Latest IT News and Information

I'm really pleased to let you know that I'll be co-hosting a business training seminar on the 6th July from 07:45 till 10:30 at Canterbury Christ Church University's Hall Place Business Centre in Canterbury, Kent.

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.

I was invited to Warsaw to give a presentation to a group of business people and entrepreneurs on Using the Internet and Websites for Better Marketing.

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

I've just got off the phone to a company who are having a really difficult time. You see, in the past they got a small one man website design company to build their website, only now, he's decided to stop trading and is not answering their calls. It's a big problem, made worse by the fact that:

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.

We've recently Search Engine Optimised (SEO) a number of our clients sites. But what does this mean? Everyone is talking about SEO but what does it mean for you? Well SEO translates into more hits on your website. But if done properly then "SEO translates into more appropriate hits on your website", which means better client conversion. The site www.jowaddell.co.uk is a good example. We have optimised her site for her business speciality, treating PTSD, and another example is www.nickkemp.com where we have updated the site content to reflect his growing business into Manchester. When you look at these sites see how many of the ways we have achieved this you can spot.

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.

We're pleased to announce the creation of another Spartplugin which can be added to our clients sites. This one is called "Sparttestimonials" and as it's name suggests it allows you to add testimonials to your site dynamically.

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!".