It wasn’t until 4:30pm today that someone contacted us via an alternative email address and let us know that our phone systems were not ringing correctly and therefor we were missing out on calls and whats more our email addresses were bouncing back errors to people and we were not receiving any emails our end.

After some quick investigations it has been determined that a DNS update that was done last week has some how caused problems with our email system and we have been able to only send/receive a very small amount of email over the past few days.

It is important that we let people know that this is an issue on our internal email systems and that we may not have received emails from the past few days you may have sent us. We intend to correct this DNS issue as soon as possible and then determine and fix the telephone system.

A bit hectic for a Monday!

** UPDATE ** It seems not only was our INCOMING mail affected but also our OUTGOING mail – so we now have to sift through our last few days of outgoing mail that may or may not have actually left the mail server (which we don’t know which have or have not) and resend emails – so if you are only getting emails from us in the next 24 hours – they could have been from the past few days – or if you receive duplicates we apologize.

Online video like any form of advertising or marketing should be focused and dependant on your type of video. The questions that should be approached primarily with video is where and how?

Video works for business plain and simple. Here are some tips on how this can be done better, with results.

1. Don’t rely on one video to create your success – one 30 second pitch video about your product and service is not enough to gain the credibility you want.

2. Be ubiquitos – Youtube is a great place to host your video, its quick to load, free to use, simple to upload and ensure your video is available on multiple platforms – there is nothing worse than creating a video then when your potential customers want to see your video & they are using a mobile device or tablet computer can’t view your video because they are missing a plugin or flash!

*Read the rest of this blog post over at www.seanprice.co.uk*

What iBox-Security did

• Information Architecture
• Visual Design with several initial concept designs
• HTML/CSS/JavaScript template build
• Integrate ecommerce solution for trade customers
• Integrate our email marketing solution to maintain customer relationships

Visit Oak Lodge Bed and Breakfast website www.oaklodgebandbinwrittle.co.uk

What iBox-Security did

• Information Architecture
• Visual Design with several initial concept designs
• HTML/CSS/JavaScript template build
• Integrate our email marketing solution to maintain customer relationships

From time to time there are news items posted, special offers, deal and tips to help improve your website and network security two areas we focus on within our business.

We are also on Twitter – find us on twitter.com/iboxsecurity or tweet directly to us @iboxsecurity and say hello!

And if you are really serious about business then you should be using Linkedin.com – well now you can find us there also.

Leave us a comment or send us an email let us know what you think.

This is the smallest and most affordable option we have and consists of

• 500MB disk space – Plenty of space for most small websites
• 10,000MB of bandwidth - Transfer allowance which allows visitors to be able to view your site and all your images
• 2x MySQL databases – All our platforms support PHP and MySQL for dynamic websites and database driven content
• FTP access – As standard with all of our plans, FTP access allows quick and easy access to upload and download your site content
• THIS PACKAGE COSTS JUST £29.50 PER YEAR IF YOU PURCHASE NOW (OFFER ENDS AND PLAN EXPIRES TO PUBLIC 31ST MAY 2010)

If you are looking to move your website to a faster host (because we all know speed matters for Google rankings now), one that is UK based (this matters also) then contact us today and sign up to our Home hosting plan and let us move your site for you at no additional cost.

What iBox-Security did

• Information Architecture
• Visual Design with several initial concept designs
• HTML/CSS/JavaScript template build
• Integrate ecommerce solution for trade customers
• Integrate our email marketing solution to maintain customer relationships

With a vast amount of fresh fruit and vegetable available to sell direct to the public and to local businesses Mylocal5aday was already looking to be an impressive idea, couple that with recurring orders, an informative blog and forum where local fitness instructors help towards getting you on a better nutritional diet, this site needed to perform quickly and be very user friendly to visitors of all ages.

The website runs on Magento a very powerful ecommerce solution which allows the web site owner to populate the store and manage potentially thousands of products and customers effortlessly. The site underwent a vast amount of customizations to achieve the necessary functionality and to tie everything together. Now having taken up an email marketing strategy the website owner can target specific customers, send them special offers on produce and bring back return traffic to increase sales.

The design was inspired by using an old style vegetable truck outside a traditional fruit and vegetable shop with the sun shining and colorful backgrounds to make the site more inviting and attractive to the user base.

What iBox-Security did

• Information Architecture
• Visual Design with several initial concept designs
• HTML/CSS/JavaScript template build
• Integrate ecommerce solution
• Customize the shopping cart software heavily to meet the clients requirements

“As a forum owner who’s coding abilities are nil, I’ve had to rely on programmers to implement the various upgrades and forum mods necessary to keep my site up-to-date and secure. Over time my site started to experience quite a slowdown in speed, which was beginning to really annoy the existing members, and myself.

The only option was to find a professional hosting company who could also look after the site security and perform upgrades etc. when necessary. After a lot of searching I was fortunate enough to discover iBox-Security, who have proved to be exactly what I need.

My forum now runs at a cracking pace and other niggles such as security issues have all been addressed.

Nothing has been too much trouble for the guys at i-Box, and I’m particularly impressed by the fact that all questions and concerns I posed were all dealt with in a quick, professional manner.

If you’re a website or forum owner presently disillusioned with your existing hosting company, then I can highly recommend the services provided by iBox-Security.”
Paul Hruza
The Lone Arrangers Keyboard Forum

And now what with Google using site speed as another factor in rankings can you afford to have your site running slow? How would that affect your site – especially ecommerce where people will leave if they have to wait more than a couple seconds for items to load.

Friday Google officially posted on their blog that site speed is now a certain signal to their algorithm – this means that the speed of which your site loads and its performance will also influence your search engine rankings. So what does this mean for the average user? Well we know that server/IP location of where your website is hosted also influences your rankings (Google uses around 200 variables to determine how your site should rank) speed and location being two of the latest so should you be paying a cheaper hosting company based in the united states and your target audience is in the UK there both factors are going to hurt your rankings.

An average UK user surfing to a server/website in the USA will see a typical response time of around 200-250ms and then the time to download the site from such a remote location, now with a website hosted on UK based servers will see on average a much quicker response time – in the case of our servers we host many clients websites and have a typical response time of 20 – 30ms which is a huge improvement. Couple that speed with the location and this will aid search engine rankings improve – now the next step is looking at your website as a whole – finding out where the bottle necks are, improve the design, infrastructure and layout of the code to improve site performance. There is a lot to take into consideration in order to improve speed – suffice to say its going to make a lot of businesses consider moving away from servers hosted in the states to a more locally based setup.

Read how Google are using site speed now and further more in the future over at the official webmasters blog.