Talk about value for money, the sheer energy and commitment of their show was second to none. The band played for over a mammoth two and a half hours, which consisted of over 30 songs from their 20 year back catalog featuring tracks and hits from seven of their eight albums. I was exhausted by the end and I had just been watching them! Green Day have been in our lives for over 20 years now and this really shows with how they work the stage and audience.

Green Day opened with “Song of the Century”, the first track from their 2009 album 21st Century Breakdown, and then proceeded into track 2 “21st Century Breakdown”. The pyrotechnics and shooting flames were spectacular as well. Audience participation is a huge part of their show and throughout the 3 hours the charismatic front man Billie Joe Armstrong, brought several fans onstage to help out on vocals and on one occasion in particular one fan sang the whole of ‘Longview’ while the rest of the band played on.

Billie Joe likes his on stage props as he proceeded to launch Green Day t-shirts and toilet roll from some kind of air launcher gun. Have a look below at something similar from another concert:

The show closed with Green Day playing two encores, with the particular highlights being ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ and ‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).’

If you have the chance to go see them live do not turn it down as you will not be disappointed.

Navigation was an important aspect for this new redesign, therefore a dynamic fading drop down system has been implemented to allow the user to navigate the site as easy as possible. We have given the “Contracts” section of the website more prominence, as research showed it was a key reason for people to visit the site. Additional features include a Homepage “News” rotation created using “jQuery” and “PHP”.

Visit the new Rural Housing website.

This was an unusual match between Barbados and Grenada.

History behind the video
Grenada went into the match with a superior goal difference, meaning that Barbados needed to win by two goals to progress to the finals. The trouble was caused by two things. First, unlike most group stages in football competitions, the organizers had deemed that all games must have a winner. All games drawn over 90 minutes would go to sudden death extra time. Secondly and most importantly, there was an unusual rule which stated that in the event of a game going to sudden death extra time the goal would count double, meaning that the winner would be awarded a two goal victory.

Barbados was leading 2-0 until the 83rd minute, when Grenada scored, making it 2-1. Approaching the dying moments, the Barbadians realized they had no chance of scoring past Grenada’s mass defense, so they deliberately scored an own goal to tie the game at 2-2. This would send the game into extra time and give them another half hour to break down the defense. The Grenadians realized what was happening and attempted to score an own goal as well, which would put Barbados back in front by one goal and would eliminate Barbados from the competition.

However, the Barbados players started defending their opposition’s goal to prevent them from doing this, and during the game’s last five minutes, the fans were treated to the incredible sight of Grenada trying to score in either goal. Barbados also defended both ends of the pitch, and held off Grenada for the final five minutes, sending the game into extra time. In extra time, Barbados notched the game-winner, and, according to the rules, was awarded a 4-2 victory, which put them through to the next round.

The first stage of any SEO  is to ensure that the server and website are returning appropriate information to the search engines in the best ways possible. This will allow us to have a strong technological foundation upon which to develop an effective SEO campaign.

On the whole having a sound and search engine friendly technological set up will not positively affect your search engine performance. Rather, having a technological set up that is not developed with search engines as a primary concern can significantly reduce your ranking potential.

HTTP Headers
HTTP headers are sent by your server to anything that requests the page before the page of HTML code is returned. Google looks specifically at two main groups or HTTP header; those that describe the status of the page and those that give information on when the page/site was last updated.

Having an incorrect response returned for web pages can lead to devaluing of your website and may lead to ineffective indexing by the major search engines.

200 OK
This header is sent out by web pages that have been requested and will be returned by the server effectively to the user. All pages, except error pages, should deliver this header. It lets the search engines, and browsers, know that the content will be delivered as requested without any problems.

404 Not Found
When a server cannot find a webpage, such as when a user has typed in a URL incorrectly, it will return a 404 error header response. This will tell the browser to display the correct error code to say that the page could not be found. Google will inspect your website to ensure that error pages return this code. If your error pages do not return this header response for missing pages Google will not allow access to information within Webmaster Tools.

302 Temporarily Redirected
This header lets browsers, and search engines know that a page has moved from the requested location. This HTTP header indicates that the page will be returning to the original location shortly. The browsers and search engine are then moved to the temporary location of the page.

Search Engines do not effectively spider these redirects. Unfortunately, the default setting for page redirects on Microsoft Servers is for 302 redirects to be used. This can lead to your website losing pages in the search engine indices following redevelopment.

301 Permanently Redirected
301 header redirects indicate that the requested page has been moved permanently to a new location. Search engines will transfer all the attributes from the previous page location, such as links, to the new location. The redirect sends a web user from the old location of the page to the new location.

Robots.txt
This file is used to inform search engines which parts of the website we do not want them to index. This file is requested by default by all the major search engines. It should be located at http://yourwebsiteurl/robots.txt.

Favicon.ico
This image appears within Mozilla-based browsers in the address bar and is an image for the website that will also appear when the page is bookmarked. Google currently uses a web spider based on the Mozilla browser and requests this file from every page it visits. The Favicon.ico will also appear on user’s web browser if they bookmark your website.

Stay tuned for part 2.

The penalties for breaching the terms and conditions of the search engines can range from reductions in website positions to complete expulsion from the search engine rankings. Ethical SEO is improving the position of webpages to improve not only the quality of visitors to a website, but ensuring that the users receive appropriate and relevant content once they arrive at the site.

I only recommend ethical SEO techniques to my clients to prevent damage to the long term health and stability of their website.

1. Technological Aspect – Ensuring that the website can be indexed efficiently, correctly and easily
2. Content Aspect – Making content relevant to search engines
3. Linking Aspect – Ensuring that links point to documents to increase their relevancy

I am by no means an expert on SEO but unless a website effectively tackles these three aspects it is unlikely that they will be able to compete in the natural search engine results.

Basically in simple terms what this means is that the content provided on your website should be relevant to the search query entered by the user and if there are links pointing to your website this also indicates that you are relevant for the search query entered.

The reason I bring custom fields up is that I have came across a good article on Smashing Magazine that goes into detail on how to use them and examples of what they can be used for.

View Smashing Magazine Article

We started by unpacking the tank and all of the equipment from the box, and straight away we very impressed by the quality and size of the aquarium. It was the perfect size for us and it fitted perfectly on the kitchen worktop. Before adding any equipment to the aquarium we rinsed them with cold water to remove any contaminants that might be harmful for the fish. We also done this with the decorations we had bought the previous week.

So after adding all the equipment, gravel and decorations to the tank we began filling it up with tap water until we got it to the desired level. I recommend leaving it about an inch below the max level indicator to prevent overflow when carrying out small water changes. The next step was to add some water conditioner which removes chlorine and chloramines instantly from the water. This makes tap water safe for fish whilst neutralising heavy metals. Our new aquarium was now ready to turn on.

Our Aquarium - Image 1

Before adding any fish to the aquarium the tank has to be up and running for at least a week to stabilise the temperature and make sure everything is working correctly. After 2 days we added some aquatic plants as these have many benefits in an aquarium such as resting areas for the fish, spawning areas and places for the fish to hide when they feel threatened. The plants will also absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen into the water.

Our Aquarium - Image 2

All we have to do now is wait 7 days to add our Glowlight and Neon Tetras to get the cycling process underway.

The current Rural Housing website does not have a Content Management System, which is one of the main reasons why this new website is being implemented. I have got the design visual signed of for this website so development will begin immediately.

Check back soon for further updates on this project.

www.ruralhousing.co.uk