Tenerife went crazy when local football team CD Tenerife broke through into the first division.  Having finished the 2008-9 season in third place in the second division their breakthrough to the premier league in June this year after a seven year absence was heart-stoppingly exciting.  It was as if the whole island had won the lottery. There was dancing in the street, flag waving, lakes of celebratory beer and wine and car horns tooting through the night.

Of course, getting back into the premier division is only the first step on a very steep ladder  but CD Tenerife fans can keep an eye on the competition via Sportal Maps – a clever mash up of Microsoft Virtual Earth, Google maps and Google street view which provides a pretty unique look at sports facilities around the world. Football is one of the topics and there is also Nascar, Forumla 1 and 360 degree views of international stadiums.

Once on the site you can manipulate the images in several ways and come up with some excellent views. This is a part map, part 3d shot of the CD Tenerife stadium. Although you might not see it on the  screen shot, the view is close enough to see players in action on the field (still shots).

You can choose to see 2D, 3D, arial, bird’s eye or with labels – all of it a very cool and clever use of web services. You can click through on the picture to get to the CD Tenerife page on SPortal and have a fiddle.

It is not only Spanish Premier league home grounds you can spy on either. Look up the English and Scottish first league teams, Germany, France and more.

George Gray of The Tenerife Property Guide kindly invited me to write an article for him on the basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

In cases where a business owner decides to leap into the breach and design his own website – something that is becoming easier every day – it is quite normal for  search engine optimisation elements to be missed off entirely until he or she starts looking into why their newly fledged baby is not flying quite as high or as fast as they had hoped.

In time some will realise that their website is missing the ‘keys’ that would open the door to search engine visitors. Others will never find that out and instead simply assume that internet marketing is a load of hyped up garbage.

That is unfortunate because there are no other methods of marketing as cheap and effective to my knowledge as internet marketing.

It must be even more upsetting for those who pin their hopes on a website for which they have paid a designer in the expectations of it coming out the box shiny and new and ready to take on the world. Unless the designer has incorporated SEO elements into the website that is not going to happen.  So again they may investigate and discover the benefits of SEO  or they may never know the reason why their new site never gets off the ground.

In the latter case, the paying customer only sees a loss of money and thereafter considers the internet to be waste of budget and time.

Most web designers today will include the basics of SEO but if you are currently unhappy with the performance of your website that is the first thing you ought to look at.  Is your site being found in the search engines for terms related to your business (and by that I don’t mean by your company name). If not, why not?

Read The Tenerife Property Guide – SEO – Help is at Hand

Oh, what a flaming nightmare I have had for the last week. It started with a couple of emails refusing to send on OUTLOOK and snowballed into no ftp, an unstable and dead slow internet connection and culminated in no internet whatsoever and me having kittens about my inability to get my work done on the internet.

I’ve been back and forth with a lovely lady in the US where my sites are hosted. I’m sure if she was within striking distance she would have given me a cuddle and a cup of tea she was so sympathetic (thank you Sheila of FQ) but unfortunately there was nothing she could do.

John of Sorted Sites lent me a sympathetic ear too and recommended I call ‘his computer guy’, Col, who talked me into getting a grip and pointed me in the direction of how to properly do a full system scan (get off the internet for a start).

After scanning and scouring the pc with assorted anti-virus and bug killers all weekend I was sure that the computer was clean and would now run like a well oiled racehorse (or something like that) but to my great frustration the damn thing still sat there like a fat slug, refusing to do more than creep on to one page of the internet before keeling over in exhaustion once again.

Telefonica were useless. I knew it was their router that was at fault. I tried to tell them that. First call resulted in me being sent packing to the English department. The lady there must have a hot link to the technical depatment though because she bounced me back to the techies quicker than I could say ‘Then what’s the bloody use having an English Department?’

To cut a long (long, long, long) story short about three days and a million calls to Telefonica later we were still no further forward. George at The Tenerife Property Guide had had an earful of my plight when he called me mid-week and kindly offered me the use of an extra router he had lying about.

I cantered down to get it yesterday full of hope and pondered for a moment or two over the odd bits and bobs that are to be found in George’s store room. I knew better than to try and plug and play the router myself because by now I was beginning to suspect that aliens were emitting a magnetic frequency through me that were frying any computer equipment that I came within five feet off. That turned out to be a clever move because then I couldn’t get the blame when His Nibs tried to install it and it didn’t work. (heh!)

But before the abortive attempt to get the replacement router installed there was an added little twist to the day. Our car had just been brought out of the garage that morning having had repairs to the driver side door. It had gone through the car wash and was sitting there in the car park looking all shiny when three little yobos came along and stoved in the passenger side window! My neighbour saw them do it. Thankfully she did not intervene as I would rather have a stoved in window than a duffed up neighbout but can you imagine!

Anyway, George’s router did not work last night and by this morning there was no choice but to call in the cavalry. Cue Ackie who arrived at 9.00 am to find me clucking over the computer like a worried old hen and left at 10 having changed the router and got my pc singing like a lark again. Thank you Ackie and Hello World!