Friday, August 26, 2005

Caliban accounts now come ready to go

We are still making dozens of improvements, big and small, to the Caliban
system.

When you sign up for a Caliban account, it now comes fully configured with a
test page, template and components. You will need to do some minor and
straightforward editing and add your copy. The whole process, from signup to
publish takes no more than half an hour.

And we have introduced Caliban Tokens. These make the process of creating
your own page templates really easy, If you have a website already, just
open a page in your browser, view the source code, copy the code into a text
editor and replace the title, subtitle, main text, and so on, with tokens,
and put a couple of tokens in the header. Voila!

We're now making improvements to the Objects technology that underpins
Caliban and makes it possible to componentise - or Calibanise - the text in
your site, so that you can just change one Object, instead of hundreds of
pages.

Saturday, May 28, 2005

Here's a summary about how to set yourself up on Caliban

It's quite easy. Just go to www.calibanweb.com and follow the instructions
for creating your account. You will then be able to access your account by
going to www.calibanweb.com/youraccountname (whatever it is). This takes you
to your own login screen where you can set up your preferences.

Next, you need at least one template. You can build your own, based on your
own web design, just dropping in the relevant bits of Caliban code to pull
in pictures, text, links, and so on. Alternatively, you could use one of
ours.

You are now ready to start making pages. Just drop your content in and save.
It's as simple as that. Your page is now published on the web as
www.calibanweb.com/yourname/yourpage.html

Now you will probably want to have your content appearing under a URL that
contains your own domain name. It is quite simple. Just ask your ISP (or
whoever holds the DNS records for your site) to set up a subdomain called
pages.yourname.com (this can be whatever you like) and ask them to make a
CNAME entry pointing to www.calibanweb.com. You now need to make just one
link from your website to one of your Caliban pages - just so there is a
path for the search engine spiders to follow.

That's it. You are now ready to put lots of great, search-engine-optimised
content onto the web really quickly. You can then sit back and watch your
traffic, and hopefully your business, grow dramatically.

Saturday, April 09, 2005

Good Quality Content Essential to Search Engine Strategy

Here's something to check out. This is why generating content through Caliban is such a powerful way to uprate your web presence.

A special report from the Search Engine Strategies conference emphasized the importance of high quality, relevant website content to optimise search engine performance.

- A "What is Content?" panel sought to provide information on creating content to help boost search engine visibility.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3492496

Welcome!

Here's the blog for Caliban - the Web Wizard.

Caliban is one of those ideas that seem so obvious, but that no one else seems to have cottoned on to. We have been using it in-house for several months now, and the results are great. You save lots of time, avoid lots of aggravation and make adding content a breeze for anyone, regardless of technical ability. And your content has a habit of appearing at the top of search engine rankings.

Caliban lets you build web pages quickly and accurately, without any need to test or upload them, so there's no worry about whether web links will work once you have it on the site.

It makes sure that your pages are automatically optimised for good search engine rankings, without resorting to the kind of spam techniques that can get your site barred if found out.

It makes sure that search engines find all of your site content, without you having to build links to new pages.

It encourages other users to link to your site, so that you get found and go up in the rankings. Adn you can monitor the searches that find you.

It lets you manage your content really effectively. With Caliban, you can build some or all of your pages from components – text blocks, menu bars and so – and instantly update tens, hundreds, or thousands of pages with just one change.

So many companies spent lots of money on a web site, only to leave it unchanged for months, or even years, because it was just to time-consuming or expensive. Others tried to solve that problem by having a database 'back end', not realising that this incredibly powerful content would be invisible to search engines and so never get found. Caliban solves all this.

This was the case with the all-important jobs database for creative and media recruitment company Workstation Solutions plc, another company in the same group. Pre-Caliban this was powered by a simple Access database, which was totally ignored by search engines. Now that the jobs site has been 'Calibanised', each job on the system gets found and indexed, and can, potentially, be automatically updated from the main in-house management system (in this case Enterprise 6).

It is the same with weblogs. When we release Caliblog in a few months time you can be confident that all that valuable content gets found and adds to the power and influence of your site.