Business Websites Simplified

Have you ever wanted to create a business website? Don't want to pay out large sums of money?

Our simple non technical guide is the one stop help and assistance you need to create a beautiful looking and professional website in minutes.

Think of a Name

The chances are you know what your business is all about.  Are you selling something, or do you offer a service or trade? Either way your business will need a name and your websites name should reflect your business.  Today's challenge is coming up with a fun and unique name that will be both catchy and say what you do.  The best place to start is to write down a bullet list of keywords that reflect your business. These don't have to be just practical words, but begin with the first things that come into your head. You'll need to register a domain name and it's generally a good idea that the domain reflects your business and most of the time it should be the same name as your business.  Take the keywords you thought about earlier and combine some to see if you can make up and name.  Chances are the first few names you come up with will be taken, so check to see if your website name (domain name) is available. If this is your first website, stick with the .co.uk and .com domain names.  i.e www.mysite.com or www.mysite.co.uk.  You can check if your name is available by visiting a site such as https://www.whois.net/. If possible try to think out of the box to get both the .co.uk and .com

Selecting a Hosting Provider

This is where it can get tricky, but try not to be put off by some of the sales speak on some of the providers websites.  We can offer very competitive web hosting here at DevTeamSolutions Limited and can help guide you through the process, however please do search on Google for hosting providers in the UK and spend some time comparing and seeing what seems comfortable in terms of pricing and ease of use.  We can recommend a number of other hosts if you choose not to go with us, please do ask.  The host you choose with depend on the scale of site you are looking to create and the amount of content and expected visitor numbers.  We would recommend choosing a hosting package that includes a content management system such as WordPress, or similar, with at least 100mb disk space (you don't need that much for a simple business site).

Choosing a Content Management System

In our opinion one of the best content management systems on the market is WordPress. The best part is that it's free. It's open source and updated all the time and allows you to select from a wide range of additional features via plugins and themes.  Some of the plugins and themes are chargeable and often the best themes are not free.  However we can help set-up a WordPress site for you will all the features you will ever need including full search engine optimisation, analytic to see how well your site is doing, and even eCommerce.  We have used many content management systems in the past and have found WordPress to be the best and easiest by far. However which ever one you choose, please ask for a full demo before parting with any cash, and ensure it's not only simple to use, but easy to add new pages and content.  We are also able to recommend other CMS systems, and can even write a bespoke one to meet your exact requirements. We are more than happy to help, contact us today.

Storyboard your website

You may want to do this before you purchase any package to ensure you are not over purchasing.

You will need an A4 piece of paper for each page of your site.  The paper represents a page on the site.  Each page should have a title and you should try to draw roughly what you want on the page.  Don't write any paragraphs or draw the pictures, put in place holders for these.  Ensure each page is specific to the content it will contain and don't try to include too much on one page.

Once you have all the pages you need, think about how those pages will connect with other pages on the site. Take another page of A4, and draw the heirarchy of your site, the first page being your home page, and then 2nd level pages that will likely be navigated to via your sites menu.  Then you may have a 3rd layer of pages under that.  Try not to make your page layout too complicated.

Sourcing Images

You can't just search Google for an image and just use one you find. Often photos are protected by copyright and you could get into trouble by using unautorised material.  There are 2 good options to getting good quality photos for your site.  The easiest and trouble free option is to take the photos yourself if you have a good enough camera.  Chances are though that you are not a photographer.  The next best option is to visit a stock photo site like iStock and pay for some high quality images.  They are not too expensive, but budget at least two hundred pounds for sourcing the right images.  Believe me, it will be well worth it.  The advantage of iStock is that you can get animations as well as photos and videos to use on your site.

5 reasons to upgrade to sql server 2014

We all like to play with the latest technology. Often as developers we find a lot of upgrades being sold to us with a  heap of features we just won’t use.  Sometimes it’s nice to be able to have a plain English list of the more useful items in the upgrade.  I’ve formulated a small list below to highlight some of these features.  Not intended to be a “How to”, but more of a “Heads Up” on the most useful features of SQL Server.

  • From 2012 upwards there is a hidden option to compress the database when creating backups.
    • Saves a shed load of disk space
    • Faster to transfer the backups locally or to another server on standby
    • Backups don’t generally take any longer
  • New Design for Cardinality Estimation (never heard of it)
    • The cardinality estimation logic, called the cardinality estimator, is re-designed in SQL Server 2014 to improve the quality of query plans, and therefore to improve query performance. The new cardinality estimator incorporates assumptions and algorithms that work well on modern OLTP and data warehousing workloads. It is based on in-depth cardinality estimation research on modern workloads, and our learnings over the past 15 years of improving the SQL Server cardinality estimator.
    • In our experience this makes queries 10-15% faster.
  • Delayed Durability
    • Sounds rubbish doesn’t it?  Well it’s not.  The best example I have on this is statitics logging on a website. Most of the time while the data is useful it’s not essential.  You don’t want to slow down the users load of the page just to wait while indexes are updated in your stats table.  By using Delayed Durability you can return back to the user instantly while in the background SQL will spend the time committing the operation.  It does this at the expense of reliability, but TBH you’ll only really loose anything if you restart the server, which you’d hope not to be doing that often.
  • High Availability Groups
    • This is a brilliant addition to SQL 2012 and improved for SQL 2014
    • With Microsoft stating that Mirroring may not be an option in the next version, it’s well worth taking a look
  • In-Memory OLTP
    • One of the most exciting new feature in SQL Server 2014 is In-Memory OLTP, which allows you to move individual tables to special in-memory structures. The performance boost can be as huge as 30x. There are a number of limitations and special requirements for these tables, so they won’t work under every circumstance. But when they do, your OLTP performance will go through the roof. This is better than other in-memory solutions that require the entire database to be placed in memory. You can get more performance by converting existing stored procedures into in-memory procedures, too. You’ll need to test to make sure your tables are compatible, but if they are, you’ll love this feature.