed us. The question had been “Which river runs through Cambridge?” We knew it was the river Cam, but we couldn’t think what that related to in the computer world. When we asked we were told it stood for “Constant Access Memory”. We presumed this was an old school term from the early 80′s, but having been really sad and looked it up today on Wikipedia (no relevant result) and Webopdeia (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/CAM.html) I’m not sure that is the right answer. If anyone can enlighten us please leave a comment.

This leads me to the main point of this post, the often bewildering and ever expanding universe of Internet marketing acronyms that seem to appear on a daily basis (The latest I came across was CPK which stands for Cost per keyword). I have toyed with the idea of putting together a list/ dictionary of all of these to put on this blog but I would be reinventing the wheel. Better people have done this far better and in more detail than I ever could, so I will keep myself to just pointing you in the direction of a good source of information for marketing terms http://www.marketingterms.com/ which provides definitions and descriptions of all the key terms you should make yourself familiar with.

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