News

We've made some significant improvements to the performance of the Salon Guinea Pig website http://www.salonguineapig.co.uk/ - as we were finding that the speed of listing and searching for users was becoming severely degraded on account of the increasing number of people using the site.

Salon Guinea Pig was created as a "proof of concept" website back in the summer of 2008. Its design was innovative, using an XML database for back-end database storage, as opposed to a standard relational database, with XQuery used as the query language for retrieving results from the database.

We have since had much greater experience of XML database design and performance while working on the design of Salon Alchemy, yet, until recently, simply didn't have the time to re-visit Salon Guinea Pig in enough detail to resolve the performance issues that were gradually becoming worse and worse as more people signed up to the site.

Thankfully, we've now spent a couple of evenings working on optimising the database queries used for listing and searching for users on Salon Guinea Pig, as well as a couple of other design tweaks - with the result that the speed of listing and searching for users is now much improved - with pages loading several times faster than they were before this work. This should hopefully now give satisfactory performance until we get enough time to re-visit the underlying design of Salon Guinea Pig in more detail - to bring it in line with design improvements that we've made since working on Salon Alchemy, as well as adding new features and making the site more meaningful and easier to use.

We've also done some work on the DNS records for the Salon Guinea Pig domain, salonguineapig.co.uk, to add an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record to list the IP addresses for which Salon Guinea Pig emails should originate, which should hopefully give more reliable delivery of Salon Guinea Pig emails (with fewer emails incorrectly being rejected as spam). This technique will also become increasingly important when we complete the design of our Salon Alchemy email marketing system, which will be available as an optional extra to Salon Alchemy customers, to allow clients to sign up to a salon's mailing list by ticking a box on the salon's website, and then receive newsletters and details of special offers via email from the salon.

One of our customers was in the unfortunate situation where someone else had registered her domain name for her and forgot to renew it - and when we realised what had happened, he was away on holiday - and by the time he'd got back and finally got his brain into gear, the domain name was in the "redemption" phase, where it would have cost £200 + VAT to renew it.

Consequently we set up a "domain watcher" with 123-reg.co.uk - which should theoretically have registered the domain name for us when it became available for re-registration yesterday - but unfortunately one of those horrendous cybersquatting speculative extortion racket companies in the States managed to get there first - so now we're waiting to hear back from them to see whether it would be cheaper to buy the domain back from them, or just order a similar one from 123-reg.co.uk (which would mean having to re-print a lot of leaflets as the website address would have changed).

Normally, our ethics would say don't touch any of those "domain auction" companies with a barge pole (as we think they are all cybersquatters running a huge extortion racket and making immoral earnings at the expense of small business owners) - but at the end of the day, our primary concern is that of our client - so in this case, it looks as though we're either going to have to throw our ethics out of the window and cough up, or our client will be in the unenviable position of having to re-print all her marketing material with the new domain name on it!

The moral of the story? Make sure that your domain names are set to "auto-renew" - so that you don't run the risk of losing your domain and facing either an exorbitant fee to renew it during the "redemption period" or - worse - an even more astronomical fee from a cybersquatting "domain auction" company!

Naturally, any domain names which we register for our clients (via 123-reg.co.uk) are always set to auto-renew (unless our clients tell us that they no longer need their domain name) - so this situation should never happen to any of our clients who have ordered their domain names through us.

Following the rise in VAT to 20%, and to ensure that we can continue to run a sustainable business in the long term, we've unfortunately had to increase our prices - which, while still very competitive, are now a more accurate reflection of the amount of time and effort put in to creating and maintaining websites for our clients, and the cost of running our servers which we use for hosting our clients' websites.

When we first started out designing websites for salons, in the spring of 2008, we were still hosting websites from a Linux server in our home office via our broadband connection - and the web design work was just something we did as a bit extra when we had time during the evenings and weekends (as we were still doing full-time IT consultancy work back then). Consequently we were able to both design and host websites for an amazingly low price - as we had the IT consultancy work as our primary source of income, and very little in the way of outgoings for hosting our sites (just our monthly business broadband bill, and the electricity for our Linux server).

In August 2009, we set up a new Linux server that we purchased from Dell, located in a secure data centre in the West Midlands - which was significant both in terms of capital investment and in ongoing monthly data centre costs; we felt that this was a necessary step in being able to grow the business and provide the quality, speed and reliability of hosting that we would wish for our customers. However, until well into the spring of 2010, our pricing remained very similar to what we charged when we first started - despite having worked full time on web design and work on the "Salon Alchemy" system from November 2009 onwards, and not having the steady income from IT consultancy work.

We were also too ambitious in our advertising expenditure - having paid out for advertisements in a number of beauty related magazines - as well as running a stand at the "Beauty UK" show in Birmingham last year. Consequently, in the fourth quarter of the 2009/10 accounting year, and the first quarter of the 2010/11 accounting year, we unfortunately ran at a loss, although we did turn a small profit in the second quarter of the 2010/11 accounting year.

At the end of August last year, with a tax bill looming 3 months away at the end of November, we had to make the decision to take on more IT consultancy work - at least in the short term - to bring in enough money to pay the tax bill and to recoup some of the money that we lost in Q4 2009/10 and Q1 2010/11. Although we were lucky enough to be working on a very interesting project for a great team, using similar technologies to "Salon Alchemy", this unfortunately meant that we had a lot less time available to work on web design for our clients. We'd therefore like to apologise to any of our clients who have found that our level of service during this period has been poorer than what we would ideally have delivered - as there is nothing more frustrating to us than simply not having the time or energy to be able to complete work as soon as we would otherwise have been able to.

Thankfully we made a huge amount of progress over the Christmas break, and were able to complete 7 websites for our clients - http://www.tannedandpolished.co.uk/, http://www.soundsolutions.me.uk/, http://www.nailsandbeyond.co.uk/, http://www.thebeautyroomirvine.co.uk/, http://www.magnificentmake-up.co.uk/, http://www.essentialsbeautystudio.co.uk/ and http://www.jaygeesbeauty.co.uk/ as well as completing our design for enabling "discount codes" for use on our online shop websites, where particular clients can be sent details of a code they can enter into the website when making a purchase via the online shop giving them money off their order - this is currently in use on http://www.nailsand.co.uk/ and http://www.creativeten.co.uk/

We're now back doing the IT consultancy work 5 days a week until the end of February, so please bear with us until then (we are still doing web design work at weekends, just not at the rate we were able to when working on the web design full time) - after which we'll be doing IT consultancy work part time a few days a week for a few more months - which will actually be the ideal situation, as it will combine a steady income from the consultancy work with a lot more time to work on websites for our clients as well as completing upgrades to the "Salon Alchemy" system - such as getting our email marketing system up and running - and finishing the "Holy Grail" - our appointment booking system.

With regards to pricing - we've unfortunately had to put our hosting charges for our "standard" websites (those without an online shop) to £60.00 per year (including VAT) - this is because we are now running two servers at the data centre (with the aim of re-designing Salon Alchemy as a "clustered" application - thus providing fault tolerance and failover should anything happen to either server) - so need to recoup the cost of buying the new server (which is bigger and more powerful than our existing server) - as well as covering our increased data centre costs - which have more than doubled since we've got the new server into commission (as the new server takes up more rack space and uses more electricity than our existing server). We've also needed to factor in the time taken maintaining websites (we prefer not to charge for doing "trivial" changes to our clients' websites - but the time taken doing those changes sure adds up) and on working to improve the design of the "Salon Alchemy" system - the end result of which will be a more powerful and flexible system, which will enable our clients to do even more of the work involved in maintaining their websites themselves - thus freeing up more of our time for improving the system even more. However, this still works out at only £5 per month - which is still extremely good value for money, given that our websites combine a bespoke design (rather than re-using exactly the same templates across several different sites) with a content management system that allows our clients to make many types of changes to their websites themselves.

Our hosting charges for e-commerce websites (i.e. "online shops") have had to go up to £120.00 per year (including VAT) - this is because of the increased complexity of our online shop sites compared with our "standard" websites - and to cover the cost of ongoing upgrades to the system - such as integrating new payment methods (e.g. Sage Pay), an automated user registration system for "password protected" online shopping websites (e.g. those selling professional-only products), and a stock control/inventory management system. However, this still works out at only £10 per month - which should be a negligible cost compared with the sales volume of an average e-commerce website.

Our website set-up costs have also had to rise unfortunately; previously our standard pricing was £200 (including VAT) for setting up a 5-page website (of which £45 was charged by Verve Designs for creating the logo and graphic design for the website, and the remaining £155 was charged by us for setting up the website and hosting it for a year). To keep our pricing competitive, we've simply reduced the number of pages included as standard - from 5 pages to 4 - which has meant we've actually been able to reduce the minimum charge for setting up a website - from £200 down to £195 - so while Verve Designs' prices have remained the same for logo and graphic design, our charges for setting up the website and hosting it for a year are now just £150 (although you now get only 4 pages instead of 5 included in the price). We've kept our standard charge for setting up additional pages on the website to £30 (including VAT). However we are going to have to be a lot stricter across the board in charging for changes which we have to do to existing clients' websites - whilst we'll still be reasonable and do trivial changes free of charge, we will need to charge if a requested change takes us anything more than a few minutes, or if several requests for changes are asked for in a given year (however our planned system upgrades should mean that clients will be able to do a lot more of these sorts of changes themselves anyway). Likewise, we'll have to charge for any changes which clients ask us to do which they would otherwise be able to do themselves using the Salon Alchemy system, e.g. entering treatment menus or uploading images to galleries.

The main advantage to you of this new pricing structure will be that we should be able to offer you a much higher and more consistent level of service - websites will be completed more quickly, and you won't have to wait as long for us to make changes to your website - primarily because we shouldn't have to take on more consultancy work to "make ends meet" - so should be able to be a lot more pro-active in responding to client requests (rather than work having to wait until weekday evenings or weekends before we are able to fit it in). We also aim to take on additional staff to work on things like website changes, thus freeing up more time for hard-core Java design and development work on the "Salon Alchemy" system. Likewise, charging more for hosting will also free up a lot more time for improving the underlying design of "Salon Alchemy" - so what we'll be able to offer you will be a lot closer to our original vision of "one system to do it all"...

From the moment Salon Alchemy was conceived, it was envisaged that our system would support multiple salons for a customer. The underlying data model has supported multiple salons pretty much from the word "go".

We've now done some more work to the front-end interface and business logic to make multiple salon support more of a reality.

Today, we added the ability to choose which treatments are offered at a particular salon (much like the way that you can already choose which treatments are offered by which therapists). Again it's a simple matter of just ticking boxes - if the salon offers the treatment, you tick the box for it - it's really that simple!

We've just finished a couple of design tweaks to Salon Alchemy's content management system - now all user logins are recorded, and any changes made to web pages or other web content are archived, along with the name of the user making the change, the IP address they have logged on from, and the date and time that they have made the changes.

These changes have been made to ensure that clients who choose to employ the services of a third party search engine optimisation (SEO) company are able to maintain a complete audit trail of all work that the SEO company does on their website.

We normally recommend that people don't use a separate search engine optimisation company unless they really need to (e.g. in exceptional cases where "common sense" search engine optimisation techniques and making use of "free listing" websites and reciprocal link swapping has not led to a high enough ranking on Google and other search engines).

However, it's your website at the end of the day, so we're certainly not going to stop you from using a third party search engine optimisation company if that's what you want to do.

But when you've parted with your cash, you want to make sure that the search engine optimisation company are keeping their promises - if they say they're going to update your website every month, then it's in your interest to make sure they do.

So now you'll be able to track their every move - you'll be able to see at a glance when they log into the system, and (soon) every change they make to your website, and the date and time that they make it (this information is already logged to the database - we just need to design a nice "front end" to let you view the information via the Salon Alchemy application in a nice user friendly format).

A subsequent enhancement will also make it easy to revert to previous versions of web pages - ideal for if you accidentally delete some text that you really didn't mean to - and quicker and easier than asking us to restore the page from the daily backup.

Why go to all this effort though? Well, since we aim to offer excellent quality and value for money, we want to make sure that you get your money's worth from third party search engine optimisation companies too (or have documentary evidence to seek to claim your money back if not, if the search engine optimisation company have blatantly broken their promises and failed to deliver).

While there are some excellent search engine optimisation experts out there, it's often hard to choose between reputable companies and the real cowboys out there. And frankly, there are certain "SEO" companies out there that I'd quite happily see removed from the gene pool (or from the Companies House register at least, anyway). These are the companies that cold-call you out of the blue, lie through their teeth claiming to work for Google when in fact they have nothing whatsoever to do with Google - and subject you to high pressure sales techniques, and complete and total bull about "keywords" - and before you know it, you've parted with your credit card details and tied yourself in to one of the most unfair contracts ever to disgrace the legal system! Should you see the light and wish to cancel, you'll then have deemed to have made a "verbal contract" - and the dodgy SEO company have somehow managed to circumvent the Distance Selling Regulations by not giving you a proper 7-day cooling off period (that is assuming that they haven't just decided to completely ignore the Distance Selling Regulations) - either way, they sure aren't going to give you your money back! And if you try to go to your bank for a "Section 75" refund on your credit card, you might just find that the dodgy SEO company drag their feet all the way too and come up with excuse after excuse as to why you shouldn't get your money back.

Alternatively, if you just go along with the status quo and let the dodgy SEO company do their "thing", you might end up with a lot more than you bargained for, like "gibberish" in your keywords and description meta tags (well, the same random combination of letters repeated over and over again - that mean absolutely nothing and certainly won't improve your site's ranking on the search engines for anything meaningful to your business anyway) - or "SEO" that benefits the SEO company more than it does you.

However, if they try to hoodwink you on a Salon Alchemy site, the logs will show you exactly what they've been up to, and when!

Furthermore, should you have reason to believe that you've been ripped off by an SEO company working on one of our sites, we'll be only too happy to provide documentary evidence that you will be able to use in any action against them. In fact, we'd consider it to be a real bonus if we'd helped to drive the SEO cowboys out of business by exposing exactly what they're up to - thus protecting all website owners from being exploited and ripped off by unscrupulous companies and their bully-boy tactics.