If you are unfortunate enough to have had your website hacked, you will understand what an upsetting time it can be. Not only do you have to deal with the fallout of what your website ended up containing (spam, malware or the selling of some strange blue pills!), you also have the time consuming task of trying to clean the mess up.

As we mentioned in our blog post about reliability, we have moved all of our services into the Amazon Cloud and this post is a brief overview of how this helps our customers.

Imagine this scenario; you are looking to get a website designed for your new company, you've found a website design company that you like the look of and have decided to go with them. Your new site looks great, it's all paid for and it's officially live. You have started marketing your site and telling potential clients about it and convincing them to use your business. This is a good time for any new startup but what would the impact be if there was a problem with the hosting company's server and your website went down? How would that look to your potential clients and what would it do to your reputation?

Around 4 years ago, we started up a blog for MDS Solutions and came up with quite a few posts on website design and SEO. We had a few issues with the installation and for one reason or another it fell to the back of the queue in terms of importance. We also had lots of new client projects and our own website and blog had to sit on the back burner for a while and it didn't really get the attention is deserved.

Google have announced a new infrastructure for their search engine codenamed "Caffeine". They are inviting developers and power users to help test out the new infrastructure which will allow them to "push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions".

Twitter have released a "search widget" that you can customise and place on your website to show all of the latest "tweets" that have been made on a particular subject. What is the Twitter Search Widget? The Twitter Search Widget is essentially a piece of javascript that you can place on your website. The javascript will create a kind of "news ticker" type section that will display all of the latest "tweets" that are made on a particular subject. How do I get the Twitter Search Widget? You'll need to first visit the Twitter Search Widget page where, if you are logged in, you will be presented with a few required details on what you want your search widget to contain: You'll need to enter what it is you are actually searching for (notice that in the example above we've decided to show all entries that match Web Design OR SEO so that we get results from two different terms). You can also customise the Twitter Search Widget so that it displays a title and a caption that suits your intended use. If you want to change the colour and size of the widget, you can also do this by going to the "Appearance" and "Dimensions" tabs on the left hand side, however you won't notice these changes on the above preview page: If you click the "Finish & Grab code" button at the bottom of the page you should also be presented with a textarea containing the javascript that is necessary to put the widget onto your site. Assuming you have done all of this correctly, you should hopefully see something like this: