Newsletter 24th January 2011

I hope our newsletter cheers you up on this, reportedly the most depressing day of the year, or it might have been last Monday depending on which reports you read or indeed listen to. The reports are full of economic doom and gloom and no-one could dispute that times are tough, but there are still savings to be made and good news to be had.

When I first started out in business and was looking for an accountant, a friend of long self-employed standing told me that an accountant should always save a company more than it charges. Now I don’t know the truth of this, but I liked the sound of it and it’s the tack we take when speaking to prospective customers. We’re able to save you more money on your company’s IT set-up than we charge you to look after it/consult on it/set it up (whatever it is you want) because we use open source software which doesn’t cost anything. That means we don’t have to build into our charges the thousands of pounds other companies have to spend on licenses for every step of providing email, websites and other services. Open source software is marvellous for lots of other reasons we won’t bore you with (unless you ask us), but for many companies the cost-saving alone is reason enough to talk to us.

IT for Business Workshops
Our first workshop runs on Thursday morning. Further details can be found here, but in a nutshell these workshops are designed to give you help, advice and ongoing email support to tackle the problems your company faces and support any changes you might be considering.

Domain name email
Very basic stuff, but I felt it was worth a mention this week. Marketing has been the name of the game here lately (I know, it’s like cleaning your teeth to within an inch of their life the day before visiting the dentist) which has involved much researching of companies. The number of companies that make do with a googlemail or – shock horror – a hotmail address is quite shocking, especially when these email addresses are included on a website at the company’s own domain name! windowcleaner34@hotmail.com on www.whenimcleaningwinderrs.co.uk isn’t a good look. It says a lot about what a company thinks of its customers when that approach is deemed acceptable. Once a doman name’s been bought, it’s a piece of cake to set up an email address or two on it, and instantly improves a company’s image.

Other bits and pieces that have caught our eye this week include:

And finally

JFK Twitter account (@Kennedy1961) chronicles the president’s life, marking 50 years on Thursday since JFK’s inauguration.

A Nigerian village connects to the internet for the first time, via a mobile phone charged by a generator.

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