Choosing a domain name

Using your domain name for additional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Most companies and organisations want to have a  domain name that matches the name of their business, club, organisation etc.

This makes good sense if you are a big multinational company as people will specifically want your goods or services and can make a guess at what your website address is.

What if you are a small organisation that isn’t well known around the world?  Most people will be completely unaware of your existence or what it is that your are offering to the world.

The domain name of your site is processed, along with the rest of the text on your site.  Most search engines give text found in the domain name relatively high rankings.  For this reason, it is a good idea to try and utilise this opportunity if at all possible.

Review your top search phrases you deduced for your site and try and find a corresponding domain name that has not been taken.  For example, let us imagine your site sells shaving brushes and one of your top phrases is badger shaving brushes (NB: in case you didn’t know, all the best shaving brushes are made from badger hair).  You could have a look to see if the domain name www.badger-shaving-brushes.com (or similar) is still available (it was when I looked).

Note the use of hyphens in my example.  These give a better result than underscores because most search engines assume underscores are part of the word whereas they will split the domain name up into constituent words if ir contains hyphens.

There is nothing to stop you using a domain name that does match your business or organisation name as well.  Nothing to stop you linking the two domains together.  Ask you hosting provider for advice on how to do this.

Domain name extension

Commercial websites should use an extension of .com or .co.uk (for United Kingdom – corresponding extensions are available for other countries).  If using a country-specific extension, only use the one that is relevant to your own country.

Non-commercial ventures are still free to use .com or .co.uk (etc) or could also consider .org or .org.uk (for UK, corresponding extensions available for other countries).

If your website relates entirely to Internet matters then the .net extension is also acceptable.

Personally, I would avoid using any of the weird and wonderful new extensions such as .biz, .gb.com, .uk.com etc as nobody seems to take them seriously.

Website navigation

It can be exciting building your own website; there are lots of things to learn and the end product will be the public face of your business or organisation on the Internet.

In this article I will point out some guiding principles you should follow when creating any website.

Stick to a simple but elegant design

Think about a few of the most popular websites in the world such as EBay, Amazon, Facebook or the BBC; their sites are simple but elegant. These businesses realise visitors are after what the site have to offer, be it participating in an auction, social networking, buying a book or retrieving a news report or TV listing and not flashy HTML trickery.

Do not make the mistake of making your site too flashy or gaudy. Doing so is a sure-fire way of ensuring your visitors will leave and seek out your competitors’ sites instead.

Avoid obscure navigation

Don’t add navigation links that are controlled by Flash.

You want search engines to be able to spider your full site when they come visiting. Spiders do this by recognising hyperlinks in your page. Then when the current page has been spidered, any linked to pages can be visited too. Making links that can’t be recognised (e.g. by using Macromedia Flash or obscure JavaScript tricks) may mean search engines can’t pick up your hyperlinks.

If you really can’t live without having Flash navigation, consider putting additional plain-text hyperlinks on the page just for the benefit of search engines.

Don’t overfill your pages

As with so many things in life, when it comes to web pages, less is often more.

By this I mean you will almost always get a better result if you DON’T cram every single piece of acreage on the page with content. Pages with areas of blank space are easier on the eye.

People are often averse to reading large blocks of text without breaks. You should split long narratives up into short paragraphs broken up with subtitles. Bullet points are also good for breaking up longer passages.

Unless your page is on a very specific topic where you are sure visitors will want to read from top to bottom then you should try and restrict your page lengths to 400-800 words. Any less than this and you may find it difficult to optimise the page properly for your selected phrases. Any more than this and you are in danger of putting your visitors off by the sheer amount of text you are asking them to read.

If you find a page has become longer than you anticipated at the outset then consider splitting it into two or more sections. This has the added advantage of giving you additional pages which mean additional opportunities to optimise for search engines.

Avoid pages with just text

You should try and add at least one image or graphic to every page on your site. This has a number of advantages:

• Gives the page a bit of colour or visual interest.
•  Illustrates the point of the page text.
• Additional opportunity for SEO; give the image a meaningful name, separated by hyphens (e.g. view-of-pool-harbour.jpg) and ensure each image has a caption and ALT tag.

Don’t overdo the ads

Many site owners want to make money from their website (sometimes referred to as monetarising). There is nothing wrong with doing this but here are a few guidelines:

• Avoid ads that flash pyrotechnics at you to attract your attention (what do you think when you visit a site with this sort of ad?).
• Use ads sparingly. Having lots of ads will give the impression to the reader that you are only interested in your commission cheque.
•  If you use Adsense, and you are selling a product or service, make sure Adsense is set to not display ads of rivals.

Don’t publish pages with errors

There really is no excuse for publishing pages which contain errors in spelling or punctuation or, even worse, don’t make sense – you knew what you meant when you wrote it but somehow it got garbled when it got written to the page. The solution is quite simple:

Proof read your work several times until you are 100% happy with it. If possible, get somebody else to proof-read your work, especially if your spelling or punctuation is not that great.

In addition to the words on the page, you should check the following:

• All hyperlinks link to where you expect them to.
• All pictures and images are present and contain ALT text and captions (don’t put ALT text on things like company logos – the text is read out by software products for the visually impaired).
• Check each page displays correctly in all the major browsers. Don’t assume because your page looks ok in the browser you normally use that it will display properly in all browsers. Internet Explorer is notoriously flaky in its adherence to browser standards. You should, as a minimum, check your page in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome.

Don’t concentrate on the homepage

Look on every page on your website as an opportunity to appeal to search engines.

Don’t put all your efforts into you home page and then add your other pages as an afterthought; each and every page on your site should be aimed at one particular aspect of your subject matter and should have as just as much love devoted to it as other pages on your site, including the home page.




Beginners guide to SEO

Search Engine Optimisation definition

Search Engine Optimisation (or more often just SEO) is the name used to describe a set of techniques for making web pages attractive to Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.  The better your pages are optimised, the more likely they are to appear near the top of search engine unpaid (sometimes referred to as organic) listings.  The nearer the top of listings you appear, the more visitors you will receive and the more visitors you receive, so long as you are optimising for the right phrases, the more money you will make.

Why is SEO required?

Think about how you yourself use a search engine.  When you are shown a page of results, how often to you venture beyond the first page or two?  If your answer to this is ‘not very often’ then you can appreciate how desirable it is to get one’s pages into this position.

You may be  thinking that is must be extremely difficult to get to the top of the listings if everybody is striving to be in this position.  This would indeed be true if everyone was trying to get to the  top with exactly the same phrases.  This is where SEO comes in; if you target your pages at phrases that precisely define what the page is about then not only will the competition for those phrase be a lot less but the traffic you do attract will be targeted exactly at what your page is about.

Different types of SEO

Local SEO

Local SEO is required for businesses where geography is an important factor.  For example, tradespeople, schools, garages are all primarily interested in customers from the same geographical area.

National SEO

For a lot of items, for example; books, DVD’s, clothing and kitchen appliances, you don’t really care where the business is based.    You are interested in getting the best price or service.  As long as the business can get the product or service to you in an acceptable time.  This will usually, but not always, mean the business is based in the same country as you.

International SEO

At the other end of the spectrum, some businesses are truly international and aim to promote their goods and services worldwide.
Downloadable goods such as software and  e-books are ideal as they can be downloaded straight off the page after payment has been received.

International SEO is certainly possible but there are a lot of additional problems that need to be addressed if you want to trade globally:

• Your site needs to cater for different languages.
• Postage prices will differ depending on where you are shipping to (downloadable products get round this problem of course).
• There may be legal or regulatory issues depending on country; for example mains electricity in the United Kingdom runs off 240 volts whereas most other countries run off 110-130 volts.
• There may be customs or excise issues when  goods enter countries.
  

  Search Engine Optimisation

What is  the cost of SEO?

The price of an SEO campaign can vary immensely.  There are companies that will be more than happy take on the  job for you but this can be expensive.

With a little study, you will be able to perform a lot of the SEO tasks yourself.  If you do want to handle  your own SEO then here are a few things for you to consider:

1. Think carefully about the keywords for each page on your website;  what phrases are you targeting? How competitive are they?
2. Make sure your website is SEO friendly – links should be plain text hyperlinks so search engines can follow them when they spider your site.
3. How much time and effort are you prepared to put in?  Don’t let SEO become an obsession; being on the first page is one thing, being at the very top of the list is more difficult as large companies have departments devoted to getting their sites at the very top.  If  you are spending time optimising your site then this is time you can’t spend running your business.

SEO is a complex subject; if you are not prepared or are not able to commit the time and effort optimising your site then you are probably better off enlisting consultancy services to get you going.  Be careful to agree exactly what you are getting and how much it is going to cost.

Pay Per Click

Google makes a fortune with their Adwords PPC (Pay Per Click) service (other search engines have similar offerings):

Google Pay Per Click example

Free, or organic, listings are shown at 1.  Pay per Click entries are shown at 2; these are where people are prepared to pay whenever someone clicks on their link.

The pink listings at 3 are the top entries  from the PPC program.  Entries for this section are determined by how much that client is prepared to pay ‘per click’ as well as how well their ad has performed historically; namely the Click-Through-Rate or CTR.

Pay-Per-Click is certainly an option for generating traffic but it is a completely different ball-game to optimising webpage for free listings.

Even if you decide to go for PPC, I recommend you still optimise your pages as best possible; a lot of people don’t trust PPC ads as they know the site will be trying to get their money out of them.



5 reasons why you need a website

More than half of all small to medium sized companies in the United Kingdom don’t have a website.  There are probably a number of reasons why so many don’t have a web presence, such as:

• A lack of understanding of what is required to get on the net.  This attitude is probably more prevalent in older people.
• A perception that a website is not required; “we have always got by in the past so why should we go to the effort and expense if we don’t need it?”.
• Failure to understand the advantages of being present of on the Internet.
• You may have heard stories from people you know who have parted with their hard-earned cash for a flashy website, only to be disappointed by the result.

In this article, I will try and impress on you the advantages of having a website as well as explaining how to get you own website up and running which won’t break the bank, will be effective and which you can run yourself.

Drumming up business

A website is by far the most c0st-effective way of publicising your business.  With a bit of effort, you can optimise your website so it ranks well on search engines such as Google for phrases relevant to your business.

Selling goods and services

Over the last 5 years, the volume and variety of what has been sold on the Internet has skyrocketed.

Around the turn of the century, buying on the Internet was considered a dodgy proposition but nowadays more and more goods and services are being sold online.  Groceries, electrical goods, antiques, cars and many others.  Sites such as EBay have  also done a lot to make buying online safe and acceptable.

Even if you don’t think the goods or services you supply are suitable for online sales or if your service is geography dependent, for example you offer a professional service to your local area, you should consider trying to promote your sales online.

Keeping in touch with your customers

A website offers an excellent way of keeping in touch with your customers.

You can either offer a form on a page on your website to invite visitors to leave you their contact details.  You can then email them details of new products or services as they come available.

A neater way to stay in touch with customers is to offer RSS feed.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  If somebody signs up for your feed then their RSS reader will alert them whenever you make an update to your site.

Your competitors have one

As time goes on, more and more companies and organisations, including your competitors, will be online.  Also, more and more people are relying on the Internet to do their research before making a purchase.  If your business is not accessible on the web then you are denying yourself the opportunity of showing these people what you have to offer.

It doesn’t cost as much as you think

It is now extremely cheap to get yourself online; a lot of the software required for building and running a website is either free or available at very low cost.  If you are prepared to put in the effort yourself (and you  should – its your business after all) then you can also keep the development costs to a minimum.

Heading tags

Heading tags are very important for emphasising important phrases and terms on your webpages both for human readers and for visiting search engine spiders.  This article gives you some guidelines on how to  use them on your webpages to increase your SEO.

What are heading tags?

Headings are added to source of webpages by embracing the text in ‘tags’, like this:

<h1>Here is some text in Heading 1</h1>

This example shows how to display text in ‘Heading 1′ , which is the biggest heading; progressively smaller headings, from h2 down to h6 are also available.

How a particular heading type is rendered in a visitor’s browser is determined by the style which is defined separately, either in the head section of the page or in a separate file known as a cascading style sheet or (CSS).  NOTE: If you are defining a style for a site with multiple pages then it is considered better to save your style information in a CSS.  This means if you need to change your style then you only need to change one file and the changes will be rippled through to every page that uses that style sheet.

Although it is possible to specify how text looks by using font, size and colour tags, this practice is discouraged in favour of using h1 – h6 tags and then styling h1-h6 in your style sheet as mentioned above.

Heading tags and search engines

You should use H1 for the top title on your page.   Human readers and search engine robots / webbots will expect the most important phrase to be in an H1 tag and progressively less important phrases to be in correspondingly lower heading tags, like this:

Most important thing about the page

First sub heading

xxxx xxxx xxxx x

Second sub heading

sub-section 1 of second sub-heading

xxxx

sub-section 2 of second sub-heading

xxxx

and so on.

You should take the opportunity to use the heading tags for important key words or phrases for the page you are on.  Try and get a key phrase as the first, or only words on the tag and make sure this key phrase is included in your meta tags for the page as well.

Don’t waste the heading tags with stuff like ‘welcome to…..’ or ‘home page’ which will do absolutely nothing for your search engine standings.

Offsite promotion

In the 21st century the word ‘online’ is the most talked about word. You come across this word in offices, homes and on the street. It is the also the most frequently typed word. Among all this ‘online’ talk, one tends to forget that he owes his literacy to the print media. A German goldsmith named Johann Gutenberg started a revolution in 1439, when he invented the printing press. Every facet of man’s life was transformed. In this age of the internet, let’s not underestimate the print media, which can complement and enhance all our online efforts.

The days of paperless office are yet to become a worldwide reality, and the days of offline work are far from over.

An Offline World

Consider the following: How do you communicate with your friends,  relatives,  neighbours and business associates? Obviously, by offline methods, 90 percent of the times. Our senses are still accustomed to living in the offline world. Our minds think offline. Our actions and living habits are offline. If we apply this mindset to our communication and promotion methods, it will do wonders.

But how?

Do you have a product to sell, or a business to offer, or a website to promote?  Let’s say you are a website owner, how many people know about your website? If your answer is an unsatisfactory “few”, try some offline methods. If your answer is a satisfactory “many”, imagine the boost offline promotion can give you.

Our sense of hearing and sight affects what we speak, how we act and what we decide

How does news about a good product,  a new supermarket or even an effective household tip get around?  By word of mouth.  Word of mouth is a very effective means of offline promotion. Most people would boast about their novelty possessions but would seldom talk about their website. A subtle inclusion of your website matter in a conversation is a good way of letting others know about your website. A mention of your website address can follow. Be it a casual face to face conversation or a telephonic discussion, word of mouth is carried far. What an inexpensive way to promote your website.

Our sense of sight is a gateway to our mind.

Do you use a drink coffee, wear a T-shirt, write with a pen, drive a car, read the newspapers and keep a visiting card? Others do too. How about if your website address could be seen on the things they use? Yes, seen… It has been scientific proved that what we consciously or unconsciously see (and hear) affects the way we act sooner or later. That’s what the multi-billion dollar advertising industry thrives upon. It’s time to stake your claim.

Where would you put your telephone number?

Write down every bit of stationery that you or your company uses and gifts out to others. Be it pens, pen-stands, writing pads, paper-weights, invoices, vouchers, receipts, letterheads, visiting cards, mouse pads, coasters,…..every article can accommodate your website address. Find out ways to print it there. Every time your customer looks at that article, it will create an impression on his subconscious. It will have the effect of a follow-up email.

• Print your website address on posters, notices, notice boards, banners,  fliers,  placards, handbills, leaflets.
• Display your website address on the rear windshield of your car.
• Publish your advertisements in your local newspapers and magazines. Go international if your budget permits it.

writing quality content

Content – the key to a successful website

Good free search engine rankings can only be achieved if you have high quality, original and fresh content.

The best way to produce content is to write your own. I can sense your buttock-clenching at this statement but it really isn’t that difficult once you get in the swing of it. Your site is more than likely related to a subject you know a lot about.

Get yourself into the habit of writing something everyday. Set yourself a goal of writing, say, 500 words every day. If you are unable to commit to this amount (should take about 20-30 minutes) then aim for a smaller amount. The important thing is to get in the routine so you are constantly producing new content.

It is a good idea to take a notebook and pen (or PDA) around with you. Whenever you have an idea for something to write about when you are out and about make a note of it for when you are back at base.

You don’t necessarily have to write a whole page in one sitting; you may have split the page into sections and are writing a section a day for example. If you are doing this then you should only publish the page to your site when it complete.

Review pages on your site regularly. I suggest you don’t let a page go any more than 90 days without reviewing it. When you review a page you should make sure you change something. This may be adding a few extra words or moving stuff around. Regularly updating pages will indicate to search engines that your content is being kept current.

Nine tips for writing web content

1. You probably only have about one second to persuade the visitor that the page is worth reading. You need to get their interest on the very first line by spelling out what is the benefit of reading on, for example, by telling them what they will know by the end of the page or what problem they will now be able to solve. A ‘How to….’ or ‘How do I ……’ format is often successful – if the reader can identify with the question being answered then there is a good chance they will read on.
2. Write primarily for human readers then tweak for search engine optimisation (SEO) later.
3. Use short paragraphs, preferably no more than 100 words; people tend to be put off reading long sections of text with no breaks.
4. Make sure your spelling, grammar and punctuation are correct.
5. People like lists. For example; 10 things you should know about Google free listings or Top 10 techniques for getting to the top of Google.
6. Only use words in common use; if a reader needs to reach for a dictionary then there is a very good chance they will give up and go elsewhere.
7. Try to keep the main article on each page of your to between 400 and 800 words. Any less and you may find it difficult to include all your key phrases without raising the keyword density to a level where the search engines consider it spamming. Many more than 800 and it may put people off reading it. If you find a page has gone over 800 words, consider splitting it into two halves; this gives you an additional page to add SEO.
8. Write content in a conversational manner as if you were talking to a friend.
9. When finished, re-read your content to make sure it makes sense and reads well. If possible, get someone else to proof-read it for you.

Using keywords and phrases

You need to incorporate the keywords and phrases you came up (click here if you don’t have these) into the text of the page. Search engine spiders give most prominence to the words that are nearest the start of a block of text – so don’t beat about the bush – get your main key phrases in as early as possible – don’t waffle on with stuff like ‘Welcome to our website’ or similar as this will do absolutely nothing to your search engine standings.

Save your keywords and phrases in the page’s meta keywords section, separated by commas. You should restrict your list to a maximum of 35 words or phrases.

You should try and use as many of your keywords and phrases within the text of your page and endeavour to get the major phrases in a number of times. The most important thing to remember is the page must read well primarily to human visitors. Failure to follow this rule and filling your pages with keywords with the forlorn hope that it boost your search engine ratings will more than likely have the completely opposite effect and could result in your pages getting blacklisted.

Using Heading (h1-h6) tags

Title tags are used by search engines to rate the importance of content so you should utilise them on every page: Make sure every page has an h1 tag (most important) at the top of the page and assign each sub-heading an appropriate heading tag to reflect its relative importance on the page.

Website press release

It’s catchy!

A press release is a short news-like article with a catchy title, written to describe a particular feature of a company, or a real event that has taken place in a company. It is not an advertisement, but a realistic piece of information used to communicate with the media.

Do you have any distinctive feature of your company that you would like to highlight? Do you have a new product or service that you want to launch? Do you want to announce something regarding your company? Do you have a newsletter to publish? Use a Press Release.

Why a press release?

The demand.

A press release is what the media is looking for, be it the newspapers or the TV networks. Why are they interested in your press releases? Obviously, to make news! Every editor, reporter, journalist or news channel runs out of ideas. But they somehow need to keep going and fill the newspapers or magazines or the talk shows with interesting content. Where do they get that content from? Your press release.

But what about copyrights?

A press release is meant to be circulated, and copied, and reprinted. How else would it gain media coverage and travel far? Who cares for copyrights you are getting a great deal in the bargain?

Free publicity.

Imagine what happens to your credibility as a company when your press release is published or broadcasted! Needless to say, your credibility increases. You not only get free publicity but also gain some good customers because the media is quoting you. Due to media popularity, search engines would not mind putting your material among the very first to appear during a search.

How does it compare to advertising?

A press release is an inexpensive way of reaching the public whereas an advertisement is very expensive. If market research is to be trusted, a press release goes farther and is seen by more people. Also, a press release does not create the hype that an advertisement creates. Therefore people tend to trust a press release more. Even large companies who spend millions of dollars on advertisements use press releases to reach a section of target readers

Writing tips.

Choose catchy title that people can identify with and that can describe your write-up in one sentence. Always stick to real facts and avoid fiction. Write keeping your readers in mind. Send your press releases to the media that reaches your target readers or consumers. Do a lot of research to find out what works and what doesn’t. Find a good press release distribution service that will make your press release available to the right media. There are many free online press release services. Some are paid services. Use the search engines to look for a good one. You may try a free one to begin with and then shift to a paid one. It all depends on your budget.

The right stuff in the right place at the right time! That’s’ what you need to be achieving with your press releases.

search engine opimization

What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation (or Search Engine Optimization they say in the US)  is the term used to describe the activities undertaken to improve the quantity and quality of traffic to a webpage or website by making the site and pages attractive to search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

A good Search Engine Optimisation strategy is vital to any site that needs to appear highly in free Google, Yahoo!, MSN listings.  This article discusses ways we can help your site achieve this

Businesses and business people will often spend large amounts on getting a fancy website up and running without paying any heed to what Google, or other search engines, will think of the site. Only after the site has been live for a period of time, and the returns from the site have been disappointing will they start to investigate their search engine rankings.

If you are relying on your website to attract high quality traffic then SEO needs to be central to its development and maintenance.

Website promotion is an ongoing process; it is not a case of just writing a few pages of stuff and then sitting back to watch the visitors arrive. SEO needs to be an ongoing activity if you want to maintain search engine rankings once they have been achieved.

Our optimisation service will drive traffic to your site.

We are able to offer a full range of services to get your site well placed on search engine free listings:

Assessment and selection of key phrases to target for each page.

Targeting the right keywords on each page is essential for attracting the right sort of traffic to your website.

We can advise what phrases to use for each page based on a number of factors:

• The subject matter of the page.
• Popularity of phrases with other websites.

Optimisation of web page content

• Optimisation of the ‘content’ on the page to complement the chosen key phrases.
• Page titles, description and Meta tags.
• Use of title tags.
• Use of pictures.

Production of web page content

A lot of people find it difficult to write quality content for others to read, even though they know their subject matter inside-out.

Depending on what your website is about, we may be able to offer a service to write content for you.

Website health check

It is important that web pages work correctly if they are to be looked on favourably by Google and other search engines. Pages that contain broken links or contain JavaScript that doesn’t work will soon drop out of search engine listings.

Scheduled updating

Search engines, and humans for that matter, appreciate webpage content that is up-to-date. If you are looking for something on the Internet, are you not more likely to favour a page that has been updated recently than one that has languished untouched for months or years?

Rivals

Keeping an eye on what your rivals are doing can give you ideas on what additional services or products you should be considering for your own site.

Offsite promotion

Search engines, especially Google, consider incoming links highly significant when ranking a webpage. We can help you develop external links in to your site by posting articles to directories and blogs.

If yours is the type of business that requires clients to make appointments or reservations then you will know how much it can cost you in lost revenue if they fail to show up. If you run:

• Clinics
• Doctor’s/dentist’s surgery
• Opticians
• Veterinary surgery
• Restaurant
• Hairdresser
• Accountant, Solicitor or other professional services provider
• Chiropractor, chiropodist, physio-therapist or other health care services provider
• Estate Agents
• Travel services (coaches, trains, airlines, ferries etc)

Or any other business that relies on clients turning up for pre-arranged appointments, then our service can dramatically reduce the number of missed appointments you experience.

What does it do?

Our system will automatically send SMS messages (more commonly called txt or text messages) and/or email messages to your clients to remind them of their appointment. The timing and format of these messages will be tailored to your precise requirements, but an example template might be:

3 days prior to appointment

This is a courtesy message from [your business]. We would like to remind you that you have an appointment for hh:mm on dd/mm/yyyy. If you are unable to attend this appointment then please telephone [your phone number].

24 hours prior to appointment

This is a courtesy message from [your business]. We would like to remind you that your appointment with [your business name] is booked for tomorrow (dd/mm/yyyy) at hh:mm. If you have any problems please telephone [your phone number].

How does it work?

• You define your message templates (i.e. like the example shown above).
• You give us details of your appointments.
• We send the SMS and/or email messages to your clients/patients at the appropriate times.
• We send you a daily email report of the messages sent on your behalf that day (comprehensive information about your account is always available on our website).

How do I give you details of my appointments?

There are a number of ways you can get your information to us:

• Upload them straight onto our website.
• Email them to us.

Details should be sent as CSV (comma separated variable) files which can be saved directly from Microsoft Excel. If you use a software package to hold appointment details then this should have an export facility for backing up your data.

On request, we will provide you with a facility to convert a backup file into a suitable format for our system, free of charge.

It sounds a bit technical. What do I do if I have a problem?

As our client we will provide you with unlimited technical assistance and instruction to ensure you can use our service productively.

How much does it cost?

It is free to join as a member after which you are can use the system to add details of appointments. Please note that SMS messages will not be sent unless there are cleared funds in your account.

We will charge you a small amount for each SMS and email message that is sent on your behalf (dependent on your average volume of messages). There are no licence fees or minimum subscription.

What else can I use the system for?

• Reminding patients about regular checkups.
• Notifying customers that items they have requested are now in stock.
• Notifying patients their results are now available.
• Notifying customers of special offers or events.

Two way SMS will be available in the near future. This will enable clients to send an SMS message to our website which we will accumulate and send to you in email format. There are many other exciting possibilities, such as games and other revenue generating facilities that will be possible with Two-way SMS. If you want to be kept informed on progress of Two way SMS then click here to join the mailing list.

How do I add funds to my account?

You may use a debit or credit card or Paypal. If you wish to pay by cheque or direct debit then please email us and we will be happy to arrange this for you.