March 11th, 2010
The most important organisation involved in your website is almost unquestionably the web host. These are the people that are responsible for putting your site on the Internet and also keeping it online. Without them, there is no way that anyone else could see your website and thus there would be very little point in working hard to produce reams of content. It is of no use to you if it cannot be seen.
Actually getting your website online is not the only responsibility that your host has and thus there are a multitude of factors that have to be taken into consideration before you choose which hosting company to invest your trust and money in.
The first factor that will draw your attention is of course the place. There is no chance that you will choose a package that is too expensive for your budget, regardless of how good the features and services contained within the pack are. It is important when looking at these figures to be careful of whether the prices are annual or monthly. Different companies price their packages by different time frames, so it is imperative to be vigilant here so as not to be caught out.
Uptime is also important. There is absolutely no point in setting yourself up with a web host that is going to be down half the time. No-one can see your website then and your money has been wasted. For more information on how important uptime is, read our post on it here.
You also have to consider web space and bandwidth. The former is the amount of space you have to store all the files for your website, like all the pages and any images that you use. Estimating how much space you will need means you won’t be caught out by cheap deals with little space. Bandwidth, in basic terms, is the amount of traffic that can come in to your website. If you are envisaging a lot of visitors, you are obviously going to need more bandwidth. It’s as simple as that.
E-mail services are another factor worth considering. Some hosts offer the ability to set up e-mail addresses connected to your website with the number of addresses allowed being dependant on the package. In order to find the best deal for you, you must decide how many addresses you will actually need and also how many you can afford.
So basically, there are a huge number of features that you need to look at when comparing the many different hosting websites there are out there. Only you can know what features you need and how much you are willing to pay in order to get your website running to the highest of standards.
All of these factors above and many more besides are of paramount importance when choosing your host, so it is very important that you know what you want and shop around to see as many different offers as you possibly can find.
simplewebhosting.co.uk is one of the UK’s longest established web hosts.
Tags: hints and tips, hosting, simplewebhosting, simplewebhosting.co.uk, support, technical support, uk web hosting, uptime, web hosting, web hosting support, web hosting uptime
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March 10th, 2010
The visual appearance of your website is an integral factor to its success. If your website is not pleasing to look at, then visitors aren’t going to want to stay on the page for very long and therefore they won’t get the information from the page that you want them to get. For this reason, you must ensure that your design is excellent. If you aren’t particularly good at web design yourself, then it is a good idea to hire a professional to do the job for you.
But how do you choose the right professional for the job? Well, allow me to tell you.
Any web designer worth their salt has their own web page. For this reason, it is always worth doing a web search in order to see if you can find anyone that catches your eye. You can even refine your search to find only designers in your area or those that are based in a particular country. We hope you’ll agree that OUR webpage does the job nicely 
Viewing a few of the designers’ websites can be a very nice way to sort the good ones from the not so good as, generally, someone who is able to produce a stylish design for their own website is going to be able to produce a stylish design for your website. If the designer has an aesthetically poor web page, then the odds are that they won’t be able to produce a solid design for your website either.
If none of the organisations and people you come across take you eye, or even if you just want to find some more alternatives, there are various online directories of web designers and also websites that designers congregate on that are set up for prospective clients (which here means you) to present details of the job they want doing. Then, designers are invited to bid for the project and the client chooses who they want to hire for the job.
These websites are useful as they often have a rating attached to each designer based on reviews from previous clients. This allows you to get a feel for how reliable a worker the designer is and how high the quality of their work is. The same can be achieved by testimonials from customers on the websites of designers.
However, you must always be aware that only pleased customers would have provided positive testimonials and the designer would not print the bad reviews. Due to this, independently produced feedback ratings are a far more reliable way of judging how good a designer is.
So basically, there is no definitive way to find a good web designer, but there is very little chance that the first one you come across is the best you could possibly have. You are unlikely to find the right designer by doing a very quick search. It in fact takes a great deal of research and a look through some comprehensive feedback to ensure that you pick someone who knows what they are doing and will be able to make your web page look fantastic.
simplewebhosting.co.uk can design your website for a little as £149. Find out more.
Tags: cheap web design, hints and tips, simplewebhosting, simplewebhosting.co.uk, uk web design, web design, website design
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March 8th, 2010
Before the turn of the century and the beginning of the new millennium, no-one would have been able to tell you what ecommerce was. Now though, ecommerce is big business. More and more companies have decided to utilise the power of the web in order to get their products to their customers in a way that is more convenient for everyone.
An online arm is now almost essential for any business. Not only does it give the opportunity for another wave of sales along with your physical point of sale selling, but ecommerce allows sales to happen in an easier and more convenient way, over the Internet, meaning that your customers don’t even have to leave the warmth of their homes.
There is little question as to whether going out to a shop or buying online is easier. It is obvious that a customer would much rather find the item online and order it from a website, waiting for it to turn up at their door. This is reflected by the fact that high street stores are being forced to close and that online retailers such as Amazon are getting gradually bigger shares of overall sales, particularly around the Christmas period.
This shows that the market for online business is huge already and is continuing to grow every year as more and more people convert from high street shopping to doing it all from the comfort of their armchair at home. Due to this growth, it is all the more important that your business capitalises on this trend and moves itself into the online market as quickly as is possible.
So the next question is, how do you do it? Well, all you really need is a website and a simple payment system. Domain names can be picked up very cheaply and hosting is equally so. There are websites that enable you to set up simple shopping cart systems and also developers who will charge a very small fee for a higher quality system, along with customer support bundled in.
Alternatively, you can choose not to bother with a fancy system and instead just ask for money to be paid to you manually via your chosen payment method in return for your goods or services. This method can be just as effective as a clever and intricate system and also can save you a bit of extra money in the process, whilst also meaning that the customers put their trust in a person instead of a fancy online system.
So ecommerce is easy to set up, depending on how complex you want to go and it can also be a hugely beneficial method to bring online sales into your company and transfer your products to a wider audience than what you would get from selling them in the high street.
It is certainly a method that companies should take on if they truly wish to capitalise on the trends and now it is likely to be a battle not of who can do it, but who can do it best.
Find out more about the great e-commerce solutions simplewebhosting.co.uk offers and get YOUR webshop online today!
Tags: e-commerce, hints and tips, hosting, online shop, online store, sell online, selling online, simplewebhosting, simplewebhosting.co.uk, web hosting, web hosting support, web retail, webshop, website design
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March 5th, 2010
In March we’re celebrating our BIGGEST promotion ever – for just £20 we’ll design your brand new, bespoke website.
Yes, this may look too good to be true but it’s really not! When you order any simplewebhosting.co.uk hosting plan, we’ll create a three-page website for your business or organisation for just £20.
We don’t use off-the-shelf templates for any of our web designs; whether you pay £20 or £2000, every single web site we produce is individually created by our talented web designers.
Find out more and get yourself online today.
Tags: cheap web design, design, did you know, simplewebhosting, simplewebhosting.co.uk, web design, web hosting, website design
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March 3rd, 2010
Picture the scene. You are looking for a website as you want to buy a book on how to market your business. The first thing you do is type ‘marketing books’ into your favourite search engine. Slowly, you begin to work your way through the results that the search engine throws up. Most of them are the usual rubbish but you find one that looks good. You click the link.
To your huge annoyance, the page doesn’t load and a message comes up telling you the website is down. Slightly disheartened, you return to your search page and continue to browse. Are you ever going to visit that website again to have a look at what they have to sell? No, you aren’t. You will find another one that offers the product you want and you will buy from there.
The point of that example was to illustrate how detrimental downtime can be to a business. If your online presence is not around at the time someone is doing the research for how to spend their money, then you aren’t going to get the custom of that person. They will simply carry on looking and find someone else. Search engines throw up thousands of results for almost every product a customer could possibly want, so one website that ends up being down is not of massive importance to any prospective buyer.
Webmasters are constantly fighting to ensure that their percentage uptime is as high as possible. The best hosting packages wear their uptime on their chests like badges of honour as it is perhaps the single most important thing for a package. Your pages can be covered in fancy coding and beautifully written content, but all of that means absolutely nothing if people cannot access your website because your host is experiencing downtime.
Quite simply, uptime equals success. The more time your website spends online, the more chance you have of an interested party coming across it and deciding to contact you as to your products and services. It is simply a case of longer exposure time leading to more chance of being seen. It makes logical sense, which means that it is imperative that you select your web host carefully, making sure they have a good reputation for keeping pages online and not falling apart every time a page gets a high level of traffic.
So the crux of the matter is that any website that wants to make money needs to make sure that they are online for as long and consistent a time as possible as this shows not only reliability on the part of the company, but also allows the interested person to gain information about your business and products, which means they know what they are buying and have the facility to buy it.
Uptime is what makes a website tick and therefore, uptime can keep your business ticking and downtime… well downtime stops the clock.
simplewebhosting.co.uk offers all web hosting customers an uptime guarantee. We guarantee that your website will be available 99.9% of every month (but of course, we aim for 100%!) You can view our uptime reports for the last 12 months and see proof that we’ve never even once failed our uptime guarantee.
Tags: hosting, hosting uptime, simplewebhosting.co.uk, support, technical support, uptime, web hosting, web hosting support, web hosting uptime
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