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While internet take-up may continue to increase rapidly it doesn’t mean that those users, old and new actually understand how even the basics work.

The above screen-grab using Google’s Insight for Search shows that the sixth most popular search-term requested from the search engine’s UK database in the last 7 days was ‘google’ – meaning the searchers had managed to get to google (probably set as a home page) but still felt the need to search for ‘google’. Weird, stupid or maybe a combination of them both.

With archived records on the site showing this a rising trend, perhaps any web designers and content writers out there ought to consider the potential level of understanding of their audiences carefully before launching anything too technical. They should certainly keep an eye on search trends using the Insight for Search site. The Beta-state facility allows you to track search trends by not only keywords but also region, platform and time-frames.

Thanks to the blog at www.cupofcoffee.co.uk for making us aware of this one.

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A report from the US suggests the social media generation are showing worrying signs of addiction as Facebook, Twitter, and even SMS threaten to dominate their day-to-day lives.

The latest Retrevo Gadgetology Report reveals a nation becoming obsessed with social media. 19% of respondents aged under 25 admitted that if they wake up in the middle of the night they do check their Facebook or Twitter accounts. With over 32% of under 25s admitting to checking their accounts as soon as they woke up in the morning, it seems the younger generation are struggling to get on, without their social media kick.

Perhaps even more worryingly, a large percentage seem to have no limits as to when and where they will check an incoming message. Again, younger respondents seemed more willing to interrupt what they were doing to check a message but even 12% of those surveyed in the over 25s bracket suggested they had no problems logging on even when they were on the toilet. We can only wonder as to whether the 6% of over 25s and 11% of under 25s who admitted to checking messages even during sex were being too honest for their own good or just spicing up their replies.

With technology set to advance even more in recent years, could the warnings ring true that computers may come to dominate humans?

Where do you do it?

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The internet is supposed to make our lives easier and communication simpler, but how many of us  carry around more than one mobile phone, have a different Skype number and run several email accounts? Then there are the accounts for Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have one place where you can post all this contact information? Somewhere you can securely control all that personal information via the internet and choose who can see it and what they can see? It’s actually already there via the .tel domain.

By signing up yourname.tel (eg johnsmith.tel) you not only get your personalised domain but you also get a single personal online home which will help your friends, family and work colleagues stay in touch with you. Plus being your name: it’s easy to remember!

You can even add some extra information about yourself such as hobbies and interests and keywords so that like-minded people can find you in the .tel directory that could spell the end of traditional telephone directories.

With apps available for iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Android as well as a simple online updating form, keeping your information current is easy and you don’t need any additional hosting or special products, just the domain.

For visitors to your site, life is easy too. They can view all your public contact details online or download the information as a vcard direct to their mobile phone.

For your close friends you can add additional information – perhaps a home phone number – and keep that in a private area, only accessible by a username and password.

If re-organising your life into one simple page sounds like your sort of thing, sign up for your .tel via 123-reg.

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Whether you’re a pro web designer building websites for clients, or you’re just starting out with the 123-reg Instantsite website building tool, there are some great free resources out there to help you make a better website. Here are a few of my favourites.

1. ColorZilla

Colorzilla is a free extension for the Firefox browser that helps you to find and match the right colours for your website.

Download colorzilla from the Firefox website here. Once installed, the colorzilla picker sits down in the bottom left corner of your browser.

The next time you are on a website and you want to know the RGB colour of any element, just click on the colour picker and then click on the colour you want to evaluate. Colorzilla then lets you know the RGB and Hex values of that colour.

2. Imagemerger.net

Do you ever take images from your camera, and try to use them on your website? Modern digital cameras produce such massive, high-resolution images that using them on your website will use up all your webpace allowance. What’s worse, it will make your website really slow to load, and drain the users’ bandwidth.

Take a look at Imagemerger. This lets you resize your images to a point where you can use them on your site. Just specify by what percentage you want your images reduced by, and the site will do the rest.

3. Paint.net

How do you produce graphics for your website? If you’re a beginner then you probably try MS Paint. And if you’re you’re a pro you may have shelled out for a copy of Photoshop. Paint.net is a good compromise between the two. It’s a powerful tool that lets you carry out lots of the functions of Photoshop, but a bit easier to use. Oh, and did I mention? It’s free!

Paint.net lets you create your graphics in layers. You can change individual layers, and then save and flatten the final work. You also get the ability to save the image as lots of different file types.

4. Screen-Resolution.com

Computers have lots of different screen sizes, and users set up their browsers with a range of toolbars. This means that each of us sees a slightly different amount of each website. A few weeks ago we told you about a free browser size tool from Google that lets you see what your website looks like in different screen sizes. There’s another great tool that’ll do the same, and it’s called screen-resolution.com.

To see what your website looks like in different browsers, just type your website address into the main box, choose the size that you want to investigate, and click ‘go’. Screen-resolution.com then launches a new browser that shows your website in the exact size you specified. You can immediately see how other users view your website.

5. Zamzar

Zamzar is a handy file converter that lets you… convert files! You can change almost any file to almost any other. Got a word doc that you want made into a PDF? An excel file into a  jpeg? Zamzar can do it all, and also works with most video and music files too.

Here’s a list of files that Zamzar works with: .rtf; .docx; .doc .ods; .odt; .ppt; .pptx; . odp;  .wpd; ps; .pub;; .xls; .xlsx; .cvs; . .wps… and so on

Zamzar also gives you a browser button that lets you download, save and convert Youtube videos.

6. fivesecondtest

fivesecondtest is a community of web designers who will give you feedback on your design for free. Submit your website, and it is revealed to volunteers for 5 seconds. They have to let you know what they get from your website in the first 5 seconds.

For example, you can ask them what things they remember about your website once the image has gone. Or you can ask them to click on and name the things that stand out.

This is a great way to test out your current and new designs ideas. Bounce rates are one of the biggest problems for web designers. People arriving on a website need to quickly be able to see what it’s all about; if they don’t know in the first five seconds, the chances are that they will leave.

fivesecondtest lets you quickly test whether your design is clear and easy to understand.

That’s it

These are some of my favourite free tools to help build websites.

Check them out and let us know what you think. Do you know any other free online tools that you can share?

Nick Leech runs Digital Marketing Agency Euston Digital

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Before the rise of the personal computers, the differing styles of lettering were comfortingly known as typefaces, and a font was just one variation within that typeface. Now one designer is taking that traditional term literally and developing a nifty piece of software that will allow a user to create a font (or typeface) based upon the proportions and variations of their individual face.

Combining the current internet trend of personalisation and plain. simple fun, designer Mary Huang first announced the project in October last year via her blog. There is still no formal site but Huang has been keeping enthusiastic potential customers updated via the blog.

TYPEFACE utilises a webcam to bring together facial recognition and type-design and produce a font as unique as your own face. Yet, far from just a one-off font creator, Huang sees the software as something to have some fun with that can keep evolving:

“Originally, TYPEFACE was about creating a typeface that corresponds to each individual, like a typographic portrait. However, I found that what people really wanted to do was make funny faces at the camera so they could watch the type change. So, I decided to encourage that. I also wanted to draw a closer connection to handwriting, so I added the ability to type in the program, which creates sentences with accumulated variation in the letters.” she says on her blog.

Blogging last month, Huang suggested a download might be available by the end of this month and we’ve already bookmarked her site to keep an eye on what we think could revolutionise the way we write and present our musings online and in print.

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Today is St Patrick’s Day and that always seems a great time for a celebration.

Whatever the occasion, if you are planning your own celebration, the internet is a great resource for recipes, craft ideas and almost anything you need to make your event go with a swing. St Patrick’s Day is no exception.

We’ve trawled the net for some of the top St Patrick’s Day resources and suggest you make the most of the day when Green means fun.

Kaboose
This US-based site is aimed at kids but there is plenty to entertain the bigger kids amongst us. There are some useful stats and facts about St Patrick himself alongside recipes for stuff like Irish Soda Bread and a traditional Corned Beef Supper. Check out the St Patrick’s day riddles and jokes, St Patrick’s Day Bingo and some crafty ideas, like how to make your own Leprechaun Hat to store your chips in!

Activity Village
Another site aimed at kids but plenty there for creative adults too. From colouring pages to printable bookmarks with a St Patrick’s theme, we think the St Patrick’s Day Origami pages (make your own paper shamrock!) could be a winner here.

New York St Patrick’s Day Parade Cam
If you fancy just being a voyeur on other’s enjoying the craic, check out Earthcam’s streaming cam which has a webcam located one block south of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. The parade, now one of the biggets in the world began in 1766 and this year’s coverage begins at 4pm British time today and is set to last for five hours. There are also clips from previous years if that is not enough

While you are surfing the net, why not take advantage of the 123-reg offer celebrating the luck of the Irish. We’ve cut the Blarney and are offering you your very own personal domain (.me) for just £4.44. That’s less than a third of the normal price for .me domains (£14.99) saving you £10.55 per domain. But hurry! The offer is only on until the 19^th March.

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Any final year students out there? Have you started getting into that tricky job hunting phase yet, when the need to find some way of earning a bit of post-university cash starts jostling for attention alongside revision and making the most of your remaining university months? It’s not that long since some of us here were there ourselves, y’know…

There’s always a lot of competition for graduate jobs, and temporary work can be tricky to come by too. Even opportunities that aren’t part of formal graduate training schemes are likely to see an upsurge in applicants.

That means it can be wise to come up with ideas to set yourself apart from the rest. One relatively easy option is to make use of the internet.

What does Google say about you?

Rightly or wrongly, many employers will Google the names of job applicants to see what shows up. Some jobs, especially those in the creative and web industries, will expect you to supply an online portfolio, so not having anything relevant on the web could be a real disadvantage.

Even if there’s no official requirement for this, it can’t hurt to put together an online CV to complement your paper-based one. And if it pushes any embarrassing Facebook photos further down the Google results for your name then that’s a bonus too.

Using free space

Your university may offer web space to you for free, especially if you’re pursuing a course that’s related to computers or the internet. However, this isn’t always ideal place to create a portfolio site or online CV.

For a start, the facilities on offer might be pretty basic. And if you can get round that, you might find your university deletes your account (wiping out all your efforts and any work examples you’ve added to your website) the day you leave university. Not exactly ideal if you’ve built an impressive website, put the address on your CV and told prospective employers to check it out.

Try our student hosting instead

Our student hosting service has been designed to provide an alternative to this approach. The package includes a Windows web hosting package with lots of useful features (including PHP and ASP.NET, for the technically-minded among you). It costs £1 a month, but when you sign up, you’re guaranteed the package for a whole year. We won’t bump the price up or cancel the package the minute you stop being a student.

So, if you join us on 20 March 2010, your package won’t expire till 20March 2011. And once the year’s up, you’ll be given the option to renew or cancel. You’ll certainly get plenty of notice before any of your valuable online work is in danger of being deleted.

Oh – and we’ll throw in a free .info domain name, so you can put a snappy web address on your job applications. That alone is worth £9.99 a year.

Ready to start creating your online CV, portfolio, or whatever you want to call it? Get full details of our student hosting offer here.

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They could quite literally become the hottest domains on the planet if the internet governing body Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) give the go ahead tomorrow to a new  top level domain – the .xxx.

Back in 2005, ICANN gave the nod to the creation of the domain but two years later reversed that decision following large scale protest on moral grounds from conservative groups, mainly within the USA.

Now an independent review by the American Arbitration Association’s International Centre for Dispute Resolution has declared that decision unfair and has the issue back for re-consideration by the ICANN board at their meeting in Nairobi, Kenya.

ICM Registry who put the plans forward for the .xxx domain and would oversee the sale of the addresses, suggest that if the go-ahead is given, the domain names could be on sale before the end of the year. However, ICANN is unlikely to make a snap decision and are expected to throw the issue back for consultation with its members and the internet community as a whole.

The .xxx domain proposal started long before ICANN’s first approval. Back in 2001 it was proposed as a way of filtering pornography on the internet with an immediate identifier of the content. Although any scheme would be voluntary – porn-sites could still be registered under other domains such as .com too – it might help to re-organise the internet and in particular search engines, becoming clogged by content that is less than family-friendly.

Ironically, the ICANN deliberation comes less than a week before sex.com – seen by many as one of the most valuable domain names in the world – comes up for auction in New York with a starting price of US$1 million. The domain was reportedly purchased for US$14 million back in 2006 by a group of private investors under the guise of Escom LLC but the company appears to have defaulted on the loan used to secure it, leading to the lender forcing sale.

Update (22 March): the future of any possible .xxx domain extension is still unclear, as ICANN elected to delay making any decision last week, and instead opted to produce a document outlining the proposals. It’s now likely the proposal will be voted on in June. More from the Telegraph.

What are your thoughts about a new .xxx domain?

Could it help clean up the internet?

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In the run up to the General Election our elected representatives are going to be doing everything they can to convince us that they are the right person for their constituency.

One MP, Derek Wyatt has been representing Sittingbourne and Sheppey in Kent since 1997 and is attempting to cover all routes of communication to his constituents, with accounts on bebo, twitter, facebook, myspace and even his own .tv video-clip site.

It is perhaps not surprising then, that the former Director of The Computer Channel at BSkyB and Chairman of the All Party Communications group in Parliament, is the first to try out a new iPhone application allowing would-be voters to keep a track on their serving Member of Parliament.

MyMP allows members of the local community to find out where Derek is, what he’s doing and even send him a message directly. They can also keep up to date with the latest local issues and give their view on major points that the MP is seeking feedback on.

We are not sure if every MP will be as embracing of new technology – some seem to live very complicated private lives – but with over 6,000 downloads in the first two weeks of its launch, the MyMP app certainly seems to have captured the imagination of the tech-savvy electorate.

Have you downloaded the MyMP app?

Have you ever contacted your MP via the internet?

Should MPs embrace technology more?

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Sometimes when you’re on a website you can’t work out what to do. Where is the ‘more info’ button? How does the demo work? How do I contact the website owner?

At times like these its useful to turn to a friend for a bit of help. But if your friend knows less than you, and if there’s no one else around, what can you do?

The Google Sidewiki  – a new feature on the Google Toolbar – is a clever solution to this problem.

Get help and advice

The Sidewiki button sits unobtrusively over the left hand side of the web page you’re on. Click the button and a browser sidebar appears, in which you can read notes, advice, feedback and reviews about that web page that have been left by other users.

The Sidewiki can also bring in notes and feedback left against other web pages that contain the same snippet of text. This means you can find out what advice and comments users have even if they have been left elsewhere.

This user generated content can be a great aid to help you get want you want from a website.

Give help and advice

And as a part of the Sidewiki community, you get to leave your feedback and notes too, contributing to the conversation and helping others out at the same time.

Get web design advice

As a website owner, this brings a few added benefits and a few pitfalls too. You get to read what people are saying about your website all in one place. Getting user feedback is one of the most important steps to improving your web design. If users are having problems finding a particular product or some information on your website, you know you need to make it easier to find.

Get business advice

As a business owner you might get immediate feedback about what your customers are saying about you. Do they mention poor service, high prices, unreliability or poor customer service? You can gather this feedback and make improvements to the way you do things.

Bad feedback can be damaging

But this might where the pitfalls are too. The last thing you want your new website visitors to be exposed to are a chorus of complaints and dissatisfaction. The Sidewiki has the potential for disgruntled visitors to turn away others from buying.

Stopping single issue moaners

There are a few elements built in to the Sidewiki that prevents ‘single issue’ moaners from dominating your feedback.

Where a webpage has multiple entries Google uses ‘signals’ to rank- in real time – the most useful higher up. These signals take on board what feedback a users has left elsewhere. So this hampers users from using the sidewiki to have a moan just at you – they need to be consistent users for their feedback to stay at the top.

You can read more about ranking on the Google Research Blog.

Have a try!

If you want to have a look at the Sidewiki visit google.com/sidewiki and download the Google Toolbar with Sidewiki.

Do you think the benefit of the Sidewiki feedback outweighs the pitfalls of customer griping? Are you happy to share your feedback? Leave a comment below!

Nick Leech runs Digital Marketing Agency Euston Digital

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