Zarr Blog :Experiences of running a UK web design company

We’ve been having quite a lot of success with SEO or search engine optimisation of our websites recently. Our core product, Zarr Retailer is optimised for search engine robots, plus includes features to allow site-owners to optimise their site quite a lot without using external SEO resources.

As with all search engines, it takes time to test out new concepts and techniques for improving your search engine ranking without falling foul of any of the points that the search engines say you shouldn’t do. e.g. keyword stuffing.. We still believe that “content is king” and the more relevant content your have on your site, the better - within reason of course. Robot friendly URLs, e.g. www.site.com/friendly-page-url.aspx, appropriate metatags (both keywords and descriptions) and corresponding title tags are all becoming more and more important to ensuring your site gets picked up and ranked for the right terms.

Our Zarr Retailer and also any of our content management solutions are all setup with these SEO features that the site’s owners can update themselves.  As an example, Markes International are ranked very highly on google for terms such as thermal desorption.

I’ll try and write a bit more soon with more info as to what else we do as standard in our web solutions, but in essence, we try to empower our clients to manage their websites themselves - rather than having to outsource small parts of work - be that SEO or even updating the website themselves. 

Zarr is one of the newer types of business where we don’t have any stock to hold, and virtually everything we do is electronic. We keep post to a minimum, we don’t have a fax, we use email as much as possible.

The solutions/sites that we develop are of course electronic too, and each site is effectively a computer program generating the webpages. Even all our brochure websites are more than plain HTML in that they have forms allowing users to make enquiries, menus dynamically show depending on where you are in the site - and we also have visitor statistics that record what each user does such as are they returning visitor etc.

Each website we develop has a core “framework” of code that we’ve spend a long time developing, and its a flexible solution and we put this functionality into each site. As an example, we have a ecommere ‘module’ that some customers assume we develop it each time for them - when infact weeks or months of work has gone into it in the past and we are reusing that previous work. It make take X sites for that to pay off, but you can also compare it to buying a car - the car hasn’t gone through all the EU emmissions testing, NCAP road safety tests each time - instead each car manufacturer spends millions of R&D, ensures it passes all the tests and then each car sold helps to make of £X of the R&D investment.

The program code that we use is our intellectual property and its well guarded and secure within our business. Due to events in previous weeks and months, for any employers out there, I would strongly recommend you do the following to guard your intellectual property as much as you can - and it this applies to any intellectual property:

• Ensure that there is a clause in employee contracts so that anything they develop whilst working for you is copyright to you.
• Put copyright messages into the intellectual property in as many cases as you can - so in the case of programming code, put it into each file.
• Make sure that employees know that they are not allowed to take intellectual property offsite, and what the consequences are if they do - eg. gross misconduct.
• If employees are stupid enough to send intellectual property by email, ensure your company email is monitored/archived.
• Switch off USB ports on PCs so that people can’t use USB pens to copy files.

If you have grounds to believe that intellectual property has been stolen, or taken without permission, suspend employees immediately on full pay while you investigate. and once you have investigated, if you think they have, go through the formal disciplinary process, plus call the police and report it as a crime.

Thats all I can advise for now - if it helps you then fantastic!

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a while, but now its atlast safe to write. I’m a strong believer in working hard, and in general for those that work hard they will reap the benefits - although it may take some time.

What I don’t like is people who abuse other peoples good will, or are deliberately malicious in their actions.

There is a national body called Business Link who provide advice to startup and existing businesses and help them overcome their business problems. In the Coventry area, Business Link are targetted with helping some of the poorest areas, or areas that have been identified as needing financial injection to get them “better”.

Now there is generally funding available from Europe or from the government to help these businesses - but there is a catch to stop the system being abused. If for a project to improve a business comes to, for sake of argument £5000, Business Link will provide funding for 50%, as long as the company provides the other 50%.

The majority of projects that Zarr have done for Business Link are exactly along these lines where companies want to have an new online presence, or even extend their existing website. There are other bodies providing the same type of services as Business Link.

As from a few weeks ago, Zarr has “sacked” a client who had used us to get free funding money on the pretence of us doing work for them. The whole thing had gone on for quite a while (in the league of 1-2 years), but we were dupped into providing the necessary paperwork, but we never received the money and our “sacked” client pocketed it. It came to several thousand pounds that they benefited from.

This annoys me on two sides - firstly the funding money comes from taxpayers money - so people like you and me. So its short changing us. Secondly, its just utterly dishonest and a complete abuse of the system thats setup to help businesses. That money could have helped someone else who was in need of it.

There were some other reasons contributing to us sacking the customer, but I do take a small element in satisfaction that they had to setup their website again. It must have taken them time and money and I would guess quite a bit of stress and hastle.