My first stop everytime is http://www.colorschemedesigner.com/ This site is a great resource to find which colours work well together and which contrast. It is a site the has the funstionaloty to cater from novice to expert as the settings give the abillity to adjust the colours, hues, saturation, etc down to exacting levels. If you want something a bit simpler then it has a great function to randomise the palette to get quick ideas. When you need get the full details of you chosen palette you can easily export to various formats for either you HTML style sheets or your favorite art package.

If you are looking for just one colour code to put into your style sheet then http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colorpicker.asp is the site you need. Not only is this easy to work to get the HEX code needed for HTML but it is also a great resource for all things coding. Definately a good bookmark.

If you are lloking to get further into the coding side of things then go straight for the horses mouth with http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/learning This gives a great list of sites that offer online tutorials.

One thing that you may hear about is web safe colours. This isn’t some thing that needs to be worried about quite so much nowadays. When the internet first began and browser were very basic designers would only have a limited palette of 256 colours that they could chose from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors explains which colours can safe be viewed on all browsers.

I hope you find this useful and there will be more coming soon…

The webmaster help that google offer is a great offering back to all web designers, web developers and web masters.

They offer a lot of insight into the information that is help and processed about your site on the web. This coupled with Google Analytics give a really in depth way to look at how you site is performing.

The main webmaster information can be found at Google Webmaster and the analytics can be found at Google Analytics.

More will be written on this in due course.

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The header tags of your web pages have several functions. The main function and the original design of this code was an easy way to write and distinguish different levels of heading and subheadings within a web page. The main page title would be enclosed in <h1> tags; this would give them the largest font size and the highest visual impact on the web page. When the page the requires a sub-heading the <h2> would then be employed, and if a sub-sub-heading was needed <h3>, and so on…

In the early days of the internet the search engines would use only a few items to rank a page. These would be the page description, page keywords, header tags and content amongst a few others. The heading tags have evolved from a purely visual part of coding to something that the search engines now use as one of their many (more than 200) algorithms that produce their results. They judge that the <h1> tag  that originally gave the most visual impact on a page is the wording that will then give the most relivence to search results.

Bad Tricks

Font size

The use of header tags for relevance of content has been used for some bad tricks to try to get better page rank. Using cascading style sheets (CSS) it is possible to place the wording on a page where the font size doesn’t visually show how a standard page would render; instead of the wording jumping out of the page it just seems to be the same size as standard text.

Font colour

Again using CSS it is possible to add extra content to try to fool serach engines by making the heading text the same colour as the background. This would then hide any text from the user but for seach engines this will seem like standard content.

Don’t be fooled

Even though this may give your webpage some quick results and jump you up the ranking the mondern search engine is a very different beast than when the web was first born. The algorithms that are in use nowadays see the whole of the CSS so that they add together all of the different parts to see the code for what it is.

Nanoseal Protect seals and protects alloy wheels from the corrosive effects of brake dust and salt. Derived from Nano Technology, Nanoseal Protect chemically bonds to the wheel to form a long lasting, ultra thin coating that is durable and protective.

BatchHeader have implemented a content managed system that will not only show off their product but is a functioning shopping cart to collect the required shipping data and then pass the client on to PayPal for completely secure payment.

If you would like further information or question our implementation for them please use the contact form @ Nanoseal Protect

We were commisioned to re-design their website as their old version was begining to feel dated. We have moved them on to a CMS (Content Management System) and given them a system that will be able to be visually updated using templates but not affecting their content.

A problem that was encountered was that as they had an exisiting site which already had been crawled by search engines and this traffic needed to be picked up; We have put in place a system that will pick up their old URL’s and redirect them to the new content. This system after being put in place now means that they will never have a 404 (page does not exist) error given to their visitors.

If you would like further information or question our implementation for them please use the contact form @ Nano Hygiene Coatings

We helped to facilitate this for them by initially downloading their site to make sure that it was backed up, then when the domain had seemlessly transfered we re-uploaded the site. When the domain was live with BatchHeader we then set up the required email accounts.

Please contact Sporting Barbers direct at via their website at www.sportingbarbers.co.uk

From this start Threshold Telecom Ltd approached BatchHeader to take over the maintenance of their domain and website hosting. As a professional web host, we initiated this by transferring their .co.uk (free) and .com (only £5) domains and implemented our standard unlimited package to give them the ease of moving forward however they wanted.

The decision was made to implement an online store to compliment the already thriving installation and maintenance company. The store that has been setup has the ability to search on individual product, manufacturer, category, etc. The ease of setting up the e-commerce solution for Threshold Telecom Ltd was made so much easier due to the free shared secure server access (SSL) that is offered with all hosting packages; This meant that all the information that was passing between the end-user and the web server was certified secure and encrypted

If you would like further information or question our implementation for them please use the contact form @ Threshold Telecom Ltd

BatchHeader proposed hosting the local community site and setting up a Joomla CMS site that incorporates an online calendar with latest news scroller.

Another requisite was that multiple email addresses would be setup for each of the committee member to replace a free email address. As BatchHeader’s package includes unlimited email addresses this was an easy leap. They now have a dedicated email address for bookings that can be emailed direct through a contact form on the website that helps the user to work through any questions relating to hiring the centre.

As part of the latest events component we have complimented this with a self updating local whether module; This will then give the end user the chance to see that the weather will be nice for the summer fete. Also as a Getting to Us page we have utilised GoogleMaps and have placed a pin directly at the door of the Centre!

If you would like further information or question our implementation for them please use the contact form @ Ettington Community Centre

Well, I have the hope that this will be informative on some coding tips, that I can help with some web hosting issues, update on tech advances and generally just adding a little colour to web hosting in Stratford upon Avon.

What is BatchHeader? We are a family run web hosting and design company based in Ettington just outside of Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire.

Why use us? Even though we are small this does not mean that we are without punch. We believe that web hosting is more than just providing web space and FTP access. Our aim is to provide individuals and businesses with everything they need to express themselves on the internet, be that through an idea or selling goods and services.

If  there is an article that you would like to see or some advice that you need that you think will help others then just drop us an email from the contact form above.