The latest marketing seminar run by our sister company Essential Marketer was a roaring success yesterday with over 20 visitors. If you missed this one don’t fret as there will be another one on the 6th November. If you’re interested in that then get in touch with Abi or John on : 0845 508 5008 to book your place.
If you attened the marketing seminar we all hope you enjoyed your time and learned something useful to take back to your businesses. We mentioned some useful websites on a handout with a URL to some of the tools and areas covered on the day. The URL for future reference is here: Marketing Seminar Links.
1. Violating Convention
Designers who go against convention on the web are trying to ski up hill. Its a no-go and Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think” makes it pretty clear why. Users have an internal model of how a site should be with a rough idea of what a navigation bar looks like, where it goes, how it flows. Same goes for any other part of a site.
Have you ever noticed that shops, department stores and supermarkets will often put their “Branch Locator” in one of just a few places? Convention! There’s a time to follow it and a time to break from it.
2. Opening New Browser Windows
Everyone seems to be guilty of this and its an oldy but it sticks around because people won’t let go of the whole new browser window. Remember: If a user wanted a new window they can get one. @helping’ them out will often do no more than irritate.
3. What is It?
If a website can’t answer that simple question in less than a second it’s losing the battle. People don’t consider a site for minutes or even seconds at a time. Its less than a second and if the user needs to think - they’ll likely get irritaed and move on. Make it clear what you’re about!
4. Ads
Unless its how your site operates then get rid of the ads - people rarely like being sold to and the more intrusive the ads are the worse off you’ll be.
5. Heavy Text
People don’t like reading on a monitor and so they’re unlikely to want to trawl through great tracts of your latest novella online. If you need to write a lot then add images, break up text with sub-headings, etc. Make it mor elike a magazine and people will be more inclined to read it.
Essential Systems have been avid users and suppliers of Snom products for over 6 years now and recently joined the ranks fo the Snom Value Added Reseller Program. As members it benifits our customers in two key areas. Firstly we get to pass savings onto you due to our reduced purchasing costs. Secondly we are committed to continued development of our Snom technical expertise and advancement so can bring the latest and greatest Snom has to offer straight to your company too.
Snom are a VoIP telephony manufacturer who produce wired and wireless handsets handsets as well as a range of accesories for call handling such as repeaters, headsets, etc.
Technorati Tags: snom, voip, telephony, asterisk
One thing we’ve noticed makes a huge difference to your sites success is the theory behind the “Golden Triangle”. Numerous experiments have been done where strange contraptions have been attached to people’s heads while they go about their usual business online. What these eye tracking devices have all consistently found is that people concentrate on the top left-hand corner (as can be seen in the photo) before moving on. It’s that ‘Golden Triangle’ of a persons focus that by far has the greatest impact on a person’s view of a site.
Even though this research has been public knowledge for some years now the same mistakes are still being made by web designers all over the world. By placing your most important content and expecially your call to actions at the top left you can easily see double, triple and quadruple jumps in your sales and leads online.
For more information on eye tracking check out Googles answers.
This is great news for our future customers! Essential Systems have attained approved status and are now on the West Midlands Suppliers Register. What this means for you the customer is that if you go to the Business Link West Midlands and say you require a product or service to help your business grow they will fund half the cost of the project.
As approved suppliers we’re on the list of companies chosen by Business Link to help companies with their technical projects. Joining the supplier register required an approval process to ensure our company meets the required quality and legal guidelines set out for the register. In just 10 days Essential was approved and its a testement to the efficiency of the local Business Link service.
If you’re interested in a Business Link grant to help with your technical growth then get in touch.
Technorati Tags: business, business link
Found this on StumbleUpon.
I’ve just spotted these three great voice packs available in British English format while browsing the UK Asterisk User Group:
We’ve recently been restructuring some of our servers here at Essential and shut down our Windows resseller acocunt at Fast2Hosts after 5yrs service. We’ve recently setup two new servers at our Studley datacentre providing fast, reliable hosting and expanding our CRM services.
So on to the subject of the post. Why Debian? Well for those not of the techy persuasion Debian is a server OS like Windows, Unix, etc. In fact its a ‘flavour’ or distribution of Linux. You may have heard the old saying about over 70% of the Internet’s servers run on Linux well Debian happens to be a major chunk of that and there’s a lot of good reasons why:
- Reliability - From our personal experience and the stats out there Debian is by far the most reliable server OS available.
- Simplicity - Due to the robust nature of the OS build Debian has made it incredibly easy to maintain. With Aptitude handling program installation and DPKG handing configuration, Debians ease of use makes working with it a pleasure.
- Aptitude - This is actually an app distributed as part of Debian. Its called a package manager and it makes the task of installing, updating and managing software an absolute breeze. Seriously - its easier than Windows and its ‘point-and-click’ method. Not only that it will install anything else you need to get things working. Want to install a MySQL database? Simply type:
aptitude install mysql
- Stability - Similar to reliability above but this is more about Debians overall solid build. Its one of the most integrated OS’s out there and you can tell form using it that they’ve put effort into every small detail of the system. With over 2000 developers worldwide and thousands more volunteers working on the codebase this OS has a testing and development team unmatched by any other in the world of open or closed source projects. If you include Debian derivatives such as Ubuntu we’re talking of hundreds of thousands. Thats one hell of a seal of quality.
- Users - So who else uses Debian? Well here’s just a small taster:
- Boeing - Commercial Flight Test Data Systems.
- City of Munich - Being used as the main system and configuration platform for the city.
- Digg - One of the biggest news sites on the net receiving millions of hits per day.
- The Register - Major UK IT news service.
- Technorati - Worlds biggest blog search engine.
- Council of Europe - Uses Debian for their servers (SMTP, POP, DNS, etc).
- Semiconductor Physics Group, Cavendish Lab, University of Cambridge - Providing NFS, NIS, CUPS to over 100 workstations.
- Bittorent - The original torrent service uses Debian.
- Ministry of Public Administration (Spain) - Have transferred over 8000 of their Windows workstations to Debian.
- Thawte - One of the biggest internet security and certification agencies in the world.
- United Drug Plc - Irish pharmaceutical company.
- OpenDNS - An open and free DNS service.
- Many, many, many more - too many to list but here’s some more you may have heard of.
Technorati Tags: debian, linux, os
[UPDATE: This position has been filled]
Essential Systems are looking to recruit a fresh new web designer/developer for our growing company. You have to be motivated, energetic, keen to develop your skills and be part of a team.
Deep knowledge of web development isn’t essential as training will be given but you will be expected to learn and grow in this position.
If you’re interested in working for us then get in contact with Abi Cooper via email or phone: 0845 867 9002
Google released a great new web security tool on Wednesday (2nd) which aims to help web developers tighten up the security of their web apps. It goes by the name RatProxy and as its name suggests it works by acting as a proxy between the browser and the site your viewing. In that position it can monitor all the communications between them and flag any potential concerns.
Its especially useful for discovering cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and its being used actively at Google for their own systems. We plan on using it here at Essential on all our existing and future web apps to add another tool to the security arsenal.
Other security tools we’d recommend are:
- Nikto - Web server security scanner.
- ProxMon & WebScarab - Python proxy analyser for pen-testing web servers and the proxy itself.
- Nessus - A hugely comprehensive network security analysis program.
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