Mailr is our new collaborative cloud-hosted email service. It’s a low-cost, high-ability system designed to be an alternative to Microsoft Exchange and GMail for Businesses.

Many businesses are stuck using basic POP3 email accounts that come bundled with normal web hosting accounts; these are perfectly usable email accounts, but they lack any additional features to help your business work effectively. With the steady increase in mobile working, and the desire to be ‘in the loop’ when out of the office, more and more business are looking for email services that allow them to work smarter.

We can provide a lot more detail about the service features, but here’s a quick summary:

Key Features

Exchange Alternative
Exchange Server is Microsoft’s collaborative email platform. For most SME’s it’s prohibitively expensive to deploy and maintain. Mailr offers comparable functionality at a fraction of the cost.

Webmail Client
All your email, contacts and calendars are accessible via an advanced webmail client. Check and respond to email from any computer or device connected to the internet.

Anti Virus on Server
Mailr scans every email for viruses, and quarantines those that it finds, protecting your mailbox and PC.

Anti Spam on Server
Mailr features advanced anti-virus software to reduce spam in your inbox. The filter is configurable per mailbox.

Access Email Anywhere
Mailr stores all of your email and appointments on a cloud server. This means that you can access your mail from any device anywhere you have an email connection. If you read an email on your phone, it will be marked as read on your PC, any email you send from your PC will be in the sent folder on your phone. Appointments added to your phone will go directly into your webmail and PC calendars.

WebAdmin Interface
Mailr offers an advanced administration interface available on the web. You can add, delete and modify user accounts and setup email aliases across your domains.

Shared Calendars
Shared calendars enable you to see what others in your organisation are doing.

Cloud Hosted
Mailr is hosted ‘in the Cloud’. This means that it is always on and is scalable. You never need to worry about how much email you are storing (2GB storage available as standard, extra storage can be added at cost).

Push Support
Mailr offers PUSH support on a variety of mobile devices covering calendar events and email. Most users do not require this, but it is available as an extra cost option if required. A quotation can be provided on request.

Support Levels

The Mailr service is available with 3 support levels with corresponding price points:

No Support
No bundled support from WDL. A nominated individual has administrator access to your domains and can contact us with support issues; the resolution of those issues is charged at our standard hourly rate.

Admin Support
A nominated individual has administrator access to your domains and provides user level support within your organisation; issues they are unable to resolve can be escalated to us. The resolution of escalated support issues is included in your monthly fee.

User Support
All Mailr users within your organisation are able to contact us with support issues. The resolution of user support issues is included in your monthly fee.

We’re very proud of Mailr, and we think it’s worth mentioning that we use it internally for all of our email and calendars. Get in touch to find out more about how it can help your business improve it’s efficiency.

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If you’ve ever tried to manage an email marketing campaign using Excel and a normal email program, then you’ll understand the appeal of having a smart system to do the sending and list management for you. Having the right tools to help you communicate effectively with your hard-won customers can make a huge difference to the outcome of any marketing or newsletter campaign.

Our professional sending engine can schedule your campaigns, manage your bounces, and handle your unsubscribers. You get full reporting on each and every campaign, as well as optional Google Analytics tracking for e-commerce sites (track someone from clicking a link in your email right through to checkout).

If you’re interested in email marketing for your sites or services but don’t know where to start, our team can help you create beautiful emails, focus your content, and help you decipher the reports and analytics afterwards.

Key Features

Key features of the Circulate.it service include:

Subscriber list management
Automatic and manual subscription and unsubscription systems, list-specific statistics.

Campaign management
Create new campaigns with emails based on templates, previous campaigns or completely customise the new campaign.

Unlimited email templates
Additional templates can be commissioned (at cost) from WDL to be used in any of your future campaigns.

Full reporting
Complete statistics on opens, clicked links, bounces, forwards, deliveries and unsubscriptions for every campaign sent (as well as open / click behaviours for each subscriber list).

Website integration
The system can produce a form that allows users on your site to sign up directly to your marketing lists without your intervention.

Self Service
The Circulate.it service is available from any web browser via secure login. This means that you are able to build and send email campaigns yourself (WDL can look after this for you if required, additional charges apply).

Advanced Features

The features described above allow you to get started sending targeted marketing emails to your customers straight away. However, the system we provide is scalable, and we are able to provide you with an enhanced service.

Advanced Templates
We can design and build custom email templates for your use, fully integrated into the system.

Managed Service
If you don’t want to get involved in building and sending emails yourself, WDL can provide a managed service for you; all you need to do is send us your content, and approve the email before it’s sent out.

API integration
Of particular interest to e-commerce providers – ever wanted to send specific emails to purchasers of particular goods or services? The API for our service allows your website to add customers to separate or segmented subscriber lists on purchasing products from your store

Autoresponders
Not heard from a customer for a while? Our service can send a reminder or time-sensitive offer (free delivery? %age off next order?) to customers who haven’t ordered for a particular amount of time.

Initial Setup

There is an initial setup fee (contact us for pricing) which includes the following

• Setup and initial configuration of your account
• Addition of the relevant updates to your domain DNS (this can help reduce the chances of your emails being classified as spam)
• Import your existing customer lists into the system (assuming they can be supplied in a spreadsheet format)
• Creation of a single basic email template, usually reflecting the design of your website
• Addition of a form to your website to allow visitors to signup directly for your marketing campaigns
• 1-to-1 training

This is only a basic summary of how circulate.it can help you to communicate with your customers – give us a call or pop in for a chat about how we can help you to get the best out of your customer lists.

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Honk if you think 2011 went by in a blur (*honk*).

I know, right?

The main question that has been on my mind, as a Digital Marketer, is what does 2012 have in store for SEO, along with the general field of Online Marketing?

Content

What’s the score?

First things first, I know that content will remain King, although a lot more emphasis will be placed on the ‘freshness’ (thanks to the ‘Freshness Update’ Google applied to its algorithms on 2nd November 2011, which affected approximately 35% of searches) and quality (thanks to the ongoing iterations of Google’s ‘Panda Update’, originally launched in February 2011) of the content.

What can be done?

Make sure you update your site regularly with high quality, insightful, UNIQUE content which contains original analysis. Readers don’t want to see re-hashed articles on your site when they could read the original article in more depth on someone else’s site.  Remove or improve shorter articles because it is better to have one longer, in-depth piece on a topic than two pieces of shorter content virtually saying the same things but in a slightly different way.

Make sure you talk about timely topics as soon as they are relevant, to capture users who want information from your site’s point of view about a trending topic. However, there will be times that you just can’t generate enough original comment about a topic to put out a full article on it – in this case, write a tweet/Facebook post/Google+ post to acknowledge the event and here you will be able to at least express some sort of feeling about the event and what it means to your business. These social media posts may well be pulled by the search engines when someone searches for the topic.

However, bear in mind that search engines will also want to display general or historical information about a topic when it develops and pops up in the news again. Therefore, you need to make sure that your site contains ‘evergreen’ content about all relevant topics for which you want to have ‘expert’ status. ‘Evergreen’ content isn’t as time specific so can be read all year round. An example of this might be a ‘how to’ article on a bank’s website, for example ‘How to open a bank account’.

Authority and Trust

What’s the score?

Search engines want to rank authoritative and trustworthy sites well. This is all part of trying to provide the best user experience to searchers when suggesting potential pages to them in search rankings.

If users click through to your site from the search engine rankings, the search engine would rather the user enjoy the experience (website design is also important here) and stay on the site because it is a huge indication that your site is relevant for the search term that made your site appear.

Authority and trust play huge roles in user experience – who hasn’t gone to a website, seen the first page, screamed in horror in fear that just being on the site is going to end up in the theft of their identity and/or credit card details and clicked the back/close button faster than The Flash? I figured the number would be small.

Users are also looking for indicators that the information they are reading is accurate and that the person who wrote it is somewhat of an expert in their field. Are you more likely to click on an article about interviewing celebrities by ‘Parkinson’ or ‘Joe Bloggs’?

Remember that if a user (is logged into Google) visits your site from the search listings, is horrified by what they see and exits quickly back to the search results, Google registers this ‘speedy exit’ and then displays a ‘block this site from the search results’ link for the user to click on. If the user clicks this link, they won’t see results from your site when they next search using the same term (and it won’t reflect well on your site in Google’s eyes). You will have lost a potential customer and will lose traction with Google, who will likely reduce your rankings as a result.

What can be done?

Make sure that your site is designed well and contains accurate content by people who know what they are talking about. Proof read your content to check for factual and spelling/grammatical errors (I will NEVER buy stuff from sites that have spelling and grammatical errors – if they can’t be bothered to proof their text, how careful are they going to be with my credit card details?).

Give your authors an online presence by using authorship markup to enable Google to list your article along with the author’s name and a picture of him/her. Your readers will start to recognize the author (it’s easier to remember a face than a name) and want to click on their other articles when they see them, especially if they had a great read from the first piece?

If you are an ecommerce site taking payments online, register for industry standard security protocols (e.g. an SSL certificate) and display a badge, on your homepage, to show your users that the credit card information they enter will be safe.

Make sure that your site users can contact you and display contact information prominently. This will help because users will be able to see that they can contact someone who runs the site if they have an issue (and that it’s run by a real person/company and not a fraudster who is going to rip them off) rather than clicking back to the search engine results after 10 seconds.

Social Media

What’s the score?

Social media equals lots of user-generated content (blogs, images, videos). Firstly, search engines love new, fresh, unique content. Secondly, because people are looking for this type of content, search engines want to keep the users happy and want to present this type of content in search listings.

Social media is a great way to raise awareness of your brand because search engines will display items like Tweets, blogs and YouTube videos in the search listings. If you don’t have a presence in these areas, you won’t be there for search engines to list when the time comes.

Also, if you can get your users to talk about your brand and share content related to it, more people will hear about you and link to you which should increase the likelihood of being listed in relevant search listings.

What can be done?

Engage with your users via social media platforms, especially Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Do this by posting regularly and frequently. Share great deals on social media sites, tell users about your new blogs/other content.

Encourage your readers to follow your social media pages by adding buttons from sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to key pages on your site.

Also, encourage your readers to share your content with their friends/followers by adding Facebook ‘Like’, Google ‘+1’ and Twitter ‘Tweet’ buttons to your content.

Finally, make it easy for readers to share your content on social bookmarking sites by adding buttons for sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and reddit to your content.
What are your thoughts for how to keep up with Digital Marketing in 2012?

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At the beginning of the year it’s always a good time to have a clean out and shed the mountain of useless rubbish you may have accumulated over the previous 12 month period. It can also be a great time to give your website a fresh coat of paint it has been crying out for since 1997.

apple.com 1997

apple.com 2012

Looks aren’t everything I hear you cry, but having a website that is modern and professional in design can help maintain user attention for longer which, will help push your site up the search engine highway.

Ask yourself this when you next visit a website that you may be making a purchase from. Do you trust that company with your credit card details? What worked 10 years ago may not be working for your site today. Modern browsers are smarter and include features which are waiting to be used. Below is a list of some of the latest trends which will be making a big impact in 2012.

Bright and Colourful is Key:

Neutral colours are great for subtle design elements but bright hues of color can really grab a user attention and make a call to action stand out on your site. It can be difficult when selecting the right colours for a website but the general rule of thumb is to keep with no more than three main colours. It is also important that the colours on your website match your current branding otherwise it can make a logo stick out like a sore thumb.

Typography:

Font style is a vital ingredient with any design. They can help to change the meaning and tone of a sentence. It can be a struggle for any web designer when selecting fonts to use on a new design. Generally we are limited to web safe fonts which can be very generic and lacking in character (pardon the pun!). Luckily there are some ways to get around this. There are many free font archives available which offer a wide range of free font styles. Google offers its own version of web fonts which you can download and use in your new design http://www.google.com/webfonts.

Bigger text is better and if you want to get a message across it is always good to increase the font size. There are many good reasons why increasing your font size can make a big impact on the usability of your website. For example at the age of 40, only half the light gets through to the retina as it did at the age of 20.  The following article has put forward a good argument for increasing the size of the body text on a website which I hope will have a big impact in the New Year http://tiny.cc/4f4kh

CSS3 + HTML5

These two have been around for a couple of years now but with the legacy that is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 still on its death rattle it’s been hard for these new features to be used during the building stage of a website. It is said that CSS3 and HTML5 will be big this year and there is plenty of reason why it will be great move in the right direction.

There are many options available including box shadows, animated buttons, multiple backgrounds, rounded corners and transparent images. All these can help to create amazing new website layouts.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design refers to the development of a website which changes the contents layout depending upon the size of the screen the user is viewing the site on. Why would this be important to me you may ask yourself. Have you recently viewed a website on a mobile device or tablet? Some sites which are not designed for mobile devices can offer a poor user experience and in some cases will not work at all.  Mobile devices currently hold around a 7 percent share of web traffic, which is set to increase by 17 percent in 2012. This, in turn, will only further increase as we enter faster mobile broadband territory. These are potential users which may not be getting the experience you wish them to have from your current site.

For more information:

http://inspirationfeed.com/articles/design-articles/web-graphic-design-trends-in-2012/

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

http://designmodo.com/responsive-design-examples/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20118380-94/mobile-devices-driving-nearly-7-percent-of-web-traffic/

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Your choice of hosting for your website is arguably the most important decision you’ll make in the lifetime of the site. The quality and features of your chosen hosting service will directly influence the performance and availability of your site for you and your customers.

A good hosting package will give you the services you need to run your current website, as well as access to extra services should you decide to expand or reposition your online presence.

A better hosting package will give you piece of mind – knowing your site is secure and regularly backed up means you can focus on running your business.

WDL offer several types of hosting, at varying levels of scale and feature sets. The most common of these are Shared Hosting, Virtual Private servers (VPS) and Dedicated servers.

1) Shared hosting
This is the most commonly used service – we rent you space on one of our managed servers for the hosting of your site. The package cost will depend on the level of services, drive space, and bandwidth your site requires. You can upgrade or downgrade your hosting package to suit the changing needs of your site.
This type of hosting is most suitable for small to medium static or ecommerce websites.

2) VPS hosting
A VPS is ideal if your site needs more resources than is available under a shared hosting package. It allows us to customise the server operating system and hosting environment to allow for specific or unusual requirements. It also offers the improved security of a private server with limited shared systems or resources.
This hosting is ideal for larger ecommerce sites or complex high-load applications like video/media sharing platforms.

3) Dedicated servers
These are physical server machines rented exclusively for the use of a customer. You can put as few or as many of your sites on these machines as you like. Unlimited access to the full resources of a dedicated server can make a great deal of difference to the performance of the hosted sites and applications. The advantages of Dedicated server hosting are similar to VPS hosting, with the added advantage of hosting all your sites and services on your own server where no-one else can influence it’s performance or availability.
Dedicated server packages are offered with or without ongoing maintenance/management agreements as these machines are rented ‘as is’ – you will need someone to look after them to keep them secure and up to date.
This type of hosting is aimed at customers running one or more high-load sites, possibly with additional online services or applications.

WDL will discuss the best hosting option with you when you approach us for a new site, or when you’re moving an existing site to us. Aside from the options above, we can source specific hosting services to match any unusual or specialist needs, such as:

• overseas hosting accounts for localised websites
• cloud hosting for 100% uptime, scalable, business-critical services
• secure online data storage for resource / document hosting
• online media storage with distributed upload systems – capable of uninterrupted uploading of GB’s of data

Acronyms and buzzwords aside, we appreciate that what our customers really want from our hosting is high availability, effective and invisible backups, and the ability to provide a real response if something does go wrong. Knowing this, all of our hosting servers are located in industry-leading datacentres, protected by next-generation security and served by multiple-redundant fibre backbone internet access. Our backup systems image each server several times a day, and can provide a worst-case bare metal recovery in a matter of hours.

We haven’t lost many hosting customers; of those who have left no-one has gone because of poor service provision or support. That makes us proud and more than a little happy.

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Unless you have been in hiding without access to any kind of media whatsoever it would have been hard to miss a QR code over the last few years. You will no doubt be aware of the strange looking little collection of black and white squares that adorn advertisements on bus shelters in magazines, shops and even on the television.

These little square blocks are QR codes and are a ways to embed information. QR codes are now used for any number of reasons by businesses and individuals alike. Dan Smigrod has a comprehensive list in his post ‘101 Uses For Quick Response (QR) Codes‘, which includes business cards with imbedded contact information, websites with secret/extra areas, discount codes for products and to release more content on dvd’s.

Wikipedia states “A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) first designed for the automotive industry. More recently, the system has become popular outside of the industry due to its fast readability and comparatively large storage capacity. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be made up of any kind of data (e.g., binary, alphanumeric, or Kanji symbols).The beauty of these codes lies in the fact that they are completely unobtrusive but can provide direct, location specific information when requested.”

A traditional barcode is scanned and directly turned into a series of binary values read from left to right. Examples of these can be found on any product you find any any shop. QR codes allow the information to be read both left and right, but also vertically. This means it can store far more information.

The four squares in each corner (see image above) provide information to the QR reader (you can download an app on any smart phone – for an Android version try QR Reader for Android , for IPhone try QR Reader for iPhone. They give the camera “anchors” in the image so that it can determine its orientation, alignment, and other features.

Many businesses are developing their own QR codes as smartphones become increasingly more popular and people want faster and more direct lines of communication between the products and services that they they’re interested in.

QR codes provide a quick and easy way for consumers and individuals to interact with the world around them and will no doubt continue to grow as medium of conveying information. WDL recognises the importance of new ways to promote your business and can create a unique QR Code for your business or product and add it to your website, your printed materials, or indeed anywhere you want it!

Contact us for more information about QR Codes.

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Internet scammers are becoming smarter, ever more complex ways to steal your information are commonplace and making safety and security online is paramount. Last week Facebook launched a new security guide for parents, teens and teachers – the “Guide to Facebook Security”.

The downloadable handbook written by internet security experts Linda McCarthy, Keith Watson and Denise Weldon-Siviy and covers topics such as choosing the best password to make your Facebook account secure; taking back control of a hacked account and avoiding phishing (a way of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication).

The team at Facebook say “If you’re not using one-time passwords, secure browsing, or even tracking your account activity, this guide shows you how. It even explains why account thieves and malware pushers want your account.”

Top Tips for Staying Secure on Facebook;

• Only Friend people you know.
• Create a good password and use it only for Facebook.
• Don’t share your password.
• Change your password on a regular basis.
• Share your personal information only with people and companies that need it.
• Log into Facebook only ONCE each session. If it looks like Facebook is asking you to log in a second time, skip the links and  directly type www.facebook.com into your browser address bar.
• Use a one-time password when using someone else’s computer. •  Log out of Facebook after using someone else’s computer. •  Use secure browsing whenever possible.  •  Only download Apps from sites you trust.
• Keep your anti-virus software updated.
• Keep your browser and other applications up to date.
• Don’t paste script (code) in your browser address bar.
• Use browser add-ons like Web of Trust and Firefox’s NoScript to keep your account from being hijacked.
• Beware of “goofy” posts from anyone—even Friends. If it looks like something your Friend wouldn’t post, don’t click  on it.
• Scammers might hack your Friends’ accounts and send links from their accounts. Beware of enticing links coming from  your Friends.

You can download your copy from the Facebook Security Page.

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Last night saw the Colchester Digital group meet for the 3rd time in it’s short 3-month history. Around 25 members attended the informal get together at the River Lodge bar in Colchester.

Members from many different areas of the digital spectrum – software developers, social media guru’s, web developers, digital marketers, SEO practitioners and graphic designers – were among the attendees. Topics of conversation ranged from the Google + social platform to the new html5 markup language and the various projects that members are working on.

Colchester Digital is a Meetup group for individuals and businesses in and around the Colchester area.

Spanning the digital sectors, our members are developers, designers, digital image and video specialists, marketers, PR, social media and SEO experts, and everything between.

The group welcomes freelancers, graduates, experts, professionals and anybody who feels that they could gain from the group, or add something to it.

Colchester Digital members meet once a month (usually the 1st Wednesday) at various locations in and around the Colchester area. We get together to share knowledge, experience and information, and where possible to collaborate on a wider scale. It’s essentially a group of like-minded people who want to grow a bigger and better foundation for the digital community in Colchester.
Please note that you can still join the group even if you are unable to attend a Meetup or event. The group pages allow for interaction with other members and for dialogue to occur, and your suggestions on future Meetups or events are more than welcome. There are no expectations if you join, all we ask is that you give us your feedback and input your ideas when you can.

Future Colchester Digital Meetups will include speakers, trainers and workshops on various aspects of the internet and associated industries. So tell your friends and colleagues to join Colchester Digital. The more members there are, the more you can get out of it.
To join the group, and keep up-to-date, simply go to www.colchesterdigital.co.uk and click the button in the top right-hand corner of the page.

If you have any questions email us at social@colchesterdigital.co.uk, or join and leave a comment.

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Every now and again we come across a quirky little idea that tries to make our lives easier, but sometimes we come across an application – or app as the cool kids are putting it – that is just designed to take away a little bit of stress.

For all Photoshop users this app could be a blessing. How many times have you yelled words not fit to be heard until after the watershed whilst Photoshop is loading and saving your work. This particular app brings in all your RSS feeds each time the loading bar appears, so instead of getting irate you can catch up on your latest news without leaving the confines of Photoshop, making your work a little less stressful – hopefully!

http://www.popuload.com/

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