Tuesday, 27 November 2012
Professional E-Commerce Website Design or a DIY E-Commerce Website.
New Wordpress CMS and E-Commerce Websites now live
Please take a look.
Many Thanks
The Media Orb Team
Friday, 23 November 2012
Bibic Charity Bridgwater - Drive 4 Change fundraising website
This is there mission - In October 2013 the ‘Drive4Change’ team of Steve Hancock, Tony Cole and Ben Worth will travel from London to Cape Town covering 10,000 miles through 21 countries. The sole purpose to raise as much money as possible for bibic by breaking the current record of 11 DAYS 14 HOURS 11 MINUTES set in 2010 by Mac MacKenney, Chris Rawlings and Steve MacKenney. Prior to the 2010 expedition, this record had stood for 47 years.
From high speed motorways, across desert tracks and pot-holed roads, this journey is a true test of man and machine.
Wednesday, 24 October 2012
Rackspace!!!!!!!!!!
A Managed Hosting environment from Rackspace offers you the flexibility to build a truly tailored solution. Whatever Managed Hosting solution you choose, we do our best to ensure you've got a stable operating environment with our 100% network up-time guarantee, so you can focus on your business.
So if you require dedicated website hosting and email support look no further than Media Orb.
Wednesday, 26 September 2012
New Sites
www.ex-tat.co.uk
www.classicmopedspares.co.uk
Thank You for now.
Tuesday, 4 September 2012
SEO (Search Engine Optimsation), is this important for my website?
Within the current economic climate, more and more business are turning to Search Engine Optimisation as a cost-effective way of increasing traffic to their website, which means it is becoming ever more important to ensure your business' website is not left behind by your competitors. There are a large number of businesses that are yet to understand the power and potential of the internet and online marketing, and the benefits it gives you in aiding your business’ growth and increasing turnover and profitability, but this is a trend in decline. It is becoming ever more important to ensure your business takes all the initiative.
Below you can find some eye opening statistics that may shock you, and you will ask yourself if you can afford not to have an SEA strategy in place.
1. 36.8 million users in the UK spend on average over an hour a day on the internet.
2. £4.2 BILLION is spent online in the UK alone
3. 78% of internet users conduct product research online
I trust you are still asking yourself if you can afford to miss out!
It is becoming increasingly obvious that Google is the new Yellow Pages.
But to understand why it is critical to your business that you have a credible SEO strategy a few more facts & figures for you to think about:
1. 75% of users NEVER scroll past the first page.
2. 70% of the links search users click on is organic – NOT sponsored.
3. 10.3 billion searches are conducted on line EVERY month on Google.
4. 20% of monthly Google searches are for Local Businesses.
What this actually means is that if your website cannot be found on Google, no one will ever see it!
Making sure your website can be found high up on Google is not just an option, it’s a business must.
Wednesday, 29 August 2012
Why is my Facebook timeline photo / cover blurry?
Media Orb's guide to great quality Facebook Timeline covers
With the compulsory introduction of Facebook's timeline, it has become very important to have a great Facebook timeline cover, as this is the first thing anyone viewing a profile will notice; in order to minimise bandwidth however, Facebook's developers have been pretty heavy-handed with timeline photo compression which means that, without the right optimisation, timeline photos will look blurry and distorted. Fortunately, through a great deal of trial and error, we have found the best Photoshop settings to export a Facebook timeline cover that minimises blurriness and jpeg artefacts.
Image Dimensions
On photoshop, create a new file with these settings for your timeline cover |
For some reason, Facebook's developers have neglected to forcefully resize profile pictures and timeline covers to the size they appear on the front-end of a profile. This is the major cause for blurriness. Facebook profile pictures must be uploaded with a minimum width of 180px, yet they display at 160px x 160px, without Facebook resizing the cached image, which means that the user's web browser is forced to resize the image on the fly (bad practice generally!). This is why profile pictures are always a bit blurry, but this is unavoidable unfortunately. The problem is not unsolvable for timeline covers however, which means as long as a timeline cover is sized at 851px x 315px, it will not be resized by the users browser which means you can avoid that nasty re-sampling!
The following table shows Facebook's image sizes as displayed.
Image type | Width | Height |
---|---|---|
Timeline Cover Photo
|
851px
|
315px
|
Profile Picture
|
160px (must be uploaded at 180px)
|
160px
|
These are the results when the timeline cover is 1px by 1px smaller than it needs to be. Notice the blurriness of the text. |
JPEG Compression Quality
The other major factor that creates nasty blurriness is the file size of the timeline cover. Simply put, if the image uploaded is larger than 100 kilobytes, then Facebook will re-compress the image. This results in an image being compressed twice (which really messes up the image), and also being compressed more strongly than it would be if it was uploaded with a file size less than 100kb.
These are the settings used for our final timeline cover |
The easiest way to maximise image quality for timeline covers, is to use the 'Save for devices' utility in Photoshop. Gradually reduce the JPEG compression quality (usually defaults at 100) until the preview file size in the bottom left is safely under 100kb. Then save the file and upload it Facebook!
The Final Result
When the image is the correct size, and uploaded with a file size less than 100kb, the clarity of the timeline cover is greatly increased!
This image was uploaded with a file size of 97.51kb, and remained unchanged after Facebook's processing. This means that you are given an extra 40kb ish, of image quality! |