Business leaders from across the region attended the first ever Best Employer, Eastern Region (BEER) Festival at Ickworth Park near Bury St Edmunds November 15th 2013. The event was organised by Pure Resourcing Solutions (Pure) specialist recruitment agency and eras ltd providers of psychometric testing and people development solutions.
Chief executives and managing directors were among delegates Norfolk attended the unique event, to find out more about how employee engagement can benefit their business and staff, and to share knowledge with their peers.
Footage of the presentations are now live on the website www.best-employers.co.uk or on YouTube link below…
For more information on the BEER please visit the website or call Lynn Walters on 01223 209888
The recent changes to the Married Couples Allowance for individuals born after 6th April 1935 will allow you to transfer some of your Personal Allowance to your partner. This update has not yet been put into effect and interested parties can register their interest on the Government website who willemail youwhen the changes are fully implemented.
Personal Allowance is the figure that you as an individual are able to earn before being taxed, currently £10,000 and increasing to £10,600 on the 6th April. If your income for the 2015/2016 tax year is less than your Personal Allowance you may be able to reduce your husband, wife or civil partner’s tax by up to £212 (10%).
This is positive news for couples where one of you has zero earnings or £1,060 or more of their Personal Allowance remaining – by utilising the new marriage allowance you can make full use of the initiative and claim back the £212.
Eligibility
In order to claim Marriage Allowance, the following conditions apply:
You are married or in a civil partnership
You have an annual income of less than £10,600 – including pensions, savings and investments
Your spouse or civil partner has an annual income of between £10,601 and £42,385
You are both born after 6th April 1935
The Married Couples Allowance
There is also an allowance for married couples where one or both of you are born before 6th April 1935. This allowance can reduce your tax bill by £314 to £816.50 a year. This can be claimed either through your annual tax return or, if you aren’t required to fill one you can contact HMRC and inform them with details of your marital date and the date of birth of both you and your partner.
To get advice on this update, contact your nearest office and speak to one of our specialist tax advisors.
The Magento team released a critical security patch (SUPEE-5344) to address a remote command execution (RCE) vulnerability back in February. It’s been more than two months since the release and still more than 50% of all the Magento installations have not been patched, leaving them open to attacks.
This means hundreds of thousands of websites are vulnerable right now, worst yet they are e-Commerce websites. This means that they are used to sell goods online, capturing personal identifiable information (PII), including credit card information. The impacts of Magento websites getting compromised can be devastating for every online buyer that uses or has used a website built on the platform.
This is a very serious vulnerability, it allows allows an attacker to run any command they want on the server, allowing them to take full ownership of the vulnerable online shop and it’s associated web server.
Full Disclosure Going Live in a couple of days
This vulnerability was discovered by the Check Point research team and reported to Magento back in January. They gave us an early warning to help spread the word to as many Magento admins as possible. In a few days (likely this Monday or Tuesday – April 21st), they will release full details of the vulnerability on their blog. Once the details are released, it is expected that within hours there will be a working Proof of Concept (PoC) available for the masses. The severity of this issue cannot be understated, we cannot stress the importance of patching immediately.
If you own a Magento site, you must patch it immediately! Go to the download page, search for SUPEE-5344 and follow the instructions.
Some might ask what is the difference between computing in a village, a town or a city? The answer probably comes down to how many community hubs (pubs) there are within a 10 or 15 minute walk. In other words not a lot of difference. Although there is a need to walk through the community, whatever the location,and make those connections worth making and ignoring everything else, unless it is in your face. By making these connections a software developer is able to practice their art.
I have found that a quick dash to the shop to talk to the lady serving and sometimes the odd customer makes for the removal of any mental blocks that might be occurring.
A Software developer (coder / programmer) requires what many others also require. Three meals a day, punctuated with the odd snack (Fruit :), or Eccles cakes – used to be chocolate), a roof over their head, decent tech to work with, and funds to pay for overheads. These days you could throw in a decent internet connection also.
Why is it a challenge? If the days work is not a challenge then you are not making forward progress. If things seem too easy then I get the feeling that something is wrong. It might just be me, everything is a challenge to me (feels like running uphill all the time), it makes life interesting and it keeps the largest muscle in my body happily exercised. Sometimes (well quite often actually) this muscle tells me to go to the pub and have my one pint.
I shall say that there is a beautiful moment in any workday when the challenge disappears and the last peice of the jigsaw puzzle falls into place. This is momentary until the next challenge presents itself.
The fact that the business is situated in South Norfolk has importance for two reasons: 1.it is close to the Suffolk border, 2. It allows for inclusion in the Norfolk Chamber. Being close to Suffolk is good as it is a whole different market place to sell into, and inclusion in the Norfolk Chamber has many benefits, one of which is this forum.
The Premier Loft Company was founded by Malcolm Newman in 1990 and provides quality loft conversions in London and Greater London. Their services include loft installations, kitchen extensions, ground floor extensions and shower rooms.
We have had the privilege of working with Premier Lofts this summer to add value to their website’s SEO and User Experience. When Premier Lofts approached us at Tudor Lodge Consultants, their site was not visible on any of Google’s search rankings, other than for their brand name. We therefore devised a strategy in order to boost their search results and make the site more user friendly, with the intention to generate more enquiries.
What we did for Premier Lofts
Our content team created over 40 different landing pages for Premier Lofts, each over 1,000 words with specific keywordsrelating to their products, presented with videos, images and maps to create an SEO friendly and a pleasant user experience.
For pages like loft conversions in north london, users are now presented with a high-quality video of Malcolm speaking about his services and what he can offer you. There is a clear map showing which areas they work in and images highlighting the quality of their work. Overall, creating a very optmised page.
From a technical aspect, we reviewed the code of the site to ensure faster page loading times and removed any crawl errors, dead links and 404 pages.
From a links perspective, we added the site to local directories to show Google that they are a real bricks and mortar company (excuse the pun!) and also made enquiries and gained links in local news and industry related sites.
The Results
Within a matter of weeks, the Premier Lofts site is now ranking in the top 3 on Google for ‘loft conversions + area’ including ‘Loft Conversions in Barnet’ and ‘Loft Conversions in Finsbury Park’
We look forward to working with Premier Lofts in the future to create more relevant content and generate high quality links – this will further boost their rankings on Google for competitive keywords and generate good enquiries.
The weight of quotes and statistics are overwhelmingly for companies embracing mobile sites. The speed at which customers make a move is staggering, and every vote they make affects your bottom line. For a fractional outlay compared against lost custom you could potentially secure, and lock in each and every customer accessing your business on their mobile.
It’s not just your customer you owe it to. Give yourself a break too.
You have the power to mobilise your customers into action. By saying yes to a mobile friendly site you can expect to watch business grow
Making your current website accessible to your mobile customers doesn’t just make sense in today’s economy. It’s essential. Meet your customers on every corner. Join them – at their convenience.
You may never know how much custom you’ve missed. But you’ll certainly enjoy the new custom on its way.
So what do you say? It’s doesn’t make business sense to give your competitors any more easy pickings. Going mobile lets you reclaim the custom that was yours in the first place.
Mobile won’t be ignored and accepting the change now will mean quicker, greater benefits in the future
If you aren’t the decision maker, talk to them. Let them know that you get the power of going mobile. Point them to some facts and tune into the sweet sound of your sales line ringing off the hook!
We have helped GLC gain this position through the use of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It has involved a continued effort to add quality content to the site and gain traction and PR from a variety of news and industry sources. In addition, we have followed Google’s guidelines to create a good user experience, adding images and videos where necessary and ensuring that the site speed of the website is very fast. Plus, the site is fully responsive on desktop, mobile and tablet – something that Google loves to see.
Daniel Tannenbaum who is the account manager for GLC said: “We have been working on the SEO for GLC for 12 months. Considering that there are over 50 guarantor lenders in the UK and around 12,000 monthly visits on Google for this search term, getting on page 1 is a very exciting proposition. Wehope that they will receive some quality leads and this will help the site grow from strength to strength. Trying to rank for loans on Google is very competitive as there are companies all over the world competing for these positions. We are thrilled that our hard work has paid off.”
GLC is a basic comparison site for guarantor loans in the UK. Users can view over 10 different companies, the rates they charge, loan amount and duration. For more information, please enjoy the video above.
Yes you read correctly. Don’t promote your developers. They deserve to stay where they are.
Having worked for a number of companies who believe the only way to show their appreciation for hard working developers is to give them more responsibility, I am a firm believer in doing the exact opposite. Companies move successful developers into other areas of their business, often into people management, and take away what makes the developer good at their job, or at the very least dilute their skills by asking them to focus on people rather than code. But there’s a reason your developer is good at what they do. Most developers are not ‘people people’, they are software people and for very good reasons.
If the software development team is writing the core product or system the business is using day-to-day, moving those developers away from developing will have a significant impact on productivity and quality. Even promoting a developer to an architect, for the purposes of paying them more, is often wrong. Software architects are not the same as building architects, they still need to code and code regularly. Obviously there are exceptions to the rule and a developer may want to make a career change. If they want to move to something very different, let them. If they want more responsibility, make it over the design and or make them the team or project technical lead, but make sure someone else does the people management of the team.
Perhaps some companies feel the need to justify the pay rise on offer, giving the developer more diverse responsibilities in order to do so, but why would you move someone from a job they excel at into a job they’ll struggle with just to pay them more money? Tech firms need to understand that their software developers are at least as important as their people managers, if not more so, and recognise the importance of technical excellence. The solution as a business owner is to keep talking to your developers, make sure they’re doing what is best for them, and your business, and regularly increase their pay in line with everyone else in the company. A good developer is a valuable asset, so reward them by letting them shine in their role. Listen to what they have to say and let them manage code, not people.
Many buy-to-let investors are attracted by the idea of investing in residential flats, but beware…
On the face of it, the lease may not prohibit subletting, and the owner is therefore free to enter into a short term letting, usually on Assured Shorthold Tenancy terms. However, the lease may contain a covenant that says that the flat can only be used as a private dwelling for the tenant and his family.
The recent case of Burchell v Raj Properties Ltd looked at this issue. The tenant of the flat wanted to sublet it for investment purposes and argued that it was still being used as a private dwelling “for” the tenant, (ie he was taking the benefit of the rent) even though it was not being occupied “by” the tenant.
The landlord successfully argued that the tenant was at liberty to sublet to members of his family but not to anyone else, as the flat could only be used as a private dwelling for the tenant and his family.
Anyone looking to invest in residential flats should look closely at the wording of the lease to ensure that there are no restrictions on who can occupy the flat. Subsequent discussions with the landlord to vary such restrictions could prove costly and substantially reduce the anticipated return on the investment.
The automatic enrolment legislation puts the onus fairly and squarely on employers to operate automatic enrolment correctly for their employees. The message for employers is that preparation for automatic enrolment is very important and planning for your start date cannot begin too soon.
Many firms are now planning their response to automatic enrolment and many are taking steps right now. Financial advisers are uniquely positioned to help employers fulfil their duties and below we set out some of the ways an adviser can help. We have identified a number of questions which are key for employers considering how to fulfil their responsibilities.
• When do I have to have my pension scheme in place?
• Who do I have to enrol into the pension scheme?
• How much it is going to cost?
• What are my options in terms of providing an eligible pension scheme?
• What administration systems do I need?
The Pensions Regulator (TPR) has issued its first compliance notice to an un-named employer that has not met its duties under the automatic enrolment (AE) regime, as well as warning letters to 38 other employers. As of 31 March 2013, TPR had opened a total of 89 investigations into possible non-compliance by large employers.
The great thing is Lovewell Blake Financial Planning Limited can help an employer answer the questions above right now and enable the employer to be compliant by adhering to the legislation.
We are hosting a series of free seminars around the region in order to assist employers with the answers to the above questions. Please visit https://www.lovewell-blake-fp.co.uk/ for further details and to reserve your place.
P272 & P322 – Although sounding like the latest droids from the new Star Wars Film, they are in fact the latest energy industry rule changes supported by OFGEM.
They are a little confusing & do have some cost implications, but there is a silver lining.
P272 affects any organisation with a metering profile of 05, 06, 07 and 08. You can find this out by looking at the first two digits of your S Number this can be found on your latest bill.
There are an estimated 160,000 meters across the UK that will be affected by this regulation, 92 out of our 500ish clients have meters that fall under this regulation so it is possible.
If you would like to know a little more, we have produced this guide Peck Here
As a member of the Norfolk Chamber, we would be more than happy to check any bills that are sent to us, to let you know if you will be affected.
Some more advice/assistance for those who may be trying to plough through the digital marketing landscape unaided and with little or no budget:
As we see less and less inclination for Google to rank a site with little value, or no brand loyalty, and presumably pushing you toward spending money on Adwords – Google made £3.2 billion on Adwords revenue in the UK in 2013 alone!. You may like to look at how you place your content. There are some social bookmarking sites you may not be aware of, but ones which can assist you including:
instructables.com storify.com Pearltrees – free web-based social media app LiveJournal
All will allow you to post content and to link back to your website, which in turn will give it a boost.
Because of the popularity of these sites in our profession, it may take Google a while to see this once posted, but it will happen, and it will improve your search engine standing.