The widgets will show you:

• Top 5 most overdue invoices - so you can chase up those payments! (see 1. on image)
• Top 5 most urgent bills to pay - so you can avoid any surprises! (see 1. on image)
• The clients you need to contact most urgently (see 3. on image)
• The leads you need to contact most urgently (see 3. on image)
• The prospects you need to contact most urgently (see 3. on image)

From these powerful mini reports you can quickly access more information in a handy popup - so you don't loose the page you're on. Great for quickly getting to the information you need! (see 2. in the image above).

Content is king. The bottom line is you need relevant textural content. But there's a lot more to it. How the page is structured, the order of HTML elements, the balance between code and content. The words found within the code and a whole host of aspects determine your pages organic SEO scoring. Then there's a whole lot to do with how the page is linked to and referenced from the rest of the world wide web. But remembering content is king and your code is the easiest thing to control, then we work with our clients to help them produce the most relevant content and we make sure that the page is structured in a way that improves its SEO! We've been doing this for years and are trusted by our clients to get on with it.

Embedding Videos Into Websites

From a web perspective, videos are great content and our spartAV plugin is designed specifically to allow our clients to enter videos into galleries on their sites.

In the image above we see Mark, our director in the new Leeds office showing Nick Kemp his website with movies embedded.

As well as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and client databases, the online SpartOffice system handles company financial transactions including:

• Salaries
• PAYE & NICS
• VAT Calculation
• Bank account balances
• Expenses
• Bills
• Invoicing

And with plans to handle in the near future:

• Quotes & Estimates
• Shares & Dividends

With all this money flowing in and out of your business the dashboard is a great way of keeping an important eye on the health of your company.

The dashboard saves hours of time and expense giving you instant feedback without needing to call your accountant or sift through spreadsheets and paperwork. Just one of the ways SpartOffice is empowering businesses, from sole traders to SME's. Whether you're VAT registered or not.

Get in touch to find out more and join the growing list of companies that are choosing SpartOffice as the smart way to manage thier companies.

• It's online and secure so you can access it anytime and anywhere
• It's integrated so you can manage you clients and their invoices in the same place as your accountancy and payroll!
• It's intuitive and friendly. There is help and support available directly on the pages!
• It's very cost effective! From single seat licenses up to multi seat large company licenses and with NO contract or tie in!
• It's evolving! to constantly include more features driven by the users themselves!

Spartoffice is in beta testing and we're looking for volunteers! A number of businesses are already evaluating it and helping to shape it's future. What's more they're already discovering the great benefits!

When you'd like to get involved then get in touch!

There is a lot of buzz and talk about "Social Media Marketing" (SMM) which in essence is using your social networks like twitter and facebook to market your business or products. The missing part of the description is the "media" bit. This describes the "what are you using to get attention" part. This could be words, images, both or even promotional online videos and we're going to describe how to do it and what works!

Where does your website fit in your plan?

Social Media Marketing is just that, it's marketing, which means it's one small part of a much bigger success strategy. The goal of SMM is to drive either direct contact or interest to your website. The website can do so much more for you than many people realise. Once people land on your site then they are immersed in your brand and your world (unlike facebook). Some of the jobs of your website could include:

• Convincing people to become clients (client conversion)
• Generating loyalty and a "fan base"
• Selling products or even ideas
• Gathering subscribers to your mail list
• Saving you time by answering routine questions (FAQs)
• Getting you discovered in the first place (SEO)

A healthy website depends on the right ingredients

I oculdn't help myself with the food analogy. The latest website we have produced is for a fully qualified and successful nutritionist and they will explain that a healthy strong body comes from having the right stuff in the right quantities in a persons diet. Many websites are unhealthy, fat with content but lacking in focus or goals. Too much of one thing and no consideration of another. Luckily we know what we're doing at Sparticle which is probably just one of the reasons we're doing lots of new websites for small businesses who take their business and money seriously.

Blogging Strategy: To Get traffic from facebook and Twitter etc.

1. You write a briliant blog article on your website using the spartpress plugin.
2. You post a link to your blog article on your facebook/twitter/linkedIn wall.
3. People who know you visit your website, and because they know you they spend more time on your site than visitors from say Google searches.
4. They tell people about you on Facebook and share your link with their friends!

This isn't theoretical. We've been doing this for years and it's brought us clients from all over Europe! and it's really simple!

The SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Benefits of Blogging with Spartpress

Each post is a page in it's own right. And we've done some IT magic in the background to make sure that when you post it is formatted and presented in a great way to get found by search engines. In fact some of our clients who blog regularly report that it drives about 25% more traffic to their site. And here's the cool thing... it's good quality traffic!

So when you visit the nutritional therapists website that we've just done, see how many of the features are designed to help her easily engage in social marketing and to further improve her SEO rankings.

Below are the top 5 websites ranked by traffic growth compared to last month. These are all websites created, managed and hosted by sparticle limited. When we build websites, whethere they are 5 pages or 500 pages we always make sure they are SEO optimised and the modules we have such as the Spartpress blog/news tool are key to driving traffic.

• Spartmedia.co.uk - up by 85%
• corza.net - up by 56%
• gbcharityevents.co.uk - up by 54%
• provocativechangeworks.com - up by 44%
• edinburghbioquarter.com - up by 18%

Using blogs to increase traffic - Social Media Marketing

When we look at the analytics for spartmedia.co.uk shown in the diagram, we see that the top five traffic sources include twitter, facebook and youtube. This is a compelling example of how easy it is to drive traffic to your site when you've got the right tools, like Spartpress, and understand effective Social Media Marketing strategies.

Social Media Marketing Strategy

Here is a very simple strategy that will drive more traffic to your site.

1. Once you've got the spartpress blog tool in your site, which is very easy to get and easy to use...
2. Write a relevant, interesting and most importantly engaging short article/blog post
3. Link to the article on your website from facebook, linkedIn, twitter etc.

It's that simple! and the more you do it the more momentum your site and marketing get.

Learn how to get more business using Social Media Marketing

Over the last few years I've run a number of training courses specifically for businesses to help them leverage the power of facebook, twitter, linkedIn, youTube and other social networking sites. The next session I will be co-presenting is a morning training session on the 15th of June in Medway (more details to follow). So feel free to get in contact to find out more and watch this space for the official press release for this event.

We completely redesigned the previous ANLP website, vastly improving the ease of use, helping users find the information they are after. Along with successfully migrating the large amount of existing data, the new wesbite adds many new features and improves on existing ones including:

• Blogs
• Online shop
• Member sign-up and subscriptions
• Search
• Book reviews
• Public and private forums
• Advertising
• Content Management System
• and many more...

There are even more great features which are in the planning and we will be continuing to support and develop the website further in the near future.

Before joining the Sparticle team Carl has worked in a number of industries, including solicitors and the police, providing excellent client side IT support.

Please join us in welcoming Carl to the Sparticle website development team!

We took Edinburgh BioQuarter's existing website and by making various updates to their design greatly improved on both the look and feel and also usuability. Incorporating many features including twitter feeds, news blog (using out spartpress plugin), gallery (using our spartav plugin) and also a secured area (using out spartsecurity plugin).

With the website now live we will be working closely with Edinburgh BioQuarter to continue to deliver support with content updates, further SEO improvements, and more...

Visit: Edinburgh BioQuarter Website

Local Business Networking a Roaring Success.

Kent based charity LionAid, who are committed to halting and reversing the massive decline in Lion populations have really benefited from Kent's great business networking. In October LionAid trustee Chris Macsween had a chance meeting with Mark Zaretti, director of the Canterbury based website development company Sparticle.com at a business network meeting.

“I had heard about LionAid and I wondered what they were all about.” said Mark. “Having studied Biology at University, I'm always interested in wildlife issues. When I heard Chris speaking about the plight of Lions and the fact that, despite the work by other charities, over 90% of the worlds lions have been lost in the last 50 years, I was genuinely shocked and moved.”

Over the next few weeks Chris and Mark's paths crossed at a number of networking events including Counterpoint and Cathedral BNI business meetings in Canterbury. After the BNI meeting I invited Chris to join me for a coffee in town and we discussed LionAid's work.

“At LionAid we realise that traditional approaches to Lion conservation are not working, as seen by the massive decline in Lion populations. We take a different approach and are actively engaging with politicians, diplomats, policy makers as well as game reserves, hunting organisations, scientists and other parties who have a real say and impact on Lion populations. It's not easy and often feels like David and Goliath.” explains Chris.

“Our PR and marketing was really hampered by not having a good website. Luckily Sparticle.com came to our rescue, literally, and have built us an amazing website with blogs, galleries, and social media marketing all included. We are really pleased with their professionalism, support and importantly timing. Since the site going live we've gone international with a debate in Parliament, coverage in National Geographic and talks with international news broadcasting companies. Without the website and Sparticle's support we wouldn't be able to move forwards easily and react to events.”

When we spoke to the team at Sparticle.com they said, “This was a real collaboration and wouldn't have started without the contact from local networking meetings. There are some great businesses in Kent and further afield too. Matt Horwood of Corza.net based in Leeds kindly donated his expertise and time for the graphical design work. He is one of our clients and, during a meeting, we mentioned the LionAid project to him and he was keen to get involved and help out. This project has been a great example of how, with a 'can do' business attitude it's possible to achieve so much in a short amount of time. We're delighted to see LionAid become more successful as a result of the site we provided and importantly that they are having a real impact on saving Lions.”

To find out more about the charity work that LionAid does, visit www.LionAid.org.

We teamed up with Corza.net, one of our clients, a design house in Leeds that produce great T-Shirt designs, and they came up with the new graphic design for the website. We then took that design and using our inhouse experience and special website plugins we added a whole load of features including:

• Spartpress - our blogging and page authoring tool
• SpartAV - image and video galleries,
• Spartmail - email marketing campaign tools
• Improved SEO and analytics

All these features are designed to help LionAid market to a wider audience and bring the decline of lions to a halt.

"We wish LionAid every success and we'll be continuing to support them in their great efforts."

A. Bostock - Director of Web Technologies

"Data from the Channel Value Benchmarking service puts the comparative cost to councils per enquiry at £7.40 for face-to-face, £2.90 for the telephone and just £0.32 for web enquiries...." The article then says that because councils are not investing in the internet enough they are not satisfying their customers... "Information from Socitm's Better connected survey suggests under-investment in the web is the cause of its current low performance and this needs to change. Investment in the web that will reap significant returns because of the potential to reduce the cost of meeting customer enquiries"...

That's an estimated saving of about 95% comparing face to face with online enquiries and a saving of approximately 89% compared to telephone enquiries!

It's nice to see some real figures to back up a principal we've been promoting for years. This is why we developed the SpartFAQ website plugin, which provides our clients with a way of easily publishing FAQs that can have text, images and even video. FAQs which stand for Frequently Asked Questions, are a great way of saving money by providing the answers to questions your clients regularly ask. This means your staff don't have to spend their time and your money answering those questions on the phone, face to face or by email.

Just another example of how our SpartPlugins help your business to be even more successful.

For full details read the original article here.