Ozbon Articles

Today, we’ve joined up with the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). Initially it’s an experiment, and we’ll see how it goes.

The benefits on offer to a business through being a member of the FSB certainly make it worthwhile though - particularly if you have employees, but even as a one-man business, it’s got plenty of benefits. A whole raft of free legal advice, should you need it, on all aspects of business - employment law, business law, taxation law and many others.

In addition, as a member of the FSB you can get free business banking with the FSB - something that is likely to pay the FSB membership costs on its own.

At the moment the membership costs £30 to join, and £120 per year.  We think it’s likely to be worth it.

When we design a site for a new client, one of the hurdles is always to get that site seen by Google. If it’s a brand-new site, that’s even more complex.

Submitting the URLs to Google (or any other search engine) is usually a waste of time - it can take weeks or even months to get Google to index the site in that way.

What we find works best is to have a link to the site from our client pages, which Google indexes on a regular basis.  Once Google has followed the link, the new site will start to be found on Google.

Recently, we’ve worked with two completely different clients who have both somehow managed to pick remarkably bad hosting companies for their websites. In light of this, a few pointers for finding a decent hosting company.

• Check the hosting company’s website. If they can’t do this correctly (for example, non-working links, out of date content, etc.) then avoid them like the plague.
• If the hosting company make things incredibly difficult to do the simplest tasks, avoid them. Examples of this that we’ve seen include refusing to have a control panel for your domains and web set-up, instead preferring to do everything through their own technical staff. It’s also included security authorisations that needed to be faxed or posted through to the company
• If the hosting company provides non-standard (or even in one case recently, no) site management tools - WebLog analysis, so you know how many visitors your site is getting, or a Database management front-end like PHPMyAdmin - then avoid them.
• If the hosting company try to tie you in to long-term contracts with heavy penalty clauses for moving sites away - yes, avoid them.

Here at Ozbon we use (and recommend) a couple of highly reputable hosting companies, 34sp in the UK and DreamHost in the US. We’ve been using both of them now for upwards of four years, with no problems or issues at all.

There are plenty of other hosting companies out there, and we can (and do) work with most of them. But it doesn’t take much to check that they are at least vaguely competent.