Design Conscious .com Telford today announces the immediate availability of competitively priced self managed hosting accounts. You can now buy a hosting account direct for as little as £5 per month or with discounts just £57 per year.

You can benefit from a choice of 3 accounts which cover hosting for the beginners website through to fully loaded feature rich hosting accounts that include: multiple email addresses / mail boxes, multiple FTP Accounts, addon domains, Search Engine Submit Tool and a whole lot more

All hosting packages come with

• Generous webspace
• Full bandwidth
• FTP Access
• Multiple email mail boxes
• cPanel
• Search engine submit tool
• Web stats
• and many time saving features such as SpamAssassin, Backup Wizard

Purchase your hosting through our checkout partner Google Checkout which is processed through our COMODO secured ordering system.

And it’s so easy, here is a quick “How to purchase hosting in 10 easy steps” guide:

1. Choose your web hosting package here >> web hosting
2. Click the buy now / order now button
3. Specifiy your domain name choice and continue
4. Choose if you want to purchase monthly, quarterly, half yearly or yearly and add to cart
5. Enter a Promotional Code if you have one (join out mailing list here to get this months money off code)
6. Hit the Check Out button
7. Add your name and address details (this sets up your account with us)
8. Click Complete Order button - don’t forget to click ‘I have read and agree to the Terms of Service’
9. View your invoice and click the Pay link to use our payment partner Google Checkout
10. Pay by credit card at Google, then get back to your brand new hosting account and start web serving!

If you know your domain name is available (or is previously registered) and you have already added your credit card to your Google account - then it should take you no more than 10 minutes from start to finish…. but if you are having some challenges along the way - we have thought of that too, our client management system has a fully functional support ticket system built in to allow you to contact the design conscious hosting support team to help you with your problems >> click here to raise a support ticket

Well for a business and anybody who sends out marketing literature - that’s quite a saving.

At the moment Pitney Bowes are offering a 30 day free no obligation trial on a mini-franking system. By accepting the trial you will benefit from £20 free postage and a free company logo worth £45. Here is a link to a presentation of their system.

www.dm50.co.uk

I have to say that’s an awesome trial offer, there is no obligation to keep the machine and they can arrange a free pick up if you send it back. The DM50 removes the hassle of going out and getting stamps, you just plug it into your phone line and dial in how much postage you require - it then downloads what you need and Pitney Bowes bill you at the end of the month.

Simplicity and Saving what more could you ask for?

I’m running the trial at the moment and it’s working really well. Ricky is offering the deal and here is his contact info, make sure you mention Ian Blackford or Design Conscious .com when you speak to him and he will look after you:

Ricky Beavers
Email
Pitney Bowes Sales Executive
Tel: 01493 418697

Remember to mention Ian Blackford or Design Conscious .com to get the best deal!

Domain Registry of America sent me a Domain Name Expiry Notice, if you read it - which I know a lot of people don’t ‘actually’ read things. It says that your domain will soon need renewing and that you can do it through them. They aren’t saying you ‘have’ to but that you will ‘need’ to.

Now, I register my own domains, so I know I have never used the DRA before - and they have nothing to do with my registrar. So under no circumstances am I going to fall into the trap of transferring my domain to them… but a lot of people - I suspect - do.

It’s happened to a client of mine in the past, the letter is very convincing that it is the right thing to do to renew with them. So they went ahead and renewed without asking me or waiting for me to remind them.

I get annoyed by this because so many people don’t know what they are doing on the internet, so many people don’t know what they are buying when they take a domain name or a hosting package. And this blatant attempt to capture someones renewal is just adding to the confusion.

So the advice is:

• Check with your webdesigner when your domain is up for renewal
• If you bought your domain direct, login to your control panel and double check what you are doing

Design Conscious .com is proud to announce that it is now a Zero Carbon Footprint office.

All our electricity and gas is supplied by British Gas on their dual fuel tariff which now means the office here in Telford has gone carbon neutral.

This step means we are well on the way to become the greenest web design studio in Shropshire as we are looking at ways of persuading our hosting companies to go Carbon footprint Free.

The typical opener I get is: ‘Hello, how much does a website cost?’

OK, lets try asking that question at a garage: ‘How much are your tyres?’ Who can answer this question without getting some further information: what size wheels, type of car, how many are needed?

A website can cost anything - it could be a holding page at £75 or it could be a shopping site the size of Amazon and cost £30k upwards.

Here is a quick list of info that you need to have and the type of questions you need to ask:

Tell the designer:

• if you have a domain already registered
• if you have hosting
• what type of site you want and the type of content you have for it
• what other sites you have seen that you like
• if you have a budget to consider
• if you require photography, or if you have the photograph, or if you need stock photography purchasing

Ask the designer

• whether you can see their previous work
• what are their techniques regarding search engine optimisation
• if they have payment options
• whether they work from templates or design bespoke

Try and think of any useful information and offer it in the conversation, I quoted at least one of my potential clients an incorrect price because I didn’t fully understand what they wanted.

The incorrect price was in their favour by the way!

Design Conscious will add this important marketing facility to any site we design for you and you then have two choices:

You can have the username and password so you can run your own mail outs.*

Or

We can run it for you, we will design the emails using your information, we will import any contacts you already have into the system and we will schedule the mailings so they go out at regular times.

Pricing

Set up with website: £500 - one off charge to set up the messagelist account

• Please note: Spamming will not be tolerated. Anyone suspected or reported for spamming will have their account terminated immediately with no refund.

But what are the bits you need to have in place?

Why do you really need a website?

Why, now that you have a website, does it not bring in the work you expected?

Worst of all - how do you find the answers to these and a million other questions?

At Design Conscious we recognise that you sometimes don’t need the full web service that our company can offer. You quite like your existing website, but it’s just not working for you. Sometimes you want to do some marketing or advertsing but the words scare you - ‘MARKETING’ normally associated with people in suits telling you what to do and then charging you a fortune.

Sometimes you just want to do it yourself… if you could just find out what to do.

The simplest thing to do is: Ask someone.

Even simpler than that, book an hours consultancy with us and… ask away.

……………………………………

Here’s the deal

……………………………………

1 hour consultancy = £40 - Just £40 to get all your questions answered

(Payment before consultation begins via PayPal or credit card)

The consultancy is to be conducted over Skype* in multiples of 1 hour (If an hour isn’t enough you can just book more time). Telephone can be considered but Skype is preferred because the call can be recorded and sent to you for later referral and because of Skype’s instant messaging it makes it really easy to show you examples of websites or methods of working etc. Of course the biggest bonus about using Skype is: the call is free.

So to recap:

• 1 hour £40
• Call recorded and sent to you
• Free call via Skype
• Done at a time to suit you

Your consultation will be conducted by Ian Blackford: Owner/Manager of Design Conscious .com

Get the answers you need to move your business forward

*Skype is a free internet telephone system that allows you to use your computer to make free calls via your broadband. Software from Skype is required (free) and a headset - or your computer might already have a microphone / speakers built in.

I took a stroll into town to start searching for shoes and came to a fishing tackle shop (of all places) with crates of shoes outside. I looked at the price label which said £9.99 each - that seemed a little expensive to me so I went to walk away. Out of nowhere up sprang the shop keeper to point out that she had written on the back of an old label (which had turned over in the breeze) and the shoes were actually 2 pairs for £5. I bought a pair (and some for my daughter) and as I was paying, the lady mentioned that they had the cheapest wet suits in town. I had a good walk round and, she was right - they were the cheapest. I went back and bought 4 - one for all of us.Now think about that for a moment - I could have walked away from that shop and would never have grabbed a bargain. But what’s worse the shop keeper might have missed out on two sales. All she did was tell me (the customer) what she sold and because of that I was able to make up my mind and buy what I wanted.

This is a fundamental rule to apply to any business, just tell people what you sell, plain and simple, and shout it louder when you have items on sale. There are many ways of doing it too, send out letters to your past customers, run a mailing list on your website, print flyers and have them inserted in the local free papers or just go house to house and push them through letter boxes.

Remember if people don’t know you sell it - they can’t buy it from you.

Hmmmmm, good film: Kevin Costner, big field, ghost baseball players one of Hollywoods better turn outs. But the internet is not Hollywood. If you build a website, there is no guarantee that anyone will come to it - even if it’s indexed by the search engines.

Why?

Well, your site for definite is competing with millions of others all around the world for search engine results. You may also be in a market sector that is swamped with spam results. You might have only just made your site live and so you haven’t been indexed by the search engines yet - and even if you have been indexed you won’t show up straight away (months even) while Google (and the others) sandbox your site for an unknown period of time.

Gloomy isn’t it?

Then along comes a company GUARANTEEING you search engine placement. Their SEO package of improvements will catapult you up the results pages. Very possibly they will make things worse, at best nothing will happen at worst you will be de-listed by the search engine because of their spamming methods. Our advice is don’t touch these companies.

Actually… it’s not just our advice - while looking around for info to back up our beliefs above (because we could be pulling the wool over your eyes - just like the SEO companies), we came across this, read it from the horses mouth: Googles’ Take on SEO

So what can you do to promote your website?

Well, the old saying of “do it right first time” still applies. Get the right mix of keywords for your market place, write your website copy carefully, focus on your core business and…. most importantly…. compete locally.

Compete Locally? What does that mean?

Can you honestly say that you want to have enquiries from abroad, or from other parts of the UK? Do you really want to be number 1 for “your market sector widgets” in America? Or France? Or even the other end of the UK? can you fulfill those orders? If the answer is no, then you don’t need your website to compete globally. This is something that many people overlook completely.

Tell people you sell stuff

This might sound a little obvious - but how many times have you been in a shop and found something that you wanted and that you had no idea they sold? Worst of it is you had been looking everywhere for it and bought it at a higher price only a week or so before? Ok, so we can go on adding in the cliché’s but you get the drift.

Tell people you sell stuff - then tell them again, and again. Regular customer contact is easy to achieve and very powerful for results. This is why you get the leaflets in your free paper, this is why websites run mailing lists etc.

There a hundred and one things that you can do to promote your site, some of them will cost you money, others won’t cost you a penny, but promotion is the key to a successful website.

Talk to us and let us help you do it right first time.

Wrong, just because you like it doesn’t mean to say somebody else will, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it will turn your market on. The best way to find out is to create something then show it to someone and gauge their reaction. If they don’t like it you change it and present it again. This is what you should do with your website, get a few pages up there, gets some feed back and then improve and expand.

Anybody can design a website, the tools to do it are readily available and relatively cheap. If you want to try it, go right ahead, be aware however that finding that right balance of images and layout may take you a long long time, ‘Design is never ending…’ remember. The secret isn’t knowing when to stop it’s knowing where to begin. It’s knowing how to research the design trends of a market and pick out the best bits, it’s knowing how to melt those elements into the clients existing style. It’s knowing how to collect the feedback to improve the whole.

Design isn’t just visual, it’s far more than that, this is why design professionals are used. While it might seem expensive in the short term, in the long run you can’t afford not to if you are serious about your website.