Wow, I’ve just looked and it’s been 90 days since my last blog post. Considering we do quite a bit of consultation on Social Media, that’s not very impressive is it? Some may think I’ve been lazy. So here’s what’s been going on in the last 90 days or so.

We’ve opened a second office in Norwich as part of our expansion plan. We’re already starting to get enquiries through the new office, which is great, and we’re better able to service our Norwich based clients from there.

We’ve developed a web application for the UK’s Charting Progress project for Defra (due to go live this week), which demonstrates the quality of our oceans.

In collaboration with a number of European institutes, we have agreed funding for 6m Euros for the development of public outreach information hubs and applications, for which we are a partner.

We’ve taken on a couple staff to join the growing team and are now engaged in developing iPhone / iPad / Android applications and other interesting technologies.

We’ve also spent the last 3 months working on countless web design projects, social media campaigns and online marketing. I do need to get our portfolio up to date so you can see them all.

We’re sponsoring the Lowestoft and Waveney Chamber of Commerce business awards this year – so don’t forget to apply! I’m sure we’ll enter for one or two as well.

Our renewable energy project is well underway and due to go live soon too.

On a personal note, those of you that know me will know I’m fanatical about scuba diving and I’ve finally got around to training on a rebreather. A rebreather is a technical piece of equipment that allows me to dive underwater for a lot longer – and without any bubbles! After an intensive week of training in Tenerife, and a long weekend training in a horrible green lake in the UK, I’ve finally qualified. I dived a fantastic wreck out of Southwold over the weekend – brilliant.

So as we enter into the summer months, what does the next 90 days hold for us? Well, it’s all planned….

Preparation for Sage Pay’s system upgrade will commence on Saturday 17 April 2010 at 22:00

We are now ready to start preparing our system for the essential upgrade as outlined by our MD, Simon Black. Once complete this will dramatically enhance the service you receive from Sage Pay.

Please take time to read the important information below and where relevant pass on to your technical contact.

If you have any questions or need assistance with any of the below, please don’t hesitate to contact our 24-hour support team on 0845 111 44 55 or email support@sagepay.com

What’s happening on Saturday 17th April?

This phase of the upgrade will involve moving the Sage Pay Live Payment Gateway service across to our Disaster Recovery (DR) site, which will enable us to rebuild our live site into the much improved and upgraded system. The new hardware enables us to increase the speed and capacity of our systems and will ensure that we are able to cope with predicted demand over the coming years.

Work will start at 22:00 on Saturday 17th April 2010. The upgrade has been carefully planned to minimise disruption to you and your business and the only potential risk of downtime will be the time it takes the internet Name Servers to pick up our new IP addresses. This could be as little as a few seconds, however it may be slightly longer — unfortunately we have no control over the internet Name Servers except to suggest how often they check for new addresses.

Important technical information

We will be changing the IP Address of the following domains during this upgrade: live.sagepay.com, test.sagepay.com and www.sagepay.com – The Sage Pay Live payment gateway address, our test environment address and our website.

How does this affect me?

You will need to make some technical changes to your website if ANY of the following statements are true:

1) You have hardcoded your IP addresses within your website/shopping cart

2) You have cached your DNS entries

3) You have firewall rules in place to only accept access to and from your systems from specific IP addresses

Download technical details you need to configure your systems

Please note: If a 3rd party is hosting or providing your shopping cart, they will need to make changes and will need to download our technical document . We will do everything we can to notify the 3rd party, however we strongly advise you to forward this email to them too.

If you answer NO to all of the above:

You will not need to make any changes to your website and your transactions will not be affected by the IP Address switch. Your local DNS server will automatically update with the correct IP Address

Once again, if you have any questions, at all, please don’t hesitate to call our support team anytime on 0845 111 44 55 or email support@sagepay.com

Thank you for your continued support, while we work to upgrade our systems.

I was delighted today to hear that children in England will, by 2011, be taught about keeping themselves safe on the internet as part of the school curriculum. This is really good news, not just to protect children from engaging with ‘the wrong sort’ on the internet, but as a side effect of protecting privacy, young people will learn to avoid doing things on the internet that may affect their futures. Employers do look at what people have done on the internet before offering jobs you know!

So what is the downside? My apologies to those friends of mine who are teachers, but most of you will confess to having relatively little knowledge about the internet in comparison to the students you teach. How then can you educate young people about the dangers of the internet and privacy if you don’t understand it? To be successful, I think the educators will need education too.

Many thanks to Rodney Forster for showing me www.wordle.net , an interesting utility that will read an RSS feed, or selection of words you supply, and produce this interesting word cloud. I did this one from the RSS feed on this site.

Web Design Words

That’s right, Kathryn and I won a couple of business awards the other night at the Chamber of Commerce awards event at Potters in Hopton. We were thrilled to win the Business Link Business Start Up Award and the Innovation & Skills Engaging Education Award. Secretly, we’d really wanted to win the Business Start Up award so were ‘chuffed’ when our business came up.

The past couple of years have been really exciting for us. Since starting our agency, our feet have barely touched the ground. I don’t think any of the team have yet had a moment spare, such have been the demands. Now in our fourth office, due to growth, we’re still expanding – but slowly. We’ve got lots of plans over the coming months and years – hopefully more awards to come

Unbelievable. I don’t often get on my high horse about this kind of thing but the economy is suffering and the postal workers have gone on strike again. Companies expand and contract all the time, due to a number of reasons. If you’re not happy with what your company is doing and you don’t think you’re being paid enough, look for another job – surely!

It doesn’t affect me too much to be honest. I’m sure we’ll get a few late payments ‘due to the strikes’, but several of our clients are going to feel it. Particularly those involved in e-commerce. After a difficult year for many, this is just another kick isn’t it? It’s an absolute disgrace that this has happened.

There, that’s off my chest now. Rant over….until the next strike….

Simon & Kathryn getting ready to dive

Ok, so it’s been a little while since my last post here and the simple reason is that I’ve been enjoying the delights of a holiday. Yep, Kathryn and I took the opportunity to go away for 10 days to the sunny island of Tenerife. Not to sunbathe but to go diving, every single day. I’d never thought of diving in Tenerife before, I assumed that it would be devoid of life and a bit uninteresting. Well I was wrong! Don’t missunderstand me, it’s not like a coral reef, but it is stunning nevertheless, oh yes – and it’s very deep. Being a volcanic island, there are a couple of short ledges out that drop off at 30m and 50m and then next ledge is 3000m+. We took the opportunity to take twin cylinders on our backs and a mix of oxygen rich gas in a cylinder side slung (for faster decompression) to allow us to dive a little deeper and longer than we would normally as the conditions were so good.

We saw so much life: huge rays, turtles, barracuda, moray eels, shrimp, jacks and so much more. There were wrecks, walls, caves and all sorts of other interesting features.

Exiting after a cave dive

During the first week we were there we were lucky enough to be diving with a group from Northern Ireland who had us in absolute stitches all week, so much so that I had stomach pains from laughing – or perhaps it was the endless chips that you get fed out there.

While we’re talking about the food, I don’t think we ate anything Spanish the whole time we were there. We had a good Indian, Chinese and plenty of tourism fried food but nothing authentically Spanish. We did try on one day at lunchtime, between dives, to go to a Spanish restaurant. There was a dozen or so of us and when the food arrived, pretty much everyone had ordered a gut busting English breakfast. Oh well, I guess we all needed the calories for the diving.

So it’s back to work for us now, fun’s over

Ray

For anyone interested in diving in Tenerife, I can recommend Dive 24-7 Tenerife Dave and Nikki, who run the dive centre, are a great laugh and as accommodating as you can legally get

Thanks to Ken and Jane for the photos.

Spam

I have a dream. Where one man can sit at his desk and look upon his inbox and feel proud that it is empty, nothing in it but whitespace, every little task……but wait! What’s this? An advertisement for Viagra? That’s just what I needed, I’ll get my credit card out right away, and while I’m at it I’ll check my bank details as apparently my account has been hijacked and I need to verify my details….meanwhile <ring ring> “My mobile phone contract up for renewal is it? Oh great, what fantastic offers do you have for me?”.

Why are we so tolerant of this? Why aren’t we slapping the people who respond to this rubbish, they’re only encouraging them? It won’t be a shock to learn that over 25% of spam comes from the USA. What may come as a surprise is they know who these people are and yet they haven’t been shot (’cause that what they deserve IMHO).

How true this next statistic is I don’t know, as it was commissioned by a company who produce anti spam software, but over 92% of all emails sent are considered to be spam. Irrespective of the source of this information, this sounds about right to me – but for arguments sake, let’s imagine it’s 80%.

OK, so if 80% of all email is spam, does that mean that criminals, as that is exactly what they are – this is an illegal activity, are forcing businesses to stump up the money for email servers FIVE TIMES bigger, or FIVE TIMES more servers than they need? That’s just mail servers, I haven’t even touched on network traffic. So, for the tree hugging soap dodgers amongst you who care about the planet and its fluffy greenness, what about the ol’ carbon footprint then? Indeed, spammers are costing businesses and individuals time, money, energy, pretty green trees and cuddly dolphins. Why aren’t we doing more then?

In December 2003, our wonderful British government, right hand on chest whilst parping out the National Anthem, introduced a few rules and regulations that prevent spamming individuals in all cases – but not businesses, we’re still fair game. The terms ‘Opt in’ were developed and various other rules. ‘Oh great’ we all thought, well – those of us to naively believe the government would do anything properly thought that. The rest of us were thinking that the government has sorted itself out with another huge bill out of taxpayers money and gone in totally half cocked again. So what can you do if you’re being spammed and want to take this up with the government? You’ll like this….you fill out a 6 page generic form to the best of your abilities and submit it to the Information Commissioner’s Office. Wow…..I know……of the 62 spam email messages that I woke up to this morning (which is a fraction of what I receive in a day), I now have to prepare 372 pages of documentation to report it….if I wanted to do anything about it that is.

Trouble is, you see, that we can all spend lots of time reporting this stuff, which is wasteful and time consuming, but the maximum penalty, wait for it, is a £5000 fine WITHOUT any possibility of prison for repeat offenders. Lets’ put that in an economical context: So if I spam thousands of people regularly, it costs me a lot of money to do it, but I get enough business through this channel to cover the cost of my expenses and fines to still make a profit then, well, that £5000 can be put down to ‘Cost of Sales’ and whoopy doo, there’s no real financial risk in me doing this (apart from the occasional ‘Cost of Sale’ expense) and there’s no court that would imprison me. So I guess I’ll just carry on.

So, what can we realistically do? Ignore this stuff – and that’s about it. Sorry, no great solution for you. If I had the time to think about it, I could probably come up with a great solution but I’ve got a 372 page report. Oh bugger, 2 more arrived while I was writing this.

Website Link Building

You do have one, don’t you? If you have a website, you should be working every day on building relevant links to your website. Contribute in forums, comment on blogs, write your own blog (that links to your site) and market that too. Write an article, a guide, a product review – and link to your website. Keep it focused on the subject of your website / company and keep going…

If you post a comment, article etc, Tweet it – get that exposure. Inbound links to your website are so important, it cannot be understated. You may have to think outside the box to build those links.

Start with a list of your online competitors and, in Google, type ‘links:www.competitorwebsite.com” (replace that with the name of your competitors website). Find out who’s linking to them and see if you can get a link there too, can you see what your competitors are doing from this?

Use Google Reader, or other newsreading software, to follow blogs, Google news etc. Comment on articles (not forgetting to provide your link). Some websites have the ‘nofollow’ attribute set so your rankings won’t benefit, but if its relevant and popular, that won’t stop you getting additional traffic you didn’t have before will it?

Tweet everything you do, don’t forget to add the personal touch. Build up your Twitter following.

Internet marketing is such a huge subject, which you really need to think about and be pro-active about. Could you build one link per day? Sure you can. If you can’t, should you be paying someone to perform these activities for you? What’s the ROI like? Potentially very big!