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We’re spending more and more time in the clouds at the moment

Not with our heads in the clouds obviously – we’re creative but very practical thinkers at brace!

But we’re increasingly using cloud technology for completing our own work, collaborating with clients, sending and receiving files, storage, and most recently – hosting!

We’ve used most of the leading hosting companies in the UK over the years and have had mixed experiences. Technical support can be patchy, sites can load slowly sometimes and we are always looking to source better value for money for our clients.

So, this month we have signed up for a big chunk of our own cloud and can now host our client’s site very cost-effectively.

Now we can receive lightening-fast technical support and were shocked how quickly our initial questions were dealt with.

We’ve also been blown away by the speed of the sites we’ve migrated to the cloud – a breath of fresh air for us – and more importantly, for our clients.

However, as the parable of the cobbler’s shoes might lead to you to guess, we haven’t migrated our own site to the cloud yet, so we can’t speak for how quickly this page loaded, but why not get in touch and we can show you some blistering examples!

If you come back next month, and the studio dogs don’t take up too much of our production time with their appetite for walkies, this site will probably be zipping along too.

Whatever questions you might have about any sort of cloud (well, technological ones anyway), please do get in touch, because we can certainly help you get your head in the clouds.

You’ve probably seen our client testimonials displayed prominently on our site.

This is because we really care what our clients think and because we think new clients are interested in that too.

We use FreeIndex for collating the testimonials we receive – so people can see we’re not just making them up!

Do you have a free account with FreeIndex? If not, why not?

Virtually every business we can think of would benefit. They rank extremely well in Google – which means that if you gain a good ranking with FreeIndex you’ll rank well in Google too!

After approaching just some of our most loved regular clients we managed to achieve a ranking of 17th out of 3523 for graphic designers in the UK (as at September 2011).

How high can you go?

To create your own Freeindex entry online click on the following link (and they’ll highlight our entry for one month for hooking you up with them):

FREE SIGN UP LINK

If you’re an existing client and would like to leave us a (glowing!) review after you have signed up, you can follow the link below to leave a testimonial:

LEAVE US A TESTIMONIAL

If you do sign up we will happily prepare any suitable graphics, eg. logo etc. for uploading for you, without charge, so you can make your own entry as effective as possible!

…and, if you’re a supplier of ours (and we try to do put our business with our clients whenever we can) don’t forget to ask us for a testimonial too!

In business, as in the natural world, the strongest survive.

Our ancestral hunting genes are continually giving us, often subconscious, hints to help our decision making. Is this or that situation a threat, an opportunity? Can I trust this person or that person? Is everything as I would expect it to be?

These hints, along with a whole load of life experience, pay a huge part in our lives, and, you should understand, in the buying decisions of your customers.

What do businesses do that help build that trust? What are the mistakes they make that destroy it?

We don’t suggest bigger businesses always get it right but it’s often helpful to consider how they do things and apply the same principles to your own business.

Below we’ll give you some examples that we come across regularly – we’re not suggesting they’re the five most important – but they are nonetheless worth a thought:

1) Quoting mobile phone numbers in the wrong places
The only place your mobile phone number should appear is on your business card and your email signature. Putting your mobile phone number on your van, or a flyer, or almost anywhere else says “I’m a one man band – and I’m too cheap to pay for a service that can handle calls in my absence” – we’re sorry but it does.

2) Having no website
It is possible to run a business without a website, in the same way that it is possible to live without a fridge, or an inside toilet, or running water! However, people are literally making an investment in your business when they buy your products or services. They are less likely to do that if you haven’t made an investment in yourself.

3) Using free email addresses
We see these everywhere we look. Sometimes the business has a website but for historic reasons or just plain lack of technical investment, it’s soandsoltd@btinternet.com, or mybusiness@yahoo.co.uk etc. It really isn’t expensive to get yourself set up with a proper email address that reflects well on your business – you really can’t afford not to.

3b) Using a different domain for your website address and email address
This doesn’t really qualify as a completely separate point – so we’ll slip it in here. Sometimes we see the .com used as the website and then, say, the .co.uk used for the email address. There’s no good reason for this, it just looks inconsistent (which is the arch-enemy of good branding). By all means buy all the different website combinations you can think of – if that’s what you want to do – but have them all feed into one web site and one email.

4) Internationalising your telephone number
There are obviously times when it is useful to quote your number as, for example 0044 (0)1933 314335, but we question how many international calls some of these businesses are really receiving. We did some work for a client once and it was to promote a local event in Northamptonshire – they asked us to internationalise their number “to make them look big”. We’re afraid that it doesn’t – used incorrectly – it makes you look small.

5) www or not www
In the second decade of the 21st century, most people have a grasp of what a website address is and how to use it. Many people have dispensed with quoting ‘www’ as part of their website address. Many people also just omit it when they type it into their computer, smartphone etc. However, it’s surprising how many websites don’t work without the preceding ‘www’. There’s no big technical reason for that – your hosting provider just needs to update their services for you. You don’t want to miss that next big job because people think your website is not working – so check it out now!

Home to dried fruit, home baking and snack products giant, Whitworths, and also Rushden & Diamonds Football Club.

We go to Irthlingborough nearly every day of the week because it’s one of Studio Dog’s favourite run offs!

Irthlingborough Business Directory

We love being based in Northamptonshire – The Heart of England – because it has a great blend of ‘town and country’. We can take the studio dog off for a long run off, away from busy roads, or we can jump on a train and be in central London in less than an hour.

There are a wide variety of businesses here with a thriving Chamber of Commerce – all needing top quality design, so, we’re here if you need us (but we can quickly be ‘there’ if you need us somewhere else!).

Northamptonshire (abbreviated Northants. or N/hants) is a landlocked county in the English East Midlands, with a population of 629,676 as at the 2001 census. It has boundaries with the ceremonial counties of Warwickshire to the west, Leicestershire and Rutland to the north, Cambridgeshire to the east, Bedfordshire to the south-east, Buckinghamshire to the south, Oxfordshire to the south-west, and Lincolnshire to the north-east – England’s shortest county boundary at 19 metres (21 yd). The county town is Northampton.

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We’ve worked with Printing and Mailing since 2003 both as a client and a supplier.

No other printing company works harder to understand the project you’re working on and how they can add value to it.

If you really care about your business you need printed material that reflects the quality products or services your customers should expect to receive from you – and that’s what Printing and Mailing deliver.

As a print management company with unrivaled purchasing power they concentrate on providing you the best quality and the best service – at the best price. And, you can be sure that your project will always be printed on exactly the machinery for the job.

Printing and Mailing is so confident about their service that they will guarantee your return on investment. Call them on 08447 705 507 or email web@printingandmailing.co.uk

We’re also more than happy to liaise direct with P&M on jobs where we do the design so you benefit from one point of contact and can avoid all the technical conversations we’ll have to ensure you get the best value and best results.

Give yourself a free SEO boost!

We’ve just been doing some routine maintenance to keep our web presence fresh and up to date with the various business directories out there.

Does your business take full advantage of free business directory services?

Often these entries push actual business websites further down Google.

We found we’d been pushed on to the second page (!) for one of our key phrases because about seven directory entries came ahead of us, but fortunately our clients can still find us (listed quite favourably) in these directories.

Part of the reason for this is that we’ve taken the time to craft our entries with good quality copy, images, logos etc. This takes a bit of trouble but the effort is worth it.

If you think you should be appearing in more business directories – and getting better quality enquiries from them – why not give us a call?

We can give you some free pointers, and if you don’t have the time or the resources, we can even take it on as a little project.

We hope not – neither would we.

In a similar vein, we used to get quite a few anonymous telephone calls from various sources – most often trying to sell us something or other – very often in an overly pushy way.

Anonymous calls are where the individual or organisation has pro-actively decided to withhold their telephone before making the call – or where their switchboard or telecomms provider has configured their system to do that for all calls.

After a particularly frustrating call we gave this some more thought and couldn’t think of any reason why a legitimate business calling us should withhold the number they are calling from…

…then, we discovered Anonymous Call Reject and it’s helped restore peace to the studio.

If you’ve just tried to call us, and received a message like…

“The person you are calling is not accepting anonymous calls. Please redial without withholding your number.”

…we just wanted to explain why.

Milton Keynes often abbreviated MK, is a large town in Buckinghamshire, in the south east of England, about 49 miles (79 km) north-west of London. It is also the administrative centre of the Borough of Milton Keynes. It was formally designated as a new town on 23 January 1967, with the design brief to become a ‘city’ in scale.

Its 89 km² (34 sq mi) area incorporated the existing towns of Bletchley, Wolverton and Stony Stratford along with another fifteen villages and farmland in between. It took its name from the existing village of Milton Keynes, a few miles east of the planned centre.

At the 2001 census the population of the Milton Keynes urban area, including the adjacent Newport Pagnell, was 184,506, and that of the wider borough, which has been a unitary authority independent of Buckinghamshire County Council since 1997, was 207,063 (compared with a population of around 53,000 for the same area in 1961). The Borough’s population is currently estimated to be over 230,000.

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Business Directories

Applegate’s Milton Keynes Page