iknowthe.net | Internet and Ecommerce Consultant

John Lewis has announced that that last week was the biggest on record for the group’s ecommerce website, with sales up 40% on 2006 levels. The website, which is mangaged from a warehouse in Chelsea, now takes in more cash than the massive Oxford Street store in London – pretty good.

Good going for John Lewis. I like the site, it looks goods, the SEO is good, its clean its simple. I’m not sure who does the site for them but well done guys. Search was a little ropey last time I was trying to find a particular item, but there’s always work to be done. They are nice to their staff too, always a plus .

Lots of new features and a new interface at Google Analytics today – check it out Google Analytics

I’ve recently needed to check a clients website redirects due to an issue with their indexing. Just a gentle reminder that its always good practice to make sure your website is returning the correct codes to users and bot, otherwise indexing ans other SEO issues may arise.
Here’s my http header checking tool HeaderCheck for you to have a play around with, and below is a list of the most useful codes and what they mean.

HTTP Status Code – 200 OK
The request has succeeded. The information returned with the response is dependent on the method used in the request.
HTTP Status Code – 301 Moved Permanently
The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs.
HTTP Status Code – 302 Found
The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests.
HTTP Status Code – 304 Not Modified
If the client has performed a conditional GET request and access is allowed, but the document has not been modified, the server SHOULD respond with this status code. The 304 response MUST NOT contain a message-body, and so is always terminated by the first empty line after the header fields.
HTTP Status Code – 307 Temporary Redirect
The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection MAY be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests.
HTTP Status Code – 400 Bad Request
The request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax. The client SHOULD NOT repeat the request without modifications.
HTTP Status Code – 401 Unauthorized
The request requires user authentication. The response MUST include a WWW-Authenticate header field containing a challenge applicable to the requested resource.
HTTP Status Code – 403 Forbidden
The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated.
HTTP Status Code – 404 Not Found
The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.
HTTP Status Code – 410 Gone
The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent. Clients with link editing capabilities SHOULD delete references to the Request-URI after user approval.
HTTP Status Code – 500 Internal Server Error
The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request.
HTTP Status Code – 501 Not Implemented
The server does not support the functionality required to fulfill the request. This is the appropriate response when the server does not recognize the request method and is not capable of supporting it for any resource.

Is it me or is gmail becoming really, really slow. I use google notifier but an email comes through, I go to check it and gmail just won’t load.

Here’s a bare-bones alternative mail.google.com/mail/x/

And here’s a very interesting discussion involving “other” ways to access google should your access be blocked.

Here’s the worlds first webserver – at CERN, home of the web. Its a NeXT machine, from Steve Jobs’ other computer hardware company. Still looks quite cool. I saw a NeXT box for sale a while back, it was hideously expensive….