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The O’Brien Media Digital Insider Blog

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The O'Brien Media Insider

Welcome to the O’Brien Media Insider – Your Go-To for Digital Insights and Business Know-How

The O’Brien Media Insider is your behind-the-scenes look at all things digital, creative, and business-focused. From web design trends and SEO tips to small business insights and local Swindon highlights, our blog covers a bit of everything – just like we do at O’Brien Media.

Whether you’re a client, collaborator, or curious visitor, this is the place to catch up on the latest from our team, explore practical advice, and get inspired to grow your digital presence. Dive in and see what’s new!
Find out the latest news from Google
Chris O'Brien

Get a Google ranking boost for minimal cost by going secure

It's nearly been a year since the news that Google will look favourably on websites using SSL security broke so we thought we'd revisit the top benefits of securing your website.

Security is a top priority for Google and its many users – by increasing the effect that HTTPS encrypted sites have on your position in search results Google can protect their users and make shopping on the web a little but safer for everyone. We're also strong advocates of anything that can improve online security so we're 110% behind Google on this one.

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Chris O'Brien 10th August 2015 11:21 am
If you got an email from Google, saying Googlebot can’t access your CSS and JS files, you’re not alone.
Code and Development
Chris O'Brien

Why blocking JavaScript and CSS files

If you got an email from Google, saying Googlebot can’t access your CSS and JS files, you’re not alone. Google recently began sending emails to verified webmasters and website owners

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Chris O'Brien 29th July 2015 11:01 pm
Drupal
Chris O'Brien

Building pages with Drupal (or what are nodes, blocks, views and panels?)

As with most tasks you’ll face when creating or managing a website using the Drupal content management system (CMS) there are multiple ways to create and display content. In this article we’ll look at the four main content creation, curation and display methods that we use when building sites for clients.

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Chris O'Brien 20th July 2015 4:59 pm
Design
Chris O'Brien

Why use mobile-friendly responsive?

We thought we'd post a little follow-up to our article about responsive design from August last year where we give an outline of what "responsive design" is as it's now more important than ever for your website to be responsive and mobile-friendly. In this post we've summarised our top three reasons why having a responsive, mobile-friend, website is essential to keep your business or organisation competitive in today's fast-paced digital landscape!

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Chris O'Brien 23rd June 2015 11:01 pm
Social Media
Chris O'Brien

Here’s why Twitter’s new DM feature is great news for brands

Twitter has just released a new opt-in direct message (DM) feature that allows anyone to send you a DM, without the need for them to follow you first.

Brands, businesses and community managers should give some serious consideration to enabling this new feature and here’s why…

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Chris O'Brien 25th April 2015 10:30 pm
Branding & Marketing
Chris O'Brien

Our top 4 reasons to own more than one domain name for your business

Over the years we've owned quite a large number of domain names, from variations on our business name such as obrienmedia.eu, common misspellings like obrianmedia.co.uk, and even for specific products and services we offer such as smsmessenger.co and tasknow.co.uk. This isn't to play to our vanity but to protect our business and brand from others who might – either intentionally or accidentally – decide to register a similar domain name, at which point we would run the risk of customers looking for us finding another business.

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Chris O'Brien 24th February 2015 5:07 pm