Advanced Web Rankings (AWR for short) is a pretty well-known tool for rank checking websites against your chosen keywords and search engines. There are four licence levels – from $99 to $599. This looks great at first glance because unlike a lot of licences in the SEO world (SEOMoz for one), this is a one-time fee instead of a monthly or yearly renewal. There is a sort-of hidden cost however that we’ll look at later.

Basic Features

So AWR seems reasonably priced, but what do you get for your money? Well, the Standard Licence (the cheapest one) lets you rank check as many sites as you like and you get access to all the data you’d expect like ranking changes over time. The next level up (Professional) lets you create nice reports to print and email – great if you have clients or people to share the data with.

The Enterprise and Server levels give you access to keyword research tools (Wordtracker, Google Keyword tool and and there’s an API for others like SEMRuch and Google Webmaster Tools) – to be honest I use separate tools anyway so that isn’t why AWR is important for me. What I like is being able to rank check sites from any search engine – the Server licence which is the most expensive, actually gives you a proxy so you get accurate results from other countries.

Setting Up A Project

The AWR Project Manager is a tool that lets you set up and manage your rank-checking project. This could be something like “My Website Rankings” or “New Keyword Set”. You start by choosing which search engines you’d like to use – Google UK and US for example – and then you add your keywords. This is as simple as typing them in, although you can export from a file or URL. You then add as many websites as you like to be checked and choose what crawl depth you’d like AWR to go to.

Realistically, it doesn’t really matter where your site is after the first few pages, but setting a crawl depth of a few hundred results let you see if you’re popping in for any of your target terms.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the bigger the crawl, the longer it takes. AWR actually rests in between querying the search engines so that it reduces the risk of being blocked.

Once you click OK that’s it – the project starts running! You can manually pause or delete it at any time, and re-checking is as simple as forcing a new crawl or scheduling one. You can even set it to email you the results.

Top Sites

One neat little feature is the “Top Sites” tab which is part of your main project dashboard. This shows you up to 200 sites that rank above you for the selected keyword. It’s a great way to keep an eye on the competition and even find sites that are worth partnering with.

One Downside

The only annoying thing about AWR is that you have to purchase a Maintenance Plan after the first 12 months in order to keep getting updates and support. This costs from $29 to $119 and as we mentioned above, it’s not totally clear at first that you have to pay this (AWR talks about a “One-Time Fee”). I’m not entirely sure what would happen if you didn’t bother to buy a maintenance licence after 12 months – presumably it would continue to work!

Overview

AWR is an easy to use, solid rank-checking program. It’s got all the features you could want to check your own site, your client sites or your competitor sites, and the reporting is great for a quick overview. You can customise the reports and dig a lot deeper into various data, but from my point of view it’s the data at a glance that’s the most useful. AWR is the best rank checking tool out there at the moment so it’s well worth using for your clients or just for your own sites.

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Reply from AWR on 26th August 2011.

The application license does have a one time fee. Upon purchase, AWR comes with a 1 year maintenance plan, which provides free application version and search engines definitions updates. When the initial maintenance plan expires, you can continue to use the application at the version level we released before the maintenance plan has expired. Purchasing a new maintenance plan, which will bring new version and search engines definitions updates, is optional, as each user may consider is best for himself.

- AD, Advanced Web Ranking Support Team

Here’s a quick catchup on some of the hottest jQuery demo’s and plugin’s at the moment. For more information about each one simply click on the image under each heading to link to the demo site. If you have any others you wish to share please do in the comments belooow.

Quicksand

Reorder and filter items with a nice shuffling animation.

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Here’s a really useful tool in our ‘really useful tools to share’ series of posts… you like that? Good, I’ll continue… If you’ve just finished collecting the Dr Who 2010 Merlin sticker collection and you’re frantically looking for another random collection to occupy your time then why not start a social usernames collection? Just imagine, owning your chosen username account on every social site on the web! Am I selling it to you yet? No? That’s good, you’ve passed the ‘I’ve got a life’ test. On the other hand if you have a legitimate reason for owning or checking the availability of a username on social sites, domain names and trademarks then this online tool is exactly what you’re after. Do it all in one search, type in a query and see which ones are available and which ones you can secure. They’re quite literally up for grabs.

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Successful websites require a series of important pre-launch stages to ensure they have the best chance of succeeding. Client liason, technical specs, design briefs, accessibility, standards compliance and SEO are all important factors in the DNA of the top performing sites. Through years of commercial experience we have found the final quality assurance stage to be one of the most important. This vital stage ensures both platform stability and quality is at it’s optimum pre-launch.

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Whether you are an IT professional or a computer novice, choosing the right backup system to use at work or home is a difficult, and frankly uninspiring use of time, and one which almost always results in making undesirable compromises. There always seem to be far too many options and the good solutions come with a price tag that almost matches the cost of the system they were designed to support. A good backup system should satisfy, at least, the following requirements:

• It should be affordable.
• Operation should be reasonably well automated.
• It should be easy to restore to one of several points in time.
• There should be some redundancy.
• It should be simple to store some backups offsite.
• Media should be encrypted for security.

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Instant Blueprint allows you to quickly create a web project framework with valid HTML/XHTML and CSS in only a matter of seconds, allowing you to get your project up and running faster!

If you’re after saving time by setting up the generic website framework of your next project then this could save you time. Personally I’d like to see a few more options like including the options to setup a specific CSS Framework.

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Viewing historical browser market share statistics the old fashioned way is a pretty dull task. There’s nothing less inspiring than sitting staring at a table of data that visually tells you nothing. On the flip side we all like a good pie chart right? All those colourful segments that kind of look like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, indicating immediately the impact of the resulting data in a visual form.

Historical browser statistics

Current browser share statistics is something I reference from time to time and I use W3schools.com as a primary source for this data. A tool I recently discovered from Axis shows the historical browser statistics from W3schools.com in a custom visualisation. It tracks back to January 2002 and includes historic deprecated browsers such as IE4.

Conclusion

A cool online tool for viewing historical browser market share statistics. Witness the demice of Internet Explorers dominant control of the market with this intelligent custom visualisation. Let us know what you think of the tool and the market share as a whole.

I’m a web designer by day and a web designer by night, I pretty much live and breath the web. I use many tools to assist me in my workflow, tools that both assist me in maintaining quality in my work and also in saving time, time I’d much rather spend catching up on the latest season of The Wire.

One pretty cool tool I use to assist in the development side of web design are grid overlays. Grid overlays are exactly what they sound like, a grid that overlays your website. I use them as a quick visual guide to check to see in all my elements line up as intended and are pixel perfect.

Browser plugins

One option is to use Firefox and an extension called Gridfox. This is useful as I already use Firefox as my main development browser.

Scripts

Andy Budds Layout Grid Bookmarklet

A more die hard approach would be to use Javascript. Andy budd wrote a nice overlay grid bookmarklet, originally inspired by Khoi Vinh’s post about using a background image of a grid for layout. The script is also demonstrated on the SubtleGradient website.

#grid

A personal favourite is this Hashgrid script you can embed on your site. The clever part is you can turn it on and off by typing ALT + G – g33k! The clever scripting gives me the functionality I need, if I have a particular layout to test with a different structure I can simply replace the bg image.

Designing with Grids in mind

Do you or have you considered using a CSS framework when developing sites? Personally I don’t as I feel I can write lightweight CSS which is both flexible and cross browser. Photoshop guides and grids help in the design phase but you lose these when developing, until now of course.

In summary

These tools help bridge the gap between the design phase (Photoshop, guides and grids) and the development phase (using these tools to test and compare). Let us know if there are any other tools out there that do something similar, I’m sure I’ve missed some, oh and let us know what you think of these, if you already use them and what your experiences of working with them are.

Christmas isn’t far away now, 38 days to be precise, and if you’re even a little bit festive there’s a chance your place of work may do a Secret Santa. It’s a fun way of buying a colleague a Christmas present without them knowing who sent it. It’s also fair because everyone normally has a small set budget in which to purchase the present. We use a simple online Secret Santa organiser that randomly pairs present givers and receivers. Simple enter the names and email addresses of each participant and each person will receive the name of the person they need to buy for, all done surreptitiously.

The Site

The process

4 simple steps

1. Enter your name, email address, and a group name
2. Select the number of presents for each participant.
3. Enter the names of the participants.
4. Click on the Pick Names button.

Visit the Free Secret Santa Random Name Generator →

A moving light in the sky is guaranteed to catch my attention. If it is slow moving and flashing then I know that it is likely to be an aircraft. If it shoots across the sky in an instant then I know it to be a meteor or shooting star. If it is fixed then I conclude that it is a star or a planet. But what if it is none of these? What if it is bright orange and moves across the sky slowly over a period of thirty seconds or so?

I asked myself that very question recently as I watched in amazement as an object that looked to me like a distant ball of fire passed silently and slowly from north-west to south-east across the clear evening sky. My initial thoughts were that I had just seen my first fireball but I knew that to be very unlikely and, besides, I was sure that fireballs were associated with freak weather conditions and on this night everything was still.

The object, whatever it was, appeared to be some distance off and moved across the sky with a speed that I readily associated with that of orbiting satellites which I had seen many times before. But these had always been white in colour and this one was a distant flaming red.

I wondered if it would be easy to check whether any satellites had passed overhead and so turned to the Internet for a solution. I came across a number of great resources which provided more than enough information to solve the mystery.

The first was a free piece of software by Sebastian Stoff called the Orbitron Satellite Tracking System which gives graphical and tabular information about the position of satellites and their visibility at a given time and place. The Orbitron software suggested that what I may have seen was a satellite which goes by the name of Iridium 43, one of a family of about seventy such satellites that provide communication services and orbit the earth from pole to pole at a height of about 500 miles and at a speed of about 17,000 miles per hour.

The Iridium satellites made the news back in February of this year when one of them, Iridium 33, collided with a retired Russian satellite and with a combined impact speed of 26,000 miles per hours both were destroyed leaving thousands of pieces of space debris to fall back to earth over the following days. The Russian satellite had been uncontrolled since, at least, 1995 but the authorities had predicted that the two satellites should have missed each other by about half a kilometre – they were clearly wrong.

Iridium satellites are known to give rise to an interesting phenomenon – the Iridium Flare. The satellites are equipped with three highly reflective door sized antenna made of silver-coated Teflon on polished aluminium  and occasionally one of these will pick up light from the sun and reflect it down onto the earth’s surface generating an illuminated spot on the earth about 6 miles across. To an observer on the surface of the earth the satellite appears as if from nowhere as a faint object that slowly increases in brightness to a maximum and then just as quickly dims until it is no longer visible, with the whole show lasting no longer than, perhaps, thirty seconds. A simulation is shown here. The satellite that I saw appeared a rich flaming red in colour but I put that down to atmospheric conditions and its effect on the light as it was reflected from the satellite down to earth.

A really excellent web site that makes it easy to determine when and where to look out for satellites that are likely to be visible to the naked eye is Heavens Above. Start by declaring your location and follow links from the main page to get predictions for when Iridium flares, the International Space Station or other such objects will be visible in your area. The site also displays charts showing you where in the sky these objects will appear.

If you like to see a more earth-based and dynamic view of how any given satellite is orbiting then this real time satellite tracking web site has a mashup showing the live movement of selected satellites superimposed over the familiar Google Maps background. You can combine this view with an Iridium flare  prediction from the Heavens Above web site to get a Google Maps view of the expected track of a visible satellite too.

It is all a little geeky, but I find it reassuring to be able to get an explanation for such phenomena.