0845 658 1331

Would you lease your company website from its designer?

In our daily travels across the web we’ve come across one of our competitors who are prepared to lease websites to their clients.

On the face of it the concept of ‘website leasing’ sounds a good idea.

From the client’s point of view it means they get a large, complex and potentially costly website for their business for a small monthly fee without the outlay of a large amount of capital. This is great if your cash flow is tight or if you’re a new start-up with a limited budget. As such we can understand why the idea might sound attractive to some companies.

However, we believe that whilst the ‘leasing’ concept works fine for commodity capital equipment such as company cars, IT equipment or office furniture; the ‘leasing’ idea has some inherent flaws as a method funding a web development project.

If you’re a business contemplating leasing your next website, here’s some food for thought.

Read the rest of this entry »

Are you a BT Broadband user and having problems sending emails? Then you’re not alone…

If you use BT as your ISP you may experience problems sending emails from accounts which use domain names that are hosted independently to BT (such as the ones that we host for you and that are associated with your Keyclicks email accounts).

To resolve this issue you will need ‘Open Mail Relay’ setting up on your BT account. To do this you will need to contact BT’s Technical Support people and request to have “mail relay” set up on your domain(s).

This basically means that BT will add your non-BT hosted domain names on to their “allowed list”. That is to say, BT will then permit you to send emails using your domains through the BT network.

Sounds complicated we know, but it isn’t really.

You can read more about ‘Open Mail Relay’ on BT’s website here. Under the heading Related articles click on the link: How can I set up mail relay?

Preparation and time invested in formulating your ideas into a formal website development brief or plan will save you time and money in the long run.

Many companies, both large and small, approach us to design and develop their new company website. However it’s clear from the outset after talking to many of theses companies, that little or no preparation has been undertaken before they’ve picked up the phone to an agency such as us.

This is a real shame for everyone concerned, let me explain why.
Read the rest of this entry »

Be Aware of Google Adwords Phishing Emails

We and some of our clients have started to receive a lot of phishing emails that claim to be from Google Adwords.

These emails generally have the sender as “Google AdWords-noreply� and the subject header of “Please re-activate your account� or similar.

When the email is opened it looks like a genuine email that claims to be from the people at Google Adwords. The email then encourages you to click through to what looks like a genuine log-in web page for a Google Adwords account and then ‘reactivate your account’ or ‘change your credit card details’ by first logining in with your Adwords Username and Password.

The web page you click through to is very well produced and could easily fool all but the very wary as it looks exactly like the genuine Google Adwords login-page. But it isn’t (take a close look at the web address).

These emails and the resulting login pages are not from Google, but are illegal phishing emails designed to collect account Usernames and Passwords from unwary Google Adwords customers.

Once the Username and Passwords have been gathered, the User’s real Adwords account is accessed and credit card information is stolen by the people sending the phishing emails out.

If you receive such an email, delete it immediately.

If you feel you’ve been fooled into giving your Username and Password (it’s an easy trap to fall into) – then immediately go to your Google Adwords account and change your password.

Be vigilant.

Here at Keyclicks Towers, most of us are PC users as opposed to Mac users. It’s nothing personal: it’s just the way we’ve been brought up. Notable exceptions to this ‘norm’ are our graphic designers such as Kathryn and Dimitri, who like most creative designers have being using Mac computers all their working lives (the design industry is traditionally a Mac stronghold).

Still, we don’t think any less of them!

Read the rest of this entry »