New Business cards

I was excited recently to receive the business cards that I ordered a few days ago.

I heard about VistaPrint.co.uk from a flyer in an Amazon package. There was a special offer available to get 250 free business cards, with the only payment for postage. In the end I went for an additional 250 cards in a different design as well, but all in all I ended up getting 500 business cards for less than £6.

Without getting all American Psycho on your ass, they seem decent quality, although perhaps on the colour card, the Times New Roman business slogan on the purple background could be a little clearer. All-in-all I think I got value for money, but the proof of course will be to see how many enquiries I get from handing these out.

I noticed that VistaPrint also offer a large variety of other marketing materials such as pens, mugs, keyrings, stickers, personalised notepaper etc. so they are worth a look. Oh, and by the way, I only selected the “slow delivery” (21 days) to reduce cost, but they arrived within a couple of days anyway.

My two new business card designs are pictured below – let me know what you think!

The free design:

White Business Card for Tripe Sites .com

The slightly more expensive design – (I managed to find one with lambs on!)

Colour Business Card for Tripe Sites .com

Off topic: Outlook tasks, notes on iPhone

Off topic:

Hurrah! Tasks and Notes synching from Microsoft exchange to iPhone!

I have a iPod Touch, that I sometimes use for checking my work email, which runs on Microsoft Exchange server. While the iTouch (and iPhone) can sync emails, calendar and contacts with Microsost Exchange as standard, up until now it has not been possible to sync the Outlook Task list and Notes.

However, I just noticed a new app in the Apple store which does just that: iMExchange https://sites.google.com/site/rerlsoft/imexchange

As an added advantage it also lets you turn the Out Of Office message on and off, and edit what it says (and end to that annoying feeling of turning your laptop off at the end of your final day before going on holiday, only to realise that you’ve forgotten to set the OOO!).

Finally I can use my iTouch as a pda which is connected to all areas that I normally access through using Outlook: Emails, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Out of Office assistant.

NB: They do have a caveat that connection depends on your Microsoft Exchange settings (in a corporate situation this will be set by your IT department ), but they do provide a free viewer-only version of the app so that you can check that it connects before committing to buy (currently £4.99).

Thank you RERLSoft!

About me

I’ve added some personal facts to the About me page, so click the link on the navigation to see them.

Site update: I actually have some pages now

I made a few more updates to the site this evening. I added:

• an FAQs page,
• a Contact Us page, with a form and everything (thanks Microsoft!)
• a price list (as yet unpopulated)
• and a section where I will be sharing my pearls of wisdom for free.

Not to fear though, loyal blog reader, you’ll always be my favourite, and will get all the good stuff first .

Site update: construction logo, SEO and cute lamb!!

I got round to doing a bit of work on the site this evening.

Firstly I used Google Image search to find a generic “Under Construction” logo that I added to the first paragraph of the home page.

Secondly I found an image of a lamb from Wiki Commons,  and editted it using the free trial version of LightBox Image Editor. I particularly like the ‘clone brush’ tool which allowed me to brush out some of the background without a clumsy cut and paste of a different area of the image. I added this updated image to the ‘Theme – custom image’ area so that it would appear as the main image in the header.
After I saved and tested this, the image seemed to take almost a second to load, so I reopened the image using Paint and saved it as a GIF format. This decreases the file size of the image dramatically (from 40kb down to 8kb) and does decrease the quality significantly too, but in this case not noticably.

I also added my homepage metadata in the ‘Page Editor – Page properties’ section. Metadata is “data about data” – in other words it is information about what is on the page. Two important pieces of metadata for search engines are the keywords (that many search engines use to categorise the page) and the description (again, some search engines use this of categorisation, and some such as Google show this as the page description in the search results). Making sure your pages have relevant keywords and description is basic “Search Engine Optimisation” (SEO).
Another thing I did a few days ago was to notify the main search engines about my site.

• For Google you can do this at: http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?continue=/addurl,
  For Bing (Microsoft’s new search engine) you can do it here:
• http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx,
• For Yahoo the page to submit your site is: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/uk/free/request, which requires a Yahoo account;
• Ask.com doesn’t allow you to submit your site.

It is worth noting that all these engines will automatically pick up your site eventually provided that some other sites on the web link to it. As I can’t guarantee this in the early stages of my site setup, I thought I might as well get the ball rolling by submitting it.

Footnote: the current market share for search engine searches in tke UK is roughly 90% Google, and 3-4% for MSN/Bing, Yahoo and Ask/AskJeeves.

Why bother?

So what has lead me to the decision to spend time on this whole debacle?

I was reading some articles on starting a side business and liked the idea of setting up a side business as a hobby.

I have a full time job working for a global IT consulting firm, which often takes up considerably more of my time than a standard working week, but occasionally does leave me with some free time. I also sometimes find myself away on business with not much to do in the evenings other than surf the interwebnet, and there there’s only so much of the “other stuff” available on the web that one can handle…

My specialisation within my day job is interactive marketing (a.k.a. digital marketing), but because our clients are generally large multi-nationals, this work is often quite high-level (e.g. setting up outsourcing arrangements, advising on strategy etc.) so I thought it might be illuminating to get some coalface experience.

So I am hoping that by undertaking this project I will:

1. Get to play around setting up a website, which I consider to be (at least partially) fun.
2. Write a blog; again, may be fun and a useful experience.
3. Find out about setting up my own business, something which I have been interested in for a while
4. Possibly at some point some additional financial income.

Join me here on my blog, and on my website www.tripesites.com (currently under construction).

What’s the point?

Well indeed.

The purpose of this blog is to document my activities as I attempt the following:

1. Create a side business aimed at providing a service to small local businesses to set up a basic, but effective web presence.
2. Investigate setting up a legal entity for the running of that business.
3. Provide a detailed account of setting up my own web presence.

It has occurred to me that point 3 may well cannibalise potential business for point 1, but my feeling is that you don’t get anything without giving something away these days, so if people can learn from my exploits then fair play to them.

My intention is to post here once or twice a month (I do have a day job!).

I hope also to entertain, if my own humour is insufficient, then I can at least link to amusing cartoons.

Hello world!

First post WOOT!

Hello worldHello worldHello worldHello worldHello worldHello worldHello worldHello worldHello worldHello worldHello worldHello worldHello worldHello world

Etc. Etc.

The purpose of this post is to facilitate my aim of making each post better than the last. In other words I am setting the bar low.