Well that's logical for us. If I'm looking for a holiday cottage or villa, I don't want to spend 10 minutes looking at every last nook and cranny.  It's a flavour - if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth even more.

The really great thing about YouTube is that you can take the video and embed it into your site.  The visitor never leaves your site, which means they might just click on the book now button!

Have a look here for an example of how you can embed a video - www.westwight.net/video

Be careful though.  I picked a video at random on YouTube but I saw some terrible examples.  I saw a villa in Portugal with the wind whistling across the pool, making it look like the North Sea.  I also saw a video, apparently to promote a villa, and there was an ironing board complete with pile of washing in the sitting room!  Not much of a lifestyle statement is it?

It's all possible!

I've just had an interesting couple of days trying to resolve a mess with a big domain hosting company.  It's not the company I normally deal with, and to be honest I wouldn't deal with them at all except I have one client who insists on using them.

I must have spent hours on the phone and sent off lots of emails.  I eventually escalated the problem to the UK Managing Director (don't you just love Google!)

I've just rebuild my clients website and I wanted to to do something fairly standard to point towards the new site.  If you want to know more you need to look up DNS at Wikipedia.

I don't think, for one moment, that there was anything malicious involved but the website and email just stopped working.  They were in the middle of a big system rebuild but instead of being honest in the beginning (we could have waited a week to make the transfer) we were just plonked in the middle of a big mess.  No web site, no email.

To be fair to the company they were trying their best but they just didn't have the resources to deal with the hundreds (or thousands?) of similar support requests they were getting.

Whether it's domain name registrations or even web hosting, it doesn't always pay you to go with the cheap option - there is always a catch.

What?  A blog can improve your place on Google?  Really?

Well, yes and no.  First off, let me confess something.  I don't really know how search engine optimisation (SEO) works.  Now not many web developers will say that to you.  SEO is the holy grail of web site designers and something that we're all supposed to be able to guarantee.

Can I? Yes, I can but clearly there should major caveats in there.

Any company that tells you they can make you No 1 on Google is either lying, deluded or planning on charging you vast sums of money.

Google is an immensely successful company and has a lot to protect from its competitors.  Therefore how it indexes sites is a closely guarded secret.  We can all have a good idea of how it works but in reality there are things we just don't know for sure.

In the olden days (the 90's!) you could write some web pages and virtually forget about them.  Now, with so much more competition clamouring for attention, it seems Google and others, give preference to dynamic content.  The more often I change my site, the more frequently Google will visit.

If you've got a rental cottage in France, write a journal once a week.  It can be the current weather, what's on in the local towns, how this years vintage is, anything.  It won't guarantee that you're going to do better with Google but you might list higher than your neighbour.

I've got all the facilities of the CMS.  I can change the look of the site instantly using another template.

I'll add more and more features over the next few days.  It's fun, and it's easy.