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UKFast Websight - February 2009
Dear Newsletter Subscriber
Welcome to February's Websight. 2009 is truly upon us now and we are busy as ever serving clients, growing the team and meeting new people. This month we have launched a new marketing campaign designed to spread the word about the importance of server speed in delivering strong Google ranking. There is more on this below.
We have our usual round up of UKFast news, including a snapshot of our expanded blog site, and all the big stories from the Internet business arena. We continue our series of expert opinions - imparting nuggets of wisdom from our senior staff and the popular Spotlight section focuses on the online audio/visual retail sector.
We hope you find this month's issue enjoyable and that Websight continues to be a valuable resource for you in 2009.
Best regards,
Communications team
- Google warns of 20 per cent drop in traffic - Research from search giant Google proves that a slow website results in a dramatic fall in traffic. Google is so confident of this that speed is now included in the quality score of advertisers - which means slow websites cost you more.
- UKFast doubles data centre team to cater for growth - Leading Internet hosting provider UKFast has expanded its 24/7 engineering team at its data centres by 50% to service its expanding customer base. The development is the first phase in an extensive project in 2009 to scale-up operations.
- UKFast blog - Slow sites cost more says Google - If you thought that spending more than your competitors on pay per click (PPC) advertising campaigns was all that you needed to do to get top billing then you would be wrong.
- UKFast blog - innovating for the future - UKFast reaches its tenth anniversary later this year, so it might seem strange that such a young company is placing a focus on future generations of leaders and team members.
- Google to join case against MS? - Google wants to join the case to prove antitrust charges against Microsoft, relating to IE's dominance of the web browser market.
- On the edge - web standards - Although there are many reasons why the Web fails to render appropriately in browsers, the two main reasons today are browser bugs and ambiguities in the standards.
- Carter defends digital plan - Lord Carter has defended his Digital Britain report, especially the countrywide 2Mbps broadband speed.
- Yahoo to undergo restructuring - The Wall Street Journal is reporting that new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is about to announce a major restructuring at the search engine company this week.
- US proposes ISPs keep logs for police - Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet Wi-Fi access points to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.
replication for reliability
Data loss is one of the biggest fears for online businesses as it can potentially be the downfall of any operation. Even a minor interruption to your service can have huge implications. To guard against data loss and to give yourself a competitive edge on your competitors we offer comprehensive database replication solutions.
Our bespoke packages deliver the reliability that gives you total peace of mind and they don't necessarily mean that you need to increase your server farm. Replication can be setup as a failsafe to another underutilised server within your solution.
The cost of the service is relatively low (depending on your data volumes and movement) and with UKFast you can benefit from all of the following:
- Increased resilience from having a full replicated database
- Uninterrupted service during master database maintenance
- Quick restoration of access to data and applications
- High availability and automatic failover
- Choice of Windows SQL or Linux MySQL replication
Find out more about UKFast's database replication services.
cutting training means cutting your effectiveness - The Brigadier
In the current business climate many companies are looking to reduce costs. To the overzealous bean counter looking at the company cost spreadsheet, the training budget is often the first place their beady eye stops and the finger hovers over the delete key. "It's easy to slash the training budget, it only affects our people!" they say.
Now let's look at this from a different angle. Surely in these economic times this is when your staff need training more than ever, this is how companies differentiate themselves, great people giving great service.
People still need training and developing if newer hires are to reach standards required and longer established staff continue to develop and keep their skills fresh. When the training budget has gone, the real leaders are the ones who roll up their sleeves and get stuck into training their people themselves.
Gone - The training course with neat presentations from the suits, interactive role plays and the nice sandwiches and cakes.
Enter - On the job coaching, mentoring, peer skill sharing and you. Find your marker pens, and enter the tried and tested - the good old white board.
Pull random telephone calls and get the team to evaluate them. Get one of your superstars to talk about how they closed that deal, sorted that tricky customer's problem. Have a huddle at a convenient time with a cup of tea to get a key learning point across every day. You made it as a manager, you know your stuff, share it with your people, make them better and lead from the front.
To read more of the Brigadier's and other UKFast bloggers' posts, visit the UKFast blog pages.
HMV the beneficiary from Zavvi's fall
The credit crunch has unfortunately clamed many companies over the last six months in Britain. One of the most high profile was high street and online entertainment retailer Zavvi. While the general economic climate was the reason for most demises, Zavvi's can sadly be linked to one particular event - the collapse of the Woolworth group. This is because Zavvi's main supplier was a subsidiary of Woolworth and its death devastated Zavvi's supply lines.
Using online traffic technology we can look at the dynamic of Zavvi's demise and pick out interesting indicators for the industry at large.
The first point on the graph to note is the impressive dominance of Play.com in this sector. The Jersey, Channel Island based online retailer commands around a third of the entire online entertainment market.
In the distant chasing pack are the high street big players HMV and Zavvi. Up until Zavvi's problems both had carved out a respectable online niche in the market, particularly HMV which ranked (and still ranks) second overall.
What is most interesting however is the fact that Zavvi's problems over Christmas delivered a directly positive influence on HMV's online traffic, while not significantly impacting that of Play.com. This is best indicated when looking at traffic for December 24 2008. That day news outlets announced that Zavvi had entered into administration. Traffic spiked for the doomed retailer and this was closely mirrored by HMV's traffic.
When online shoppers could not get what they wanted from Zavvi's website, in the main they went to HMV's. This indicates that in the minds of online entertainment shoppers the Zavvi and HMV brands are very closely linked, while Play.com is not as closely associated. In turn this shows that the high street association has converted to an online association.
This is further backed up by data on user search terms and traffic movement. Most of Zavvi's Google traffic comes from searches on its name and not on specific products it stocks. Meanwhile, the most popular destination for those leaving Zavvi's website is HMV's website.
In conclusion we can say that Play.com's dominance is not under threat but that HMV stands to strengthen its hold on second place because of the demise of Zavvi.
We hope you enjoyed the February edition. Websight will return next month with all the big March talking points.
Best wishes,
Communications Team
