Zarr Blog :Experiences of running a UK web design company

I flew back from holiday yesterday - well the early hours of this morning.  It was a 4 hour flight and I had one of the most cramped flights I’ve ever had and I’ve flown about 350 take offs and landing in the last 5 years.  To put it into context, I’m 6ft 5ins - well a few millimetres under that, but I prefer to round up!

Getting into a seat on a plane in cattle-class/economy is normally not too bad, but airlines seem to like packing in as many rows of seats as possible.  On my flight yesterday, when I was sat down, my knees were pressing into the seat in front.  If i contorted my thighs, I could get one leg, or the other (but not both at the same time) so it wasn’t pressing into the seat in front.

The arm rest (I was in an aisle seat) has a little button underneath that allows it to be unlocked to give you a bit more room, or make it easier to get in and out of the seat.

My partner asked one of the flight crew why my arm rest wouldn’t move.  The cabin crew’s words were along the lines of “we’ve got about 20 broken seats and we are waiting for the parts to arrive” and “sorry, there isn’t anything i can do”.  He also said I shouldn’t worry about DVT as my calf muscles weren’t pressed against the seat so I’d be okay.  Now one thing I hate is someone trying to be authoritive on a subject they don’t know enough about. 

There are a couple of things I fail to understand. 

1. As average heights for people are increasing, why don’t airlines provide enough seat space for tall people?  If the seat pitch (from back of one seat to the back of the seat in front) was about 1/2 inch less or if my legs had been 1/2 inch longer, I would not have been able to physically get into the seat - so what would the airline have done then?
2. Why do people who are about 5ft 5ins get the emergency exit and bulk head seats when they don’t need the extra leg room?
3. Its impossible for me when sitting upright to rest the back of my head against the head rest and infact, the top of my shoulders are about a inch from the top of the head rest.  If the plane hit turbulence, or I got jolted forward, there is nothing to stop me from head butting the person in front as my head would completely miss the headrest in front.
4. Following on from point 1, I think airlines should have a legal requirement to state the minimum seat pitch when you book the flight so you can check that you can fit in before buying your ticket.

The airline by the way was Thomas Cook, the DVT ‘expert’ was called Alex I think, and I’m in the middle of writing a letter of complaint - I’ll let you know their response.

For other fellow tall travellers, please have a look at this link on the Sunday Times campaign for Fair Flying.

I’m a programmer and have been programming in some form for the last 23 years.  Thats makes me sound very old, but I’m not!  I first started programming from a Sinclair Spectrum Basic manual in 1983.

Being a programmer has its advantages in that if I want to quickly knock up a website, I can - and I did that just a few minutes ago - partly for a small business idea, and partly to see how quickly Google can pickup a brand new website and domain name.  I reserved it about 20 minutes ago,  a small 3 page site is up and running and its linked into an affiliate programme - check it at warm legs.

Now you may wonder why I’ve got an interest in that type of site.  Well I heard on the weather this morning that its going to get colder, girls in the office were saying that they found it cold and I also received an invite to an affiliate programme.  The cogs starting moving, I did some checking of domain names and the rest you’ve probably seen if you clicked on the link above.

Bet you are wondering how this relates to the title of this post… Well for a while now I’ve been building up a portfolio of domain names - some quite good names, others have less potential but I plan to get a mini-site up for each domain name, do some basic content for each site, get the sites indexed and see what happens. 

If I’ve got say 100 sites and they each earn £1 a day, thats £700 per week, or £36,400 per year.

It took me about 20 minutes to get the domain reserved, got the site up onto the internet, so we’ll see later in the year how profitable that 20 minutes was!

I’m also monitoring how quickly the search engines pickup the new site as its got backlinks from some of my other sites and on some blogs I’ve read that people have reported new sites appearing on Google within 3 hours…  I’m expecting a week, but I’ll monitor and will report here shortly.

On two occasions this week I’ve had people ask me how often you should submit a site to the search engines, and what do we/Zarr charge for doing so.

If I was ruthless, I could lie and take the money…

However, I’m not.  The answer is that you probably never need to submit a site to Google, Yahoo or MSN as if you are linked to from any site, then you’ll be picked up automatically.  If you haven’t got anyone linking to you, you could always try Google Site Submission.

Just a side note in that if you submit a site using the Google Site Submission tool today, you may not appear in the Google results (even if you do a site:domain.com type syntax) for several weeks.

Just to expand on that, say if your new site A was linked to from site B.  The search engine robots/crawlers getting content from site B would find the new URL to your site A - and add it to the queue of what needs to be crawled.

The when a robot requests a URL to crawl and your site appears, off it goes to pickup your site’s content, indexes the content, finds all the links on the page and adds those to the list to crawl……… and so on.

In hours, days, weeks or months later when it next decides to visit URLs on your site, it will again index the content, find new URLs etc.  You can’t really influence the frequency of visits but the robots will return! 

Adding new content to the site on a regular basis will encourage them to come back sooner rather than later.  To give an idea of how many robots you can expect - one of my person sites thats got about 600 pages gets about 1200 robot visits a day on a normal day.

So answering the question I’ve been asked twice this week: “how often you should submit a site to the search engines, and what do we/Zarr charge for doing so.”

You shouldn’t as it will happen naturally after you first get indexed…  But be sure to add regular content and the robots will come back regulary.

For those of you living in the UK, you may have heard of 123-Reg which are one of the biggest registrars in the country - with lots of customers.

Their prices are low and like most companies, they have a control panel for you to maintain your DNS and other details.  Personally I don’t use them, and never have because I prefer the more comprehensive service of GoDaddy.com. 

But after buying an existing domain name from another person - who had it registered with 123-Reg, getting it transfered should have been a straight forward process.  I can only comment from the GoDaddy control panel, but the idea is that you make the transfer request, an email gets sent from GoDaddy to the administration contact for the domain with a Transaction ID and password inside the email.

The administrative contact then needs to supply those to the new buyer - and also the Authorization Code or EPP code from 123-Reg.

Not having had access to the 123-Reg control panel, I knew the authorization code was needed, but the person I was buying off said there wasn’t one.  In the end, and after searching Google for a while, I found the problem, and the solution.

Whereas 123-Reg make it very easy to move your domains to them, they don’t want you to move elsewhere and even their FAQs omit this common question of “how do I move my .com domain away from 123-Reg”.

The solution is to create a support ticket asking something like “please supply me with the EPP code or Authorization Code so that I can transfer my domain to another registrar”.  Depending on when you make the request, you may have a 24+ hour wait for the reply.

Why companies make it so hard to move their domains away I don’t know.  When someone wants to leave or transfer their services away, they’ve obviously thought it through and made their decision.  Making it harder to move away is only going to frustrate them more and never come back - or even make a blog post!

For those of you living in the UK, you’ll probably remember Summer 2007 as the wettest ever with some of the worst floods in many decades.  This bank holiday weekend was quite a change in that it was hot!  Well about 25C which was a nice surprise (especially with an extra days holiday) when we’ve just had its been 17-19C and rain rain rain for the rest of the summer.

I checked today to see what the traffic has been like collectively across all the site’s that Zarr has developed and Saturday, Sunday and Monday were all down - by about 40% compared to normal Saturdays and Sundays.

Thats quite a drop and looking again collectively across all the ecommerce sites we’ve done, it looks like orders in general dropped proportionally.

Of course, it may have been just because it was a bank holiday weekend, or possibly due to the hot weather -difficult to know for sure, and the only time we normally see a drop to this extend is on Christmas Day.  Even on days such as Saint Valentine’s Day in the evening when people should be romancing their partners, traffic doesn’t seem to drop!

I wrote just over a week ago about what Zarr does to stop spam emails.

We’ve just had an existing customer phone us and signup to using our spam filter. He was pretty cheesed off with himself, and you can see why from how the conversation went:

We get around 100-200 spam emails a day. I thought I was dealing with it okay, but amongst the spam, I deleted a genuine customer enquiry (which came through on a day I was on holiday) and I just happened to come across the deleted email when searching for something else. Although the lead came through about 4 weeks ago, I tried calling them back but they said that as we hadn’t replied, they didn’t think we were interested. I think the work would have been about £5000. ($10,000).

Our spam filtering doesn’t need any changes your end - instead we do a slight change to the domain name to tell it that all email goes through our spam filter first before it gets to you - and no changes needed on your end to Outlook.

If spam is becoming a problem, why not give us a try?

Google… the god of search engines.   Its got the highest market share, its releasing new products every few months (take a look at Google Sky announced today), but there isn’t a quick or easy overnight solution to getting your site to the number 1 spot, or first page of Google.

 There are from what I recall in a The Times newspaper article, over 120 pieces of data that contribute to your overall score or pagerank.  What these are is a closely guarded secret (a bit like the Coca Cola recipe) known only to a select few at Google.

However… In the SEO world there are a handful of respected and experienced SEO people who’ve contributed their comments to what the top ranking factors are for Google.  I won’t duplicate what they’ve said, but its well worth a read

I just happened to be checking some of the numerous domain names that Zarr owns and came across a problem.  When Microsoft announced the successor to Windows Server 2003, they code-named it “Longhorn”, and so we reserved “Longhorn-Hosting.co.uk” and a couple of variations.

 I did a whois search and by mistake entered the .com version of the domain name and saw it had been registered by someone else.  Hmm… I went to the site and saw the following:

The content is identitical to our zarr.com site, even the layout is the same.  Its nice they are promoting what Zarr does, but the links don’t work and definately don’t go through to our zarr.com site.

So what can I do about this?  Well I’ve dropped them an email telling them to remove the content but as the registrant is not in the UK - where we are based - the chances of getting it removed is slim.  I’d guess the longhorn-hosting.com domain is one of many they’ve reserved and sat on - which is fine, but please don’t use plagiarised content from an existing website.

My next port of call is to report the site to Google, MSN etc.  Not sure of the outcome but will let you know.  If anyone has any advice, please let me know.

An American student has developed something he’s called “Wikipedia Scanner” which reveals who has changed Wikipedia entries.  Quite dull you may think, but its shown that:

• Apple have edited Micrsoft’s Wikipedia entry adding more negative comments.
• Amnesty International have removed negative comments from their entry.
• Coca Cola removed comments on the negative effects of its drinks.
• MSN Search added “is a serious competitor to Google” to its own page.

 and there are many more.  Read the BBC news story or visit the official Wikipedia Scanner website for more info.

I don’t think there is anyone I know who doesn’t get spam email. Its a problem thats been around probably since the very early days of the Internet and continues to get worse.

My company provides website, database and email hosting for websites that we’ve developed, and also people who just want to host their own sites with us.

I think we are quite unique in the web-design world as we have our own servers - and by that I mean that we rent the racks, organise our own IP transit, and no-one else apart from authorised Zarr staff can access our servers. A lot of web design companies outsource the hosting to companies like HostEurope - which do offer cheap hosting, but you get what you pay for.

Anyway, back to spam. Zarr provides spam filtering facilities for quite a few companies and using our hardware spam firewalls, we receive each email, do a virus check on it first (using 3 virus definition providers), and then do spam checks - using Bayesian filters, intent analysis, known spam sources and other several other tests. The email is given an overall score which will determine whether it gets blocked immediately as spam, tagged as “possibly spam, but not 100% sure” and let through, quarantined or let through as “looks like genuine”.

Since January this year, the number of emails we filtered each day was relatively constant - about 250,000 +- 20% each day. Then on 28th June, this shot-up to about 650,000 literally overnight - without any specific new clients added to the system. it then stayed roughly constant until a few days ago when it peaked above 1,000,000 for the first time.

The peak and increase seems to be bad receipient and rate controlled emails - where they are targeting your email server with invalid domain names, or one source sending too many emails without a certain timeframe. Luckily, as we filter out over 95% of spam our customers are happy that they aren’t having to wade through a full mailbox each morning.

Zarr charges (at the time of writing) about £35 per user per year to filter email or about 67 pence per week. I’d estimate that if you are spending more than 30 seconds per day fighting spam in your mailbox, then you can benefit from Zarr filtering your spam email.