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.

The event held last year aptly named “Wired Weston” at The Royal Hotel in Weston-super-Mare had a great turn out and proved to be a great chance to network with like minded people and talk about business moving online in a town which is very much sat in its old ways.

This February 17th at the Royal Hotel sees the Chamber of Trade and Commerce come back with their 2nd part of the event with “Wired Weston II” – where by this time the event will touch on content from the previous event briefly and then move deeper into how you can benefit greatly from using Social Media on both a personal and business branding level.

We shall be presenting again this year and will be approximately 30 minutes followed by Q&A – we love to answer as many questions as possible. If you are interested in coming along to the event please visit the Weston chamber of Trade & Commerce website, a buffet and refreshments will be provided, no pushy selling to join the Chamber, come along and learn, ask questions and network.

Whether you are an individual that wants to have a small personal website for themselves, freelance website, small to medium sized enterprises or an e-commerce solution iBox-Security can help you every step along the way as we offer a multitude of services.

What we do

1. 
   

   Network/Forensic Security

   
   Network security is our primary focus at iBox-Security we offer services both to the general public and organizations. Our services include computer forensics, bug sweeping, black and white hat penetration testing, secure remote backup, training and consulting.

   In addition to the above services we also have several hardware and software items for sale in our online shop – purchase some of the best computer and network security gear.

2. 
   

   Bespoke Applications Development

   Our software development team develop software solutions that aim to improve your business performance and efficiency.
   Our solutions have fantastic user interfaces and reporting with the advantage of being completely customized to your requirements.

   Our team work with business consultants and project managers to design, develop & deploy software that will enhance business workflow, increase productivity, efficiency and decrease work based stress.

3. 
   

   Web Design

   Our services include web site development & design, ecommerce web sites, Windows/Linux hosting, web site maintenance contracts. In addition to web development we offer email marketing solutions, online marketing/advertising and search engine optimization (SEO).

   We work closely with the customer throughout the design process, gathering ideas, explaining technical issues and helping them to find the right package for them as an individual, or as a company.

There has been for the past few years OPENDNS which has an enourmous DNS table available to the public and by simply changing a couple of numerical values in your network settings you have faster DNS. But now Google last week released their public DNS available for every one to use just as OPENDNS. There are several differences which we shall cover in the weeks to come as Google extends their service further.

In the mean time take a look at NameBench http://code.google.com/p/namebench/ available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux to determine which DNS service may be best for yourself and outperform your local ISP DNS.