January Newsletter
Dear Newsletter SubscriberWelcome to the new look UKFast Newsletter.
We’re starting the New Year with ambitions to work as closely as possible with all our clients and I’d like to thank you for the co-operation we’ve already received in developing our Alerts Manager system further improving communication channels.
Below there are top tips on getting active with cyber crime as well as pointers on creating websites that make users who find you, find it hard to leave you.
The Spotlight this month is on our Internet Innovator envirofone.com and there’s Internet Law news for 2007 in the Hot Topic. So moving onwards…
In this months issue
January@UKFast
As we develop the Alerts Manager, we’re adding new options to allow you to sign up for more than just network information. Shortly before Christmas, I mentioned our intent to include options to sign various contacts up for Domain Renewal reminders and the UKFast Newsletter. This is now available in an easy to use table. To add the option for existing contacts simply click on the relevant alerts to change them to a tick.For adding new contacts, the relevant section is found within the My Accounts tab. Choose to add a new contact and fill in the necessary information. In regards to the newsletter, we’re also interested to know which format you would most like to receive it in. This is why we have made this edition available to view in a browser as well as your email client. Within the add a contact section you can now show your preference for an HTML or plain text newsletter. I’ll be interested to see the results.
The client area has also been enhanced this month by the addition of an SQL 2005 option. You can now purchase SQL 2005 databases direct through your client area in the services section.
In company news we are thrilled to announce that the UKFast registered trademark came through a couple of weeks ago, which protects our name against unauthorised use. We have also finalised our second year of sponsorship for Airwaves-Ducati who won the constructors title last year and after 3 months of extensive testing we have also been nominated for two ISPA awards this year and will discover the results mid February.Starting the year with purpose, Lawrence Jones has highlighted our desire to lead the field online by winning a private auction for the domain name servers.co.uk. We will be developing servers.co.uk as a resource with information about all aspects of business online, concentrating specifically on useful resources for learning more about the technical aspects of hosting. I’ll bring you more news on this next month.
The Phishery
Recently, I have been astounded by the amount of news about spam. Once again it is amongst our biggest online concerns and Phishing is emerging as the most successful and deceptive tool in the cyber armoury. By delving deeper into the subject, I came across a website called the Phishery, run by ECSC Ltd a Yorkshire based Information Security Consultancy.As part of internetdefence.net, the phishery is an automated system for capturing and analysing phishing emails. It determines the phishing site from the email, then visits that site. If the site is still reachable at the time the email is received, then it is "fingerprinted" to determine if it is a phishing site - rather than an innocent site linked to in the email, or a site which has been taken down and now points to some other page for example.
The process is automated. Once a new site has been discovered, it is monitored to determine when it is taken down. It provides a "real time" monitoring service - from the time the phishing email arrives, is processed and the results displayed.
The online repository lets you cross check emails you have been sent to see if they are amongst the known phishing list. Currently there is no facility for sharing any phishing emails you have received that are not within the database but the Phishery tells me that this may be an option in the future.
Take a look, especially at the Repository, and the Realtime Monitor which is bang up to date with fake websites claiming to be everyone from eBay to Barclay’s Bank.
About Stickiness
Stickiness is about giving visitors reasons to return to your site time and time again, with the ultimate aim of increasing site traffic and converting visitors into customers. If your site isn't sticky, your website and the strategy behind it will struggle to achieve success.
There are many ways to make your site sticky. Some of the best are about providing a rich content portfolio, examples of this include:
RESOURCES
Add glossaries, FAQs, links, polls and competitions, information about industry bodies. Build your site up as a place visitors can turn to for relevant information on your industry.
NEWS
Provide constantly updated industry news and company news to keep pages fresh. Provide an RSS feed to this also so that people are drawn back to your website through a new avenue.
BLOGS
Create a community, people like to share their views and make themselves heard and at the same time you can build up your opinion as an expert in your field.
PODCASTS
An extra service that shows commitment to your sector and like Blogs and News feeds allows you to build a list of subscribers who will be reminded of your site when they are not on it.
NEWSLETTERS
Remind your customers of what is available to them on your site, using links to current information or user interfaces – such as the Client Area!
Once you've determined who's looking at what and for how long, the key is to adapt your site accordingly. This may involve providing more pages with certain types of content, and even starting to put advertising banners on those pages to prompt sales.
If you don't measure stickiness, you can’t manage it. Knowing what visitors want more of helps to drive your marketing strategy and your return on investment.
Back to top
UKFast’s Internet Innovator – envirofone.com
We’re very protective of our Internet Innovator award and don’t give it up easily. With our privileged viewpoint on the industry we know that there are dozens of you pushing the limits and pioneering products that shape the online landscape. So our innovator has to prove an ability to drive a product forward whilst setting trends in motion that have a tangible impact on our lives in the real world.This said, envirofone.com won our judges over with the same speed that it’s capturing Europe with right now. Still less than a year since its official launch, the mobile phone recycling scheme has grown ahead of all expectations. Chief Executive of Eazyfone Group, Pete Petrondas was not the first to trial such a project but he added the magic ingredient.
Petrondas has done what every great salesperson aims to do. He has created the ‘win win’ situation. We’ve been able to give our old mobile phones away to charity for years if so inclined but suddenly there’s a way to recycle your mobile and get either credit with a major high street chain or cash in hand. You do your bit and you get what seems like something for nothing. It’s a no brainer.
I’ll bet that people across the UK now choose their new mobile phone deals based on how much they will make for said phone when they upgrade in a years time. The whole nation has got involved and it’s little wonder Petrondas and his team have already made inroads into Europe.
Naturally, one of the things we love about this business idea is that communication is almost completely Internet based. The process provides recyclers with feedback at every stage of the trade-in process from the moment their phone arrives to their receipt of cash or credit. Growth has also been helped by a rather shrewd marketing campaign that includes the employment of sister websites and a partnership with the free paper Metro that lands in the lap of envirofone.com’s perfect demographic every morning. Having tried and tested its technology with the mass consumer market envirofone.com is now offering own brand, white labelled online solutions to third parties.
The recyclers and the mobile using public are not the only ones that benefit either. Every mobile phone that the company redistributes to developing nations helps to reach the United Nations Millennium technology goals. So really it’s win, win, win.
Internet laws for web transparency
While researching businesses online I’m constantly amazed at how many websites do not display tangible information about themselves. It doesn’t inspire confidence when a site lacks obvious details of where the business is based, what the official company name is, or even, who owns it.As far as I’m concerned, if I don’t know who you are, I won’t buy from you, or pick up the phone and call you. However, there’s good news. Our contacts at Hill Dickinson, specialists in Internet Law, keep us up to date on legal developments and I’m glad to say that non disclosure on websites is to become a thing of the past.
From the start of this year the rules on disclosure of a company's details were extended to cover websites and emails. This means that every company now has to ensure that its corporate name place of registration, registered number and the address of its registered office are set out in legible characters on its website and business related emails.
In addition to this, you must also disclose the name of the organisation with which the customer is contracting, which might differ from the trading name and any difference should be explained. The address given must also be a geographical address, a PO Box address will not suffice. If a business is a limited company the registered address must be included.
I believe this is great news for the industry forcing all websites to be more business wise and giving the consumer more confidence in the products that they find online. There are fines for those who choose not to adopt the new rules and further requirements for specific types of sites. Any business with an e-commerce offering has to supply additional information.
I’m hoping that this shift towards transparency will help to bring more consumer confidence back to benefit all UK businesses that do trade legitimately on the web and provide a service that is able to back up promises made online.
If you’d like any more information on this issue please feel free to email me.
I hope you like the new look of the newsletter. We want to provide you with easy to read, good quality information to help you build your online business every month, so if there’s anything that you feel would benefit you, please email me and I’ll find ways to incorporate it in our monthly Insight.
Until next month, I look forward to speaking to many of you and working toward a prosperous 2007 online.
Best wishes,
Jonathan
For more information on the range of UKFast products and services go to http://www.ukfast.net
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