Simon Lorkin is very pleased to announce that in 2009 he is now celebrating 23 years experience in traditional antique restoration and French polishing.

He is also celebrating his successful relocation to Normandy in Northern France four years ago, after thirteen years succesfully running his own business in Shere in Surrey.

Simon has an excellent reputation for his fine restoration and conservation skills and he always undertakes restoration to the highest of standards. He continues to be passionate about the furniture that he restores, whether it is a small occasional table or a five metre dining-room table. He always prides himself on the attention to detail in both the preparation work and the French polishing.

Restoration can be carried out on all types of period furniture including:

• Dining Room Tables
• Chairs
• Chest of drawers
• Clocks
• Bureaux
• Davenports
• Canterburys
• Classic Car Dashboards
• Linen press and Wardrobes

We’ve been looking for someone to help look after our chamonix chalet when we are away and came across Chez Vous Chamonix. We’re hoping to find a company who can take responsibility for our property and assets and here is what they say:

Chez Vous - Chamonix is specifically designed to look after you and your property.

We are an established and experienced company offering a wide range of services to home owners in the Chamonix area. We aim to provide the highest quality service, offering our clients everything from private concierge to keyholding, cleaning and laundry services to a tailor made package to suit individual needs.

Chez Vous specialises in property management and we customise our services to suit each of our clients individually. We listen to what you need and how you would like your property to be managed. We then discuss the options and ideas together and finish with a solution that is tailored specifically for you and your individual needs.

We understand that your time, family and friends are precious. We are an English and French speaking company with over 12 years experience within the corporate world, ranging from the French Alps to Private Yachts in the Mediterranean, USA and Caribbean. Chez Vous strives to be your personal assistant, ensuring that your stay in Chamonix is enjoyable and relaxing. Our local knowledge and trusted local suppliers will ensure your stay is within the hands of professionals.

You know when your alarm goes off in the morning and you have no choice but to haul yourself out of bed? Well, you could hit snooze a couple of times, but really you just have to get on with things. Get up, get dressed and make your way to your job and start the day. It’s your routine. Every day you have to get there roughly on time because if you don’t you’ll be fired sooner or later. In return though, you don’t need to worry too much about money. Oh sure you’ll feel like you don’t have enough of it from time to time, we all do.. but in return for being disciplined about your routine and turning up at your job every day you get paid every month, you know how much you’ll be paid and you don’t need to worry.

Working as a freelancer from home like I’m doing, you don’t have that. When my alarm goes off, I COULD stay in bed. If I get bored during the day I can just wander off and no one will care. On the other hand, no one is obliged to pay me and every month there are still bills to pay. Work is still work. It’s when you have to do something that if you were really free to choose, you wouldn’t do it. You must do it to get paid. That needs discipline and routine.

Imposing discipline and routine on my life is difficult but important. I have a pathological fear of routine and I try to break it every chance I get. I wrongly think routine will depress me, but the truth is that the lack of it is even more dangerous. Discipline I struggle with too. I still have remnants of that dumb teenage attitude ‘No one tells me what to do’. Including myself it seems.

I’m getting better at it. Slowly. And although it’s a difficult part of one’s personality to address, discipline and routine are definitely useful things to be good at.

I risked nearly £500 of my hard-earned quids at the end of last week by buying some Northern Rock shares at what I decided MUST be the rockest, bottomest price they could go to. Unless they went into liquidation. And surely that couldn’t happen?  As soon as a solution to the problem raised its head (ie a buyer was found), the price would shoot up surely? And boink!!! The boy Branson’s offer bounced the share price by 50%! I sold the shares again this morning and made nearly £250. Then I promptly rang up Northern Rock and paid my November mortgage payment partly with that money. Is that robbing Peter to pay Paul? It’s definitely robbing someone - the unfortunate Northern Rock shareholders probably. Damn spivs.

Google Analytics is rapidly becoming the industry standard for measuring website traffic. At this stage we will set up a google analytics profile for the website. This is done either on the client’s own Google account, with us granted access to view the statistics, or if preferred on our own Google account with the client being given access to their statistics.

The analytics code will then be added to the entire website and tracking started. We will also set up conversion goals in the Analytics account so we can also start to measure the effectiveness of converting traffic to our goal actions.

What the hell is a blogroll anyway?

A blogroll is a list of links. Generally blogrolls are part of a wordpress installation. A default installation will have a Blogrolls section.

This is where WordPress site-admins can place link to sites that they want to promote. Sometimes they want to promote their friends and relatives.

And somethimes they have several thousands pages indexed by google which you would do well to link from.

Someone with enough nouse to be using WordPress in this way would probably have experimented with various ways of making money from their website.

This is a good thing. These people have blog which they know the value of.

And know. Without question. That a coupla hunnert is a damn good price for dropping a site-WIDE link to ALL your domains. Innit.

1. Page titles

A vital key to search engine ranking are well written page title tags. The tags must contain a good keyword density for targeted phrases and accurately represent what is to be found on that page. Page titles should be unique for each page.

2. Navigation

There must be clear navigational paths for spiders to follow through the whole site. These paths must use plain, well written HTML as opposed to javascript or flash (which is invisible to spiders). This is achieved with footer navigation link blocks and other similar methods.

3. On page Optimisation

Every page needs to have a good amount of targeted keywords on it. HTML images need to have well written alt tags. HTML formatting needs to be made as clean as possible. And most importantly, the page’s content must be analyzed for correct keyword density and other factors.

4. New content creation

An important factor in good SEO is well written copy, ideally with fresh content being added all the time so that when search engines crawl the website it appears fresh, updated and vibrant. Depending on the existing site content we would consider such additions as blogs, auto-updating news feed content and language translation to increase the website’s visibility. Some of these additions may incur extra costs to the client, so at this stage, we are only recommending these options.

Some changes are going to be needed to any website starting the SEO process. Websites are crawled by search engines on a regular basis once they are included in the engine’s index and there are many basic ways to make a website as attractive as possible.

To do this we have to consider how a website looks to the spider robots used by the search engines and adapt the website to help it as much as possible. There follows a short, but not exhaustive list of the things we will look for and change on a website as part of this step.

Ceros. Being a part of the original development team of the Ceros product has certainly been one of the high points of my career. Even though I’m only loosely involved with it these days, it still gives me a great feeling to see it go from strength to strength.

A recent article on mequoda.com

talks about ceros’s leading position in the market and outlines a vision of the future for digital magazines in general. Here’s an excerpt

How Ceros Media is creating digital editions that “draw upon the best qualities of the Web”.

Digital editions are quickly creeping up on the magazine industry. If you are a magazine publisher and haven’t looked down this avenue, you might have another thing coming. You might think that users prefer paper, but you’d be surprised to know that users now prefer to have both, and you don’t really have a choice unless you’re prepared to be the underdog.

The 2007 BPA-Certified Digital Magazine Reader Survey found that:

* Digital magazine reader satisfaction rates remain high, 88% of readers are “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with their digital edition, an increase of 3% from 2006.
* Digital magazine readers are highly engaged with the digital edition; 89% read the digital edition the same week and 42% read it immediately or the same day.
* Digital magazine readers are reducing their use of print, making digital magazines critical for reaching these readers. Over 44% of respondents have decreased their use of print in the last twelve months. This is an 11% rise from the 2006 survey in which 33% of respondents had decreased their use of print.

Today we’d like to introduce you to one of the larger digital magazine providers, Ceros Media. They publish the digital editions for clients such as Marie Claire, BBC, and National Magazine Company. To see specific examples, read the interview.

With their platform, all individual pages of each magazine are optimized for search. If you google “miss gobbledegook”, you’ll find that the number one result is page five in Monkey Magazine. According to New Media Age, Monkey Magazine has recorded an increase in its ABCe figures to a new high of 271,667, up 10.7% month on month. It is the third successive month Monkey’s ABCe has climbed.

Something else we’ve noticed about the Ceros platform, in comparison to other digital magazine providers, is that their look is extremely clean and their interface is intuitive. Not only is it search engine optimized, easy to browse and delivered digitally, it is as classy and elegant as the brand it is representing.

We had a chance to talk to Dominic Duffy, co-founder of Ceros Media to ask him about Ceros and the future of digital magazines…..

read more here >>

If you’d like to distinguish between your subdomains, you can create an Advanced filter for your profile with the following settings:

Filter Type: Custom filter > Advanced
Field A: Hostname
Extract A: (.*)
Field B: Request URI
Extract B: (.*)
Output To: Request URI
Constructor: /$A1$B1

With this filter in place, the previous examples would appear with the subdomain attached:

www.example.com/index.html
help.example.com/more.html