I moved to the GiffGaff network – I kept my same number and they use the 02 network so my signal stayed the same! The best thing is you are not tied down to a long 24 month contract – they let you choose your tariff month by month! Ideal for when your saving for something!

I managed to upgrade my tariff to 400 minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited internet for just £15 a month (via their Goodybag system – which is excellent I must add!)  – this meant a saving of £25 a month (or £300 a year)!

Don’t just take my word for it – take a look for yourself! You could save you and your business a small fortune! Visit GiffGaff and order a FREE sim card.

NOTE: I thought it was worth noting I have no affiliation to GiffGaff, I am just genuinely delighted with the service and savings I have received from them.

“I’m just a tiny business… Why would I need to build a website?”

“Designing a website sounds like so much work… Would it be worth it?”

“Why bother? My customers probably won’t even look at it.”

The truth is, many small businesses should have a website.

This isn’t to say that you need a long, complicated website with tons of functionality or fancy animation. Some businesses do just fine with a simple informational website that’s between 3 and 5 pages long. That length covers all the basics: a home page, some information about your company, a page about your services, contact information, and perhaps information about the types of clients you serve or testimonials from happy clients or even just a single page with all this on it! See our £99 Website.

With just a few pages and the right information, you can have a website that gives your business tangible benefits such as:

1. Giving new contacts an easy way to learn more about you. When you go out networking and meet a new prospect, how can they get more information about you? Calling to follow up—along with leaving voice mails and playing phone tag—is certainly more work for many new contacts than just jumping online. Visiting your website may help a new prospect to learn more about you, easily, on their terms. And that may help you convert more leads to sales.

2. Making updates easier and less expensive than printed materials. Instead of updating text, redesigning a marketing piece, trying to make new copy fit the new layout, and then printing (and paying for) new material, all you have to do is rewrite your copy and integrate it into your website. You can do this yourself with a Content Management System (CMS)!

Updating your site yourself makes it easy and inexpensive to ensure that your website is always accurate and you never have to apologize for it being outdated. Don’t worry if your no good with computers – if you can use Microsoft Word we promise you’ll be able to update your website!

3. Providing a place for all the information you need to answer prospects’ questions. Printed materials limit the amount of space that you can devote to text, product photos, or informational graphics. A web page can include more content than would fit on a letter-sized piece of paper, especially because readers can scroll down if you have more to say. It doesn’t take a significantly larger investment to add two pages, rather than one, to a website. This is not to say that your website should go on forever, but you can take the real estate you need without worrying about the cost involved in printing a larger format document or more pages.

4. Making your company look professional and established, while extending your brand. A website can help your business make a full and positive first impression. Instead of prospects who are disappointed that it’s difficult to find out more about your business, you’ll have happy potential customers who can easily get their questions answered. And if they get those answers from an attractive, well-written, easy-to-use website, they are more likely to form a good opinion of your company. That good opinion can go a long way toward making a new prospect feel comfortable about your expertise and credibility and want to hire you.

5. Helping you find and connect with new clients. Creating a website can extend your marketing reach beyond your city—and sometimes outside of your own country. If you have a product or service that you can deliver over the phone, online, or even by mail, you can open up new territories that you’d otherwise have to reach by direct mail. Just think of all the new clients who could become available to you.

And through search engine optimization, your website can be there when your prospect is actually looking for the product or service you offer. It’s easier to make a sale to a prospect that wants or needs what you offer rather than trying to convince them that they need what you have.

6. Enabling you to hit the business goal you’re reaching for. For example, your website can also help you sell products and services with an online shopping cart, grow your contact list through a newsletter sign-up, answer journalists’ questions through a press room, or educate potential clients through an articles/news section. There are many other things that a website can do for you—so talk to us about your specific business goals and creating a website that will get you there.

These are just a few of the benefits your business can gain from a website and it might not cost as much as you think! Contact us today for a FREE no-obligation quotation. Don’t worry about anything – Let us take care of it for you!

1. People are Social by Nature – We are social beings and we enjoy the company of others when we don’t feel intimidated or judged. Social network removes the visual queues that we typically rely on to establish whether or not we want to engage in a conversation with someone. This allows people connect to more people then they normally would, creating a bigger community.
2. People Value The Opinion of Friends – Recent studies have shown that people are more likely to try or buy a product or service based on the recommendation of a friend.
3. People Like what their Friends Like – Every once and a while something resonates with a community of friends and creates what is referred to as social buzz. With social buzz the community promotes your product for you.
4. People are Popular – Some people are just popular. If you get a few of these folks to like your product or service, there is a god chance their followers will push you content into the view of more and more users.
5. People Spend their Online Time, on Social Networks – Social networks are where the people are. There are more eye balls looking at social network sites then any other genre of sites on the entire web.

In summary, social media works because it is designed and revolves around people. It is people that make your business successful not products, services or partners. The landscape has shifted and you have to be involved and engaged with the masses and if the masses are spending most of their time on social networks, then that is where business is taking place.

Talk to BoltBlue Media about integrating Social Media Marketing solutions to your existing or new website.

SEO (Search Engine Optomisation) – Get your website up the rankings in Google for search terms that you want!

When you think of designing a website for yourself, chances are that you dream of a website with all the bells and whistles – flash movies, stunning images, streaming audio – the works! But, unknown to you, these elements may actually be damaging your business prospects because what appears attractive on the surface is detractive when it comes to search engines rankings. If your website includes these elements, it is automatically relegated to a much lower rank even though the content is relevant and you are making use of cutting edge technology.

In short, it is important to stay away from design elements that can damage search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, a recent poll showed some appalling results. 1 in every 10 website designers believes that SEO is not their business. Worse, more than 24% of website designers do not have the foggiest idea about what SEO is!

Before exploring the reasons to opt for an SEO friendly website design, it is essential to understand what this is all about.

You see, search engines employ automated ‘web spiders’ to crawl through websites. These ‘web spiders’ collect important information about the website. The information they glean helps them assess the relevance of a website for particular keywords. Now, you must remember that these are automated programs that have been coded to crawl through web pages in a certain way. The spiders deposit the information they collect in a database. So, when a user queries a keyword, the search engine dips into this database and lists pages according to relevance. Pages that ‘seem’ more relevant come out on top, while those that are not, end up at the bottom.

While design elements alone are not responsible for dismal search engine rankings, they too play an important role.

Whether you are a professional web designer or a business owner, it is important to know why you must always, always aim for an SEO friendly website design.

• An SEO friendly website design is the best way to befriend search engines. If search engines are not happy with your design, you can expect only a trickle of traffic from back-link referrals and direct visitors.
• Surveys show that approximately 45-65% of web traffic to any website comes from search engines. Therefore, a website design that is not search engine friendly is washing its hands off this amazing volume of traffic.
• Generally, an SEO friendly website design is also very user friendly. Therefore, ensuring that you use proper HTML coding, target proper keywords through content and meta tags, make use of ALT tags, use proper links and so on, make the site quick to download and easy for the user.
• An SEO friendly website speaks of quality web page design. If you are a company with some standing, the kind of web page you have impacts your brand value.

Boltblue Media include basic Search Engine Optimisation techniques in all of there websites so you’ll always see good results! However, for a more advanced SEO package check out our SEO options.

As we are a new business we’d love to give fellow new local businesses a special offer to help them get started. We are offering 15% off any of our website design and hosting services.

Quote: LOCAL BUSINESS 15% – when requesting a quote to receive discount.

Offer ends: 31st October 2010

*Terms and Conditions apply. Excludes any other offers. Businesses must have headquarters in the Ayrshire region. Boltblue Media have final say on this offer. Only applies to website design, maintenance, hosting, content management and e-commerce services,

A few examples include:

Apple

King of Cool Apple have came a long way since their original logo which featured a small apple shape sitting under a tree with Apple Computer Co set into the frame of the picture.

Ford

The Ford Blue Oval is recognised the world over yet it wasn’t always as we remember.

BBC

The BBC are also prone to a change of logo.

Contact us to see what we can create your your business!

Why not incorporate an updated website with your new logo and save £££ with Boltblue Media?

Not only do they create a link between you and your new contact, they’re also a quick way to give a great first impression. It’s not often you get to design your first impression to last! Business cards promote your skills, branding, ideas and your vision as a professional.

Why not challenge us to make you a business card that gets you business?

According to data from a recent study by Commtouch (Internet Threats Trend Report) published in April 2010 and referring to the first quarter of the year, every day we send about 221 billion email messages, of which 183 billion are classified as spam (85% of the total traffic globally).

United States lead the ranking of the “spamming” countries with 38 billion emails per day followed by India (13.7 billion), Russia (9.8), Vietnam (9.7) and Korea (7.6).

How much does all this junk mail cost the environment in terms of CO2 emissions?

Studies have estimated that each email message generates about 0.3 grams of CO2. Multiplying this value by the number of spam messages sent daily worldwide what we get is that every day around 54.900 tons of C02 are released into the environment: a number that translates into around 21 million tons of CO2 every year.

Just a curiosity, for the sake of comparison: the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption in April 2010 released into the air around 150,000 tons of CO2 every day.

Worth worrying about? Leave your thoughts ….

So one football World Cup has finished and so begins the build up to the next. The lead up to the World Cup finals always has a soft spot with designers – new logos, advertisements, colour schemes and concepts all appear and converge into one giant football spectacle.

The 2014 Brasil World Cup logo is constructed from “… interlinking hands in the yellow and green of Brazil and shaped like a trophy aim to enhance Brazil’s image as a warm, hospitable nation. The design is taken from an iconic photograph of three hands triumphantly raising the World Cup.” – Quote from World Football Insider.

Personally, I really like the new logo and the concept behind it, the iconic trophy is represented by the linking of hands showing how football can bring us all together. Its plain, simple and to the point but still conjures up all the emotion of lifting the World Cup and the culture and carnival atmosphere of Brasil itself.

However, there are already critics, and many people are liking it to a  ‘facepalm‘.

All I can say is, roll on the qualifiers!

What’s your opinion?

What do you think will happen?