I’ve taken on another client this week, yet another who’s web designer has just disappeared. When you are a new business or just want to save money, often one is tempted to hire a school leaver or someone without much experience to create your brand and/or website for you. It certainly saves money on the initial design, but what when they get a job, or just give up on web design entirely? It’s hard to reject people who have put all their time and energy into you and for a young man or woman, disappearing can be much easier than helping a client out of that mess.

Zako media has a number of options to spread payments or even cut costs, and we have backup systems in place. If we all died tomorrow, there are systems in place to ensure our clients are given an easy transition and don’t suffer because of it.

If you still want to use a cheaper alternative, please make sure the following are in place for your protection and to ensure things continue smoothly:

• Make sure your domain name is in your name and not that of your designer. Check on whois.net to find out. This means that your new designer/rescuer can easily walk you through the steps of regaining control.
• Make sure you know who your domain name is registered with. Even if your designer claims to host the site, often this is on reseller hosting and in his absence, we can go up the chain to the people who hold the actual hardware your website is stored on.
• Get control panel and/or FTP access to your site. This will enable your new web designer to get access to the code used on your site.
• If you can, backup your site regularly and store one each on and off-site for redundancy.

With these in place, it is usually much easier to regain control if the worse comes to the worse. Remember, your website is a business tool, a sales person and you should have control at all times.
If you do lose control of your site or your designer disappears, you can contact me directly on 0208 123 6609 or email me and we will go through the steps necessary to pull your site into somewhere you have access with or without the above information. We don’t usually charge for this process even if you don’t choose us to continue developing the site. This however depends on the size of the site and how easy it is to move. If it’s a large site and the details above are missing, it could take several hours to get something usable.

Alternatively, Derek Sorensen at Website Repairs can help, particularly if something on your site has stopped working.

A new client, contact and friend, Simon Ellinas, whom I met through Ecademy presented me this afternoon with my very own caricature. (He managed to sneak in my wife as well) I’m going to be chuckling all weekend.

Simon has made numerous TV appearances and ran cartoon businesses and companies for many many years. He can create caricatures by email for as little as £30! Forget all the hassle fiddling with Paintshop or Photoshop buttons, don’t even try that damned watercolour effect and get it done properly and professionally by someone who knows how to add character, flair and imagination into your caricature. Why not have a specially hand-drawn picture instead of your normal boring wedding, birthday or Christmas cards?

Simon is also available for hire at events whether business or pleasure to do on-the-spot caricatures for guests. I also found out that Simon can draw on whiteboards and flipcharts to bring life and humour to otherwise drole business presentations! I’m sure Northern Rock would have loved to hire him at their shareholder’s meeting.

Anyway, visit his website, read his blog, give him a call and most importantly, pay him to do something!

The London Caricaturist
Simon Ellinas’ Blog

Call: 0208 449 1368

When you go to the cafe for a coffee… you wouldn’t email your clients or family about it would you? If you want 5 minutes peace, or are even bored and WANT a phone call… do you email people to tell them?

Introducing Twitter, another social networking platform. Simple but effective and allows you to do the above quite effectively. Below you’ll see my live feed.

Right now I can update my status on Ecademy, it will pass through to Twitter and then onto Facebook… now that’s true power! Graham Jones explains how to do this.

Is there a real use for this tool? In terms of online networking which is becoming increasingly popular with people of all ages and business sizes absolutely!In terms of instant advertising or even communicating with those people at home who share your living room who you don’t often get to see.

With real time updates, you could even have separate boxes with current status’ next to your staff on the company key members page. (Yes we can do this with more customisation than twitter themselves.) With the way today’s small or personal businesses work, if you’re not in, you’re out.

Follow me?

The days of trudging round the supermarkets fighting for the best-looking tomatoes are over. More and more of us are relying on our computers to bring home the groceries.

Britain is streets ahead of the rest of Europe in terms of shopping online, with internet sales topping £1billion a month, a report reveals.

Online sales in Britain were worth £12.8billion last year, compared with £10.3billion for Germany, the next most enthusiastic nation of e-shoppers, said researchers Mintel.

France came in third, raking in £5.5billion through online sales, while Italy and Spain were slower to catch on to the digital shopping revolution with annual internet revenues of just £870million and £790million, respectively.

The figures are perhaps not surprising given that Britain also has the highest rate of growth in online shopping – a 75 per cent increase in revenue between 2005 and 2007. And further growth of 199 per cent is predicted by 2012.

Mintel retail research head Richard Perks said Britain had ‘the most developed online market in Europe’ thanks to the ’sophisticated offerings’ of British food retailers.

Mr Perks said the rise in Britons using the internet for weekly shopping and consumer boom in recent years had also played a part. Tesco is the biggest online food retailer in Europe, with most of its turnover coming from groceries. Its website enjoyed revenues more than twice as high as its closest European rival, French retailer Carrefour.

(Taken from metro.co.uk March 30th 2008)

Now who wouldn’t want a peice of that pie?