Time to Upgrade – Drupal 8.1.0 is Now Available

On April 20, 2016, Drupal community officially confirmed the release of Drupal 8.1.0. According to the press release published on the official website, they have made significant changes in their release process, adopting semantic versioning and scheduled feature releases. This allows them to make extensive improvements to Drupal 8 in a timely fashion while still providing backwards compatibility. Drupal 8.1.0 is the first such update.

What’s so interesting in Drupal 8.1.x?
According to the Drupal community, Drupal 8.1.0 is released with numerous improvements such as CKEditor WYSIWYG enhancements, added APIs, an improved help page, and two new experimental modules. Experimental modules are provided with Drupal core for testing purposes, but are not yet fully supported.

So, What It Has to Do with Websites Built On Drupal 6, Drupal 7 and Drupal 8?

1. Is your website built in Drupal 8?
If your existing website is built on Drupal 8, then it’s time to upgrade to Drupal 8.1.0 to continue receiving bug and security fixes. The next, very important, bugfix is scheduled to be released on May 4, 2016.
Updating your site from 8.0.6 to 8.1.0 with update.php is exactly the same as updating from 8.0.5 to 8.0.6. Modules, themes, and translations may need small changes for this minor release, so test the update carefully before updating your production site.

2. Is your website built in Drupal 7?
Fortunately, Drupal 7 is still fully supported and will continue to receive security and bug fixes throughout all minor releases of Drupal 8. If you wish to migrated your website built on Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, then there is a new Migrate Drupal UI for Migrate also allows migrating a Drupal 7 site into a Drupal 8 site. However, you may encounter errors or missing migrations when you try to migrate due to incomplete migration path.

3. Is your website built in Drupal 6?
If your website is built Drupal 6, then unfortunately, Drupal 6 is not supported anymore. All you need to do is create a Drupal 8 website and try to migrate all your data into it at the earliest. Your Drupal 6 site can still remain up and running while you test migrating your Drupal 6 data into your new Drupal 8 site.

Contact a Drupal Development Company for Help!
If this new update is beyond your understanding or if you are in need of help, then hire professional and experienced Drupal developers to migrate your existing website to Drupal 8.1.0. You can contact a Drupal development company to hire Drupal professionals on project or on timely basis.

For more information, contact us at www.iCrayons.co.uk.

Knowledge Source: https://www.drupal.org/blog/drupal-8-1-0

Internet Marketing Services, UK – Everything from Search Engine Optimization to Social Media Marketing

Every business over the web needs the help of professional internet marketing services to thrive and to survive the fierce online competition. Tailored internet marketing services not only help businesses expand their reach globally, but it also helps them to build a much needed online reputation. Whatever is the nature and the size of your business, if you are going online with your business, then customized internet marketing services are a must.

We are iCrayons, a UK based internet marketing company, and we help businesses in the United Kingdom get found online with the help of our internet marketing services. If you have a business in the United Kingdom, or anywhere else, then we have tailored, industry specific internet marketing services for your business.

Does My Business Need Internet Marketing Services?

In the age of iPhone, iPad and Android, on one depends or picks up the bulky Yellow Pages to find a local business. Smart citizens just Google it on their smartphones. People are switching to the internet to find products and services of their need; thus making the internet marketing an essential strategy for your business. So, at this point of time, every business over the web needs professional internet marketing services, including yours.

iCrayons – Complete Internet Marketing Package

We are iCrayons, an expert Internet marketing company serving a variety of businesses and entrepreneurs from across the globe improve their web presence through our time-tested internet marketing services. We believe in results, and if your business website isn’t reaping enough ROI for you, then it’s time to contact us at sales@icrayons.co.uk. We have a tailored / customizable internet marketing package for every business; and some of our Internet marketing services include:

• Search Engine Optimization: There are millions of people waiting for your services and products, SEO helps us to optimize your business for search engines.

• Pay Per Click: PPC is the best way to gain instant exposure and ROI. We have a dedicated team of PPC experts with years of experience.

• Copywriting: You might have heard “Content is King”; hence, we write persuasive marketing content that is loved by both – Search Engines and End Users.

• Social Media Marketing: If your business is not on social networks, then this is the biggest mistake you are making. Social networks are the best ways to communicate with people, share information, promote direct marketing & drive sales.

Get a Free Quote

If you still have any questions related to internet marketing or want to know, how our internet marketing efforts can help your business stand above the ordinary, then contact us at sales@icrayons.co.uk.

Our talented team is readily available to discuss the needs of your project. All of our Internet marketing services include a Free Quote & No-Obligation Consultation! Contact us today and see how iCrayons can help your business.

For more information, please visit http://www.icrayons.co.uk.

Google Punishes Websites with Unnatural Outbound Linking

It seems that the search giant, Google, is in no mood to pardon the websites with unnatural linking, especially the unnatural outbound linking. Since last weekend, Google has released many link penalties targeting the outbound links. Google issued many manual actions for unnatural outbound links. The manual action team at Google is taking care of the issue, and penalizing websites that are trying to manipulate the Google Search Results. If you fear, your website is among the one that is penalized, then check your Google Search Console message center immediately.

How do I know, whether my website is penalized or not?

To find out, whether your website has been penalized or not, all you need to do is log into your Google Search Console account and check your all message box to see if you have this notification, or any others. Unfortunately, if you were hit by the outbound link penalties, there are instructions on how to fix them over here.

Here Is Screen Shot of One of the Notices a Webmaster Posted:

Being a webmaster, if you see this notice on the Manual Action Page, then it means that your website is linking outwards to other websites in a manner that Google believes it to be against their SEO guidelines. It also means that Google has found a series of unnatural, unethical, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links. Hence, Google will penalize your website, because according to the Google’s SEO guidelines, purchasing links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank is a breaking of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to the affected portions of your site. Actions that affect your whole site are listed under Site-wide matches. Actions that affect only part of your site and/or some incoming links to your site are listed under Partial matches.

Knowingly or unknowingly, playing with Google’s SEO Guidelines can lead to unfavorable consequences for your website and even for your online business. Therefore, hiring SEO experts is highly recommended.

For a free SEO Analysis of your website, contact us at http://www.icrayons.co.uk/

SEO or PPC? What’s Better for Small Business in 2016

Most small business owners over the web with limited marketing budget get confused between what’s better for their business i.e. Should they go with PPC or SEO? The sole purpose of PPC and SEO is to bring more business and traffic, but the approach, strategy and the path of both is totally different from each other. If budget is not an issue, then a business owner can capitalize on both to achieve a strong search engine marketing strategy and to target the 60%-70% of traffic that search engines account for.

However, if you are one of the small businesses over the web with limited internet marketing budget then, here’s a basic comparison between the two;

Advantages & Disadvantages of Search Engine Optimization

• If you do it by yourself, content optimization is free; however, SEO requires a basic setup to make your CMS search engine friendly.

• You can enjoy benefits even if you stop investing.

• You can enjoy high volume of free and quality traffic towards your website.

• SEO works great to increase your footprint in combination with PPC campaign.

• It requires ongoing attention (need to submit fresh & original content) for better SERPs.

• SEO requires a level of expertise in handling, keyword research, Google Analytic & AdWords.

• It takes time, but simultaneously offers long term results.

Advantages & Disadvantages of PPC

• PPC requires a hefty budget.

• You need to be a PPC expert to setup and handle PPC campaign for your business.

• It requires ongoing attention and management.

• PPC offers instant results.

• ROI are highly measurable and trackable.

• PPC campaign can be initiated in a very limited time.

• Once budget stops, results stops.

• PPC campaigns are usually expensive.

• CPC (Cost Per Click) depend on multiple factors.

So, SEO or PPC?

If you want to know, what’s better for your business, SEO or PPC, then the answer is “It Depends”. PPC is the best way to jumpstart your business’s internet marketing efforts. It offers immediate ROI. Whereas, SEO is a time consuming task but extremely necessary. It helps you create a strong online presence of your business.

If you are still confused, then we request you to contact our SEO & PPC experts for a satisfactory answer to your question. Contact them at http://bit.ly/25KEUHV.

Build 2016 – Microsoft to Refine the App Submission and Promotion Process

To help application developers make more money out of their developed apps, Microsoft, during Build 2016, revealed several big changes to the Dev Center. Moreover, Microsoft also confessed to make some useful changes to the app submission process and app promotion. Here are the big announcements by Microsoft at Build 2016:

App developers are now allowed to push updates and data to targeted groups of app users through app flighting.

Different languages can be used for app listing in the Store. This facility will improve the way we communicate with the customers and will also help us in our app marketing efforts. This also means that developers now only have to submit screenshots and store listings in one language if they so choose.

In order to help developers find what content users are seeing more, the Dev Center will start displaying the status of app packages and app metadata updates.

There is a new Windows Store submission API which is currently in preview and being rolled out to select developers in stages. This new API supports submitting updates, modifying metadata, and adding/removing in-app products when submitting apps for publishing.

The dashboard of the Dev Center has been redesigned to work faster and offer more data to developers. Currently, the new dashboard is available for those in the recently announced Dev Center Insider Program.

‘Community Ads’ is the new concept introduced by Microsoft for app promotion. These ads basically endorse other apps within the marketplace and only display when regular paid ads are not available. Developers will earn credits each time their apps show one of these ads and the credits can be used to get their own apps promoted in other apps that are participating in the program.

The concept of promotional codes has been refurbished. From the next month onwards, the creation of promotional codes will take only a few seconds. The Dev Center will start managing advanced promotional codes which can be given expiry dates, have their redemption status checked, and even cancelled if needed.

Live Tile updates & notifications can now be targeted so developers can promote and engage with select demographics.

During Build 2016, Microsoft has announced a lot of new features and products, and all them are pretty substantial. Let us know your comments regarding Microsoft Build 2016.