We’ve been well and truly upstaged by our business park neighbours this afternoon. While our car park is filled with a mix of humdrum Fords, Vauxhalls and other family cars, next door they’ve got pest control in.
Either there’s a serious infestation in the building, or it’s some sort of promotional stunt. Either way, yes, that really is the Ghostbusters car. Who ya gonna call?
The Rissington Podcast bills itself as a “web-geek version of Gardeners’ Question Time”. This isn’t a genre I’ve stumbled upon before, but presenters Jon Hicks (who, incidentally, designed the Firefox logo) and John Oxton make for an entertaining double act. They deliver quality internet and web design tips alongside irreverent banter and jokes (and some strong language).
It’s a must-hear for our in-house design team. The latest episode covers everything from comics, Lego and mojitos to rock music, telecommuting and Bounty chocolate bars … plus lots of CSS, HTML, design and accessibility tips, of course.
Much of the show is based around listener questions, so if you have a burning query about web design, code or even cheese (yes, really), you can fire a quick email off to the duo and wait to see if they answer your question.
One of the items this week was about choosing web hosting and a domain name registrar. As you can see from their homepage, they mentioned 123-reg during the piece. (Thanks for the plug lads, but next time could you remember it’s 123-reg, not reg-123?)
Anyway, if you haven’t come across them before, you can have a listen now.
The 123-reg super summer sale has begun with 20% off all shared hosting, InstantSite and annual ecommerce accounts. It’s as simple as that!
There are no gimmicks, no “buy this to get this”, or “first month only”, it’s a straight forward money off deal to celebrate (hopefully) a cracking summer ahead. Simply go to buy a domain as normal, and when you are asked if you want to add shared hosting, InstantSite or an annual ecommerce package, you get 20% off those products. Super!
For a limted time only in June, you can buy a .eu domain name for only 99p. That’s a price so low it needed two exclamation marks in the title.
The .eu domain extension is a great alternative to .com and is essential if you operate across European borders, or you want to make sure no cyber-squatters pitch their tents on your lawn.
Get your .eu domain name now.
As usual, there are a few terms and conditions:
If you own Microsoft Excel 2007 and you have a Microsoft adCenter advertising account, a no brainer download has to be their adCenter add-in (Beta) for Excel 2007.
I have Excel 2007 on my personal lap top and I downloaded this keyword research add-in recently and I have been really impressed. I haven’t come across another free tool that gives you this amount of actionable data for free. I’ll be amazed if Google don’t offer somnething similar with their spreadsheet software some time this this year.
If anyone has used this already or is in fact aware of another tool that does all this for free, let us know!
The office celebrated St George’s day yesterday and the majority of people showed up in costumes or red and white clothing. With dragons, horses and knights around the office we thought there would be some dragon slaying at some point but the day was celebrated peacefully and with lots of cake served by fair maidens.
For those that are not sure what St. George’s day is all about, take a look here
On the right is an example of a shiny knight (guarding some cake) who was one of the winners of the costume competition.
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Calling all website owners!
We are planning on running a series of profiles on websites our customers have created to demonstrate what is possible with a bit of time, effort and imagination.
If you have a website you are really proud of and you would like to be included drop us an email and we will get in touch. It doesn’t matter what kind of site it is, just that you are one of our customers.
WebFusion - which is part of the same company as 123-reg -Â is looking to recruit Customer Services Advisors, to work in our brand new offices in Stockley Park. You will need to have basic IT skills, excellent customer service skills and a desire to solve problems for our customers. You will also need to be a strong team player.
Ideally, you will have knowledge of domain names, DNS and hosting and customer service experience in a Contact Centre environment. This role will cover a combination of shift and standard office hours (opening hours 9am until 7pm) and includes occasional Saturday and some bank holiday dates.
Successful candidates will be joining a strong Customer Support team in new offices near Uxbridge and Heathrow on the outskirts of London, with easy access to public transport and road links. WebFusion benefits from a loose dress code.Â
If you think you have the necessary skills to fulfil this role, please apply now by sending your CV and covering letter to vacancies@webfusion.com
Just stumbed across an interesting piece from Robin Goad over at Hitwise about Facebook and other social networks.
If you were in any doubt about whether Facebook has had an impact on how we use the internet, this will convince you. According to Hitwise’s stats, Facebook’s traffic increased 10-fold in 2007, accounting for 1 in every 50 UK internet visits by the end of the year.
And if you run your own website, maybe what’s more interesting is the impact this is having generally:
“…as the social networks’ market share has increased, so has their capacity to deliver traffic to other sites.”
In other words, lots of people who visit social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace then follow links from there to other websites.Â
Of course, as the social networks get bigger so - probably - will their power to generate traffic to other sites in this way. The upshot is that many companies are trying to target social networks as part of their online marketing strategy.
It’s not the be-all-and-end-all, but if you run a website and you haven’t considered social networks as a source of visitors yet, perhaps you should. It doesn’t have to mean a big investment -Â a good starting point is our top 6 tips for advertising on Facebook.
What do you think? Have you already tried using social networks to promote your website or business - and did it work out? Leave a comment and let us know.
As some of you have noticed, we had some problems with our DNS servers on 123-reg over the weekend. Between Friday evening and Sunday morning, some customers had difficulties with their domains.
This meant that some websites couldn’t be accessed via their domain name. If you were one of the people affected, we’re sorry.
The problem was caused by a combination of events: a piece of hardware failed while our DNS services were under excessive load. We replaced the defective hardware over the weekend and all our systems are working properly now.
To reduce the chance of a similar problem occurring in the future, we’re taking a hard look at exactly what went wrong, and why.
We’re also looking into how we can best communicate information about a problem to everyone who’s affected. If you are one of those people, you want to know what’s going on and when you can expect it to be fixed.
On this occasion, we did post updates on the 123-reg and Pipex systems status pages, but it seems some people had trouble accessing these as well. We’re looking at ways to stop this happening in the future, as well as other channels we can use to get the message out (this blog being an obvious one!).
Thanks for understanding that these things do happen occasionally. If you could see into our office this morning you’d understand that we really do take this stuff seriously - we’re doing everything we can to stop it happening again.
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