Here are some of the things we improved:

• The site was migrated onto our professional secure servers
• The Spartpresss plugin was added so that the client can update their website with latest news whenever they want
• The Styles and colour schemes were modernized
• The site was imrpoved for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Much of the original content and images were preserved to keep costs down

The whole process only took a few days and we worked collaboratively with their own in-house designers.

With co-presenter Sharon Wilding from Purple Edge Marketing, we'll be looking at the opportinities that social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook present to businesses and helping you to answer the question "Is it for you?"

The event details are here on the business forum website.

The presentation was extremely well received and the presentation covered the following:

• Free marketing opportunities
• Integrating your website into a larger marketing approach
• Leveraging social media marketing
• The attitude behind success
• A number of strategies for getting more clients
• Mechanisms of gaining useful feedback

1. He hasn't given them the details they need to log into their server and support their site.
2. He is wasting a lot of their time by not answering calls and emails.
3. He wont hand over the originals of images that they paid for.
4. They have lost a lot of content from their site and it turns out there's no backups!

And so they've been recommended us and while we are more than happy to help, our options are limited since we can't get access to the actual website code he created. However because we understand how websites, servers and the internet work we are helping them through the steps they need to get their information and access so that we can move forwards. It's a very frustrating situation for us and them and it's a great example of "you get what you pay for", because while they originally saved a few pennies, they are now having to spend more time and money fixing the inevitable problems that arise from using what has turned out to be a "less than professional" company.

We Really Do Support our Clients

1. We are a team of web design professionals so there is always someone available to provide support.
2. We have thorough backup processes to protect our clients sites, emails and data.
3. We've got years of professional big industry experience.

Considerations for Choosing your Web Design Company

Naturally we think you should use us! ;) And at the same time we're confident enough in what we do to know that even if you look elsewhere, our service still stands out from the crowd. So if you decide to try and look elsewhere then here's some really handy hints, because we want you to make the right choice.

1. Recommendation is always the best. If people are happy to recommend then it's a good sign.
2. Check their portfolio and testimonials. Can they do what they say they can do.
3. Have they been trading for more than 5 years? If yes then you know they're past the five year failure hurdle (most companies that fail, do so in the first 5 years)
4. Speak to them - see if they really know what they are talking about and are happy to discuss your needs. This gives you a "gut feeling" check.
5. Information, have they clearly defined what it is they do? Do they have FAQs and useful information? These all indicate that they are helpful and supportive.
6. Don't be fooled by memberships and associations. These are often easily got and seldom indicate quality or reliability. If someone is a member of an association then find out what that means before you assume anything. Some associations do a great job of ensuring quality while others are just meaningless. A good association will have some form of accreditation process. The web design company that have failed so completely as mentioned above are/were members of FSB (Federation of Small Businesses) and the UKWDA (UK Web Dessign Association) and yet they are not demonstrating professional behaviour or service.
7. Professional Cover. There's a lot that goes into a successful website and in my many years in IT I can count on one hand the professionals who know enough to do it all themselves. There's SEO, Server support, scripting, graphical design, photo manipulation, multimedia. In fact there's so much these days, that I would make the statement that if there actually was a single person that could really do it all... then you couldn't afford them! That's why in Sparticle Ltd we've spent years building up our core team so that between us we have the skills needed.

I hope this is useful. If it sounds a little like a rant then I make no apologies. We have been successfully supporting small and medium businesses for over 6 years and prior to setting up our company, we were supporting some of the biggest companies in the world. So we naturally get upset when we see good, hard working businesses let down by irresponsible, unprofessional web developers. Because to them it's just a job but for you it's your business and if it's worth doing then it's worth doing well since you only get one chance to make a first impression. That's why we understand that your success needs more than just a website.

So what approaches do successful businesses take:

• They are proactively updating the content on their sites to maintain a good search engine rankings.
• They use an SEO Level II approach at least once a year to stay ahead in a changing competative market.
• As their business develops they reflect these changes by making small incremental updates to their sites, adding new pages, images, media and content.

1. Login to your website
2. Add the testimonial using our easy to fill in form.
3. You can even add a video or an image
4. Hit the publish button.

Testimonials are a great convincer for prospective clients, the more you have the more it demonstrates the benefits of your service/products. Because the Sparttestimonials plugin allows you to upload videos and images then your testimonials will have more gravitas. When people watch a video testimonial or see a scanned hand written testimonial they think to themselves "this is a genuine testimonial!".

During the course, Mr Zaretti, the founder of Sparticle Limited shared some trade secrets on how to carry out effective "social media marketing campaigns" as well as a proven IT strategies for building client bases and improving Return On Investment (ROI) for businesses by using IT effectively. Nick Kemp brought years of sales and business training to the table and showed powerful techniques and attitutedes to help companies effectively generate new leads and market themselves better.

Delegates were given an insight into how Sparticle Limiteds existing clients are already using tools like our spartpress blog publishing tool or our online Spartmail email campaign management tool to increase website traffic by over 500%!

If you would like to know more then simply contact us here and to find out about our next training seminar then simply subscribe to our no-nonesense mailing list (see the button at the bottom left of any page on this site)

There are now only a few tickets left so for those of you that could do with improving your strategies and finding new ways of generating business then come along. It promises to be a very valuable seminar!

Here's the details for the event:

The Art of Good Fortune for Business, 6th Feb 2010

Nick Kemp's quote when he saw the latest addition to the site was "Brilliant" - another happy customer.

Doug's simple but elegant site is now selling his product online, and since it's a download only product... he's making money in his sleep!

We asked Nick Kemp for his feedback after he retired several different eShops and moved everything over to the Spartcart solution.

"The spartcart is a great solution, I love the way it is fully integrated into my site and the layout and usability is very simple and friendly, making it a lot easier for people to find and buy my CD and DVD products. I'm also using it to sell tickets for events and it can even handle free downloads too!"

And importantly from a sales perspective the proof is in the fact that sales through the shop are increasing! There's lots of cool features from

• SEO improvements
• multiple product category support
• Google Checkout integration
• Supports images and videos for each product
• Supports internationalized delivery and tax choices
• Lots lots more

We'll be putting up more information very soon about this exciting product. In the meantime simply contact us and we'll happily discuss Spartcart and other IT innovations with you.

• Automatic nightly backups of their websites, databases and uploaded content
• Automatic nightly backups of their emails
• Weekly backups of the above to a remote site
• All software development code is under version control and archived
• Mirrored (RAID) disks protecting against a hard disk failing on all our production servers
• Secure email
• Restricted access to all our servers for security

All of this and more is just part of the service we offer!