The Observer has information, that Google and the mobile phone operator Orange held talks about a partnership to create a special ‘Google phone’ which makes it easy to search the web wherever you are.
“Their plans centre on a branded Google phone, which would probably also carry Orange’s logo. The device would not be revolutionary: manufactured by HTC, a Taiwanese firm specialising in smart phones and Personal Data Assistants (PDAs), it might have a screen similar to a video iPod. But it would have built-in Google software which would dramatically improve on the slow and cumbersome experience of surfing the web from a mobile handset.”
Orange is owned by Europes second largest telecoms group the France Telecom, and keeps around 88.6 million mobile customers across 23 countries in touch.
December 17th, 2006
Vanessa Fox posted some useful tips on using images at the Google Webmaster Central Blog:
- Don’t put the bulk of your text in images. It may sound simple, but the best thing you can do is to put your text into well, text. Reserve images for graphical elements. If all of the text on your page is in an image, it becomes inaccessible.
- Take advantage of alt tags for all of your images. Make sure the alt text is descriptive and unique. For instance, alt text such as “picture1″ or “logo” doesn’t provide much information about the image. “Charting the path of stock x” and “Company Y” give more details.
- Don’t overload your alt text. Be descriptive, but don’t stuff it with extra keywords.
- It’s important to use alt text for any image on your pages, but if your company name, navigation, or other major elements of your pages are in images, alt text becomes especially important. Consider moving vital details to text to ensure all visitors can view them.
- Look at the image-to-text ratio on your page. How much text do you have? One way of looking at this is to look at your site with images turned off in your browser. What content can you see? Is the intent of your site obvious? Do the pages convey your message effectively?
December 17th, 2006
