Out little community is taking off like you wouldn’t believe. On Saturday we will have been around exactly 1 month… so far we have 183 members and over 7000 posts! Pretty good I think! We have a handful of affiliates and a lot of useful information going on there already.

Come and visit us at www.z4-forum.com

I have been working on a BMW Z4 community site for the past 2 days and it’s coming along nicely. There are plenty of BMW sites out there, but not too many dedicated to the Z4. We have a reasonable amount of members already, considering we’re only 2 days old!

According to our stats there has been a lot of interest in the article regarding sending mail through freeserve/wanadoo/orange/BT. For this reason I have decided to elaborate a little and put forward an offer.

If you have a domain name and you are using freeserve/wanadoo (or whatever they decide to be called this week) then you will have problems sending email… allow me to explain…

When you send email you must connect to an outgoing mail server (SMTP server). This server is usually something like smtp.freeserve.co.uk or mail.freeserve.co.uk.

This is where the problem begins. Freeserve run a check on your message. Specifically it checks if your “from address” is correct i.e. user@username.freeserve.co.uk.

This check is a problem if you have your own domain as you will have altered the from address to be yourname@yourdomain.co.uk

So, what can you do?

Could you could connect to another SMTP server? Errr, no, freeserve/wanadoo have blocked port 25 (the standard SMTP port). Nice of them!

Solution

You need to connect to another SMTP server on another port. We have setup our SMTP server to listen on port 2525 (which is not blocked by freeserve).

Offer

If you wish to get your domain working please give us a call. For £49 per year we can offer the following:

Unlimited access to our 2525 SMTP server, so you can send from wherever you are and whatever ISP you are connected with.

Advanced webmail

Web hosting space

FREE blog/gallery

We also pride ourself on our level of support, so whatever your problem with hosting/email we can help you resolve it quickly and easily.

Web design and development has never been so accessible. With the wealth of content management systems out there a lot of the unknown element of web design has been removed. Designers can base their designs on tried and tested content management solutions like Joomla, Mambo or Drupal.

This means that once the site is completed and handed over you can login and alter the content of the site with a few clicks of the mouse button. Gone are the days of being held to ransom by greedy web designers charging lots of money for altering a few paragraphs of text.

Harrogate has a wealth of good looking websites, we have been doing a bit of research, but 95% of them do not change on a weekly or even monthly basis. Think of this from a customers point of view, would you return a third time to a site that hasn’t changed the last two times you visited it? Returning visitors are 75% more likely to give you business than first time visitors so it is wise to look after them. Content management solutions are great for this.

So next time you are asking for a quote for a site, enquire about a good content management system to save you money in the long run!

Way back when the Internet was in it’s infancy it was commonplace to see the “last modified date” posted on web pages. In recent years this has become less common, as it instantly ages the page, and unless you update on a daily basis do you really want people to read that your site was last updated when Mrs Thatcher was in power?

That said, sometimes there is a need to see when a page was last updated, and there is a quick and easy way to find out.

Simply paste the following line into the address bar, hit enter, and voila up pops a message telling you when the page was last updated:

javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

So there you go…. you can even create a bookmark with the code in it, so you have instant access to the last modified date of any site!

Just a quick post to announce that the migration to the new servers went very smoothly indeed. Now that the dust has settled (that’s just a metaphor, dust is a very bad thing for servers and we don’t allow it!) we are starting to focus on the new features we have to offer.

How many times have you been to a site where you want to buy something and there is no “buy now” button? I don’t know about you but 9 times out of 10 I just move on. If that business has just taken the time to invest in a small shopping cart (one of our pro features)  then I’m sure I would have been more interested. Please contact us if you would like any details of the products we have to offer.

As web design company in Harrogate it is apparent how few businesses in this region have a web site. In fact a large proportion of our web work has come from outside the Harrogate and Yorkshire area.

I don’t know if this is due to the perceived client base in Harrogate, or simply the fact that there don’t seem to be many progressive media and web based companies in the region. We would love to hear from companies looking to start a web presence and would like to work with local web designers rather than gamble on the bigger organisations. Remember, we never take any money until you are completely satisfied so why not give us a try? It’s not as expensive as you might think!

So, drop us an email or give us a call for a FREE no-obligation quote. Let’s see if we can improve the quality of web design in Harrogate and the surrounding area!

As promised, we have added extra value for new sign-ups on our Pro package. Customers signing up from 28th January will receive a free installation of one of the following scripts:

Joomla

A feature packed content management system, as used by Little Green Men

Gallery 2

An online photo gallery system, with lots of features

Wordpress

The award winning blogging software (used on this page)

The script you choose will be installed by us and maintained to the latest stable release, you don’t need to get yourselves involved in messy upgrades.

We hope to add more features over the next few months, but I hope you agree this is a pretty good start to the new year!

I am proud to announce that we have invested in some new (even faster) servers and are in the process of migrating our customers sites over to the new servers. This is an exciting move for us and will enable us to provide an even better service and more features within our hosting packages.

Amongst other things we are now in a position to offer added value to our hosting packages, such as galleries, blogs, discussion forums and even Content Management Systems! Watch this space for further announcements!