Saturday, January 9th, 2010
Nope, it’s not a con – refreshing isn’t it? I’ve been using this for the past 6 months and it’s been fantastic, due to my being more organised, I’ve actually made more money!
Quickbooks from Intuit is a remarkably useful accounting program and if you’re a small business with 20 customers or less, you can run Quickbooks for absolutely nothing. You will need to upgrade if you gain more than 20 customers or suppliers, but it’s a great way to start off and personally, I’ve not reached that many yet.
Download the UK version at http://quickbooks.intuit.co.uk/accounting-software/quickbooks-freestarter.jsp
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
If you’re anything like me, you have a wide array of ways to network and chat with your friends and contacts. From email, web-mail and private messages, to Facebook wall posts and Twitter to real-time chatting on Windows Live Messenger and online messaging systems like Facebook and Google’s chat.
Digsby collates all of your networks into one easy way to log in and communicate from one interface.
You need to create a Digsby account which then stores all your login information. They claim their servers are secure, and I’ve not had any problems over the past few months I’ve been using Digsby.
Another very nifty feature is to generate a widget to place on your website or blog that lets you chat in real-time with visitors to your site.
It’s still a relatively new program and seems a little bandwidth-intensive when checking POP email, but the development continues to progress rapidly and new fixes are being applied all the time.
Check out digsby at: http://www.digsby.com/
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Building a website
First things first, you don’t need to be technically minded to build a website, the most important quality you can have is to be a good communicator. As long as you can get your message across to your audience, a good hosting package will take care of everything else.
What should a good hosting package offer?
A good hosting package should offer several of the following things, a great hosting package will offer all of them.
- A range of server-side software
Server side software is what transforms a good hosting package from a place to store files to a powerful system that lets you build websites and applications in an intelligent way. Many hosts will let you install Content Management Systems for websites and blogs. One of the most popular of these systems is WordPress, a blogging system that can be set up in minutes. WordPress can also be used to quickly build regular websites with an easy way to manage them. Other programs include forum software, virus scanning programs, webmail and backup systems.
- Plenty of emails, databases and server space
You should check how much space and how many (if any at all) email accounts you have been allocated. You should make sure you have several email accounts included in your package. A database is a bonus, and will let you run complex systems on your website such as Content Management Systems, Shopping Carts and other interactive facilities.
- Good customer service
With the best will in the world, you will at some point have questions or need advice on your site. If, even more urgently, your site is hacked or damaged in some way you’ll want to get things fixed as soon as humanly possible.
- A host that doesn’t dramatically oversell
It may sound like a technicality, however some hosts oversell dramatically. This means that if they have 100Gb on a server, they might sell 500Gb worth of space on it, knowing that most customers will never reach their full allocation. Unfortunately, this happens more often than some hosts like to admit, meaning disruption for everybody hosted on that server and even more so if your account needs to be moved. A good hosting company will know their limits as well as offering you a generous amount of space.
- Good backups
A backup system is included with most hosting packages, letting you create backups of your files and sometimes databases as well. This is useful as long as: 1) You have remembered to create a recent backup & 2)You are able to restore the files yourself.
Some hosting companies offer automated backups, meaning you can always be sure that there will be a recent copy of your files safely stored somewhere. Even better, some packages allow you to restore the files yourself, rather than having to contact customer service to do so. Better yet, some of these companies offer this feature for no extra cost.
- A degree of flexibility
There will always be times when you’ll need to do something you never anticipated, expand, change or add something to your package. You need to ensure your hosts are happy to add and modify things on the server for your benefit.
Do I have a recommendation though? Yep.
The entire point of this article is not as a puff piece, but lists the features I have found useful – essential in fact, to have in place to be able to effectively build and maintain a website. Having said that, one company stands out in my experiences, offering all the features listed above as standard even on their most economical of packages.
VidaHost are based in Bath, with a data centre in London as well as international hosting options. Their cheapest packages start at £17 + VAT a year and this includes a free domain. Check out VidaHost, they’re happy to answer questions and their tech-support is stunningly fast as well as stunningly free!
Nope, it’s not a con – refreshing isn’t it? I’ve been using this for the past 6 months and it’s been fantastic, due to my being more organised, I’ve actually made more money!
