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Minky gets about a bit, so if he comes across anything worth sharing we’ll post it up here. This could be useful business tips, opinions on the news or the things that annoy him.
He’s also been asked about his hourly rate and what his customers can expect to get for their money. We charge almost all of our services “by the hour” so this got us thinking – What can we do for our clients in about an hour? We have decided to do a series of posts where we hope to give you some ideas of the kind of things we do.
Register to get notifications of new posts as they happen about every 2 weeks – Minky doesn’t like spam…
Just Bananas and nuts!
If you’ve already approached a web-designer and asked them about prices, you’ll have already heard ‘What do you want it to do?’ Having thought about it and told them, you probably picked yourself up off the floor after they told you how much it will cost!
I’m not trying to put web designers out of business here. If you need an all singing, all dancing, visual extravaganza with fully functioning shopping cart, forum and blog with the minimum of fuss and you need your site to be unique in design and style, then you are probably going to have to pay them the rate they asked for (and if this is the case you would do well to approach Stylistic Web Design Ltd)!
If your initial thoughts are something a bit more basic; some static pages to get across key, useful bit of information about your company, who you are, what you do, maybe a blog, etc. then, if you are willing to do some reading and have a play about with technology, there are a couple of possible solutions for you.
You could use a What You See Is What You Get (WISIWYG) web-site development tool, such as FrontPage (2003 was the last version released, it was replaced by Expression Web) or Dream Weaver. These are off the shelf packages, similar to Word or Excel. They can be quite simple to use but the main downside is the cost. My quick internet comparisons put Expression Web at £150 and DreamWeaver at £250. They can also require a bit of technical know-how.
But another possible solution is Open Source Content Management. Sounds a right mouthful doesn’t it? But, in essence, it a framework onto which you can build. Being open source, means there are literally thousands of developers around the world working on improving and adding bits onto the basic package for free. They may be developing for their own needs but they make the fruits of their labour available to everyone.
Free doesn’t mean cheap and nasty looking either. There are a number of these Open Source Content Management systems out there. By far the most common is WordPress (found at www.wordpress.org/). They describe themselves like this;
“WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.”
WordPress is used by many leading organisations. Downing Street (www.number10.gov.uk/), Ford (autoshows.ford.com), The Wall Street Journal (magazine.wsj.com) and Richard Branson (entrepreneur.virgin.com) all use it, so there must be something in it, right?
Many hosts may also include it as a ‘1-click’ install on your hosting package, greatly simplifying the install procedure and getting you up and running quickly.
You can download ‘themes’ to change the look and feel of the site and also ‘plug-ins’ to add or enhance functionality. Once you get a feel for it and if you are prepared to do a bit of reading and learning, you can edit these to ‘tweak’ them for your specific site or develop your own from scratch.
This site uses WordPress. It uses a ‘tweaked’ theme (Ahimsa) and a number of additional plug-ins to control things like e-mail subscriptions, spam monitoring, Google Analytics and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Total monetary cost to Sara – £0.00 – just a bit of time and (my!) effort.
A bespoke web site with similar functionality from a web designer? Somewhere in the region of £5-6000!
So hopefully the posts in this series have opened your eyes to how you can produce a web site for your business. At the end of the day the most difficult thing to come up with are ideas… that’s why professional web design studios cost so much…
If you would like Above Parr PA Services to help you create your web presence, contact Sara.
There are as many hosts as there are stars in the night sky! How can you choose one?
As with everything, the best one is probably a recommended one. If you haven’t got a recommendation then the internet can be a valuable resource as long as your research is structured. Jump on and type ‘web hosting’ into a search engine. For me that only returned 225 MILLION hits!
Look at a few pricing structures. Some will offer ‘Unlimited disk space’ (read file storage). Some will offer ‘Unlimited Bandwidth’ (read amount of data that can be transferred to/from your site). Some will offer packages that give a fixed amount of one or the other or both. There are price/option decisions to be made at this point, but most hosts should be flexible enough to allow you to swap pricing/features plan. Think about where you want your files hosted. They can be anywhere in the world. This is technology and everything is done remotely. In fact your host may well have never even seen the physical hardware they sell space on, or indeed, even own it!
But price isn’t everything. Think about the downsides as well. Low cost probably means that you are sharing a server, probably with 10s if not 100s of other companies. If one of those writes a bit of web code that isn’t very good, it may tie up your server, causing it to run slowly and take ages to present even the simplest of web sites to your visitor. Your host should be monitoring this kind of thing, but it’s reactive, you may have already missed that new customer because your site wouldn’t load before they get it fixed. It’s a trade off. At some point in time you may need some support. If the hosting company isn’t in your time zone then questions could take a while to answer. If the hosting company plans an upgrade ‘out-of-hours’ will it be out of your hours, or right in the middle of your prime web site viewing time? For these reasons alone it may be worth having your site hosted in your country if possible, not to mention language barriers (trust me, I manage a team split in the UK and India, language and custom is a much larger barrier than everyone says).
So, find a host, and then search for some reviews about them. Make an informed decision, but it’s not the end of the world if you have issues – you can move your web site quite easily between hosts. For your info Sara was introduced to her host through a networking event – TwentyHost, and is on their Shared UK Hosting Plan. It gives her site 150MB of storage space (including email storage, but this can me moved off-line), 2.25GB of Bandwidth/month and up to 25 unique email addresses, more than enough, for now.
Once you have your host – link them to your domain name using the DNS Lookup on your domain control panel. Your new host should have given you the names of their ‘Names Servers’, you need to enter these into your domain control panel ‘Names Servers’ section. As if by magic (well, over a couple of days – the internet is a big place you know and word needs to get around!) your domain name is linked to your hosted space.
In my final post in this series I’ll be looking at possible ways of creating some content for your new site.
In my second installment we’ll look at what you need to get started in the on-line world.
The first thing you’ll need is a ‘domain name’. This is your address on the internet, your ‘URL’. You know, ‘www.blahblahblah.com’ or ‘www.thingybob.co.uk’.
Think carefully about the two parts of the address, the ‘blahblahblah’ bit and the extension ‘.com’ or ‘.co.uk’ (or a multitude of others) it can reveal a lot about your company and it’s ambitions.
The first part would ideally be your company name, but the world is a big place and your address (or URL) may already be registered, either to another company with the same name or to someone who has registered the name in the hope of making a fast buck and selling it on at a profit. You may need to opt for an alternative. Sites where you register your domain name (for example I always use www.123-reg.co.uk/) will usually do a free search and list some alternatives if your first choice isn’t available.
For the extension, think about what you want to portray. ‘.com’ is usually seen as a big corporation or global company, think Microsoft.com or IBM.com. ‘.com’ extensions are relatively expensive however, about £10 per year. Country extensions, such as ‘.co.uk’ can prove far more cost effective about £3 per year. Some companies also like to use their extension to show the country they are located in, or a bit of patriotism (the BBC are at bbc.co.uk rather than bbc.com (although they do own bbc.com and it redirects to bbc.co.uk).
This brings me on to redirecting. You may have one site but want to have several routes into it. This is easily achievable. This site is www.aboveparr.co.uk/, but what happens if you enter www.virtuallyeverythingdoneforyou.co.uk/? You end up back here! Now this alternate address isn’t important, but it’s worth thinking about if you web address may be typed incorrectly or maybe as something for a future marketing campaign. This should be handled by your host; I’ve not had to do anything ‘clever’ other than link the two addresses.
So, you have your web address(es) what next? You need a host, someone to hold all your web site files so they are available for everyone to see. My next entry will be about finding a host and some things to think about before you finally settle on one.
OK, so this has taken a lot more than an hour – but it’s something pretty special…
We’ve been really busy for the last few weeks, organising the Denby House Open Day on 11th September – a FREE networking event to celebrate the official opening of the business centre and the rebranding of space4work.com but we’re pretty much sorted – we can still squeeze a few more people in so if you would like to attend then send me an email.
Space4work provides flexible business accommodation offering easy in/out terms, plus a range of virtual business addresses including Denby House – which is where my office is. The new website allows businesses to choose their virtual office packages online so that they only pay for what they need – much like when they use us!
I’m not the sentimental sort, but I can honestly say that the support we’ve received from Director Alan Woolley has been fundamental to the speed with which our business has developed, so when he asked us to organise his event for him we were happy to agree.
Minky is very excited about meeting so many local business people and can hardly wait. He’s been tidying the office for days and keeps checking our list of nibbles to make sure we have enough nuts! He’s also looking forward to meeting George Cowcher when he officially opens the building at 11.30am – we have a feeling he’s going to try really hard to get his picture taken with him…
Well I MUST… everyone has one don’t they? My business will fail if I don’t…
Exclamations many a small business will have heard or thought.
OK, in this ever increasing tech-savvy world we live in, an online presence is useful. I can’t say it isn’t. With the right content it can answer many people’s basic questions about your business. It can also act as a marketing tool, a shop window, even a full shop, whatever time of the day or night, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Before I jump in to tell you what could make your life just that little bit easier when it comes to web sites, a little bit about me. I’ve been professionally involved in technology since I left University in 1993, as a programmer, a web-developer, a project manager and an IT consultant for small IT companies and global multinational corporations. I’ve worked for a number of clients, private and public sector, usually on long term projects.
For the last 10 or so years I’ve always jumped on the internet at the first opportunity to research anything and everything. When I moved from London to Nottingham in 1999 it would have been the perfect solution, but web sites were the Tech companies’ domain and sites like RightMove.com didn’t exist then. I ended up spending valuable ‘downtime’ away from home, trawling around estate agents, looking at house details and booking viewings… (I wish I’d had a PA back then!)
Now almost everyone uses the internet to research just about anything, from houses to holidays, from prices to PAs.
But how do I go about getting a web site? It’s really complex and expensive isn’t it?
It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. Over the next few postings I’ll list some options and outline some ‘tips and tricks’ that hopefully can spare you some heartache, but most importantly, for the small, start-up business, save some time and money.
Minky is on holiday this week and he really needs a break. Mrs M has told him that if he takes his laptop it will be going in the pool, so we are looking after his business for him for the week. These are just some of the things we are doing to make sure he gets a well deserved rest.
So, while he’s monkeying around on the beach, his business is ticking along without him.
You will always be the best person to run your business, but could we do this for you for a few days so you can recharge your batteries? Just drop us an email…
Since starting this blog and getting himself known, Minky is getting quite a lot of emails – thankfully he has some help!
Minky ready for networking
Minky always has an inbox full of emails about “performance enhancing” products, his bank needing to check his details (even though he doesn’t actually bank with them!) and desperate widows trying to release their inheritance from evil dictators, but even though it’s rubbish it eats into his productive time and that costs him money! Considering what his “hourly” rate is he can’t afford to be sifting through emails, he’d be better off making (or selling) his product…
As professional administrators we know which emails are important to him and which are junk and can deal with them quickly and efficiently, sending him only the ones which are worth reading. With his consent we also reply to requests for further information about his products on his behalf, so that he has time to make those important follow-up calls that we all love doing…
Would you get better results if you only got the emails that were important to you? If you would like to know more about our services, or have suggestions for future posts please send Minky an email and tell him what you think!
After hearing about these people Minky has been having a bit of a sulk – and has taken to wearing shorts to the office!
One of our clients has all his company mail delivered to a UK mailing address at Denby House, where my office is. We filter out the junk, pay in his cheques and send him (via email) the important bits, so he only deals with the items that are vital to his business, saving him time and money. He gets a great service, improved cash flow because he doesn’t have to wait for his cheques to get to him before they get paid in and an extra hour on the beach – he’s based in Southern Europe!
If anything critical turns up (like bank cards or cheque books) then we post them over straight away, but for his general post we just bundle it all up once in a while and send it.
I was asked on a forum about mailing addresses a little while back – the person posting felt that it might be unethical to hide where your business is. My opinion (and that’s all it is) is that by having a mailing address you are providing a method of contacting you by post, nothing more – it’s no different to having someone answer your phone… (which we can also look after for you)
Doesn’t this sound like an ideal way to run your business? – I’m starting to like the sound of “our Florida office” If you would like to know more about our services, or have suggestions for future posts please send Minky an email
Fresh, relevant content on your website can increase your search engine rankings, giving your site greater exposure. Your acceptance by the wider community as an “expert” increases your company’s credibility and can lead to better conversion into sales. With Social Networking becoming more and more important, interacting effectively with your current and potential customers in a way that makes sense to them is vital.
Minky has a Twitter account – though he hasn’t really used it yet and only has a couple of people following him so far…
What he DOESN’T have though is the time (or the imagination) to compose interesting, meaningful content that won’t just be seen as spam. He’s also pretty rubbish at spelling…
We’ve suggested to him that he could set aside some time to decide what sort of thing he wants to blog about, then leave us to draft him some posts. That way he can have a stock ready for if he gets writer’s block, or he can compose something else and leave them for another time. We can also update his twitter page for him, to let his followers know what he’s up to…
It’s how we do our blog – because Sara has flashes of creative inspiration some days, but not every day.
If you would like to know more about how to create a set of stock blog posts then please email Minky (or Sara - if you don’t want to talk to the Monkey…)
No, I’m not going to crack a dodgy joke about your mother’s mother…
I must admit, I am a little prickly on this one – the odd typo is one thing, but when an “expert” in their field can’t get their own technical terms right then surely we have to question both the education system and their own ability and standards. When their field of expertise is supposed to be administration, I really get worried – a surgeon with shaky hands perhaps shouldn’t be a surgeon, so should a VA with poor “English” (or any other language they choose to work in) be thinking about a career change? I was given a “stationary” price list today from a local printer – good thing too, I don’t want the thing running around the office!
Whenever you publish something with words in, whether on the web, in an email or in print you WILL be judged by the quality of the work. If it’s badly written with spelling mistakes and poor grammar then your business will appear to be unprofessional and shoddy. On the other hand, a piece that has clearly been prepared with care will portray you in a favourable manner and may well win you extra sales, especially if it gets read by someone like me!
I’m not perfect by any means and I certainly spot other people’s mistakes better than my own, but I know the difference between your and you’re, stationery and stationary, affect and effect. I could go on…
Is it because I’m getting old and crusty? When I was at school spelling, punctuation and grammar mattered in all subjects – if my Chemistry homework was factually correct but littered with spelling mistakes then it came back covered in red ink, usually accompanied with a “See me” comment. However, my two stepsons, who I don’t think are classed as being anything other than pretty average are, in my opinion, rubbish at spelling and nobody seems to think it’s an issue! So perhaps I am being too hard – after all, if nobody tells you how to use an apostrophe then I suppose it’s all downhill from there really.
