Overseal Village Primary School is our local primary school where we recently offered to revamp their existing site. Naturally we turned to WordPress to do the job. The staff there are not very computer literate so something was needed that they could easily maintain and update themselves.

The previous site had a lot of content on the front page which quickly became out of date, so we opted for a design that put only the relevant information on the home page, and all the content behind. We made use of various WordPress features, including some of the social plugins.

The site now automatically updates a Facebook page, keeping the local parents and carers updated with news and information. Parents and carers can also subscribe for email updates, which are automatically sent out when new articles are posted by the school. These features have allowed information to be pushed out quickly and efficiently to the community and keeps the school running smoothly.

Sections have been created for the classes, so teachers can also publish class information out to the parents.

So far the feedback has been very positive, with the staff and parents loving the design and features. It’s great to see the school embracing the new site and updating content on a regular basis. We are hoping that the site’s ability to push information out to parents and carers that the school can also start to reduce the amount of printed newsletters that need to go out in their book-bags.

We have recently struck a sponsorship deal with the Overseal Parish Council, in South Derbyshire. This effectively allows any permanent Overseal resident to be able to create and host their own personal website through Community Hosts services. Through this sponsorship Community Hosts is providing fast, secure and reliable hosting which offers:

• Your own domain-name (such as http://www.mysite.overseal.org.uk)
• 250MB of storage space for your website
• FTP Access to move your files about
• mySQL Database support for hosting database driven websites, such as Joomla, WordPress etc.
• The option to ‘park’ your own domain-name.
  So pointing www.mysite.com to www.mysite.overseal.org.uk
• Full cPanel access, to mange, control and edit your website (including installing many common website packages such as WordPress)

Signing Up

If you would like to take advantage of this offer then please fill out the form below and we will be in contact shortly to set things up for you.

Terms and Conditions

This special offer is only available to residents of Overseal Parish Council and subject to a few restrictions:

On the 27th February 2010, Community Hosts will be supporting the hyper local community meet up, ConkerTu. Taking place at Conkers (Waterside), Rawdon Road, Moria. Derbyshire this event aims to unite local communities and issues across the National Forest.

Community Hosts will hopefully be doing several things, promoting free web support throughout the community, and promoting community spirit within the National Forest.

Promoting local events and festivals

We are currently hard at work pulling together a list of all the great things that are taking place across the area throughout the year – and we need your help.

Do you know of, or are you apart of an event that runs in the area? Village Fete, Gala, Festival? If so then please let us know and we can help promote it during the day on a looping presentation.

Simply drop an email to admin@community-hosts.co.uk or fill out the form on our contact page.

Events we know about so far:

• Moira Canal Festival, Moira
• Heart of the Forest Festival, Measham
• Overseal Gala, Overseal
• Moira Furance Folk Festival
• Overseal Fireworks Display
• Conkers Fireworks Display
• Various live events at Conkers by The Pokey Hole
• National Forest Walking Festival
• more to come….

The Internet is big…real big. Check out this graphic to see the staggering statistics for an average day!

Created by Online Education

If any of your friends or family are with Tiscali for their broadband, they’re in for a surprise early next year. Tiscali’s new owners TalkTalk are increasing the price for Tiscali broadband by £5 a month for customers who don’t take a TalkTalk phone line!

Here at Community-Hosts we are fans of the services offered by Plusnet. We’ve already recommended them to friends and family and we teamed up with Plusnet to help out all these Tiscali customers that might be feeling the increased pinch.

We suggest customers switch to Plusnet for:

• Award-winning broadband from £5.99 per month
• Free connection
• Free easy setup wireless router
• And now 3 months free broadband for ex-Tiscali customers!

To take advantage of this outstanding offer click on the image below and enter the promotion code ‘tiscalisave’ on the payment details screen.

Hurry though, this offer ends on the 31st January 2010!

If you like us, use Twitter you will want to make sure that you get the most out of it. Regardless of if you are promoting a product, services or simply looking to increase you own personal presence, you will want to make sure that you are growing your followership – and with the right people.

Look at the bottom of this post for a 20% discount code!

To do this effectively either takes a lot of time, and/or a lot of hard work. Some people will simply market themselves through ‘word-of-mouth’ over a long period of time. Others will spend hours a day looking for the right people to follow and engage individually with them. Both methods are valid and do work – but there is an easier way.

Indeed there are numerous ways in which you can increase the number of people that follow you on Twitter – however these are sometimes based on ‘spam’ methods, and likely to get you suspending on Twitter (now that they are clamping down on spammers). However, remember that it is not simply about the your ‘number of followers’. It is about how many of interested followers you have. What’s the point of have 10,000 people following you if none of them are listening to you. It’s much better to have a 100 people that are interested in what you are saying opposed to 10,000 that aren’t!

One of the tools that both works well and conforms to Twitter’s code of practice is TweetAdder. What TweetAdder does is allow you to manage your Twitter profile within one easy application. It allows you to search for the right people that you should be following – and then follow them, it also allows you to automatically to ‘unfollow’ the people that are not following you back.

Not only does TweetAdder let you simplify these manual tasks – it also lets you automate replies, messages and tweets throughout the day. Think of TweetAdder as you own personal Twitter Assistant working 24/7!

By setting up TweetAdder to do several tasks and then leaving it running in the background it can automate the whole process. So every day, TweetAdder will …

• automatically follow the new people that it discovers (based on keyword searches for example)
• Automate the sending of ‘tweets’ and messages throughout the day
• automatically ‘unfollow’ those that you are following and have not followed you back
• automatically ‘follow back’ those that are following you, and you are not following

So, set up and left alone TweetAdder will simply look after you Twitter presence and continually grow your followers – in a way that is sensible and focussed and targeted.

Sure, TweetAdder is a paid subscription service, but it can easily pay for itself very quickly! Remember also that you only pay once, and receive regular updates and support!

Get a 20% discount on your TweetAdder subscription.

Head over to TweetAdder, and download the fully functional demo software (Mac and PC) – and then once you are convinced that this will do what you want select one of the paid subscription and enter the discount code, “IMCASHSAVER” at the checkout for a 20% discount off your final cost!

If your website has been setup using WordPress as your Content Management system (CMS) then you will need to get to grips with how to manage your site using WordPress. Whilst WordPress is much easier than managing a traditional website; it still can be daunting to some.

Here are our top 6 videos (from WordPress.tv) to help you on your way to managing a highly successful website.

1. General introduction to the WordPress Dashboard
2. Writing and Publishing posts introduction
3. How to embed audio and photos into your posts
4. Creating and editing pages (opposed to posts)
5. Moderating comments in your site
6. Using Quick Edit to manage your posts

Armed with these 6 videos – you can pretty much manage the day-to-day running or your WordPress powered website.

As a long time supporter of WordPress; I believe that it is much more than a tool for just creating blogs. I recently got chatting to a friend who’s in a folk band.

People around the world have found WordPress to be an easy way to publish their thoughts and ideas. So, why not musicians?

Using a free account on Community Hosts, we quickly setup a WordPress site, with a stylish and clean template. This gave the band an immediate presence that they could start working with.

As the band already had a few other sites (MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter etc) we set about extending the site to work with some of these. Notably we installed the Twitter Tools plugin that allows the band to tweet directly from the website – but also incorporates the ability to automatically tweet about any new posting that is made on the site.

We also added the highly popular Audio Player so that the band’s latest and greatest songs could be listened to directly from the site.

In order to give the band an easy way to promote gigs and tours we added the Gig Calendar plugin. This is an incredible plugin that allows them to set up venues, gigs and tours and have them automatically create posts on the site and promote them to the fans.

Other notable additions to the site were:

• Sexy Bookmarks – my favourite social media sharing plugin to allow others to share the post on the website to their friends.
• Contact Form 7 – my favourite plugin for handling fill-out forms
• Flickpress – a handy plugin for displaying photos from Flickr
• All in One SEO Pack – the best plugin for managing SEO and promoting the site’s position in Google and other search engines.

Take a look at the finished product and see what you think. Not bad for a freebie! (www.greenfortune.co.uk)

Latest figures published in Marketing Week magazine report that 72% of marketers agree that there has been a fundamental shift in consumers’ behaviour and spending patterns since the start of the recession.

Although these figures at first glance can seem daunting for small businesses to adapt to , the opportunities are huge. We are far better placed to adjust to changing behaviour of the consumer by fully utilising and benefitting from online marketing tools. Businesses and individuals have never had access to such an array of low cost marketing tools that produce measurable results.

Communication and marketing channels such as websites allow businesses to be much more customer centric, becoming more relevant and being able to adapt fast is highly important, online channels make this possible. Email newsletters are a great cost effective way of communicating tailored messages to particular target groups and sectors. Social networking sites should be used to continually engage with customers and prospects. The added benefit of these online marketing strategies is they can all be ‘measured’ for effectiveness and ROI, and if something is not as effective as you thought it would be – you can act fast.

Once you have your website up and working how can you increase the number of visitors, growing your readership as well as retaining your loyal readers. Here are our top 3 tips on the subject.

1. Know your audience

Always think how your target audience would use your site, what do they want to see and gather information about? How often do they visit? What is it that makes them visit and revisit your site? Knowing your audience will allow you to keep your site relevant and fresh with information that is popular and in demand.

Make sure your website copy is in the appropriate style and blogs/articles tackle key issues of your target audience. By joining forums that your target audience are members of you can gain value insight into their views and issues. Looking at your website trends and statistics allows you to determine which areas of the site are strong and weak, what articles are most popular and even which geographical area they are from. Armed with this information you can be sure of who your visitors are and go about creating content that is most relevant and popular.

2. Use some simple SEO techniques

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is becoming increasingly important. With the majority of your potential customers reaching websites as a result of a search from Google, it really does pay off to put some effort into this area both whilst designing your site and ongoing maintenance.  There are many companies that specialise in SEO who you can outsource the SEO work to, yet this can be expensive – particularly for small businesses or community based websites.

Simply by knowing just the basics and having a Content Management System (CMS) that is SEO friendly it is possible to make your site highly visible in all the key search engines. A good CMS will allow you to individually name different pages in your site with title attribute, generate ‘friendly URLs’ and give your images alt-tags.  For some guidance, Google has PDF which explains the key concepts Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide in their Webmaster area.

3. Keep updating

Your website needs to keep visitors returning and new visitors to become attracted. The key to this is to maintain your site by continually updating it. Adding new content keeps your site fresh and interesting, it gives people a reason to keep coming back. A static, unmaintained site is not attractive and will almost certainly not reach its full potential.

Writing a blog is a fantastic way to update your site – talk about issues that are affecting your customers, what trends are you seeing etc.. Blogs are a great way of increasing your visibility and ranking in search engines. You can write blogs that are based on a particular subject or key-word, for example, if you want to improve your rank for ‘leisure facilities’  you can set write a blog entry to talk about leisure facilities, and get the phrase into the headline. Search engines’ search crawlers also become aware of how frequently your site is updated, so by not updating it Google will crawl your site less frequently, which is bad for SEO.