22nd Aug 2013 | General Information
I am sure you have see vans driving around. They are all beautifully branded. Then you look at the email address and see that it is a Yahoo, or Google or and address belonging to their telecom provider. Suddenly, it does not look so professional. The thought goes through your mind, ‘Am I dealing with a fly-by-night company?’
So, why have professional email?
1. It’s necessary. Doing business nowadays (online or not) requires email — whether it’s for customer correspondence, receiving invoices from distributors, or sending a quick memo to employees.
2. It’s professional. Having a custom email address that includes the domain name is much more professional that using a free email service. It tells people that the business is legitimate, not amateur.
3. It reinforces branding. Associating a business with something free, like ThisIsMyBusiness@Yahoo.com, shares half of the branding with another company. Surely, your customers don’t want to advertise for Yahoo!’s email service every time they send an email message. Also, people are much more likely to remember a business’s name if it’s in the email address.
4. It’s flexible. Your customers can create the email addresses they need. For example, if your customer’s site is CoolExample.com, then he or she can create email addresses like Info@CoolExample.com and Sales@CoolExample.com.
Best of all, we have professional email solutions starting from pence per month! Have a look at Cloud Genius Web Hosting. If you have any problems, we can help you set it up. We are the experts! 🙂
17th Jul 2013 | General Information, Web Hosting, Websites
[ss_screenshot width=’300′ site=’https://webhost.cloud-genius.com’]Special Promotion
Money off!
Our servers are faster than ever.
I would have said that our servers are HOT, too… but that would have given the wrong impression.
Our partner’s website hosting servers are going through an ongoing programme of replacement. They are now faster than ever before.
To celebrate, we are offering money off all products until the end of the August bank holiday, 5 August 2013.
Spend over £40 and get 10% off when you enter the code HOTSUMMER at the checkout.
To cash in, go to: webhost.cloud-genius.com
13th Jul 2013 | Defeating spam, General Information, Salesforce, Web Hosting
I could not help but have a chuckle when I saw this article: Kremlin to revert to typewriters. Even the secret services are having difficulty keeping their information to themselves. [ss_screenshot width=’300′ site=’https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/10173645/Kremlin-returns-to-typewriters-to-avoid-computer-leaks.html’]
To my mind this means that security is not an absolute, but a best effort. Reassuring then, that we use Salesforce, which is regularly audited as secure enough to hold credit card details (in properly designed apps). That I have been trained in security and hold a CompTIA Security+ qualification. In my past I have designed and set up security for financial transactions for boutique banks, private equity companies and hedge funds. We always use strong passwords and store the gateways to our clients’ worlds in securely encrypted stores with two factor authentication. If our computers are stolen, the hard disks are fully encrypted – inaccessible without the correct password. They will be automatically wiped the moment they re-connect to the internet.
Do criminals go after hard targets or easy ones?
What security do your IT companies use? I have seen scary cases where clients’ passwords were stored in unencrypted spreadsheets and databases!
We keep our clients secure, they sleep at night and do great business in the day.
1st Jul 2013 | General Information, Web Hosting, Websites
Yesterday, yes Sunday, a client asked me for a new website. They are selling a property in Krakow and need to do it quickly. How could they do it quickly and easily?
Well, I created for them a beautiful, temporary website:Â [ss_screenshot width=’300′ site=’https://apartmentkrakow.cloud-genius.com’]
Nice website, but what’s so special about that?
The important aspect of this website is that people find it. This website has special Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) on every page. This means that search engines, such as Google, do not just make up a summary of each page, but have been told how to summarise. The website has been deliberately submitted to search engines to ensure the earliest possible indexing. There are also full analytics and it has been submitted to Google AdWords.
The website has been laid out to help the visitor. On every page is the ‘call to action’ (‘to buy this property, go here’).
There are email addresses on the pages. They have been encrypted so that humans can click to email, but spam-generating engines cannot read them.
The pages are optimised so that to the search engine the important content comes first, but to the human every thing is in the order that suits them.
The news of the sale has to be got out there quickly – all the pages have links to social media. Any new articles are automatically publicised.
Finally, most website viewing is on mobile devices. This website automatically generates a version for mobile devices. (It is a ‘responsive’ website.)
So, it looks beautiful, it is totally functional AND it was only commissioned yesterday. The beauty of this website is more than skin-deep. Do you want the same, five-star treatment?
[Yes, they could have had their own domain, but chose not to :-)]
19th May 2013 | Charity, General Information, Salesforce
As you may know, Salesforce directs 1% of its time and profits to helping in the charity/non profit sector. Salesforce is thriving, so that is a huge gift! Most of this work is channeled through the Salesforce Foundation. The Foundation has been doing some research on what makes for smooth implementation. Here are the results. Enjoy
Salesforce Foundation Survey Results
6th May 2013 | General Information, Web Hosting, Websites
Why do you use WordPress? Isn’t that a blogging platform?
I have been coding websites now for well over a decade (ouch, best part of two). In that time I have seen many fashions in website coding and design. Repeatedly I have seen one thing kill websites. You might guess that it is flaky servers or lack of security (they don’t help). However the thing that REALLY kills a website is when it cannot be maintained.
I have seen simply beautiful websites grow, flower and die a horrible death. As the number of pages grows and the interlinking becomes more complex the person maintaining it has given up. Guilt, overwork, abandonment!
It is possible in tools like Dreamweaver to use page templates to alleviate this, but only a little.
Step up to the plate Content Management Systems (CMS). Once the framework is set up, you just add content. You add another page, all the links are updated. You add another menu item, the site is all kept in step. You want a calendar of your articles… it does it all for you. You concentrate on your company/charity/creative mission. The computer does the donkey work. Hurrah!
There are lots of CMS about. Some cost tens of thousands of pounds. (Up until a few years ago, most of them did.) Now there are a few free ones. Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress are up among the stars of the bunch. These three all run on Linux, MySQL and PHP – but you don’t need to know that. They just work. Arguably, Joomla! and Drupal are aimed at huge sites and really need techies fed to them every so often. Simplest of the bunch is WordPress. If you can operate a word processor, you can operate WordPress. Some people say that all the WordPress sites look the same… well, out of the box they do. Get a good website developer to plug in some magic. Other people say ‘Ahhhh WordPress, that is just for blogging.’ That is where it came from. It did not stay there!
So I use WordPress because it is easy for my clients to keep the site up to date. Do you remember why sites die? Yes, lack of updating. Make it easy and it is less likely to die. Keep it updated and it will flourish. Your ranking will rise in Google. (Particularly if you let me install a nice search engine optimisation plug-in.) Link it to Twitter and Facebook and all your followers will know when there has been an update. Pretty soon you will be winning the Chelsey Flower Show of websites. (And your clients/customers will know about your business/charity/creativity.)
So, what are you waiting for? What was once difficult is now easy!
Here is another opinion about WordPress – WordPress – a web developer’s tutorial
2nd May 2013 | General Information
Having been to the Customer Company Tour at the ICC Excel Centre in London I can see that Salesforce is continuing to reach out to Charities and Non Profit organisations.
There are so many advantages for charities. For up to ten licences Salesforce will give you free access to their Enterprise product. (This is the same solution used by Coca Cola, GE, Guide Dogs, Accenture, G4S and so on.) If you need more than ten licences you get them at a discount rate through the Salesforce Foundation.
Charities do not get a cut-down product, they get the full product PLUS free customisations (the Non Profit Starter Pack) that gives extra functionality. As they are getting the same product as the big companies, charities get all the advances and stability that the big companies rely on.
Adding to my knowledge of VisualForce, Apex and Force.com. These go beyond the point and click customisation that most of Salesforce is configured with. They allow for a really deep customisation.
Thanks Salesforce – lets get this Force for Good working to promote the work of charities!
30th Apr 2013 | Salesforce
I am just on my way to the Salesforce Customer Company Tour. This is a chance to find out about the latest innovations at Salesforce. They are continuing to push the idea of the social web – knowing more about your customers and donors by making use of the information they put out on the web. Most obviously this information is there for all to see in people’s Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. The other aspect of the social web is that your team on Salesforce can communicate efficiently and easy using the various features of Chatter. I am also looking forward to finding out about the continued work of the Salesforce Foundation and how they continue to help charities to achieve their aims. In all, it should be exciting and interesting. Perhaps I will see you there?
Itinerary
10th Mar 2013 | General Information
I am excited to be writing to you from Wales. It is not that that makes a significant difference to my work, but I am now surrounded by beautiful countryside rather than urban sprawl.
Part of the move involved my laptop going missing. You know… the one that contained everything of importance to my business.
My first concern would have been my clients’ data. Fortunately I have my hard disk encrypted. Recovery without the correct credentials is impossible.
Then there was getting back to work. Fortunately, everything is backed up through the day. I was able to use a desktop PC and restore everything overnight. In the mean time, the things I was working on were backed up to the cloud, so were available in a few minutes.
Everything that I have on Salesforce is available with just a web browser and is stored in the cloud. Nothing lost there then!
Finally, my internet landline was not due to arrive for a couple of weeks! Fortunately, Virgin had given me a very good deal on 3G unlimited broadband. As long as the dongle was near the window it all worked. With all the furniture still to be unpacked I was running the company and developing Salesforce installations and websites from a table that was two foot square (60cm x 60 cm).
I recommend using cloud solutions for all the reasons outlined above. I was able to experience the true benefits myself. (As well as the reassurance of good backups!)
28th Jan 2013 | General Information, Salesforce, Web Hosting, Websites
The good news is that we have survived the move!
The even better news is that, with the business based in the cloud, there were no servers to move. Even our removal company, who seemed intent on damaging as much as possible, could not compromise our data – it is all safe on servers in data centres.
As far as the business is concerned, it is business as usual. Until the landline internet is connected, we are working off the local 3G signal. The 3G in this area gives us a similar speed to that expected off the wired internet. Thanks to Virgin Mobile, we have unlimited internet at a very reasonable price.
If only all the office furniture were based in the cloud! Much of that is in need of unpacking. For you, our loyal customers, it is business as usual. Even our 0800 number is automatically forwarded to our new line. (Thanks to Telecoms World for that.)
I suppose that you do not really need to know where we are located, as we can work from anywhere. For the curious, we are in a village near Ammanford in the county of Dyfed, just off the end of the M4. The full address is on the Contact Us page.
