I don’t know how much more abundantly clear we can make things on our sites when we say, for instance, at Lucire: ‘We receive multiple enquiries from SEO or “outreach” companies about paid or guest posts each day, and if you fall into this category, please do not contact us: it’s going to be no.’ […]
Tag: Jack Yan & Associates
A decade on AWS stagnated this company
For many years (2002–12), we hosted with a US company that gave us a Plesk front end. That meant we did a lot in-house: create PHP and MySql databases, started up hosting environments for new domains, even managed our own email server. That company eventually opened up an Australian branch and my appointed customer manager […]
Six refreshed or brand-new company websites since 2021
I am going to give ourselves a pat on the back over the last few years of redesigns and site developments, helped to no small degree by getting all our sites off AWS (Amazon Web Services), which must be the most disempowering, retrograde set-up for hosting I have encountered in 30-plus years of working in […]
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One of the last times we went out-of-house for typesetting
A spot of nostalgia today: another little sheet dug up among all the old paperwork. After desktop publishing came out, the technology wasn’t good enough for everyone to have access to it, so some elements were still contracted out of house. This would have been one of the last times, done by one of […]
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Blocking the Semrush bots
It’s not enough to block just Semrush’s bot, SemrushBot, in one’s robots.txt, since they have a whole bunch of them. We’ve usually allowed all bots but with “AI” and Semrush’s terrible programming that wasted hours of my time every day for nine months, there are certain parties no longer welcome to crawl. To block Semrush […]
Losing your number-two position when switching to HTTPS, 31 months on
In 2022, when the Jack Yan & Associates site went to HTTPS—though some parts of it were on that even in the 2000s—it fell from being second place in Google to below 30th for a search for my name. However, the accepted wisdom was that HTTPS sites outranked HTTP ones on Google. The “experts” all […]
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Carry on designing
Journeys through time are fascinating. Earlier this week, I looked at some of the websites we liked from the Jack Yan & Associates links’ section. In many cases, it was a trip down memory lane, as some sites still had their 2000s layouts. Sadly, this could mean that a few of them will disappear in […]
Bringing the JY&A links’ pages into the 2020s
After 21–2 years, we’ve redone the links’ pages on the Jack Yan & Associates website. The old template dated from 2002, and, oddly, while cellphone browsers from a decade ago could by default enlarge the type to suit, modern ones can’t. (I’m still waiting for the software developers to incorporate the Bitstream technology from the […]
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Jack Yan & Associates gets a new home page
Not really major news, since it’s virtually the same template as we used for JY&A Media earlier this year: Jack Yan & Associates has a new home page. Gone is the random image that headed the old page in favour of a photo I took in Dubai that I rather liked—one of the earlier […]
At the dawn of the ’90s
More from the slimmed-down archives. Here’s a little item from 1991, when I was 19. St Luke’s Church in Wadestown, Wellington was holding a 1960s-themed dance and I designed and hand-lettered the tickets. You can see I was into Swiss modernism even then. The large type was drawn from memory: I didn’t go back […]