Newsletter October 2007

Dear clients and friends,

Autumn in Andalucia is a welcome change, arriving with its cooler temperatures, its beautiful hues, and its picturesque beaches. We invite you to read the latest news from the team at Andalucia Web Solutions, specialists in placing your business on the web.

The Drupal Conference, Barcelona 2007

By William Eaton

From the 19th-22nd of September, Stacy Prendeville, William Eaton, and Matthew Wittering of the Andalucia Web Solutions’ Operations team attended the Barcelona Drupal Conference.

Drupal is a software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Due to its open-source nature, it allows hundreds and thousands of advanced users of the system to create their own modules for new and clever functions which can then be shared with everyone else. We at Andalucia Web Solutions are continually looking to improve the performance and functionality of Andalucia.com by managing the site via an advanced Content Management System.

A Content Management System (CMS) is really useful on sites where the content needs to be changed often or where there is a huge amount of content which can be interrelated. Content Management Systems are also used in circumstances where an editor needs to update content quite often but has no HTML knowledge. The glory of a CMS is that all the information on a page is dynamic and so you can do many exciting things such as:

Dynamically relating content (dynamic links to similar pages based on descriptions);
Dynamic images – The system will find images that have something to do with the content (based on content and image tags), thereby making it possible to show different images each time;
User driven content – users can comment and add their own thoughts on the information about Andalucia like users do with sites like Wikipedia;
If there are any forum topics that relate to the content of a page then it will appear as a link;
It can show dynamically driven content on the home page which informs the visitor about the current “hot topics” and the most popular pages at that time, as well as showing information that a visitor is specifically interested in (for registered users).

This Month’s Top Pick of the Web:

Google Earth

By Chris Chaplow

Many readers will have already used Google Maps as a way of finding a location. Go to Google Maps at maps.google.com or just remember www.googlemaps.com. All you need to do is to type in practically any address in the world, in various formats and the location will be identified on a printable map.

If you have used the maps you may have noticed a “Satellite” button which changes the map view to a satellite image view. The first thing everyone tends to do is to zoom in and inspect their own house and the neighbourhood. It is amazing the detail to which it can go.

To take this satellite view to a higher level you need to look at “Google Earth” at earth.google.com.

“Google Earth combines the power of Google Search with satellite imagery, maps, terrain, and 3D buildings to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips.”

October’s Special Advertisement Offer

Buy 3 links and get 1 free.

For October, Andalucia Web Solutions is offering your business the chance to increase your own website's page rank. By placing several links throughout Andalucia.com, Google will recognise how many inbound links you have from highly-ranked relevant sites and will reward you with page rank points. This, in turn, will list you higher in search engine results sites and will reward you with page rank points. This, in turn, will list you higher in search engine results.

Strategically-placed links throughout Andalucia.com will not only increase your ranking but will also provide you with thousands of potential clients generated from the additional traffic from our 500,000 visitors per month.

Just watch your search engine ranking and traffic increase. Contact our sales team for more info at sales@andaluciaws.com.

Increase Your Website’s Alexa Rank!

By Stacy Prendeville

Keen users of Andalucia .com will have noticed the Alexa banner now in place on our home page. So what is Alexa and why is it important?

Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon, the company of one of the biggest website successes to date. It has the unique claim of being the first toolbar on the web and was initially distributed with Internet Explorer 5. Its popularity is substantial. It offers to its toolbar users an easy and efficient way of searching the web with a related links feature.

This feature lists a number of websites along the toolbar that are of a similar nature to the website you are currently viewing which in turn, Alexa hopes will aid your searches. You can check the top movers and shakers in the internet world currently with its top ranking sites page, not to mention the “Way Back Machine”, a fun way of viewing previous incarnations of web sites. Want to know how Andalucia.com looked in its first edition eleven years ago? Take a look at http://www.archive.org/index.php.

William Eaton Returns to AWS

Andalucia Web Solutions is proud to announce the return to our fold of William Eaton. Some of you might recall that William was an outstanding placement student with us during 2005-2006. At that time he worked on a multitude of important projects including the authorship of the in-house application that we currently use to control in our production control system.

William then returned to Loughborough University to complete his degree and graduated in July, 2007 with his Bachelors of Science, with honours. When he received an offer to return this year from AWS Director Chris Chaplow, William accepted gladly. His love for the Spanish culture (and in particular, Andalucia) helped make the decision to return an easy one.

William’s responsibilities will include working on the database systems and online payments as well as creating custom applications tailored to clients’ requirements. He will also be aiding us in our upcoming change to a Content Management System using Drupal. William is not only looking forward to the chance to complete some of the projects that he had begun but he also wants to explore more of Spain. We at Andalucia Web Solutions are extremely happy to have William back on board as a senior member of our technical team.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our clients for their valued support. Should you have any queries or suggestions for our newsletter, please don’t hesitate to contact us at marketing@andaluciaws.com

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