PRIME business club

STOP PRESS: We have now made the switchover. We are running this web site at a new hosting firm (called Media Temple). We hope you notice a general improvement in speed, but more importantly, experience no sudden drops in speed or loss of service.

We made the change because our previous arrangements were not good at handling peaks in traffic when lots of visitors arrive simultaneously. This can happen when PRIME receives a mention in the media or is actively promoting several events. Since we have a lot of activity planned for the Autumn, we decided to make the changeover now so the web site will be able to cope with the anticipated rise in demand.

You may notice primebusinessclub.co.uk now shows in the browser address bar. Both www.primebusinessclub.com and www.primebusinessclub.co.uk point at exactly the same pages, so it doesn’t matter which name you type in. Previous bookmarks you may have saved to particular places on the site should all still work.

There are two things that we know are not working properly yet. The text-to-speech feature that lets you listen to an item works on some pages but not others, and the forums are not working at all. These are the two areas where we anticipated difficulties and they may take some time to fix.

Please let us know if there are any other things are broken and we’ll add them to the list. But overall we hope you find the change an improvement.

ORIGINAL ITEM:

PRIME Business Club’s main web site currently at www.primebusinessclub.com will arrive on this domain name over the weekend of the 21st to 22nd of June 2008. While the work is being done this site will be incomplete.

So if you are interested in becoming self-employed or starting your own business, please go over to www.primebusinessclub.com which we’ll leave fully up and running at its old home until this site is ready.

We are moving to a new hosting firm. It’s possible that some new comments made during the move on posts and in the forums may get lost.

Disruption is likely to be worst on the forums, which are proving a nightmare to move. Fortunately the bulk of the site is done with the excellent Wordpress, so most of it should be working again soon.

Likelihood of disruption:

• Main posts, pages and links - LOW
• Text-to-speech Listen this item - MEDIUM
• Forums - HIGH

Hopefully we’ll have the system back up on Monday - without the loss of anything important.

Quietly coming into effect at the end of May, the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 summarises in one place most of the things you are not allowed to do when selling to consumers. The parallel Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulations 2008 does the same thing for businesses selling to other businesses (B2B).

The new regulations replace many existing laws, including most of the Trade Descriptions Act, so they are certainly worth a read. Among perennial bad practices predictably banned are “bait and switch” - offering one thing then actually providing another, claiming to belong to a trade association when you don’t, and pyramid selling. So most of it is common sense.

But there are some more surprising additions to the list of shame. Now banned are advertorial (paying for favourable press stories without making this clear to readers), fake blogging (pretending to be an ordinary consumer giving an independent opinion in an online web site or forum when you in fact stand to make a financial gain) and “astroturfing” - generating a fake grass-roots buzz around your product or service by paying people to pretend to be satisfied customers or supporters.

Since many of the latter practices have become fairly common in the media, on the Internet and among fans of so-called guerrilla marketing, it is likely that court cases may be necessary to define what exactly is permissible and what is not. For example it’s not yet clear whether the sort of affiliate marketing deal popular on the Internet will be caught under these regulations - for example recommending books in return for a commission on any sales that ensue

Since in many instances the offence lies in the deception or misleading of the customer, you can probably stay on the right side of the law by declaring what you are up to. If you have a financial interest in a transaction that isn’t obvious to the consumer, you can probably make everything clear and above board with some kind of declaration. Here’s a PRIME example - from our ONLY foray into affiliate marketing!

The regulations will mainly be enforced by local authority Trading Standards departments, with the Advertising Standard Authority playing a role where advertising is involved. Penalties can be up to two years in prison and substantial fines. But it is likely the authorities will go after big fish first in areas where there is any doubt to get maximum press coverage and establish the principles.

Read the rest of this entry »

An up-to-date list of the technology used to put to put this web together is given on the Site credits page.

We are not using complicated or expensive tools. If you are interested in building your own site it is getting increasingly easy.

You can get a free web site to experiment with that uses similar tools at Wordpress.com  This will give you a feel for the issues even if you decide against the DIY approach and end up hiring someone to build a web site for you.

Now you can get almost any word on this site explained thanks to a service from Answers.com
Some phrases will also work.

To use it you just click rapidly twice on any word on the page (that isn’t a link). This causes a box to pop up containing a dictionary definition. (Links function in their normal way as links and won’t provide the Answers.com feature.)

Since dictionary definitions don’t always provide enough information there’s a button marked More at the bottom of the box. This will bring up a variety of other material, including Wikipedia entries and other more specialised sources.

The dictionary provided is American, but the More pages are more varied, differing from item to item.

So if you click on Capital Gains Tax the dictionary entry gives an American answer and is largely off the point. But the More page contains a Wikipedia survey of CGT around the world, and on some occasions a link to recent Times coverage.

The system does a better job on Home Information Packs, producing a full explanation of the UK scheme.

Note that this content is all external to the PRIME site, so the Readspeaker service won’t read it out.

You can customise the type and depth of material by clicking on the Personalize button at the top right of the box.

Do try it out and let us know what you think by posting a comment below.

Note: If you have your own web site this service is free - it’s funded by small text ads. It should be simple to install if you are using blogging software or have access to the HTML. More at Answers.com

Only half of Britain’s small firms have a web site, according to the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). But ALL of the visitors to this site taking part in a recent PRIME mini poll either had a web site or planned one.

Does your business have a web site of its own?

• Yes 48% (22 votes)
• No - it doesn’t need one 0% (0 votes)
• Not yet but planning one 52% (24 votes)

Source: visitors to www.primebusinessclub.com

The two sets of figures may be compatible. Both polls show an approximately 50:50 split between web-site haves and have-nots. The different interpretations put on this may be like the proverbial half-empty or half-full glass.

Those commenting on the FSB poll have tended to take a half-empty view, decrying small firm’s lack of Internet ambition.

But since the PRIME poll also asked whether people were planning to set one up in the future, it is possible that the missing web sites may only be temporary - just something that people haven’t got round to yet.

Many of PRIME’s visitors have good reason to wait, as they haven’t yet set their businesses up either, or have only done so recently. So they may have other things to get sorted out first, before leaping into cyberspace.

If anything the mini-poll shows a vivid awareness among older entrepreneurs about how valuable a web site can be in business, with none of them saying it isn’t needed.

This web site is now equipped with its own text-to-speech facility - so you can get the content read to you by an automated voice. This can be useful if you have problems seeing the text, but is also handy if you just want to listen to one of the longer items while getting on with something else.

You don’t have to download any software to get it to work. Simply click on the small yellow-and-green Listen icon near the headline of the item you are interested in. This will pop up a new window with the reader controls in it, should you you want to skip backwards or forwards. But the voice should start automatically with no further intervention after a few seconds.

If you prefer access keys to using a mouse, then access key L is the equivalent of clicking on the Listen icon. If there are multiple stories on the page the reader will start from the beginning of the item nearest your cursor position.

To stop reading simply close the reader’s pop-up window. Or click on another Listen icon to start it reading something different.

The technology PRIME is using comes from Readspeaker, a company founded in Sweden eight years ago. It now has many public sector and corporate clients in the UK. The Readspeaker approach is to keep the complicated technology on its own servers, so web site visitors don’t have to download anything.

This approach makes things very easy for the web site visitor. The downside to this is that all the decisions about how the reader works have been taken by the particular web site’s authors - in our case PRIME.

So for example we haven’t set it up to read all the navigation links, because for most people just wanting to hear a particular article that would be pretty tedious.

But if you find text-to-speech particularly valuable , perhaps because you are having sight problems, then there is another approach which can give you much greater control yourself. That is to install suitable software on your own machine. Some of this is free. You can read more about the options on the Accessibility page.

There are several free on-line directories that are useful both for finding services you require and for researching the local competition.

Near.co.uk is a good example, and one of the simplest and quickest to use. It provides a straightforward list of businesses by type and town. For example:

Wedding services near Widnes
Chain saws near Chepstow
Car auctions near Carshalton

The data for Near’s listings comes from Thomson local directories, so it’s generally up to date. What’s good about Near is that it presents the information in a simple and clear way.

Yell is the Yellow Pages equivalent. The interface is a bit more cluttered but you can plot results on a map. On some of the examples we tried it seemed to have fewer entries than Thomson-based Near. But it is a more a intelligent system than Near, and will suggest a range of different sorts of supplier that might, for example, offer chain saws for example, rather than giving up after finding only one result.

But probably the best of the simple listing sites is - rather surprisingly, BT’s online phone book. This now has an excellent business look-up function. It’s fast, returns numerous results, and will suggest other relevant categories. Here’s the chain-saws in Chepstow query for example.

This service is free for “personal use”, and you can increase the number of results per page up to 50 in the preferences menu. So you could obtain the details of lots of businesses.

Thomson Local, the source of Near’s data, is another site well suited for compiling big lists. Compared to Near you need to think a bit more when using it. For example it returned no results for a simple query about car auctions in Carshalton - because strictly speaking there aren’t any. But if you manually widen your area of search to Surrey or the South East it starts finding them. So it’s a bit literal in how it handle queries. But it has vast amounts of data and is good for scanning large areas of the country.

There are limitations on using any of these sites for compiling big lists. Partly these are practical. Thomson Local for instance limits the results returned to 200 in any one search, so if you are looking for a very popular category like pubs in the South East it will miss a lot.

There may also be restrictions in the terms of use that seek to prohibit you from using the data from the web site “for any kind of direct marketing, telemarketing or electronic marketing”. Whether or not these are enforceable in law is a moot point, but if you use the site heavily you may find it stops working.

What’s going on here is that many of these firms have other paid-for products that they would rather sell you for compiing big lists. These can be more convenient and indeed cost effective, by for example allowing you to sort on more criteria so that less of your mailing effort is wasted.

Returning to what’s available for free, UpMyStreet is a more elaborate site going well beyond a directory, but it’s worth investigating as it offers others sorts of free information that may be useful for your business. You can simply use its Find My Nearest feature - here’s the results it returns for car auctions near Carshalton, which are displayed by default on a map.

But it can also tell you much more about a neighbourhood in response to a post code or town name. This includes a brief free Acorn profile - Acorn is a marketing system that attempts to describe the type of people you can expect to find in the area, including their likely income level, age, the sort of homes they live in and some of their consumer interests. Here’s what it thinks of the residents of Chepstow.

Elsewhere on the site you can find out about local property prices and crime statistics. Obviously these features are mainly aimed at home buyers. But they are also of interest when researching likely areas for customers or premises.

Google is making big changes to its search engine that may affect how much traffic businesses receive from the site.

If your web site currently comes in high up the list for typical queries you may find it coming in lower. Conversely the changes might be good news, promoting your site up the list into a more visible position.

The modifications are being rolled out immediately starting this week. Google has decided to rejig its famous page ranking system by merging the results of its more specialised search services - for example its image, patent and book searches, into the general results.

For PRIME this may turn out to be bad news as we do pretty well under the current system thanks to all the organisations that link to us. We’ll now be competing with pictures and books about prime ministers, not just news stories about them.

On the other hand if you are promoting your small business using blogging software you may find you do better, as blog results are expected to suffer from less discrimination under Google’s new “universal search” system.

The change-over will affect both Google.com and Google.co.uk but not necessarily simultaneously.

“Search marketers must understand that the supremacy of web page search just took a major hit.” Danny Sullivan.

Official Google announcement
Detailed analysis from search engine guru Danny Sullivan.

Skype allows you to make cheap calls to normal phones worldwide - and free calls to other people with Skype. You install some software on your PC to get it working - or buy a Skype handset from somewhere like Tesco.

You need also Internet access - home broadband is ideal. As a result small and home businesses have been much more active in adopting this way of making cheap phone calls than big businesses or the public sector, which are saddled with more complicated Internet arrangements.

There is discussion of the pros and cons of Skype in the forums.

If you are running a web site - or even just sending business emails, new rules require you to say who exactly you are. The sort of information required is similar to that already required for letterheads and invoices - full business address, registration number, VAT number etc., so the requirements are not too onerous. The rules apply to all limited companies and limited liability partnerships and came into effect on the 1st of January 2007.

More from law firm Pinsent Masons