This autumn sees the release of Apple’s latest software updates across all of their hardware, in the form of iOS 15, ipadOS 15 and macOS Monterey. The updates bring a range of new (and not so new) features to Apple devices, some of which will change the way online users engage with you and your website.
Before I get bombarded with feedback, I must state that many features released by Apple over the past few years were by no means pioneering… they had previously been successfully implemented on Android, Google or other manufacturer’s operating systems for some time. And this year is no different.
So you might be wondering what it is about Apple’s updates in particular that inspires me to take the time to write about them now, and why it is that is Apple is still the market leader. While Apple don’t tend to be the first company to come up with the ideas that impact the online world of websites and marketing, there are a few unavoidable facts that make them noteworthy:
Market share
Their updates, on the whole, are more fleshed out
In short, if Apple are releasing it, there is a higher chance that it could impact the wider world of online.
Starting off with the smaller, ‘fun’ update: Apple is updating their browser (Safari) for a more immersive experience for users across all their devices. This will involve allowing the website to dictate the colour of the search bar and control panel. A feature that is already available on android, it is a small but elegant upgrade that will help make websites more impactful and give them a ‘wow’ factor if implemented correctly.
To ensure that your website is compatible with the new change, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Moving on to the bigger, slightly more serious part of the OS updates. Privacy. Unsurprisingly, privacy is becoming a bigger and bigger issue online. Apple will be introducing new features this year to their iCloud subscribers that will help protect their customer’s privacy and will have a huge impact on online advertising and email marketing.
Both of these features, despite my introduction, are only available from Apple… But they are likely a sign of things to come. While they are no doubt beneficial features for helping users protect their data online, both changes will make gaining valuable information on online campaigns and user habits much harder, and will likely have a financial impact on any company actively marketing online.
Video and conference calls have dominated the past 18 months and become a key part of how we work and play. While Apple have held back a number of the key updates to their Facetime from the September IOS 15 update, such as Share Play, which will allow users to watch and listen to media together at the same time, they have upgraded their video calling software to be in in line with the market leaders. It might seem that Apple’s release is tailored more to ‘play’ than ‘work’…
However they will also be enabling screenshare, grid view, spatial audio and the ability to invite non-apple users into a call via guest link. All these features will put Facetime much more in line with their commercial competitors such as Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Zoom. While I don’t expect there to be a major overnight shift away from the dominant platforms in the commercial world, it will interesting to see if the introduction of a video solution tailored to iPhone and Mac hardware will further impact how we work remotely.
Behind all the glamour of new and redesigned websites, a large part of Infotex’s time and energy is spent “keeping the lights on”, i.e. managing all the little bits that ensure your website remains fit-for-purpose.
Much of this work is never directly seen by clients or website visitors, so in this article we wanted to let you know of a few bits that we’ve been working on recently.
WordPress is a platform that never sleeps; powering around 1/3rd of all websites, it is constantly under scrutiny, having features added and bugs fixed. As a result, the WordPress team publishes major updates around 3-4 times per year and some plugin authors push out updates very frequently.
Infotex’s policy from hard-earned experience is that, with the exception of security releases, it is best to apply updates in a timely manner but not immediately after release. This is because it is often the case that new updates to the WordPress core cause compatibility issues with plugins and/or themes, which can be annoying to our customers and time consuming to work around, yet are often patched by the plugin authors within a few weeks.
We have just finished deploying WordPress 5.8.1 to our fleet of sites under maintenance contract.
In the last month, we have also separately installed security updates to plugins which were evaluated by our team and felt to be of an urgent nature – such updates are often installed within hours of their release to keep our clients safe.
We are in the process of changing the architecture for some legacy sites to allow us to perform updates more efficiently (especially updates of commercial plugins). And automated testing will come online soon, to further improve the customer experience – more on this in due course.
Just as WordPress itself is constantly evolving, so are the servers which we host it on.
All of these servers are checked for security updates at least once per week to keep them secure.
We have now started to deploy the latest evolution of our preferred server operating system, called CentOS Linux Stream 8. Stream is the future of CentOS Linux and will allow us to offer newer technology earlier in the lifecycle than was previously possible. We will be migrating sites to this platform over the coming months. In addition, we are working through the process of testing and migrating our fleet of servers to PHP 7.4, which gives the latest features and performance benefits. In some cases this upgrade is requiring changes to our client websites to provide compatibility, but we aim for the change to be seamless.
With SSL/TLS now being a defacto standard on websites and email solutions, we continue to create internal automation to both monitor and renew these sooner (we now typically renew website certificates every 60 days, as short certificates provide additional “defence in depth” security benefits) and have recently renewed and upgraded the strength of the certificate that protects our Flexidial client email system.
Infotex are proud of the technical standards we work to and have recently decided that the time is right to demonstrate this. We are therefore currently working with external advisors to obtain the Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus certifications.
For those who are not familiar, Cyber Essentials is a program backed by the UK Government’s National Cyber Security Centre (https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/cyberessentials/overview) to verify that we are providing controls to mitigate the majority of cyber attacks and demonstrate that we can, and do, handle your sensitive data correctly.
To be clear, this is not related to DDoS type attacks but instead demonstrates controls (including timely installation of security updates and use of multi-factor login to our core systems) that will deter the much more common hacker attacks in addition to demonstrating security awareness and controls to reduce the likelihood of Infotex suffering from the ransomware attacks which are sadly so prevalent today.
Related to the above two items, over the last year we have invested heavily in new computer hardware for our team members to ensure that everyone has an environment which allows them to make the most of their skills in turn delivering the best technical solutions and advice for our clients.
SEO is the process that ensures your website ranks as highly as possible in organic search engine results. This improves traffic to your website and attracts relevant consumers to increase conversion rates.
Most people involved with SEO are predominantly concerned by Google’s ranking algorithms, as Google is by far the most popular search engine.
Search engine rankings are based on a series of algorithms that take into account numerous factors to deliver the most relevant, safe and accurate results to a search engine user. Google Search algorithms determine the results of a search query by looking at the relevance, quality, usability, and context of a site, and each factor is weighted differently depending on the user query.
These algorithms never sit still. Search engines are always looking for the next best way to serve you the highest quality results for your search. So, SEO that worked for you in 2014 would fail in 2021. No one can know Google’s exact algorithms, but you need a team with their ears to the ground at all times, looking for these changes, to ensure search performance security.
On-site SEO refers to the optimisation of the elements of your website controlled by you, including the code and website content.
Your page content should always be specific and target the right audience. It should be high quality and offer accurate information in good detail, as algorithms often favour more content than less. As well as high-quality writing and images, your content can be easily optimised by keywords and video to attract relevant queries.
Each keyword on a website grasps a business opportunity at the exact point the user shows intent. Making sure these keywords represent your business goals is the key to a successful SEO strategy.
Like text and keywords, video is rankable on search engines. Videos are also a good option because they are easily shared on social media, which in turn helps your page ranking in search engine results. Read our blog to find out more about how video can help your ecommerce website.
Google monitors user-experience metrics in order to get a picture of how well users are responding to a particular website. This is measured mainly through click-through rate, bounce rate, and time spent on site. If a site has a high bounce rate, for instance, it indicates that the site might be drawing in the wrong audience. This means that your site design needs to be appealing and easy to navigate.
Core web vitals were recently added to Google’s ranking algorithm and indicate the functionality of your website loading speed, responsiveness and stability for its visitors. The metrics are designed to improve the quality of the internet by measuring numerous areas of a website.
Having a site that is user-friendly across multiple platforms is an important ranking factor, especially mobile. This means that you need to ensure your mobile website has a mobile friendly design and fast mobile loading time to keep your visitors happy and your rankings up.
More often than not, Google ranks HTTPS websites more highly than HTTP ones, as they are more secure.
If a user searches your business you need them to find out all of the correct, updated contact information. So, remember to always update your name, address, and contact number both on your website and on the relevant business listings online (such as Google My Business) and online directories.
It’s also common for users to search queries including “near me” in the search bar, so it’s vital that you have your location up to date, especially if you deal in local business.
Off-site SEO refers to when Google or other search engines use information from places on the web other than your website to affect its ranking. In other words, Google looks to the rest of the internet to assess the importance of your website.
The most important of these is backlinks, that is, other website links that mention you. This has been a crucial ranking factor since Google’s inception – and things don’t look like changing. The quality of your website has to resonate across the entire web.
In this Google Search Central Podcast, a member of the Google Search Quality team specialising in spam explains how algorithms fight spam websites and websites that are at risk of being targeted by spam. Google demotes sites specifically built for spam so that they don’t show up in search results. Less than 1 percent of users land on spam pages on Google despite 40 billion spam pages showing up on Google every day.
If just one good thing has come out of Covid-19, it’s the blanket national appreciation of the National Health Service and those that work within it. Never before have so many interacted with the NHS, utilising the latest in digital technology from Track-and-Trace to the booking system behind millions of vaccinations.
Even prior to the pandemic taking hold, users of the NHS had started interacting digitally with the service with far greater frequency – and we at Infotex are extremely proud to announce that we’ve partnered with three of the exceptional software engineers who, for the past 20 years, have led the charge in such developments.
The team of Jonathan Smith, Gareth Barnes and Mark Boreham join us from NEL: the London-based commissioning support unit that covers nearly 25% of the UK population and manages over £10billion of NHS contracts.
Projects the trio have developed and implemented include, amongst others, the Allied Health Professionals (AHP) physiotherapy self-referral platform, which processes over 80,000 cases per year; the Call Information Management Application System (CIMAS), which enables police custody officers to book clinicians for those in their care requiring medical assistance; and the Lawmunion Library System, which connects over 150 hospitals and healthcare providers to share essential journals and books, both physically and digitally.
As part of their work with Infotex, Jonathan and the team have integrated several of their existing clients into the Infotex roster, most notably AHP for whom they will continue to offer technical support while developing new solutions. This influx of new clients has prompted Infotex to open an entire new healthcare division.
“After 25 years in the public sector with the NHS, it’s really exciting for myself, Gareth and Mark to join Infotex,” claims Jonathan.
“We bring a wealth of experience and skills from both the NHS and the private sector, utilising Microsoft technologies to complement those already in Infotex. We look forward to continuing to work with our existing customers, as well as developing new products in the healthcare sector.”
Anthony Agar, Infotex managing director, said of this new chapter in the company’s 20-year history, “It’s an exciting development for Infotex to bring on board three great developers who bring with them substantial new skills and experience.
“With a Microsoft.net development team focussed on building systems for healthcare providers – and combining this capability with Infotex’s core purpose of delivering websites that really do improve things for people – we’re going to do a great deal to help patients access services all over the UK.”
For more information, please contact Infotex on 01394 615 615.
Whether you offer discounts and sales or not, the huge increase in online traffic over the Black Friday weekend means there is a heightened opportunity for you to pick up those much-needed target customers. With almost a third of retail sales now occurring online in the UK, the biggest retail event of the year is not an e-commerce opportunity you want to miss…
Black Friday is a US-inspired commercial holiday that falls on the day after Thanksgiving to signify the start of the Christmas shopping period. Coined in Philadelphia in the 1950s, Black Friday made its way to our shores in 2010 when American giant Amazon offered Black Friday deals here in the UK. Cyber Monday lands on the Monday after Black Friday, 29th November. An online-only event limited strictly to 24 hours, Cyber Monday is seen as the 21st-century response to Black Friday due to the rising use of e-commerce by consumers. After the online spending boom during the 2020 lockdowns, this year’s Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend is going to be unavoidable for online retailers looking to embrace changing consumer habits.
The sale has long been a way for retailers to drive up revenue, so you may be asking yourselves why is this anything different from the norm? Though Black Friday’s popularity initially stemmed from its (perceived) sizable savings and huge discounts, the mainstream media have since been responsible for its growing prominence in the UK retail market. It became infamous for the much-publicized hysteria and frenzies that grip a bargain-hungry public. The media circus surrounding the event was the perfect marketing tool to advertise the huge discounts on offer, triggering its exponential growth.
Mobile and tablet sales already dominate the e-commerce market and are set to increase year on year. You can optimise your site with a user-friendly cross-device design, and even consider creating a mobile app for your business, to encourage mobile users to purchase your products.
Different demographics search and shop differently online, so it is important to cover all the channels that might be reaching your target audience. This means developing great marketing campaigns for email and social media, and Pay Per Click advertising.
Customers are used to being given a range of convenient delivery options, something you must provide if you are to stay ahead of your competitors. Click and Collect services, fast and secure delivery, and ensuring a clear return policy can be game-changing for customers at checkout.
At checkout, customers on any device need to be able to quickly and securely pay for their purchases. Check out our guide to the best payment gateways to make sure you’re offering optimum payment services to keep those conversions coming.
Shoppers using search engines need to be able to find your business if you offer relevant services and products. This can’t happen unless your site is optimised for search engines, meaning your site infrastructure, content, keywords, speed, and user experience, among others, have to be thoroughly thought-through to increase your site’s rankings. Click here for more information on ranking factors for SEO.
If your site is slow you risk losing customers to an increased bounce rate and decreased SEO rankings. You can optimise your site speed by caching your web pages and making sure images are properly optimised.
In the online world, reviews are highly valued by customers as verification of your site and services, creating traffic, leads, and making conversions. Make sure you feature on multiple review platforms so that your business can maintain its reputation, exposure, and bring in trusting customers.
Just as in store, your customer experience needs to be the best that it can. As well as providing clear contact information, you might consider implementing customer service chatbots on your website in order to maintain good communication with site visitors. Alternatively, having a live chat service so visitors can directly talk to someone. Live chat is often much more convenient for a user than making a telephone call or a protracted email correspondence.
Particularly if you are putting on big sales and offers, your website traffic over the Black Friday weekend could be greater than usual. To ensure your site has the infrastructure to handle surges in traffic, speak to us today for advice.
It’s vital for you and your customers that you keep your website safe, and that you communicate your site’s security to visitors. Aside from having technically robust site infrastructure, you can also enable SSL so your customer feels secure at checkout, and display safe checkout and trust badges on your site.
For help and advice on how to optimise your website, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
At Infotex, we’re known for the strength of our websites… but physical strength? Not so much…
It’ll come as no surprise, then, that our team training for the Whole Hog in October, in aid of Home-Start, is proving a bit of a shock to the system. Luckily, Luke at Airborne Fit has kindly stepped in to help our team get fit for the big day.
With our bodies usually glued to the desk chairs, the three of us were rather apprehensive when we turned up at the Airborne group workout session. The feel good factor and friendly faces soon lifted out spirits as we began what promised to be a real test of endurance. Starting with 5,10,15,20,25 repetitions of exercises – squats, press-ups, star jumps, sit-ups, planks – before ending in a jog and a plank until the 2 minute timer was up. Then rest… We wish! Same again, this time trying to better our times whilst keeping a good form.
At this point we were struggling, yet the worst was still to come. We had 1 minute to do as many repetitions of an exercise as possible before a 30 second break followed by another minute of an exercise, and so on… Around 6 rounds later, the circuit ended on a (roughly) 200 meter run to and from a distant tree. We were completely defeated, and our minds were very much set on a cold shower and bed, but more was to follow as just a few moments later we had to gear ourselves up for the same again. This time trying to improve the amount of reps we did before, which we can honestly say proved impossible.
However, once we dragged ourselves over the finish line and warmed down, there was a sense of accomplishment in the air amongst the group which certainly carried over the next few days (that, along with our very tired and achy bodies). It’s that feeling which gives us no doubt we’ll go again! Just as long as we have 3 free days post workout to recover!
As you can imagine the team is feeling slightly daunted at this point by how much training there still is to go, but grateful to have Airborne Fit on our side!
If you’re struggling to picture the mud, sweat, water and obstacle extravaganza that is the Whole Hog, you can watch of a video of the race in action… and you might be enlightened as to why we’re putting ourselves through, what seems to us, such vigorous training.
Hearing about the work done by Home-Start has made a huge impression on everyone here at Infotex, so the team motivation remains high with our goal in mind. We know that giving a significant donation this autumn can make a huge difference to the lives of thousands.
Please visit our JustGiving page if you would like to donate: www.justgiving.com/fundraising/infotex
Children miss out on the most important years of their life because of family crisis. Home-Start helps families who are reaching breaking point because of isolation, bereavement, illness, poverty, and more.
The winter of 2021 is going to be another particularly tough one for countless families across the country who are lacking the support they need post-pandemic. Home-Start works toward creating more stable, loving, and fun childhoods by working with parents and children together, by spending time at home with families, giving children what they need for their first day at school, helping families access the services they need, supporting young mothers, and creating groups for parents to get together and talk, and much more. They take an approach that is individual, expert, confidential, and compassionate.
The difficulties of isolation, the effects of postnatal illness, disability or mental health issues, bereavement, multiple births, and poverty or financial difficulties are just some of the challenges faced by families in the UK. No matter who you are, a difficult life-changing event can happen to anyone.
For more about Home-Start checkout their website www.home-start.org.uk
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, and if you can, please visit our JustGiving page to donate: www.justgiving.com/fundraising/infotex
The year is 1991, Operation Desert Storm is in full swing in Iraq, the Soviet Union is being dissolved, the Channel Tunnel has yet to open, and Tim Berners-Lee announces the World Wide Web project.
Against this background a computer science student studying at the University of Helsinki, Finland, called Linus Benedict Torvalds posts to a NNTP usergroup (a precursor to web forums) on 25th August 1991:
“Hello everybody out there using minix –
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them 🙂
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.”
His new Operating System was initially only permitted for use on hobby machines with restrictions against use in commercial environments.
Oh, how the world has changed beyond Linus’s wildest dreams!
Fortunately in the last 30 years, Iraq has returned to a relative peace, the Channel Tunnel has come to take around 1/3rd of the passengers travelling from Dover to France, the World Wide Web project can be considered a success with around 2 billion sites now online, and Linus has relented to allow commercial activity based on his operating system!
His “hobby” operating system has now become “big and professional” itself, powering the majority of websites in use in 2021.
In 1996 Linus Torvalds proposed a contest to design a logo for this new operating system, which he suggested resemble a penguin “stuffed to its brim with herring”. Thus a black, white and yellow penguin designed by Larry Ewing came to symbolize the operating system and was subsequently named Tux (purportedly standing for Torvalds Uni-X).
Linux is open-source software meaning that anyone can download the entire source code from www.kernel.org and anyone who has created an account can propose amendments to the operating system, which is one reason it has been so successful.
The size of the code has increased significantly over time, from the mere 7,400 lines of ‘C’ code in version 0.11 to around 17 million lines of code in the current version, yet the structure of the two codebases is very similar. All the additional code is there to incorporate features such as native containerisation, virtualisation support, and the ability to run on an amazingly wide range of hardware.
Linus himself still plays a major role in the direction that Linux takes. Given the size of the project and the number of contributors, there are several managers who oversee specific areas of development, but anything outside of that requires Linus’s approval, even today.
Where Linux differs from its competitors such as Microsoft Windows is that it requires such low levels of system resource (CPU / memory etc.) so it can run in a wide variety of systems – including TV’s, car dashboards, even household fridges! It is also more stable than most other alternatives, with servers rarely needing a restart except for the installation of security updates – try running Windows 10 for a year without rebooting!
Infotex has been running various versions of Linux on the majority of our web servers for more than 20 years, and some of our staff use it on their desktop computer as well.
We’ll be raising a glass to Linux on the 25th August to celebrate Tux reaching its 30th birthday, and we look forward to celebrating many more years to come. Few would have guessed where Linus’s little hobby from 30 years ago would be today and it’s hard to imagine what the world, especially computing, will be like in another 30 years time!
Amongst recent trends in brand development, logo redesign seems to be making the biggest mark… Burger King, Pfizer, Warner Bros, Cadbury’s, and BMW are just a handful of the big names who’ve opted for a refresh in the last year.
A logo is at the heart of a brand identity – it communicates the values and quality of a product or service, but most importantly, it allows customers to build a strong association with your brand. The popular move now is to upgrade to simplified, flat-design logos that work across many platforms.
Some companies, of course, never need to change their logos too drastically (think Nike and Spotify). But for others, there’s pressure to keep modernising your logo to freshen your brand.
What does your logo say about your company? Is it suitable across multiple technologies? And when might it need a refresh?
Online criticism of the minimalist logo trend, however, is enough to make us think carefully before changing our brand identities too drastically for no reason.
Still, we’ve put together some thoughts about when you might consider that logo facelift, and how to ensure it’s one that continues to accurately communicate your motives and values in an expressive way.
The tendency toward simplification in the evolution of logos is somewhat inevitable. Minimal logo designs are generally easier to digest, and the quicker a logo can get into the mind of a consumer and stay there, the better. They are easily recognizable and memorable, approachable, and highly user-friendly.
Simple, flat logos continue to be hugely effective in translating brand identity to audiences across a range of physical and digital media. What’s more, as some brands become such a prevalent part of our lives, even assimilating into our grammar (to google, to uber), their logos don’t need to hold as much information – we already know the brand promise.
There is a risk when changing a logo, though, that the association people have with your brand might be damaged. Mastercard had to undertake two years of social research before changing to a wordless logo, to ensure people would still recognise it.
There has been backlash to what’s been termed “oversimplification” amongst the logo redesign trend, with a sense that the minimalist, digital-friendly logos we’re seeing are too basic and lose character.
One YouTube trend took off under the title, “Please, don’t turn me into an oversimplified logo!” in response to redesigns like that of Pringles.
Early this year, Firefox minimalist logo memes spread widely, with great sadness that “they killed the fox”, after Firefox introduced what in fact turned out to be a parent brand logo. The fox is very much still alive on the browser icon.
We’ve established why it might not be the best idea to go for a logo refresh for no particular reason, because you’re at risk of losing the essence of your brand. However, there are times it is necessary to think about an update… we suggest taking these key points into consideration…
Your logo no longer just needs to look good in a storefront or brochure. It needs to be as clear and impressionable on a small phone screen as it does on a billboard. Many companies are opting for flat, colourful designs to work across all platforms.
Has your target audience changed? If so, you might need to change too. Instagram’s successful logo upgrade from the previous camera icon came about because, as their head of design Ian Spalter said, it “was beginning to feel…not reflective of the community.” Keeping your logo up to date shows you are listening to your audience.
When something’s broken… fix it.
Sometimes a logo just isn’t cutting it. Two years ago, Slack announced that their original logo proved “absolutely awful”, because, consisting of 11 different colours, it was near impossible to place on top of colourful backgrounds. Their new one keeps the same core spirit of the original, but is more practically refined.
Whether it’s a merger, acquisition, or simple repositioning of brand motives, your logo should grow and change as your brand does.
In 2008, Infotex merged with Shelton Internet, traders with a focus on back end technical development. We wanted to represent who we were as a new team, and the excellent technical capabilities that came with it, so we weaved the characteristic capital letters of the old Shelton Internet logo into our old “infotex” logo and brand name.
At Infotex we’re always on the look out for those important moments when a brand refresh might be necessary. In fact, keep your eyes peeled for some upcoming changes to our brand look…
We are always seeing exciting new trends explode in the design world. Perhaps it won’t be long before flat design logos give way to designs using neumorphism and glassmorhpism.
Whatever happens, you only have to look at, say, Apple, or Instagram, to know that good logo redesign can work wonders. But make sure you’re budding for that refresh for the right reasons.
Receiving prompt and secure payment for orders placed via your website is absolutely vital to any e-commerce system, but selecting and setting up the right payment gateway can often be hurried low on the agenda when setting up a new site.
The payment gateway sits as a middleman between your customer’s bank and your bank. During this process the credit or debit card is validated, checks made to ensure funds are available, anti-fraud analysis run, and then (eventually) funds are transferred to your bank.
To take payments online you will probably need an internet merchant account (IMA). Some gateways are an all-in-one solution and don’t require an IMA, such as Stripe. An Internet Merchant Account is different from your business bank account, you can’t pay in or withdraw from it – it’s just an intermediary account. The IMA enables you to start accepting online payments when used in conjunction with a payment gateway.
Internet Merchant Accounts can be obtained via your existing bank, or from some payment service providers (PSPs). The bank or the PSP will assess the risk of the business trading online, and for new companies, without a banking history, this can be a drawn-out process.
For taking payments a customer can either remain on your website to enter their card details (onsite transaction) or be taken to the gateway’s website to pay (offsite transaction). The former has an increased process for PCI compliance (see below).
Within these, there is a subset of gateways, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal, where a user has a payment method (either a card or bank details) and contact information stored in their account with the gateway. This means a customer only needs to authenticate the transaction, such as logging in or using a or login to pay. Having these on your site can increase the conversion rate.
Sadly, as with any financial transaction, taking payments online carries a risk of fraud. All payment providers will have a level of anti-fraud technology, screening cards and customer information and grading the results. Some systems will auto-block transactions with a high risk, others will flag them so you can make a decision. There is a careful balance to find between preventing fraud and not making it difficult for real customers to pay.
3D Secure transactions, where a customer is prompted to enter a password/code to complete the transaction, are covered by a liability shift. Should a 3D Secure transaction be claimed as fraudulent, the onus moves from you to the card issuer.
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is a set of worldwide requirements which aim to protect cardholder information from theft and fraud. If you take any sort of credit/debit card data (including card machines) you must comply with the standards and take steps to prove you have done so to your bank. This is usually done via a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA), companies that will be helping you perform PCI compliance assessments. Failure to be PCI compliant can result in fines from your bank and the loss of the ability to take card payments.
If you use an offsite payment method then you should be able to complete a yearly Self Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) to achieve compliance. If you take onsite payments this will involve a much more detailed questionnaire and a regular vulnerability security scan of your website and network. Using a virtual terminal (see below) will also increase your PCI requirements as you are directly handling customer’s card data.
For more information on PCI DSS please visit https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/
Selecting a gateway shouldn’t just be about transaction fees – also check what additional services and features are available.
Virtual Terminals
A virtual terminal allows you to process card payments over the phone or via their written instructions, typing their details into your computer. You will need to see if you require a Mail Order Telephone Order (MOTO) merchant account to take advantage of a virtual terminal. Note that virtual terminals will affect the requirements of your PCI compliance.
Reporting
Reconciliation of accounts is also vital to any business, so having clear and accurate information on tap in a useful format is a huge benefit.
Invoicing & Link Payments
Some providers allow you to issue invoices directly from their platform to your customers. The invoices contain a link to pay directly online via card, so often get paid much quicker than traditional paper invoicing.
If you’re not after full invoicing, some platforms have the ability to send a simple link to a customer via email, which takes them to a payment page to enter card information.
Integrations
Maybe they offer direct integration to your accounts software or add-ons that allow for recurring payments, but check out add-ons or plugins that extend the functionality of the gateway. Also be aware of future requirements you may have, such as taking payments in other currencies and check that your chosen gateway can do those.
PayPal always comes up in discussions about online payments, being one of the most popular ways to receive online payments and very easy to set up. A common misconception is that customers need a PayPal account in order to pay, however, customers can use their credit or debit cards directly. Unfortunately, this isn’t always made clear to customers as they checkout which puts off a lot of merchants from using it as their sole gateway.
A big positive for existing PayPal customers is they have your details saved – both contact and card information. This means that the customer saves time by simply logging in to their account and accepting the transaction amount they have paid, instead of filling in forms and finding a payment card. Just having the PayPal logo on your site can encourage customers to pick your store.
PayPal has a range of ways to receive payments online, the most basic of which is PayPal buttons. These are super basic Buy Now or Pay with PayPal buttons that you can add to your site with a little bit of code. Customers can then click on them, be taken to PayPal, and then either login and pay by their existing PayPal account, or via credit or debit card.
As a step up from that is PayPal Checkout. This integrates with your ecommerce store so customers can have a basket full of items to checkout with, again being taken to PayPal to complete their purchase.
PayPal has also recently added PayPal Credit, where customers can buy now and pay later, with 0% interest on orders over £99. Customers are pre-approved, and obviously terms and conditions apply. This is all handled on PayPal’s side, so from a merchant point of view doesn’t require you to do anything.
PayPal isn’t always the most popular with merchants though, with higher than average transaction fees if you’re a low volume merchant, and there have been reports of accounts being suspended with little to no notice.
Previously known as Sage Pay, Opayo is a very popular payment gateway. This is more of a traditional gateway, where the customer is asked to enter their payment details – so no quick checkout with saved cards as with PayPal.
Opayo has a range of site integration methods, both on and off-site, and can accept deferred and recurring payments. They have a few pricing plans, with the most basic starting at £25p/m for 350 transactions.
Stripe may not be a name familiar to everyone, but it’s used on thousands of sites, including deliveroo, Waitrose, and booking.com. They have competitive transaction fees with no setup or monthly costs. It is easily integrated into WooCommerce and allows you to take Apple Pay and Google Pay as well. The admin area is a little busy and takes a while to learn.
Another of the big names in online payments, Worldpay offer an onsite or offsite payment gateway integration. Prices start at £19 per month, and minimum contract applies. Outside of that their fee structure is opaque and requires you to contact them. They also offer physical card terminals, for those of you doing face to face payments.
Like PayPal, Google Pay and Apple Pay are hugely powerful logos to have on your site. People know they will be able to checkout quickly, as their payment and delivery details are already saved on their device. Usually, you would have other payment options alongside Google Pay and Apple Pay, for people to purchase with a debit or credit card. Integration is also usually done via another payment gateway, for example if you use Stripe and WooCommerce you can enable them without having to register for separate accounts.
Not strictly a payment gateway, GoCardless allows you to take recurring payments directly from your customer’s bank accounts. GoCardless are effectively a modern take on Direct Debits, which is the basis of their system is built upon.
Klarna allows customers to split their payments across multiple interest-free instalments. Klarna pays the merchant for the product as soon as the customer completes their purchase. Again, it’s another option that isn’t clear on their transaction fees, but it’s somewhere around 2.49%+20p per transaction. This option can be popular with customers, but there are grumblings about being refused payment options and charges being taken when goods had been returned.
WooCommerce Payments is built on the backbone of Stripe, with identical fee structure, it provides an integrated interface directly into your WooCommerce store admin area for managing payments. Customers can pay directly in your website without leaving to go to a separate gateway site, and save their card details for faster payments in the future.
It’s always best to speak to your web development agency before engaging with any payment gateway, as they will have experience with a wide range of them and can help you navigate the pitfalls. They will also be familiar with what gateways your ecommerce site can work with, as some platforms are harder to integrate than others and while you may save a few pounds on your transaction fees the initial integration fees can offset that.
We don’t need a pandemic to remind us that everything starts in the home. The earliest years make the biggest impact on a child’s development, so it’s incredibly important that parents and their children get the support they need when times get hard. Home-Start supports 56,000 children in 27,000 families across the UK in a unique way – by being there for parents, in their time of need.
The difficulties of isolation, the effects of postnatal illness, disability or mental health issues, bereavement, multiple births, and poverty or financial difficulties are just some of the challenges faced by families in the UK. No matter who you are, a difficult life-changing event can happen to anyone.
Home-Start works toward creating more stable, loving, and fun childhoods by working with parents and children together, by spending time at home with families, giving children what they need for their first day at school, helping families access the services they need, supporting young mothers, and creating groups for parents to get together and talk, and much more. They take an approach that is individual, expert, confidential, and compassionate.
Infotex have chosen to take part in fundraising for Home-Start, and in case you can’t guess why we think they’re such a fantastic charity, I asked our MD to explain:
Ant Agar, Infotex’s Managing Director, said “In the lead up to Christmas 2020, we were looking for a good cause relevant to the challenges of COVID19. With the second lockdown pending, we were feeling very aware at Infotex how lucky we had been throughout the pandemic so far. Times had been difficult, of course, but we felt blessed to already be working online as we do, and to be able to keep working.
A friend told me about Home-Start, so I started reading about them. I was immediately impressed by the impact they make, so I contacted their Head of Fundraising Anita for a chat. I was taken aback by the extraordinarily broad reach of the charity and the support they give. They are doing a lot with very little. Their work fills some gaps where health and social services is not able to reach.
I think the way Home-Start achieves so much with so little reminded me of Infotex. As a small company of 23 people, we know full well how a few thousand pounds extra in a year can make a huge difference to an organisation. So it is within our grasp to make a meaningful contribution. We discussed this as a team, and, as we were not able to have a company Christmas gathering, we could give Home-Start a Christmas donation.
In January, Anita joined us online for one of our daily online company catch-ups. The whole Infotex team was so impressed by what she had to tell us about the work they do. Many were really moved by what they learned, and all agreed we would like to do more. So we decided we would, for the second time in our short history, send an Infotex team to run in the “Whole Hog” in October, a 5-mile obstacle-filled, muddy, exhausting (and supposedly fun) race near Woodbridge, from which we aim to raise Home-Start a bit more cash.
The winter of 2021 is going to be another tough one for countless families across the country who are lacking the support they need post-pandemic. We know that giving a significant donation this autumn can make a difference. So training starts now. I am personally feeling a bit daunted, but having a sense of purpose is a great help to get me out there running. I hope all of our friends will be willing to reward us with generous donations to Home-Start when we reach out to them nearer the time”
We’re going to drop in stories about the Home-Start project in the coming months, but to start you off here is an introduction to one of the Home-Start collaborative programmes, called the LENA programme.
Research has shown that the number of words children hear in their first days, months and years have a huge impact on their development in later life. There is a huge gap in the number of words children hear in the first four years of their life between children from lower and higher-income families.
LENA is a coaching programme for parents of children from birth to three years of age. Trained volunteers support families in their own homes to increase their communication and interaction with their child to ensure they get the best start in life. A structured programme over 12 weekly visits is supported by the use of ground-breaking technology developed by the LENA Foundation, which gives families personalised data on how many words a child is hearing and how many conversations they are engaged in. This information allows parents to work with their volunteer to be aware of how they are engaging with their children, and look for ways of increasing the number of words their child hears.
You can find out more about this programme, and hear other stories told directly from those who have been helped by Home-Start, through the Home-Start podcast series!
To give your much-needed support, please visit our JustGiving page.
One of the things our team loves most about our work is the range of clients we get to work with, and the amazing things they do. Here we offer a peek into 6 new projects we have launched last month. From keeping clean to product rentals, they’re businesses that, as always, we’re proud to work with.
Nobody needs to splash out on expensive appliances anymore… Snelling’s brand new website allows customers to pick a product to rent, with free delivery, installation, and repairs. It all began when the company was founded by Roy Snelling as a pioneering Television rental service, back in the 1950s.
Featuring in The Lawyer magazine’s prestigious Top 200 law firm rankings, Stevens Scown is the UK’s first large employee-owned law firm.
The website refresh for Stephens Scown law firm involved the development of the website’s Info Hub, which pulls together their extensive blog content and displays it nicely broken down by video, trending articles and FAQs with a much improved user experience. This was an exciting step forward, particularly after the success of their blog during the lockdown last year (Read more in our blog: website lockdown successes and what we can learn from them).
LAC cleaning is a family run business with over 47 years experience in high standard cleaning services. Their superb cleanliness is evermore appreciated in our current context, you can imagine… and they required a suitably clean and clear website redesign to provide a look and feel that is polished to perfection.
Packability’s history of selling great value packaging products goes all the way back to 1937, when it was founded as Welsh Boxes – a solid board boxes and stocked paper rolls manufacturer. Since then, the company has gone from strength to strength, merging with the global Tri-Wall family and greatly expanding the range of packaging products from its base in South Wales.
Incognito Group are hospitality specialists, offering a bespoke service that opens doors to the world’s best sporting, social, and cultural events. The website is a ‘designer’ theme build on WordPress that displays their new, refreshed brand look, with Events at the core of the website.
With over 20 years combined experience in selling hospitality, and a network of contacts in sport, music and events, their team puts the spotlight firmly on their clients by understanding and interpreting their hopes and aspirations.
This second project for Snellings was to merge the original Snellings and Gerald Giles websites into one retail website. We had to combine these two brands without confusing customers (many of whom have shopped with Snellings for years) and without losing traction in Google. The site uses Gerald Giles for the primary domain, but with dual branding of the logo. We also have clear messaging for anyone visiting from the previous snellings.co.uk address to ensure they are reassured they’re at the right website.
You probably like reading reviews before you purchase a product or service, right? They’re our most trusted source of, well, whether to trust something. Reviews are an essential marketing tool – drawing traffic, creating leads, and making conversions.
People sometimes put off signing up to review sites for fear of receiving negative online reviews, or even none at all. However, you need business reputation to drive traffic, and there are ways to cope with negative online reviews should they arise. Indeed, even negative customer reviews are important because they can help you to see where you might need to improve your customer service.
Maybe you want to be on all the review sites to get the most exposure as possible, or maybe you want to start with just one. Either way, we’ve put together some of the most popular review platforms out there. These cover the biggest B2C and B2B review sites, but of course there are many more out there for particular service and target consumer niches.
Whether you’re business can be found on lots of reviewing platforms or not, don’t forget to include some of those all important testimonials you receive on your own website. If you don’t wish to use a 3rd party like Feefo or Trustpilot then many website platforms such as WordPress or Shopify have their own on-site review systems you can use to get valuable customer feedback automatically.
Business reviews and ratings are now often included in search results. Google, for instance, will often directly display online business reviews and consumer ratings following a search, as shown below.
Discover how our team can help you on your journey.
Talk to us today