Technology

How to get CDs and DVDs produced professionally for next to nothing

by Kev on 6 May, 2011

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Presentation is everything in business and if you offer your customers CDs or DVDs either as products in their own right or as part of your marketing, there’s little point unless they are produced professionally.

I’ve produced CDs for two of my businesses. For one, I was acting as a mini duplication company for a client and for another the CD was part of the product. Our options were either to have an external company produce the CDs on CDR and using inkjet printing on the surface for the label or to buy in the equipment to do the same ourselves. We opted for the latter and it was profitable enough. [click to continue…]

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PagePlus X5: the perfect desktop publishing tool for small business

by KevPartner on 22 December, 2010

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First impressions count. Boring, clichéd but true.  An amateurish or incomplete website, for example, destroys the credibility of any small business. The same applies to your paper-based communications. We may live in a digital world, but paper’s been around for 4,000 years and it’s likely to remain important for the foreseeable future.

For most small businesses, the day to day production of paperwork is handled in-house and this presents two problems. Firstly, you need to have some understanding of design to come up with a professional look and for this I strongly recommend the Non-Designers Design Book by Robin Williams.

The second problem is translating your design into reality. Most small businesses use Microsoft Word but Word is not up to the job of creating sophisticated layouts. Word’s purpose is to make the job of generating documents quick and efficient. This is fine for reports and letters but if design is a key component of the document then a more sophisticated tool is needed and this is where desktop publishing comes in. [click to continue…]

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Getting organised: the online Filofax

by KevPartner on 17 March, 2010

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As a business owner, keeping organised is critical especially if, like me, you’re naturally disorganised!

I’ve been using Backpack by 37Signals for a number of years and all of my businesses have a separate Backpack account. It’s a very easy to use, fairly free-form organisational tool and I use it largely for keeping track of information. For example, I keep notes about any interactions with the tax man, record customer conversations, software licenses – in fact anything I may need to lay my hands on later. Each of these is recorded in a separate Backpack Page.

It includes a calendar which can be shared amongst multiple users and also a simple writeboard with version tracking. You can also set up reminders to be sent to your mobile and even keep a journal of your daily activities.

Pricing starts at $24 per month (£17) and it pays for itself time and time again in convenience and peace of mind.

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Thesis 1.6 : the best WordPress theme bar none

by KevPartner on 5 February, 2010

Scribbleit.co.uk's website was created using the Thesis theme

Whilst primarily a piece of blogging software (this site uses it), WordPress is also used for creating fully-featured business websites. Indeed, unless your website is your business (eg ecommerce or web applications) WordPress is likely to be the best way to achieve an effective, professional online presence that you can then easily update and manage.

Installing WordPress is fairly straightforward and you should always install it onto your own domain rather than using the WordPress.org service – it’s a matter of credibility. Once installed, you can then change the look, feel and functionality of your site by adding a “theme”. There are many thousands of free themes whereas Thesis costs $89 (£56) so why would you want to buy a theme rather than use a free one? [click to continue…]

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Easy networking for the small business

by KevPartner on 13 September, 2009

If you’re hiring serviced offices then networking will be taken care of for you but if you work from home, you’ll need some way of reliably connecting to the internet from your home office/spare room and accessing extra storage. Having additional storage means you can keep project files on that storage device and then access them from more than one computer in the house or this can be used for backup purposes.

There are a number of storage devices such as this: they’re called Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. Which one to pick? Personally, I used Buffalo’s Linkstation products but whatever you choose, I recommend that you select one that supports RAID. This is a technology that allows two hard disks to be kept synchronised moment by moment. What this means in practice is that if one of the hard disks fails, the other one is a complete copy of it and therefore acts as an automatic backup. There’s no setup required beyond telling the device which form of RAID you want (you should select RAID 1 if you want the backup capability).

Connecting the network together

You’re probably aware that there are traditionally two ways of setting a network up: wired or wireless. Creating a wired network involves running ethernet cable around the house, usually from the ADSL router to each computer and to the NAS device. Wired networks perform the best but they are extremely disruptive to set up at home and it’s awkward to move computers around later.

Wireless networks are the most common form of home network. Once set up they’re fine, although they perform much more slowly than wired networks and you’ll certainly notice this when you connect to another computer or to your NAS device. There are also likely to be places in your house where the wirless reception is poor, making performance even worse. If you work in your shed, for example, you may well only get a very weak signal.

There is a more recent, third option. It’s possible to buy devices that plug into your mains power sockets and use the power cables already laid through your house to transmit the network traffic. Setup is as simple as plugging one of these devices into the mains socket nearest the router and another into the socket nearest each computer. Connect the router, the computer and any NAS device to the plug socket via an ethernet cable and you have an instant network.

Networking through the mains is almost as fast as an ethernet connection, is dead simple to set up and you can reposition the adapters around the house by simply moving them from socket to socket: no further setup required. If you’re working in the shed, simply use your power sockets in there.

I’ve been using the Netgear Powerline range for the past couple of years with absolutely no problems. Other ranges are available but you should be sure to use the same range throughout the house.

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What if your broadband went down?

by KevPartner on 13 September, 2009

Connection graphic

When you start working from a home office, the natural thing to do is to use your existing broadband connection and leave things at that. However, if your business depends on having a connection to the internet (and whose doesn’t?) then you need to have a good quality connection day to day and a back-up plan. [click to continue…]

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Accounting Software

by KevPartner on 10 September, 2009

FreeAgent Accounting Software Screenshot

When I set my business up in 1999 there was really only one choice for accounting software: Sage and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was still the case given their marketing budget and visibility.

The consequences of choosing Sage were that I needed to employ someone specifically to use that one piece of software (I can hardly believe it even as I write that!)  and that I got very little use out of it, as MD, because I would have needed to buy an extra licence to view the information.

In my view, Sage accounting software is an utter nightmare and it completely taints your view of what accounting software can do for you. In desperation, last year I looked for an online solution and, thank heavens, I found FreeAgent.

I kid you not, if you’re a Sage user or if you find book-keeping a long winded, boring process that you do because you must, take a look at FreeAgent (http://www.freeagentcentral.com). You can trial it free for a month so there’s nothing to lose.

As an illustration, I’ve gone from having to employ someone three days a week to do the books on my main company to doing the books myself in no more than one hour a month. I kid you not. In fact, I also do the books for another business and that takes 30 minutes a month.

Here’s how it works (having set up your account) -

  1. Download your statements from your online banking account
  2. Upload them to FreeAgent. FreeAgent then tries to work out what each entry means and only asks for explanations of those it can’t be sure about. It gets progressively better at this over time and I typically only have a dozen or so transactions to explain per month.

…that’s it.

Doing the VAT? Just make sure your statements have been uploaded, click Taxes, VAT, and there it is: a visual version of the paper form for you to fill straight in.

How about sending the books to the accountant? Easy: under Accounting you’ll see a range of reports to send to your accountant along with the ability to export the whole lot to Excel.

Accountants are a conservative lot and many of them are tied to the Sage treadmill (of course it suits them to perpetuate the air of complication and mystery around accounting that Sage encourages) but I’ve persuaded my accountant to accept information in FreeAgent format (you could even add them as a user on your account). If they don’t: fire them! Remember, your Accountant works for you not the other way round!

FreeAgent ranks in my top couple of web applications of any sort. As an extremely busy person, I confess to almost enjoying doing the accounts now. When a business isn’t doing well, I feel better for knowing the worst. When it IS doing well, I get a warm glow from knowing just how good things are.

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