Member Blog

Recently there have been some fantastic innovations when it comes to fabrics for made to measure blinds.

Motorisation is growing in popularity, but it is the treatment of fabrics that has become really cutting edge, including a fabric that can help with hayfever relief.

Around 16,000 people in the UK suffer from hayfever, which is essentially an allergy to pollen. The pollen season extends from March to October and hayfever not only affects people’s efficiency at work (92% of people say it affects their work capability), it also seems to strike at its worst during the exam season.

With exams coming up in a few months’ time, now is a great time to install these new blinds. The blinds are made from fabric that has been treated with Pollergen. Pollergen is a unique product created by Louvolite.

When a fabric is treated with Pollergen, it captures pollen and makes it harmless.

Louvolite says:

“Does it really work? Well, independent testing by the National Pollen and Aerobiology Research unit has concluded that a Pollergen-treated fabric shows over 50% reduction in grass pollen allergen when compared to an untreated control fabric. So simply put – yes, it does work.”

Because Pollergen is a coating for fabric, choosing these blinds won’t cramp your style; you will still have an amazing choice of Louvolite fabrics for your made to measure blinds. Pollergen is available for Roller blinds, Vertical blinds and Pleated blinds,  for the home and office.

Combine these blinds with the anti-pollen mesh on fly screens for your doors for even more protection.

So, with that exciting news, what else is new in the world of blinds?

Louvolite have excelled themselves this year. Their Vision blinds have already been popular for a few years but now they have introduced a three-dimensional version called Visage blinds.

Vision blinds are a mix of fabric and mesh which can be alternated to allow in partial light or pulled down for full privacy.

Visage blinds build on that by adding alternate sheer and opaque vanes to give an added dimension.

In essence, these blinds look sophisticated as well as giving you more choice in terms of light control and privacy than normal blinds.

For children, Louvolite has also this month introduced “Night Night Glow” a fabric which glows in the dark for half an hour, helping your child get to sleep.

All of these blinds are available from Norwich Sunblinds.

Pop into the shop in St Benedicts Street, Norwich, or book an appointment online. We will visit you to measure up and discuss the best fabrics and blinds for your needs. The blinds are made in Attleborough by local craftspeople to your exact requirements and are fitted for you.

Last year, a study found that just 40 per cent of employees are satisfied in their jobs.*

This is bad for business. And it’s bad for the individual.

An unhappy employee creates costs – financially, reputationally and in terms of morale. Dissatisfaction shows itself though reduced productivity, poor customer service and lack of innovation. An unhappy employee will not feel motivated to excel in their role or deliver continuous improvement. Indeed, this unhappiness may also lead to stress or depression – which can create absence, in some cases, long-term. And when a dissatisfied employee decides to leave a company, this not only creates financial loss – through recruitment costs or interim arrangements – but loss of skills and knowledge.

An unhappy employee can diminish a company’s reputation. A jaded remark or critical comment, in person or through the easily accessible social media route, will have a ripple effect, helping to shape a negative image. This can impact upon a whole range of existing and potential audiences including employees, customers, partners, and suppliers.

And unhappiness can be contagious within the workforce. A dissatisfied employee can lead to others questioning their own relationship with their employer. The result can be a serious dent in morale which could manifest itself in a range of ways, such as through performance and behaviours.

But aside from the very obvious business case for delivering employee satisfaction, morally, do we really want our people feeling dissatisfied? Whether full or part-time, our work consumes a huge amount of our time and energy – both doing it and thinking about it. To spend such an amount of precious life in discontentment to me is unethical. We all have the right to be happy – including in the workplace.

Which is why I feel so passionate about transformational engagement and the satisfaction it can bring. I believe in companies who engage – who ask, who listen, who recognise, who reward, who are open, who are authentic, who tell their employees ‘you make a difference.’ It is these companies which will thrive and grow and succeed because they are built around satisfied employees.

I have been fortunate to work for a company which empowered me through engagement and which valued me for the contribution I could make – and which allowed me to be me. I want this for everyone. Not least of all I want it for my daughter. One day she will be in the workplace and I want her to feel valued, supported, involved and empowered so her confidence grows and her happiness soars. And I am going to do all that I can to support this to happen.

*CIPD Employee Outlook Spring 2016 https://www.cipd.co.uk/Images/employee-outlook-spring-2016_tcm18-10903.pdf

I’m not really sure if I like mazes.

Hampton Court was my nemesis – the grim realisation, as I found myself at yet another dead end, that although I knew there must be a way out there was no guarantee I’d find it. Around half an hour of being certain I’d trudged past the same spot for the fifth time the novelty started to wear off and I began to ponder the wisdom of going into something with no idea of how I was going to get out.

Which is pretty much how most of us approach our businesses. Speak to any business guru about the essential considerations for a start-up and an exit strategy will be high on the list yet it will be far from the minds of the majority of people setting up a new business.

Which is a shame, because it is often only when the time comes to sell the business that the lack of an exit strategy hits home. The Government estimates* that around 100,000 otherwise viable businesses close each year simply because no-one wants to take them on. With the average age of small business owners steadily increasing succession failure is a growing issue.

Here are five of the top causes of succession failure:

• Unclear business objectives – If the owner is more concerned with their lifestyle outside of the business, the likelihood is the goals and direction of the business may have been put on the back burner. Businesses with clearly formed objectives and evidence of working towards them are more attractive. This level of business focus also points towards the business having some form of succession plan in place.

• Poor business performance – For most, poor performing businesses are not attractive ventures. Looking to exit when your business isn’t doing well doesn’t give the best impression to a possible successor, especially if there’s no clear pre-existing exit plan.

• Business reliant on specialised knowledge –The more reliant your business is on you, the less stable the business is as a whole. If you can distance yourself from the core of the business’ processes, the better it will look to a potential successor. A successful and efficient business is far more attractive than one heavily reliant on a celebrated owner. Once that owner has transferred, what is there to say business will still thrive? Well established systems and processes can easily fall apart once you remove the vital operational knowhow. 

• Lack of transfer planning – There needs to be time for this knowhow to be passed on and retained in the business, so start early! Transfer plans are generally considered too late, or only when the survival of the business is relying on it. The longer the handover period the better, as it leaves a bigger window of opportunity for the specialised knowledge of the outgoing owner to be transferred.

• No suitable or willing succession candidate –  Sometimes the most adept candidate for succession is a third party, but there may be reservations in transferring your business over to someone you might not know so well. For this reason, family and internal transfers and are historically very common. Whilst you might trust a family member or current employee more than an external candidate, just because they are closer to you it doesn’t mean they will have the necessary skills… or even the want to do it. Recalling the issue about the lack of transfer planning, a longer transfer period provides the opportunity to build a rapport with the third party, or develop the employee’s/relative’s skills, resulting in the perfect succession candidate.

In short, when considering business succession, the earlier you start planning for exit the better. It’s inevitable, so do not put it off until it’s too late to plan adequately. An early, well formulated and ongoing development plan coupled with clear business objectives can be the key to ensuring the best possible outcome from a business transfer.

If you want to find out more about succession planning why not sign up for one of our masterclasses on 22nd February. More details here 

Free translation for most of us is a really great thing – I totally want to see it happen. And given that my entire business and livelihood rests on selling translation and language services, many people find that surprising. But, we need to make a distinction between what Machine Translation (MT) currently can and can’t be used for. I believe the point is summed up nicely by stories like this.

Without going into excessive detail, there’s a few things the world should know about how free translation engines work – or, more to the point, how they get fed with language in the first place.

Every time you create a webpage, as a developer you add a language code to it (whether you know it or not). Google can therefore detract, with some confidence, what language it is written in – without a person ever looking at it. They then begin matching up all the different sentences or phrases they find and assign meaning to it. So we essentially have language 1 and language 2. Machine Translation engines look at how a phrase in language 1 is written and check this text against all the millions of different sources they have in language 2.

So, when you go to Google Translate and ask it how to say a phrase in language 2, it will give you what it believes to be the most likely response. Often it’s right. Or, near enough. Some of what it’s looking at could be taken from parallel texts of a professionally translated document that the engine has accessed – so as you can imagine, that’s going to be pretty good.

But ultimately, this model depends on sourcing and taking in more and more data, evaluating more and more content based on the way we talk – it can access this information through your chat & social media apps, through blogs and webpages. The problem is that more data does not lead to better quality. In fact, it means the opposite. It simply means that it captures whatever is out there.

So, it scans a lot of content in the public sphere, such as content linking the idea of Daesh and Saudi Arabia, and therefore considers that one is the most likely translation of the other, or incorrectly maps those words to the corresponding words in other languages.

And it doesn’t stop there.

This undoubtedly wasn’t an intentional act by Google – but as it said in its defence, “…Our systems produce translations automatically based on existing translation on the web, so we appreciate when users point out issues such as this.” (Source, Business Insider UK)

To quantify that, their engines blindly scan content created and discussed amongst large numbers of people, in lots of different languages, and match up this content across these languages (without ever reading it). The billions of words that get poured into the web every day in every language are being constantly compared, lined up and matched against similar foreign versions.

This automatic process is not designed to focus on proper speech or what we know to be ‘right’, but simply by what’s more commonly used. The fundamental problem is that in many cases, what’s really happening is the inclusion of incorrect data, or short term trends in word usage. This may well not prevent most users from getting great value from MT, either as a conversation aid, assisting with basic travel and survival language or even as a learning tool, but this data acquisition method is very likely to cause damaging results if relied upon for business or professional purposes.

Unfortunately, the likelihood is that as social media grows, along with the amount of input and breadth of data being fed into machine translation, they’re actually going to get worse, before they get any better.

Technology is developing constantly; communication is becoming faster and the exchange of ideas and information easier. Considering how quickly things are evolving, it’s shocking to discover that the legislation protecting our data hasn’t been updated since 1998! That was the year that Apple introduced the first iMac, Google had its first Doodle and someone hit Bill Gates in the face with a pie (a dissatisfied Windows 98 user perhaps?). Our data protection laws are as out of date as Apple making desktop computers in see-through candy colours. The state of information is unrecognisable from that time and the laws protecting it have been in dire need of an update. Cue an intervention from the EU.   After four years of work the new ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ will detail how data should be stored, how it should be used and when it should be destroyed. The public will have more control over their personal data and businesses will have a more simple set of regulations to follow when using said data. ‘Data’ in this case, refers to anything that might be used to identify an individual, including cultural and economic information as well as mental health details and even IP addresses and other online identifiers. If information held under pseudonyms has the potential to identify an individual this could also be classed as personal data. The GDPR has widened the definition of ‘data’ significantly.   The fines for those who do not comply with the GDPR are hefty (£20 million is no trifling sum) but businesses have until 25th May 2018 to bring their systems into line. The new regulations also apply to companies who process data on behalf of businesses, so developers need to be aware of the legislation too.   The basic principles are:

• Data must be processed lawfully, transparently, and for a specific purpose
• Data must be deleted when no longer required or it has served its specific purpose
• Consent to keep and use data must be actively obtained and recorded
• The public have the right to request, update, rectify or move their data or have it destroyed altogether
• Data owners must also check the compliance of any processors they may use
• Data breaches should be reported to those affected immediately and to the Information Commissioner’s Office within 72 hours
• Companies outside of the EU are still subject to GDPR when processing or controlling data of individuals within the EU

Some of you may have already thought that as the UK is leaving the EU, their regulations don’t apply, but this isn’t the case. The UK will still be part of the European Union by the time the GDPR is in full force, and even after we leave the EU we still need to be able to work with them. Digital minister Matt Hancock said the GDPR should become part of UK law as it was a “decent piece of legislation”. He has emphasised the importance of uniform standards in order to maintain data exchanges with the likes of the EU and the US, and that the UK would meet the standards set out by the Union rather than asking them to meet ours.   For an in-depth guide on how to become GDPR compliant see the article below:

Brrringg brrringg…

You’ve had a great weekend, bought that new pair of trainers you wanted, been a little hungover on Sunday and then bam! It’s Monday morning.

You wake up, get ready and make your way to work.  Walk in, sit at your desk, take a sip of the much needed coffee and then it hits you like a tonne of bricks.

It doesn’t care if you aren’t ready, halfway through navigating a spreadsheet, deep in thought or just need a minute…it wants your attention and it wants it NOW.

Jade’s Experience

For more than 10 years, I have been managing people who, when they first start, have what I like to call ‘phone fear’ a little from incoming calls but the vast majority from outgoing calls.  It is a fear that people can’t put into words. They don’t want to pick the phone up and will do anything else to avoid making a call.

One of my colleagues Jade suffered with phone fear, and she has been kind enough to share her experiences.

“When I first started working at Indigo Swan almost three years ago I had terrible phone fear. The thought of picking up the phone and ringing someone absolutely terrified me.

My biggest apprehension about picking up the phone was being asked a question I didn’t know the answer to. What if a client asked me something really complicated and I said the wrong thing and sounded really unprofessional? I have learnt that it’s not unprofessional to not know the answer; it’s unprofessional to give information that is not accurate.

The biggest thing I have learnt is that it is another human being at the end of the line. We all have our flaws and weaknesses, and that other person is probably just as nervous as you. Being nervous about making calls is such a common fear but one that can be overcome.“

What I find most strange about phone fear is that all the people I speak to about it are people that have no problem talking in meetings, or speaking to strangers in a bar. It seems speaking to someone on the phone is more daunting than a person-to-person conversation and I believe it stems from two main places.

Lack of cues

It’s not inherently the actual words that can cause the issues but the gaps in between – without the aid of subtle facial expression changes or visual cues from the other person, we can’t tell what they’re thinking. Are they silent because we’ve confused them? Are they processing the information we’ve given them? Perhaps they’re nodding in agreement. All we hear is silence at the other end of the line, which can be awkward or feel damning.

So if you are suffering from phone fear it maybe because you are the sort of person that relies heavily on visual cues but have no idea that you do.

Anxiety

Everyone will get phone fear to a certain degree – new job, new product, change of job role, new person to speak to etc – but it’s making sure that it subsides with time. You should be mindful not to get stuck in it.

Because there is a lot more focus on just the two voices in a call, I think a lot of people worry that the person on the other end will hear in their voice how nervous they are. That leads to negative thoughts like “I’m going to look like an idiot” or “they all know I know nothing about what I am talking about”.

Which is no good and, as Jade mentioned, it is just another person at the end of the line.

Here are my top tips to help you overcome the fear

1. Know your stuff. If you have been trained well and given the right support, then you will be confident in what you are talking about. If not, find out.
2. Be honest. Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know the answer to a question. Being honest is so much better than having to ramble your way through an answer that doesn’t make any sense.
3. Get help. By putting someone on hold and asking a colleague to help you, you will give the caller more confidence in your proactive ability to get things done, and it’ll allow your confidence to grow for when you are faced with a similar question in the future.
4. Build up to it. If you are based in a quiet office, see if there is somewhere you can go that is more private when making your first few calls. Everyone around you wants you to do well and should be willing, where possible, to give you the support you need.
5. Practice, Practice, Practice. Set up some test calls with your colleagues. Let people know you struggle with this, do some role play on a tough call, the more practice you can do, the better you will become.

The most important thing to remember is you’ve got this. It’s just another skill to learn, practice and get better at, like any other. And, unless you have Telephonophobia (the irrational fear of phones), you will get better.

No one is expecting you to be 100% perfect all the time, just know what your outcome is before you pick up the phone, keep at it and before long I guarantee you’ll come off a call with a smile on your face.

We’ve mentioned in blogs previously about the use of glossaries, but we thought it would be worth really going into why they’re so important. Glossaries play a huge part in making sure a translation is accurate and that specific terms are not only correct, but also translated and handled in exactly the way you need them to be. In translation industry jargon, they tend to be called a Terminology Base (or a TB), but it’s exactly the same thing.

1. Accuracy

The first reason glossary creation is so important is accuracy. Everyone wants their translations to be 100% accurate. If you work with your language service provider to develop a glossary of industry and/or company specific terms, that may or may not have been translated previously, the translation team is fully equipped to choose the correct term in the target language. Language is very flexible and everyone has different sense of language and uses a different way to refer to the same thing. This is a chance to give translators essential information about what a term means. For example, a ship builder may have their own specific names for elements of their process. Giving translators the best possible insight into what these mean and how they are being used is obviously extremely worthwhile.

2. Brand tone

Glossary creation will also help the translator convey the correct tone for your brand. A good example would be a toy manufacturer. All of their products would have their own brand specific names. Names may already exist in overseas markets for the toys, and the client and language agency should work together to decide on how best to handle the product names for each target market. The more reference materials, explanations and information given to the translator, the better. Translators can study any materials provided and create a high-quality translation written in the tone of your brand.

3. Consistency

Consistency will also improve if a glossary is created prior to translation. A list of key terms, along with their definitions, will help ensure that the correct terms are consistently used throughout the text. In the case of a technical translation, it would be unacceptable for a word to be translated differently each time. A good example might be a user manual for a product, referring to a “screen”. In English, this could be called a display, a visual display unit or a whole range of other terms. Similarly, in other languages there are a range of choices available and a glossary will make sure that the correct choice is made, and that the same term is consistently used throughout all translated materials.

4. Translation Speed

Using a translation glossary can also have an added bonus of speeding up the translation process. In reality, a good translator spends more of their time researching things like phrasing, wording, and background information rather than actual translation. Nailing down terminology can certainly reduce the total time an assignment will take a translator, avoiding unnecessary research or duplication of effort. Equally, just removing the need for a translator to continually type the term over and over again. It’s easy to see why a linguist would be grateful to avoid having to type a word like Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (a medical term for a lung disease) any more than necessary.

How to create a glossary

A glossary is created in collaboration with your translation provider or sometimes created by a client themselves.

The point of a glossary is to improve the quality of the translation, so the selection of words to be put in it needs to be handled with care. A glossary list is based on the rule of Rubbish-in and rubbish-out. A glossary should be followed as gospel, so if the terms that go into the glossary are wrong or not fully considered, it will actually degrade the translation quality. We recommend that you only add specific, technical terms and other types of word you really wish to be translated in a specific way, there’s really no need to add basic or commonly used terms.

Physically creating the glossary is pretty straightforward. The process may differ slightly between different translation providers, but at a basic level, the files is simply a bilingual excel file, as shown below. The safest way to start is by asking your translation company. They should be able to analyse your files, extract terms that may require clarification and get everything set up for you.

Why You Should Be Claiming R&D Tax Credits.

In the current economic climate, it’s still surprising that more businesses don’t explore all of the tax incentives available to help lighten the burden by either reducing tax payable and or if applicable, securing a tax repayment.

If you are a company where you have people and costs associated with project activities aimed at advancing what you do, then you could be eligible for R&D tax credits.

BACKGROUND

Research and Development Tax Credits were launched back in 2000 and the scheme is administered by HMRC. The principle is very straightforward and is a win-win scenario for both the UK economy and the eligible companies. If the government can make it easier through tax relief for companies to invest in innovation, then it is more likely that these companies will undertake innovative projects to benefit their business growth and contribute to the UK’s future success and standing.

The good news is that since its launch the benefits of the scheme have increased significantly, so there has never been a better time to claim.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?

R&D Tax Relief applies to both profit making companies paying Corporation Tax and also loss-making companies who are not, both are able to claim for eligible activities. Relief can be received as lowered corporation tax or in some cases as a payable cash credit. The calculations are many and varied so the simplest way to help you understand what you might get in the form of SME tax relief (dependent on a number of contributing factors of course) is around 26p for every £1 you have spent on eligible activities.

CAN YOU CLAIM?

This is where HMRC’s terminology can create confusion and probably why so many companies failed to recognise that they were eligible for tax relief, even to this day. In the words of HMRC it was created to benefit companies striving to achieve technical and scientific advances through projects that extend the current industry baseline, and where uncertainty in the outcome exists and the methods used to achieve success are not readily deducible. See what we mean? It’s not particularly clear what’s eligible and what’s not.

The simplest way to finding out whether you may be eligible to claim is asking yourself some questions like: Have we developed new tools, products or services using technology? Have we tried to improve our existing products through technical changes? At the start of a project, did we ever think ‘I’m not sure of the best way to do this’?

HOW CAN YOU CLAIM?

The reality is that there are a number of ways that you can claim for R&D tax relief. You can claim yourself, through your accountant or through a specialist service provider. However, it’s important to understand the implications of your choice and the consequences that can be generated.

The accountant route is often assumed to be the logical choice because it is a tax process. However, estimations show that overall accountants are only claiming for approximately 10% of the potential eligible relief for their clients due to understated claims or claims not being made. The reality is that, if the claim is assessed properly the activity is 80% technically focused. There are some things that accountants are best equipped to manage on behalf of their clients and logically these are all things purely accounting based.

The great majority of accountants are not technical and will not understand what you do, how you do it, the context of your projects and known industry alternatives and therefore generally submit conservative claims that are largely under the legitimate entitlement for the client.

PARTNERSHIP IS THE WAY TO GO

The key is to identify as much eligible expenditure as you can; The more you identify, the greater the value of the relief you’ll receive from HMRC. So the ideal partnership to deliver the best results for any client is the combination of a specialist technical R&D tax relief advisory firm such as Jumpstart, who speaks both your language and HMRC’s; and your accountant. In collaboration they can manage the assessment, preparation and submission on your behalf, ensuring you receive the biggest return for the least possible effort.

Jumpstart is a leading R&D tax relief specialist, guidingcompanies through the complexities of submitting claims to HMRC.

Jumpstart’s large team of technical analysts have specific scientific and technical backgrounds and years of industrial experience which have resulted in an extremely high success rate in securing R&D tax relief for their clients. Since inception eight years ago, they have realised almost £80 million benefit for their clients. Right now, they’re submitting an average of 500 claims per year to HMRC.

For a free R&D tax credit consultation and analysis of the potential returns you might expect, contact your local Client Engagement Manager Lee Williams on 07794201990 or email [email protected]

When starting a new business venture, a key success factor to establish is your value proposition. It’s also helpful for existing business owners to revisit their value proposition from time to time to help continued business growth.

But what is a value proposition, and how should you go about writing one?

What is a value proposition?

In short, a value proposition is a promise by a company to a customer. It explains:

• what benefits your company provides
• who you provide those benefits for
• how you do it uniquely well.

Your value proposition should be focused on delivering unique and sustainable value to your ideal customer.

Why do you need a value proposition?

As an internal tool, a value proposition helps make sure employees and management are aligned by understanding the benefit the company is trying to deliver. It helps everyone focus on the aspects of the business that make the biggest difference. A strong value proposition can therefore help you avoid wasting time, money and energy.

The right value proposition reveals the connection between your products and your potential customers’ goals. Being clear on that will give you the confidence and clarity you need for continued development and innovation of your products and business processes whilst maintaining profit. It should also give you the basic wording for your marketing messages, focusing on the few things that make the biggest difference.

How to write a good value proposition

Before writing your value proposition, you need to be absolutely clear on why a customer should buy from you. You should have a clear understanding and commitment that your product or service will add value to a target audience. Thinking about the following might help:

• Customer Needs and Insights:Are you able to solve problems, reduce costs or increase sales?
• Added Value:Are you able to add value to your customer?
• Unique Selling Point:Is your product or service innovative or are you able to offer a point of differentiation over your competitor?
• Proof:Can you create trust and quantify the benefits so that the customer believes you?
• Customer satisfaction:How are you going to exceed expectations?

Alongside this, make sure you consider all the risks in your business and be realistic with your financial expectations. Return on investment must always be at the forefront, but do not forget the importance of cash flow and the resource time required to administer. However creative you may be, I strongly recommend that you formalise a project plan or sales forecast before you get too far down the road. Key milestones and the introduction of measures will help ensure that you stay on track or adjust to compensate for any deviations caused by obstacles.

Once you’re confident that you have a product or service people want, and is financially sustainable, it’s time to write your value proposition.

When writing your value proposition it’s important to remember that it’s for people to quickly read and understand. So keep it clear and concise and avoid jargon. Try to use the type of language your customers use. You need to address:

• What is it you’re offering?
• Who is it for?
• What problem does it solve?
• How is it useful? What is its key problem-solving capability?
• How is it unique?

Structure-wise, aim for a strong headline that grabs attention, and one short paragraph to explain what you do, for whom and why it’s useful. You may also have a sub-heading, three bullet points or a visual. There’s no set format, just keep it focused.

How to use your value proposition

Having a great value proposition isn’t enough. You need to use it!

Firstly, make sure everyone within the business knows what it is. Then use it to target the customers who will benefit most from your product or service.

Make sure your customers can see it. If it’s carefully considered and well written, put it front and centre on your website homepage – it should help potential customers quickly understand why they should use your company.

You may find that you need one value proposition for your business and then a series of propositions for individual product lines. That’s fine, just apply the same logic to each.

For starters, you might look a little confused whilst you make sure that you are in fact in the right log file, but then you knuckle down and find out what the issue is and how you can fix it.

I was faced with the above problem very recently and I can tell you, it’s a bit of a pain to solve sometimes. To add a bit of context, a client sent us an email saying that they had tried to run a piece of functionality on some software we are developing for them and had been given the typical “Sorry, an error has occurred” message on their page. That’s okay, in development sometimes bugs come up that we need to fix. I take a stroll into the server logs, expecting to see the error and have a quick fix for it. What do I find? Nothing, actually. Nothing that relates to the error, anyway. Rewind back to the first section of this post about looking a little confused for a while, that was me.

After realising that I probably wasn’t going to get anywhere looking at the server logs, I decided to fire up a development instance of the project, retrace the steps the client made and find the error message there instead. Because of the UI not being completely finished, it took quite some time to follow the steps (as it is a case of clicking checkboxes and adding values to arrays, more on that later) but alas, I got to the stage of being ready to submit the form. I hit submit, and the age old error message pops up. This time, however, we get the error message in the log. Progress.

Looking at the error message, I see that it is complaining about the index of my array of data. Any time the index goes over 256, the error is thrown (I had to check this by assuring 255 values went into the array first, then 256, then 257. It took time.).

So after discovering the problem, a quick Google Search and a StackOverflow question lead me to a quick solution to my problems. It turns out that Spring (view my other post about Spring and Spring Boothere) sets the default max index of an array to 256 and to override this, you need to add in a short function. Seems easy enough, and it was actually. A few lines of code and another test of the functionality and it just worked.

After celebrating my victory of conquering the error with no output, I realised that this problem was probably the same problem we were having with another system we were creating. This too had a large array of values that we were trying to create.

I confirmed the error message was the same, added in the same function that had fixed my first problem, tested it and found that it too had been fixed.

After feeling like I had accomplished greatness, I checked in my changes and went on my merry way. In the process, I learned that through a bit of trial and error, you can often find solutions to even the strangest of problems. You might even hit two birds with one stone.

Client: ASocial Enterprise

The client is a social enterprise that provides one-on-one coaching for individuals who are looking for employment and education.

Their sessions are infrequent and varied, therefore they require a flexible room hire that allows them to only pay for the time they need. They required a private coaching room, but didn’t want the formality of a boardroom or a business meeting room.

The Space’s Informal MeetingRoomSolution

• We providedthe Loungeat anhourly rate, which gave the client flexibility to book and pay only when the space was needed.
• The room is furnished with sofas and chairs, creating a more informal atmosphere.
• The room hire also included refreshments of tea and coffee with no added cost.
• The client used thefree parkingavailable on site, allowing them to avoid busy city traffic and high parking prices.

There are two basic ways to drive traffic to your website: paid and unpaid. Paid includes social media advertising, paid search advertising and banner display campaigns, while unpaid includes SEO and organic social media.

The distinction between ‘paid’ and ‘unpaid’ is slightly misleading however. For example, SEO is a fine art, and one for which you will often have to pay for if you want it done well. You can always learn to do SEO yourself, but that will take time and resources.

Generally speaking, if you want to increase website traffic rapidly, you’re going to have to pay for it. That’s ok though, so long as you choose the right marketing method for your business you will be able to cover these costs and more with the conversions you make on your website.

For now let’s take a look at the three main ways to increase traffic to your website: social media marketing, SEO and paid search.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is, you guessed it, marketing on social media. There are two ways to go about this: paid and organic.

Organic: Driving traffic with organic social media requires the cultivation of a loyal and engaged audience. The best exponents of organic social media marketing provide value to their audience independent of their product or service. This can be done by the creation of original and stimulating content, or simply by engaging directly with your audience and building a personal rapport with them.

While organic social media marketing is ‘free’, like SEO, to be done well it can cost money. Unlike SEO, there are few proven specialists, and even fewer proven methods of delivering ROI. Generally speaking, if a company were to employ a seasoned social media professional, it could take anywhere from 6-12 months to see tangible results. This is not to say that you should neglect organic social media marketing altogether, but rather that you should not count upon it to drive any significant traffic to your website in the short to medium term. By all means maintain a social media presence, however. Visibility is key online, and you want your customers to be able to find you and contact you wherever they choose to hang out online.

Paid: Paid social media marketing generally consists of advertising on the four main social platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Paid social media marketing is capable of delivering tangible results very quickly, and can be a great way of driving relevant traffic to your website. Depending on the platform, the target audience and the product, however, this can sometimes be relatively pricey.

Nevertheless, if you do have a little bit of budget to play with then this is definitely an avenue you should look to explore. Choosing which platform is right for you will depend entirely on the nature of your business.

• The visual nature of Instagram means it generally favours well established brands and bricks and mortar businesses.
• Twitter has a broader appeal, and its keyword focussed advertising can be hugely effective with the right targeting.
• LinkedIn is the most expensive of the four platforms, but in return for your outlay you are able to target individuals based on their professional attributes which can be highly valuable in advertising certain products and services.
• By far and away our favourite social advertising platform is Facebook, however. Here you can create highly targeted ads, based upon key demographics such as income and occupation. The nature of Facebook means people are much forthcoming in sharing a broad range of personal information than on any of the other platforms. This is a marketer’s dream, as you can place your ads before highly targeted audiences, based on demographics, interests, behaviours and a wealth of other options.

Search Engine Optimisation

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the art of optimising your website for search engines. The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase the ranking of your website in the SERP (search engine results page).

If you can make sure your website is near the top of the rankings for your relevant keywords, then the traffic will drive itself to your site. The difficulty is getting your website to that point.

SEO is determined by many factors but authority and relevancy are of high importance.

Authority can be measured by the amount of links from authoritative sources to your website, hence the importance of backlinks. Sometimes the amount of shares your content gets on social media can be a sign of authority.

Relevance is measured by how relevant the content on your website is to any particular search query, hence the importance of maintaining keyword focus when creating content.

The problem with SEO, as outlined above, is that it is only ‘organic’ by name. To achieve results you will have to invest in either time or money to build your presence in search.

There are a few tweaks you can make to your website yourself, such as optimising title tags, increasing mobile friendliness and by optimising your images, but SEO is a long term commitment, and generally you will need to allocate budget to drive traffic to your website in this way.

Paid Search

Paid search, otherwise known as SEM (search engine marketing), or, more commonly, PPC (pay-per-click), consists of advertising on and across the major search engine platforms. The biggest appeal of paid search is that it allows you to gain high visibility in search engine results without the need for a naturally high ranking website.

The most popular paid service is Google AdWords, Google’s own advertising service which allows you to advertise not only in the Google search engine results, but across its vast network of partner websites.

So how does it work?

The AdWords system is built around ‘keywords’ – words and phrases which users might use to enter a search query into Google. The key to success with AdWords is effective keyword research. If the right keywords are targeted, if the sweet spot between high search volume and low competition can be met, then you will be able to drive high volumes of relevant traffic to your website, at a price that enables you to post a healthy ROI.

So, for example, if you sell garden furniture, you may want to target keywords such as ‘garden chairs’ or ‘garden bench’. In theory, when an individual enters either one of those search terms into Google, your ads will be triggered, and will appear at the top of the search engine results page above the ‘organic’ results.

Unless you’re already ranking in the top two or three organic results for your keywords then the chances of someone reaching your website through organic search for broad terms like these is very low. The beauty of PPC is that you only pay for your ad when someone clicks it, meaning that in terms of driving traffic to your website AdWords is essentially the advertising equivalent of ‘no win no fee’!

For this reason PPC is an utterly invaluable marketing method, and is by far our favoured means of driving traffic to websites.

Hopefully this article has helped you think more clearly about the options available to you in your search for traffic, and that you will be able to go forward from here to choose the right method for your business and your marketing objectives.