Latest IT News and Information

We're really proud at Sparticle HQ to announce that the official LionAid website is officially live. LionAid are a great UK based charity that are really tackling the issues around the tragically declining lion populations. In the last 50 years lion numbers have declined by 90% and so when we found out we decided to help by sponsoring LionAid and providing them with a website worthy of their cause.

We teamed up with Corza.net, one of our clients, a design house in Leeds that produce great T-Shirt designs, and they came up with the new graphic design for the website. We then took that design and using our inhouse experience and special website plugins we added a whole load of features including:

• Spartpress - our blogging and page authoring tool
• SpartAV - image and video galleries,
• Spartmail - email marketing campaign tools
• Improved SEO and analytics

All these features are designed to help LionAid market to a wider audience and bring the decline of lions to a halt.

"We wish LionAid every success and we'll be continuing to support them in their great efforts."

A. Bostock - Director of Web Technologies

Socitm, an association for ICT professionals in Local Government released information yesterday about the impact of ICT in saving money when handling customer enquiries.

"Data from the Channel Value Benchmarking service puts the comparative cost to councils per enquiry at £7.40 for face-to-face, £2.90 for the telephone and just £0.32 for web enquiries...." The article then says that because councils are not investing in the internet enough they are not satisfying their customers... "Information from Socitm's Better connected survey suggests under-investment in the web is the cause of its current low performance and this needs to change. Investment in the web that will reap significant returns because of the potential to reduce the cost of meeting customer enquiries"...

That's an estimated saving of about 95% comparing face to face with online enquiries and a saving of approximately 89% compared to telephone enquiries!

It's nice to see some real figures to back up a principal we've been promoting for years. This is why we developed the SpartFAQ website plugin, which provides our clients with a way of easily publishing FAQs that can have text, images and even video. FAQs which stand for Frequently Asked Questions, are a great way of saving money by providing the answers to questions your clients regularly ask. This means your staff don't have to spend their time and your money answering those questions on the phone, face to face or by email.

Just another example of how our SpartPlugins help your business to be even more successful.

For full details read the original article here.

The next Business Forum meeting will be held at the Hall Place on Tuesday 14th September  2010 commencing with networking, breakfast and coffee at 7.45 hrs (finishing approximately 10.30 hrs) and we invite you to join us. The cost of the event is £10 payable by cheque or cash on the day.

The topic for this session is Social Networking - making it work. Our last session on Social Networking has definitely whetted the appetite for more information on the subject, but focusing more on the practicalities, moving on from our look at the business benefits.

So this time we will look again at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and through demonstration and discussion will address:

• Setting up your pages and profiles
• Finding (the right) friends & followers
• Tips on the etiquette of Social Networking
• Tools to save time and give you focus

This session will be all about interaction so please come along prepared to share your own experiences with the group.  Your facilitators will be Sharon Wilding from The Purple Edge Marketing, who is also a very active member of and presenter for the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), and Mark Zaretti, Director of Sparticle Limited, specialist in successful online marketing strategies for businesses.

To book a place email fonte-maria.totaro@canterbury.ac.uk or call on 01227 782666. Places are limited so contact us now to secure your place.

Hall Place Tuesday 14th September 2010 commencing with networking, breakfast and coffee at 7.45 hrs (finishing approximately 10.30 hrs). Cost £10 payable by cheque or cash on the day.

We look forward to seeing you on 14th September 2010!

In June, we presented a workshop in Poland where Director Mark Zaretti addressed a forum of professionals, SMEs and sole traders and provided insights and training into how to use professional websites as part of a wider online marketing strategy. Bartek Popiel, one of the delegates and a lifestyle coach working in Warsaw has provided feedback and a review which you can find in Polish here: Bartek Popiel reviews Sparticle Limited's Business Training.

We were recently contacted by the director of Independent Pharma Consultants (IPC) and asked if we could improve their established website. We have many years of experience at migrating and improving existing websites.

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.