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Web basics – Your first small business website
May 27th, 2010
Small business websites are an essential marketing tool that no small business should be without – but there are so many options out there, how can you decide which is best for you? Firstly, lets narrow down the question a bit – if your business is to sell only online, you’re going to need an e-commerce site and that is a whole new post in itself, so for this one, we’re going to look into ‘brochure’ sites only – we’ll do an e-commerce one soon though!
So what are the options for your first small business website?
Online site builder - there are a good few of these around now, most are part of a web hosting package (you’ll pay them £5 per month to host your site and they’ll give you the site builder to use ‘free’), others are independent of the hosts and will let you use it free if you let them put their adverts on the finished site or otherwise they’ll charge a set fee for you to design your site.
Plus points - it’s inexpensive as a way to get online; you have full control over the text that goes on the site; there’s normally a wide range of templates available; you don’t need any real experience to use them – if you can use Word, Powerpoint, etc you should be fine; it’s fairly quick to do.
i-phone vs htc desire – the great office debate
May 17th, 2010
Well, after much discussion (arguments) about which new phones to get, the office has been devided into the i-phone camp and the htc Desire camp – and neither are willing to give on the ‘which is best, i-phone or Desire’ argument! There were a couple of i-phoneists amongst us already, who managed to push the undecided onto the darkside of apple, but for the rest, the new htc desire seemed to be the way to go. The basics are covered fairly equally on both phones – e-mail, browsing, social networking, etc – but which is best, the HTC Desire or the i-phone.
i-phone 3GS vs HTC desire – technical specification
I’ll not bore you with the in-depth numbers for each (because they’re all over the net already), but the HTC takes it on all of the important ones – bigger (and higher resolution) screen, higher resolution camera (with flash), more system memory, faster processor, expandable storage memory (up to 32gb), ability to multitask (run more than one program at once). The physical size and weight, there’s nothing in it and the battery life seems to be much the same either way. So all in all, I’d say a win for the HTC….
i-phone 3GS vs HTC desire – operating system
The i-phone’s been around for a good while now in various versions and the OS (the bit that runs the phone and the bit you interact with to open apps) has been refined but not greatly changed over the years – and to be fair, it works very well. The whole point in an operating system is to let you get at the things you use as easily and quickly as possible
Safety basics – Risk Assessments
May 14th, 2010
Due partly to our compensation culture and also hopefully a genuine desire to make the world of work a safer place, all companies need to manage their health and safety to some extent. Producing risk assessments for the tasks you undertake, or for your overall working environment, is normally the first step and it isn’t as daunting as some people would have you believe. For most small businesses, risk assessments are a simple document that can be produced by anyone who can work logically through a series of steps – some reading is useful to be able to identify the hazards, but we’ll get to that later.
The five risk assessment steps.
Step 1 – Identify the hazards – basically, walk around your place of work and make a note of anything that has the potential to cause someone harm, or if you are assessing a specific task, think through the steps involved in completing the task and consider which aspects of each stage could cause harm.
Step 2 – Work out who could be harmed – for each of the hazards you identified above, think about who could be harmed. Consider your workforce as a whole and also specific people – someone who is pregnant, for example, could be harmed by something that is unlikely to harm anyone else. Think about visitors, members of the public and anyone else appropriate to your business circumstances.
Step 3 – Assess the risk and decide what to do about it – the risk is basically the likelyhood of someone who you identified in step 2 being harmed by one of the hazards you identified in step 1 – look at each hazard, consider what you are already doing to make it safe and then look at what you could do to reduce the risk further – looking at ‘best practice’ examples will give you some ideas. To reduce the risk
