With the new series of the Apprentice due in early summer this year, we thought we pull up a nice piece of video to show Sir Alan Sugar and the candidates at their best. Thanks Cassetteboy
Enjoy !!!!
Archive for March, 2010
Friday Afternoon Fun
Friday, March 26th, 2010
Vertebrate Graphics and Wildscapes
Thursday, March 25th, 2010Vertebrate Graphics are proud to working in partnership with the Sheffield WIldlife Trust to develop their new Wildscapes website. After working with Wildscapes to design their brand and on a number of offline projects, we successfully tendered for design and development of the website.
Wildscapes have been working with us for a couple of years since the inception of their brand identity back in 2008. We have undertaken a variety of graphic design projects including stationery, brochures, large banners and leaflets and we are delighted to use this experience to design and develop the new website.
We take pride in the service we offer to our clients and in the fact that our clients keep on coming back to us. By offering a high quality service and innovative design coupled with robust development, we believe our offering is second to none.
Owen Evans, Digital Business Manager said “We have a great creative team and relish the opportunity to showcase our excellent design and development skills to an organisation such as Sheffield Wildlife Trust. With more media and public interest around businesses and their environmental impact, the new Wildscapes will not only promote their services but provide a valuable resource for businesses of all sizes.”
Mayday Mayday, website down
Monday, March 15th, 2010We are experiencing problems on our website which is hosted with Plus Net. Despite it being down since Friday afternoon and them having the weekend to fix the problem, it is still not available at the time of writing this article.
How a company the size of Plus Net can plan to upgrade their servers without:
a. informing their hosting clients about a potential outage and allowing them to make contingency plans – how hard is it to email all with a common courtesy
and
b. going about this change with what what seems like no contingency plan for any sort of outage such as this.
In this day and age, can a web design and graphic design company afford to be without their website for over 3 days. I would suggest the answer is no.
Problems and unforeseen circumstances do occur in life and in business, but what annoys any customer is the waiting with no contact, no information; apart from a service update page buried in their website and no prior warning communication. Customer service and courtesy can help any company when problems occur – making the customer feel valued can be the difference between a glitch and a goodbye.
Will we continue with Plus Net – I’ll let you make your mind up on that one.
Custom 404 Page
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010Whilst browsing around the internet, it is very likley that you will have come across a 404 page. This page is displayed when a website like cannot be resolved and the physical page does not exist on the website – it will give you a message stating 404 – Page cannot be found. These can occur for a variety of reasons such as spelling mistakes, accidental removal of a page or even database problems. What ever the issue, they all lead to one outcome – an unhappy visitor.
To safeguard against broken links and 404 pages you can take the following steps:
Link Checking
You will be relieved to know that you do not have to do this manually – it can be done in a few clicks. Using link checking software such as Xenu will provide you with a list of all the broken links and orphaned pages on your website. This should be done by your website adminstrator on a regular basis. If it isn’t – ask why
Custom 404 pages
By providing the visitor with a little bit more information leaves them feeling valued and much less disappointed. Whilst no website wants to serve a 404 page, in the unlikely event of soemone linking through to it, having some fun with it can be provide a much btter experience for the visitor. Offer them a site search, a link to the homepage, an apology, even inject some humour into the page and coupled with a page which retains your brand, you will find people getting more from your website.
Some examples of great 404 pages are shown below:
