Planning Your Website: Setting Goals

Graeme D Anderson

planning

A professional website is often a crucial factor in the success of your business, and could be one of the most important investments you ever make.

But if you don’t set clear goals, how will you know if your investment in a new website has paid off?

When we’re working with a client to build their website, one of the first steps in our web design process is to sit down and discuss your business goals (not just your website). This discovery session will help us get to know you better, and we’ll work with you to set clear goals for your website project.

What do I want my website to achieve?

This is the most important question of all. The clearer you are on your expectations and goals, the more successful your website will be. For example, some goals for an imaginary Aberdeen based clothing shop could include:

  • Attract new customers: by raising awareness of the shop’s offerings. The success of this goal could be measured through regular customer surveys and web statistics.
  • Increase customer numbers during typically quiet periods: by boosting sales through an email newsletter. This could also highlight Sunday trading hours, special anniversaries and other such occasions. The number of newsletter subscribers could be an indicator of success here.
  • Create a new stream of sales separate to the retail store by using online shopping. The success of this goal could be measured on the basis of sales figures.

Now let’s break down these individual goals and look at how we could achieve them:

New customersOptimize the website for search engines under the keywords “clothes shop aberdeen”. Create a Google My Business listing and a Yelp Page .
Increase customer numbers during quiet periodsIntegrating a newsletter subscription form , and encourage website visitors to sign up. A regular publishing schedule will help yu build a following, and connect with your customers.
Create a new stream of sales separate to the retail storeMake products available to purchase on your website. You should include pictures, product descriptions and indicative delivery costs. You can also ask customers to review your products, building further trust and credibility for first time visitors.
This article is part one in a four part series on planning your new business website. Further articles will be linked here.

Randsomware emails

Graeme D Anderson

There have recently been a huge increase in ransomware and cryptolocker attacks. This is rapidly becoming one of the most significant threats to UK organisations.

 

The latest strain is known as Locky. The most common way that a Locky virus will arrive is by email. You may well receive an email containing an attachment with varying filenames.

If you open this it will look like gobbledegook at which point you will possibly be prompted to enable macros if the data encoding is incorrect. If you enable macros, you don’t actually correct the text and instead you allow the virus to run.

 

Locky scrambles all files that match a long list of extensions, including videos, images, source code, and Office files making your data completely unreadable!

You are then held to ransom and asked to pay a fee to retrieve your data.

 

So how can you protect against this type of attack?

  • Backup regularly – keep a recent backup copy off-site/disconnected from your network.
  • Don’t enable macros in document attachments received via email.
  • Ensure you have robust up to date antivirus protection in place.
  • Be cautious about unsolicited attachments. Generally delete any email or attachment you are not expecting to receive.

 

Unsure what to do next? Contact us to discuss how we can help protect your systems.

Important information – email account upgrades

Graeme D Anderson

Our hosting/email provider will be making some improvements to service over the next coming days. During this time you can continue to use your mailbox to send and receive emails. As part of the migration, you may be logged out of your mailbox. If this happens, just log in again or restart you favorite mail software.

As part of the upgrade all customers on Standard or Starter mailboxes will be upgraded to the new platform featuring (but not limited to):

  • The new platform is faster when searching for emails and content that is stored on the mail server. This helps you to work faster.
  • Improved SPAM and Virus filtering, both in and outbound.
  • All standard mailboxes will be upgraded to the new Mail Lite product, doubling the mailbox storage from 50MB to 100MB free of charge!
  • SMTP (outbound mail routing) is enabled on all email products as standard.
  • Connect to your mailbox using encrypted TLS protocol.

Email icon

If you experience any issues with your standard/free mail account please contact us or log a support ticket

boxportable achieve Microsoft Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions competency

Graeme D Anderson

We are proud to announce today that we have attained the Silver Small and Midmarket Cloud solutions competency demonstrating our commitment and ability to deliver Microsoft based cloud solutions. The competency reaffirms our commitment to be positioned as a trusted consultancy business providing support and implementation services to the small and midmarket customer sector. We have a proven track record of excellence in delivering cost effective cloud and hybrid solutions built on Microsoft Office 365 platform and have successfully migrated over 30 sites this year alone from on-premise to cloud based solutions.

“By achieving a silver competency, organizations have proven their expertise in specific technology areas, placing them among the top 5 percent of Microsoft partners worldwide,” said Phil Sorgen, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft Corp. “When customers look for an IT partner to meet their business challenges, choosing a company that has attained Microsoft competencies is a smart move. These are highly qualified professionals with access to Microsoft technical support and product teams.”

Silver Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions
Earning the Microsoft Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions competency demonstrates partner expertise and commitment to delivering solutions tailored to small and midmarket customer requirements. Given the focus on adoption of cloud computing by SMBs to drive their business operations, partners that invest in this competency are ready to address the rising customer demand for Microsoft cloud solutions based on Office 365, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012.

The Microsoft Partner Network helps partners strengthen their capabilities to showcase leadership in the marketplace on the latest technology, to better serve customers and to easily connect with one of the most active, diverse networks in the world.

We are now working on achieving the Gold Small and Midmarket Competency in 2016.

Microsoft-partner-Logo-Cloud-Solutions1