Welcome to the Escape Blog

Found this useful resource for all you lazy tykes (and students) out there… FreeVectors.net

Could it be that UK coinage is getting a tad modern?

As much as people love to cling onto the past, especially when a nation’s identity is at stake, I like the new coin designs from the Royal Mint. There’s something very ‘three lions’ about them.

The new designs were chosen from an open competition which attracted 4,000 entries. The winning designer is 26-year-old Matthew Dent, originally from Bangor who now lives and works in London as a graphic designer

Nice tool here via Stumbling this morning - The Graffiti Generator.

What’s not so cool is my attempt…

March 08 search engine market share figures from Comscore show another rise for Google - up 0.6% during March, seemingly taking market share from all other players.

It’s also important that search engines can actually access your content. Don’t take my word for it though when it comes straight from the horses mouth at Google Webmaster Blog:

One of the most frequently asked questions about Accessible Search is What can I do to make my site rank well on Accessible Search? At the same time, webmasters often ask a similar but broader question: What can I do to rank high on Google Search?

Well I’m pleased to tell you that you can kill two birds with one stone… critical site features such as site navigation can be created to work for all users, including our own Googlebot. Below are a few tips for you to consider.

Great page here from Copyblogger with Brian Clark’s Landing Page Tutorials and Case Studies.

Worth book-marking me thinks.

Interesting post by Clarke & Son (Basingstoke Law Firm) about retail websites and a report by the office of fair trading… with key points:

• 14 per cent of sites appeared not to comply with the law because they either provided no physical address or provided only a PO Box number;
• 15 per cent of sites appeared not to comply with the requirement to give shoppers information on their right to cancel within seven working days;
• 31 per cent of the sites appeared not to comply with the requirement on cancellation to refund the full cost of the goods. Of these, 56 per cent excluded the cost of original delivery from refunds; and
• 40 per cent of sites did not indicate when the price was first shown that compulsory additional charges would be added, but subsequently included such charges at checkout.

Great tool - Picnik.com - for resizing and optimizing an image for the web. Here’s how to do it.

One website feature I have been seen a few of times over the past couple of years sees data fed from an external database to dynamically create web pages, with search drop down forms to access them.

The problem in the past is that Google wouldn’t perform those form functions to access the data pages so they never got indexed unless you had hard coded link throughs to them.

This looks like it could be changing - Search Engine Land. Worth a read…

Here we go then. We know we want FSC approved stock and we’ve chosen to use vegetable inks but how green do we need that stock to be?

There are actually three types of FSC certified paper:

1. There’s 100% FSC which is paper made by a certified mill.
2. Then there is FSC Recycled. This must be made from 100% post-consumer waste and made by a certified mill.
3. And finally there is FSC Mixed Sources. This one must have at least 50% of the virgin fibre coming from FSC certified forests and the remaining percentage has to be from a controlled source.

At this point I’ll share with you what a controlled source is not:

• Harvested wood from forests that are being converted to plantations or other non-forest use.
• Wood that is illegally harvested.
• Genetically modified organisms.
• From an area where high conservation values are threatened.
• Where there is or has been violation of peoples’ civil (and traditional) rights to harvest the wood.

So there you have it and if you want samples of any of these types of paper, you know where I am.