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January Newsletter

Welcome to the first newsletter of 2008!

We've hit the ground running this year promoting Manchester as a digital city and we’re also offering you an insight into UKFast with a video promo.

This month’s tech tip focuses on adding another layer of security for your solution and the marketing minute gives you some advice on creating the perfect landing pages.

Finally, we’re shining the spotlight on the winners of the Best Community website 2007 - Linux Format.

As ever, please get in touch with any comments on this newsletter or with suggestions for future editions.

January@UKFast

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This month Lawrence Jones, our managing director joined the Manchester Digital council. Twenty one candidates fought for 12 places in the hotly-contested election. The organisation promotes and supports the digital industry in the city. Now Lawrence is on the council, he intends to use UKFast hosting expertise to help promote Manchester as a digital city.

Our video production team have been hard at work on many client projects and in between they’ve put together a short UKFast promo. We’ve included the three minute video for you to watch and get a flavour of our network, our people and our plans for the future.

As well as making substantial upgrades to the Capacity Threshold Monitoring system, our R & D team has been busy creating a reporting function in the client area. If you require 24-hour support our engineers deliver a report as a PDF to your inbox on completion of this work. These are now available within the server details section of your Client Area in a new ‘Reporting’ tab.

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Verbal passwords for extra security

Here at UKFast we take security very seriously. We’ve added another level of security to build an even stronger and more secure network for you and your solution.

All customer accounts can now have a verbal password added. The question you choose will be asked if you ring up tech support. This helps to protect against information theft, virus outbreaks, and application abuse, whether from known or unknown threats, internal or external sources.

Our R & D team is working over the coming weeks on adding the function into the Client Area. In the meantime, UKFast Account Managers will be calling all clients and giving you the option of adding this extra layer of protection immediately.

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Perfect landing pages

In Google’s bid to become the world’s most powerful advertising medium it has already outstripped ITV in the UK and continues to dominate in the business environment. In order for you to maximise your chances of success on directing traffic to your site it’s imperative that you optimise your landing pages – the pages that you send visitors to from your sponsored links.

In nearly every Google search there is a huge berth of choice for the user and so the temptation to return to the search results is always there. It’s your job to deliver exactly what they are expecting on the landing page and then present a clear navigation that helps the relationship with the user progress.

So here are five tips on making the most of those hard fought click-throughs:

1. Design your ‘creative’ (the descriptive line within your advert) to be an exact distillation of the information on the landing page.
2. Arrange your content on the page to deliver the relevance the reader desires as quickly as possible so that they know it is worth reading on.
3. Make sure that the landing page is the most suitable page on your site for the product or service your advert has promised and not just a page you consider more important that bears less relevance.
4. Never link your ad to a page that needs the user to register before they can access the information.
5. Provide a great navigation which allows users to easily progress from this page to your end goal – such as an online transaction, a product download, a contact form or a telephone call.

Keeping all these points in mind will help you to improve your return on investment no end. And moving forward from this, you can have a huge variety of keywords as long as you have a huge variety of relevant web pages to go with them. So go forth and multiply.

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How to build a successful community website

Under the spotlight this month we have Linux Format, winner of the best community website in our 2007 UKFast Internet Awards.

The dedicated team at Linux Format has created a hugely successful online community using techniques that grow its subscriber base and allow users to interact with the site and with other members.

Here are some factors that have built a thriving community website:

• Linux Format is passionate about what it does – The Linux industry has a niche audience so care and patience has been used to ensure a space is created that others will want to share.
• Adding a blog - The LXF Towers Blog adds a personal touch to the community. It’s a great way to allow visitors to get to know the people behind Linux Format, the editor has even uploaded new photographs of his trip to Malaysia.
• Binding the community – Linux Format makes it worthwhile for members to contribute, giving registered users access to additional features such as definable avatar images, private messaging, emailing to fellow users, user group subscription.
• Using information from the community to develop the website - An entire forum is devoted to discussing the site itself. Welcoming the opinions of users gives Linux Format valuable feedback and gives members another way to contribute positively to the community.

Visit the Linux Format website today and become a member of their thriving community - www.linuxformat.co.uk

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Please get in touch with me if you would like more information on any of the articles mentioned above.

That's it for January. We'd just like to congratulate the winners of our 2007 Internet Awards and we're looking forward to presenting you all with your trophies in March!

Best wishes,

Jonathan

For more information on the range of UKFast products and services go to http://www.ukfast.net

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