Akira Studio blog - Web Design London Ontario

Yes, it’s hard to believe, but Akira Studio has been in business for 10 years this Friday 19 February.

To celebrate, we’ve been posting a countdown of Amazing Akira Facts on our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/akirastudio/).

We’ll be having some cake and fizz in the office on Friday, so if you’d like to pop in and say hi, you’re very welcome.

Best of all, we have a very special deal just for the day itself. Like our Facebook page now, as we’ll be posting details at 10am on Friday morning.

What do Google and other search engines actually want your website to provide? 

It’s a question that is very vexing for site owners and website designers alike, as it’s often very tricky to get a straight answer.

However, there is one place that you can find advice direct from Google, and that’s the Webmaster Guidelines.

So when Google quietly updated these a couple of weeks back, we went delving into the small print to find out if anything major had changed….

As a small business owner, it’s sometimes hard to keep up with the latest trends and fashions, let alone look ahead to what might be hot next year.

Which is precisely why we like Trendwatching* so much.

While the company provide very detailed (and very expensive) reports for global brands on predicted trends in consumer behaviour, they also let us smaller businesses in on the major trends for the year ahead. 

These parent mega-trends (their words, not ours!) are not a ‘must do’ for smaller businesses, but they do give an idea of what the big name brands might be aiming for...

It’s a question that you might well ask if you’re the owner of a very small business serving a local market.

According to a new survey*, 59% of small Canadian businesses do not have a website at all, and 41% of small business owners though their business was just too small to make it worthwhile.

Globally, these figures for very small businesses are about the same.The difference is that 55% of these businesses elsewhere in the world plan to build a website, whereas only 33% of Canadian businesses do.

Here's a statistic to make your eyes boggle - over one billion searches are made on Google every month, and over half of those are made using mobile devices.

That's one billion searches for information or news, but what exactly were people looking for in 2015? 

Here are just some of the top 'trending' searches from 2015 in Canada. (Other countries are available!*)