Whoopee, Mark did it! On a glorious day on Friday the 13th of April 2012, Mark peered out over the edge of the spinnaker tower and said… “What you mean ACTUALLY ABSEIL?!” Luckily for everyone who generously sponsored him… he climbed out and abseiled the full height of the Spinnaker tower to raise a total of £550.00. All the money raised has been donated to the Ryde Inshore Rescue Crew based on the Isle of Wight. Many thanks for all of your support and donations.

Our aim was to develop a fun and accessible range of box packs. Our approach was to spread a little love and engage the consumer with liquorice trivia.

Team Bate Brand have been getting up to date with Google’s latest changes in its search algorithm and came by some interesting information concerning designing new generation ‘responsive’ websites. These are websites specifically designed for mobile and handheld devices such as iPad. Our research was mainly in response to the knowledge that more people will view web content using a mobile device than a desktop computer by 2013/14.

There are three configurations that Google is directly recommending on how we should build websites in the future:

1) Google’s top recommended configuration – use responsive web design (phew, we already do!). Meaning sites that serve all devices with the same set of website addresses (URLs), with each URL serving the same HTML and using just style sheets (CSS) to change how the page is rendered on the device.
2) Dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on if the user agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
3) Sites that have completely separate mobile and desktop sites – then use the HTTP vary Header to differentiate.

What this means is Google really likes the responsive web design configuration because it has two great advantages:

1) Your site only requires one set of URL and HTML code. Your users only need one URL and you only need to create one site with one set of HTML.
2) Google can crawl your site more efficiently using one Googlebot user agent instead of needing separate ones for mobile and desktop sites.

This news is important to our customers and we will be contacting you individually regarding your current website configuration. The main issues that will affect the consumer and programmer that we all have to get to grips with are:

1) Websites, old or new, built without ‘responsive’ programming are gradually going to drop down the search engine rankings and customers will have to spend more on SEO to hold their current position.
2) If for whatever reason you’re unable to upgrade to the responsive web design route, Google wants you (that means us!) to communicate with them about how your site is set up. This means some additional work to your website and again if your website doesn’t do what Google wants, (basically to communicate more effectively with their Googlebots), then your search ranking is going to go down!

As far as we understand this is not going to take effect over night, however as mobile/tablet visits increase, as predicted it will do during 2013/14 then it will become an issue.

Bate Brand will soon be recommending all new website builds are responsive and existing non responsive websites are updated accordingly.

Friday the 13th may be a time to be cautious and stay at home for some, but we’re not your average design team. So our Bate Brand team leader, Mark, decided the only way to dispel the myth was by taking a leap of faith on Friday the 13th of April 2012, whilst raising some much needed funds for the Ryde Inshore Rescue service, based on the Isle of Wight.

After seeing the Spinnaker Tower one day, Mark immediately pronounced it was only 170 metres high and therefore “easy peasy” and that he intended on abseiling down it!

“Bravo!” we all cheered, “we’ll wave and pay you money instead.”

Please join us in donating funds and electronically cheering Mark on with a hearty “Bravo!” You can donate using the Sponsor me link below, thank you.