Scalar Enterprises Blog
This page contains news about Scalar Enterprises, work we have been doing for our clients, new features and services etc. From time to time I will also include useful information and articles from myself and from various other sources along with comments, tips and thoughts from myself. Hope you find it useful and why not let me know if you have a question.
Leadership & management training site goes live for trayn4synergy
We have been working with another of our clients over the last few weeks to put together their new website complete with a Content Management System (CMS).
Local business trayn4synergy is a partnership between TraynaUK and Synergy Sailing, offering a range of leadership, business management, management training and team building training courses here in the Solent area.
For more details, take a look at the new trayn4synergy website.
Athena Guardianship and Education – helping education of Chinese students in the UK
Another new client site now live for Athena Guardianship and Education. We worked with our new client’s graphic designers ( The Brand Tailor) to implement this great looking website for them recently.
Athena Guardianship and Education create collaborative relationships with schools and colleges in the South of the UK to cater for aspiring young students from China who wish to study abroad prior to their higher education.
We are now working with them on a Chinese version of the site.
A website is like a plant …
No I’m not going mad, bear with me. Many years ago when I was an engineering student, one of my college lecturers had a unique style of teaching. When teaching a subject, particularly one that was a bit complicated, he would put a lot of effort into finding a real life analogy that we could relate it to.
For me, and all the other students on my course, this was a great way of learning and made his lectures the most popular. It is a method that I have used myself many times over the years since when presenting or explaining various topics.
The plant
You get your compost and a pot and plant a seed, you feed and water it and it starts to grow. You continue the process and nurture it and it continues to grow and develop and eventually it blossoms into a wonderful flower. Everyone who sees it remarks how lovely it is. They also tell their friends about it.
The flower lasts for a short while and then withers and dies so there is nothing to come back and see so no more comments. But, if you pick off the dead flower and continue to feed and water the plant, eventually another bud appears and develops into another lovely flower and so the cycle repeats
The website
You start with the seed of an idea, you research and develop it and your web designer grows it into a wonderful looking website for you and publishes it. You tell everyone about it and visitors to your site say how lovely it looks and how useful it is. They tell their friends about it and they come and have a look too.
If you do nothing more with it, visitors have nothing new to come back to see as they have already seen it so interest diminishes. If you continue to add more content on a regular basis and share it, there is always something new and interesting for them to come back for and to talk about and share with their friends.
Hopefully you see the analogy. So many businesses still have an idea, get a website developed and then do nothing more with it. The idea of “build it and visitors will come” has always been a myth and will continue to be.
You constantly have to work on ways of driving traffic to your website using the many different marketing methods available to you these days. You need to plan it and have to make it worth visiting your site and you have to make it work (convert) so that visitors actually do something (your call to action) after they visit it. You also want to encourage them to come back again and again and also to tell their friends about it.
It is not an easy task and it is constantly getting harder as more and more businesses wake up to the fact that online marketing is a much more cost effective and measurable option for them and they start investing in improving their methods and websites, all fighting for that page one listing on Google.
In addition to this, the search engines (Google) are clamping down on dodgy search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques and poor quality content which again makes it more important to ensure your content is fresh, unique, high quality and better than your competitors if you want to get anywhere in the search engine rankings these days.
Author: Steve Wood of Scalar Enterprises
Time for ChangeWise
It has been quite a busy few months for us at Scalar Enterprises with a number of quite large projects on the go.
Working with one of our regular local business partners, Graphic Designers, Charles Design Associates, we have just completed a bespoke solution for a website commissioned by ChangeWise Ltd, a Southampton based company specialising in Lean Process Improvement.
This was a “high end”, quite challenging design and as you can see, the graphics are fantastic (as always from CDA). The design requirement included a number of animated features to be included as well.
For a closer look, please go to the ChangeWise website.
Another new look for Aura Gas
Aura Gas provide heating and plumbing services around the Portsmouth area and have been a valued client of ours for some years now.
We have continually maintained, updated and added to their website over the last couple of years but they recently decided it was time for a new look for their website so we have been working with them closely to gradually evolve and develop the new design to meet their requirements and then to produce the new site.
It was quite a big project so it took a little bit of time but it went live a few weeks ago now.
Please feel free to have a look and see what you think of the new Aura Gas website.
Updated Scalar Enterprises web services overview video
I guess I am not unlike most other business people but I often find that my own jobs are always the ones that get done last as I am usually so busy working on client projects. Anyway, today I finally managed to schedule some time to work ON my business instead of IN it and I updated our web services presentation and overview video. It also allowed me to try out some new software tools I have recently purchased so it was time well utilised.
Feel free to have a look if you have a couple of minutes to spare over a coffee break perhaps. All feedback gratefully received and if there is something you think is missing, please let me know.
I struggled to find a suitable backing track for the video and eventually found something I liked and worked quite well but then discovered I couldn’t use it due to copyright issues so had to revert to one of Google’s alternatives to replace it so not quite what I wanted but it will do for now.
Cookie compliance … or are you just ignoring it ?
Well the deadline for compliance with the new EU Cookie Law on the 26th of May 2012 has come and gone and a further survey since by KPMG suggests that around 80% of UK websites they surveyed are pretty much ignoring it. Their earlier survey of the same 55 larger UK companies before the deadline indicated that 95% were not compliant.
Other reports in the media this week suggest that because of the last minute change of advice from the ICO, which now recommends that implied consent is acceptable after all, means that many businesses who had taken steps to comply have spent a lot of money on solutions that exceed what is required. In the light of this, it seems that a strategy of “wait and see for a while” adopted by the majority was probably a good one.
General advice now seems to be to at least update your privacy policy to demonstrate you are taking steps towards complying. As a next stage, adopt an implied consent model on your site. For most small sites who are probably only using 1st party cookies for analytics, this should be sufficient to comply. If your site depends heavily on particularly invasive, 3rd party cookies you probably need to do more.
Many have been waiting to see if the browser manufacturers would do anything to make things easier to comply. The FT reported this week that Microsoft apparently stated that they would be introducing a “do not track” option set as the default setting in their next release of the Internet Explorer (IE) browser.
If this was limited to 3rd party cookies, it would have a big impact on on-line advertising. The advertising industry has not responded well to this since it would mean many advertising functions would not work any more unless the site visitor specifically enabled the use of cookies. If it applied to all cookies, it would have a big impact on many website functions and analytics as well. This approach would appear to be a step in the wrong direction and could well be another nail in the coffin for IE who are already losing quite a share of the browser market.
So, if everyone ignores it, will it go away ?
This article is not a statement of the law and does not constitute legal advice. Website owners / operators are responsible for their own compliance strategies, depending on the cookies they use and the nature of the website. The author does not endorse any particular method for gaining website users’ consent.
A last minute change by the ICO on Cookie law
Having reached the deadline today (24th May) for making websites compliant with the new EU Cookie Laws, it is expected that thousands of UK websites will not meet the new regulations.
A last minute change in the ICO guidelines, released on Friday (23rd May), now permits websites to use “implied consent” which allows the act of continued use of a site to be taken to mean users are happy for cookies to be used. This change puts the onus onto the user rather than the website.
This makes solutions a little easier to implement and appears to be an approach generally taken by some larger, prominent web sites (e.g. BBC, national newspapers) who are making steps towards compliance.
The ICO has said it will write to 50 of the U.K.’s most-trafficked websites to remind them of the rules and give them 28 days to comply hence one presumes that this is why such sites are making this effort to comply because such large sites with high traffic would be the most likely targets for the ICO to make examples of.
It would however seem to be very difficult to think that any direct action could be taken on any sites when the vast majority of Government web sites (including that of the Prime Minister apparently) still do not comply.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said in a recent statement it would offer help to non-compliant sites rather than take legal action against them. They also said that May 27th is not a cut-off date but an attempt to help websites focus on their cookie use so it seems clear that this will be ongoing for some time.
Outrageous – no more meetings at the Marriot for me !
Yesterday was not a good day for me. I twisted my back, spilt coffee on my keyboard and the last straw – I got a demand for £90 for parking at the Marriot Hotel because I exceeded my car parking period that I had paid for when I had a business meeting with a client recently at the Marriot Hotel in Portsmouth. My clients also received similar surprises in the post.
I have had meetings there in the past but they have introduced this “Parking Eye” car park management scheme since I was last there. To park, you have to enter your registration number into the ticket machine before getting your ticket. I paid for 2 hours parking which I thought would be sufficient but my meeting overran a little and I didn’t give it much thought until today when I received a demand for payment of £90 including photos with time stamps of my car entering and leaving the car park.
Guess there is not much I can do to contest it but I certainly won’t be using the Marriot again for any meetings, or recommending it to anyone visiting the locality either.
Thought I would pass on a warning so others don’t get caught out. Feel free to pass this on.
More Cookie news
As expected, there continues to be quite a lot of press on this topic as we get nearer to the final deadline for compliance on the 26th of May.
In an interview with Computer World UK magazine last week, a spokesman from the ICO said that it may give organisations with complex website environments years to comply with new EU cookie laws.
They also indicated that the ICO will pay more attention to websites using what they refer to as ‘intrusive cookies’ used for tracking to generate revenues for advertising based on a users’ prior online behaviour rather than cookies used just for simple analytics.
Deputy Commissioner Smith stated that the ICO is also unlikely to use its ability to fine companies up to £500,000 as it believes a breach of the cookie law is unlikely to meet the requirements it would need to issue such a fine. It is more likely that it will write to companies that aren’t taking steps to comply with the new regulation, providing timeframes to do so.
FT.com and Mirror Online, both rolled out Cookie Law solutions today (23-5-12) and are both using pop-ups to alert visitors to the sites’ use of cookies.
Both are in line with the ICO’s advice given in its guidance document where they suggest setting a cookie and then infer consent from the fact that the user has seen a clear notice and actively indicated that they are comfortable with cookies by clicking through and continuing to use the site.
Sources: computerworlduk.com News 18-5-12 , econsultancy.com 23-5-12
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