Google+ is a bit of a laughing stock in some circles. Launched in the summer of 2011, Google wanted G+ to be the social network that made Facebook, Twitter, and the other social giants sweat; three and a half years later, Google+ still has a long way to go before it catches up to Mark Zuckerberg and his big blue empire. At time of writing, 890 million people use Facebook on a daily basis, while Wikipedia puts Google+'s total user base at 540 million people - a solid 350,000,000 fewer than Facebook.

But does this mean that Google+ is a failure? You'd be forgiven for thinking so - most of us still use Facebook, not G+, to stay in touch with our friends, and even Google themselves tend to avoid talking about their social baby much these days. Having said that, there are plenty of good reasons to give Google+  a try...

Communities

Google+ is great if you want to find people with the same interests as you. There are hundreds of thousands of Google+ communities, and if you can't find one for your favourite thing, it's pretty easy to create your own and invite people to join it. G+ Communities are similar to Facebook Groups, but generally speaking, communities are far more active and far easier to find, join and use.

Auto-hashtags

You've probably used hashtags on Twitter, but Google+ goes a step further than its laconic competitor by automatically adding relevant hashtags to your posts. Here's an example from our own G+ account:

Notice how the post itself doesn't contain any hashtags whatsoever. Instead, Google+ looked at the content of our post and decided that #Design, #WebDesign and #Website would be suitable tags for it. This improves your content's chances of being seen by targeting trends that you may not even have known about; this feature is particularly useful if you are posting topical content about current news stories, which people may well be following using specific hashtags that you don't know about.

SEO

If you're a website owner and you're wondering how social media might help you to climb the search rankings, you absolutely need to take a look at Google+. Remember, this is Google's own social network, and any shares or +1s you receive are effectively a recommendation to the search engine itself. Here's an interesting quote from G+'s Wikipedia entry:

According to Business Insider and TastyPlacement, having "Google+ followers boosts the [Google search] ranking the most, while a "+1" still does way more for your search ranking than Facebook or Twitter."

If you use YouTube, Gmail, Blogger, Google My Business, or any of Google's other services, you probably already have a Google+ account. You may not have used it yet, but it's never too late to log in and give it a try. It may yet overtake Facebook one day...

If you'd like to add a little something extra to your garden, our latest project may well be of interest to you. We recently completed a brand new website for SunSpaces, an up-and-coming outdoor business specialising in stylish glass verandas and gorgeous garden rooms.

SunSpaces' unique selling point is their ability to provide something completely bespoke. There are several UK companies who provide sunrooms similar to those sold by the SunSpaces team, but not only do SunSpaces use better materials than most of their competitors, they are also far more flexible, offering a colossal range of options and aiming to provide a living space that's tailored to each individual customer.

The new SunSpaces site is completely responsive, allowing potential customers to research the company's garden rooms on the go and find out a little bit more when they get home. The website's purpose is to drive enquiries for the business; to get people on the phone so that the SunSpaces team can discuss the customer's options and explain in detail just what the company can do. To assist with this goal, we made sure that the company's contact details were clearly displayed at the top of each page, and that all of the content was carefully geared towards sparking those all-important enquiries.

To see the SunSpaces website for yourself - and to find out more about adding a garden room to your property - visit www.sunspaces.co.uk now.

Today is Safer Internet Day! This annual event is organised by the UK Safer Internet Centre as a means of promoting online safety for children and young people; the slogan for this year is 'Let's create a better internet together', and we at Designer Websites want to do our bit!

Here, then, are a few simple online security tips that will help your kids (and indeed you yourself) to stay safe and secure while you surf the web:

• Create a strong, unique password. When helping your children to set up online accounts of any kind, encourage them to think carefully before selecting a password. Avoid obvious sequences like abc123, qwerty and 1234567 and popular phrases like batman, football or dragon. Oh, and NEVER use your own name as a password!
  
  
• Use different passwords for different accounts. Once you've thought of a good password, it can be tempting to use that same password for every account you set up. This is a big mistake; using the same password for everything means that, if somebody breaks into one account, they can easily gain access to all of the others. Try to think of a different password every time.
  
  
• NEVER share or publish your login details online. You never know who might see them!
  
  
• Parents: research adult content filters. If you want to make sure that your children don't view any adult content while they use the internet, there are a number of plug-ins that can help you. Adult Blocker is a highly-rated plug-in for Google Chrome, and FoxFilter is the #1 parental control for FireFox. Internet Explorer, meanwhile, has built-in parental controls; just click on the cog in the top-right corner of any IE window, then select Internet Options > Content > Family Safety to set parental guidelines for your children's internet use.
  
  
• Parents: use the sites your children use. One last tip for parents (and teachers, too) - get to know the sites your children are using. For example, if they have a Facebook page or a Twitter account, set up a profile of your own and learn how to use it; this will ensure that you understand what your children are doing online, and help you to advise them when it comes to privacy settings.

Gibran is a not-for-profit organisation based in Monmouthshire. They work with female (and, more recently, male) offenders throughout Wales, helping and supporting them while they rebuild their lives.

Gibran approached Designer Websites because they wanted their website to look more modern and give visitors a better experience. They wanted a good place to talk about their projects and events, but more importantly, they needed to give vulnerable people a quick, easy way to get in touch with the Gibran team.

The new Gibran website is now live, and we feel that it fulfils every aspect of the brief we were given. The responsive design is equally easy to navigate on all screen sizes, allowing those who need Gibran's help to access and use the organisation's site via smartphone, tablet, desktop computer, and any other device - whatever is easiest for them. Information about Gibran's work is laid out clearly on all pages, and every page has an enquiry form in the footer, allowing quick contact from any point in the website.

Gibran's cause is a very worth one indeed, and we hope that this new site serves their purposes well. Click here to see the website and learn more about Gibran UK.

Back in 2013, we created a website called PorcelainPaving.co.uk. Owned by outdoor specialists Greensquares, this site was specifically designed to show off the company's stylish range of porcelain tiles and paving slabs to potential customers.

PorcelainPaving.co.uk has proven extremely successful indeed, receiving a very healthy amount of traffic and allowing Greensquares to make these paving products a much larger element of their overall business. In fact, their porcelain range now has a brand name of its own: PrimaPorcelain.

Of course, a new brand calls for a new design, and we have recently been working hard to turn the old porcelain paving website into the new PrimaPorcelain website.

This doesn't just mean that we've been changing a few bits of text - the site has been given a complete overhaul, and PrimaPorcelain.co.uk now has an elegant responsive design and an intuitive new 'Product Selector' tool that allows customers to filter PrimaPorcelain's range (which has grown exponentially since 2013!) by colour, texture, and indoor/outdoor use.

The new PrimaPorcelain website is a big step up for the brand, and we hope that it will be even more successful now than it was in its old guise. Click here to visit PrimaPorcelain.co.uk.