Currently a .co domain offers no major advantage over a co.uk or .com. These domains are so dominant within popular search engines such as Google that we must ask the question whether a .co is ever going to beat a .co.uk to the top of a UK web search?? Probably not.

But, .co. is now an internationally recognised TLD, top level domain. And while it may not be as well recognised as .com .net .org it may well be one day. So, protecting your web domain [Your Name Here].co if you own a business may well be prudent. The big boys have certainly done it.

Many suggest that .co has the potential to become a major TLD. Considering what the ‘co’ could stand for - Company, Corporation, Commerce to name a few.

You could secure the domain and then redirect it to your site. That’s cost effective and simple to do. Ask yourself if someone else would feel the need to secure the .co of your address, and if so you should grab it before they do. The worst thing you want is someone getting the .co version of your .com or .co.uk domain name and mopping up all the visitors who do not complete the address in the browser.

If you have decided to go for it and purchase the .co namesake of your current site just give us a call on 01903 790 100 and we’ll secure it and redirect it to your site.

Whatever you do, do not overpay for your .co, or get caught by a convincing email suggesting that you secure all sorts of domain names including .sg .biz etc etc….

Your thoughts, as always are appreciated….

LWS Creative have worked with Kittiwake on Exhibition pop ups, banners and promotional signs in the past.  But this exhibition is a little different. Built onsite in Hamburg the stand is a hard hitting example of how a clean consistent brand can grab the attention in a massive market and allow a firm like Kittiwake to stand out in a hall full of MNE’s and Oil Majors.

The team at LWS cannot wait for the stand to be finished and to see our rebrand and exhibition design making an impact on the world stage.

Until next week here is a sneak preview of the stand build in progress…

In the process of the move we also left behind the old LWS and Local Web Solutions Brand and became LWS Creative. With a new brand, a new website, new offices and a new training division LWS Creative are really moving forward in our quest to become the number one choice Web and Marketing Services Agency in West Sussex.

We look forward to hearing from you, welcoming you to our offices and discussing your project.

Sussex Transport is a growing company based in Sussex  and the new website refl

SussexTransportWebsite

ects the growth in size and service offerings that this Sussex based haulier has made in recent months.

The site has a built in CMS (Content Management system) to aid fast updates.  It also has a newsletter section that helps create fast, effective and branded HTML emails for marketing purposes.

Visit http://www.sussextransport.com/ to check out the latest site.

The level of trust is increasing slowely, but we are all still cautious, and rightly so.  At LWS Creative we have an expert team ready to work with you on your ecommerce project to make your site work for you and your customers.  With a combined  total of more than 30 years of experience including the testing and webmaster’ing of the www.homebase.co.uk and www.argos.co.uk websites.

Whether you are selling just a few items and want some simple buy now buttons on your site, or you have thousands of products to sell we will guide you through the process with no jargon and most importantly within budget.

Visit http://www.lwscreative.co.uk/e-commerce_websites.htm for more information or contact us by email

Whose messages or ‘tweets’ you see on your screen are based on who you to choose to ‘follow’ - so log on and see what Richard Branson is up to! You will get alerts if people want to ‘follow’ you and view your ‘tweets’ - and you can choose to accept – or if you prefer - decline them. The question ‘What are you doing?’ is for the most part rhetorical – Twitter’s not really meant for conversation but getting a sense of what people are up to.

For business people, it’s a sure fire method for improving search engine results – placing keywords and links to your website or blogs helps them climb up the Google rankings. LWS are providing a great new service including a training session, setting up your Twitter page and installing a link to your page from your website for just £195.

Interested? Contact Claire on 01903 785568 or email claire@lws-uk.com P.S. The drinks are on us!  Contact us about Twitter or anything web or design related in October and receive a bottle of quality wine or beer, delivered to you by thesussexvictuallers.co.uk

Claire is the Managing Director of Local Web Solutions and its sister company LWS Creative. This talented Arundel based team provide great looking, business generating websites, marketing and design.

Article from Sussex Local

Click here to view the pdf

In line with previous years, the aim of the Worthing Business Awards 2009 was to showcase and promote only the very best of the town’s businesses. The 2009 ceremony was the finale of many months of nominations and judging and on the evening itself, over 300 Worthing business people gathered to celebrate the winners in the 17 categories. To quote this year’s judges, “The winner of this (customer care) award will demonstrate that customer service is alive and kicking and living in Worthing. Reward a business that is passionate about customer care - nominate them for this.”

Stephen Hollamby, Managing Partner at Bennett Griffin said, “We are thrilled to win this award. Delivering outstanding customer care to each one of our clients is at the heart of everything that we do at Bennett Griffin. The nominations that we received this year from an astonishing number of our loyal clients were heartening and touching to say the very least. I know that every single member of the team at Bennett Griffin holds customer service close to their hearts so receiving this award is very special indeed. I would like to thank our clients for their loyalty and unwavering support over many years and to emphasise that we will never rest on our laurels when it comes to looking after them and putting them at the centre of everything that we do.”

Off I went for a look and we got a warm and welcome from David and Roger (love the wine!) and then got asked if we’d like a little boat trip and to start a race. The guys then did a great plug for LWS so thanks very much!

A great day and excellent to see loads of our clients down on the river too including Chris Leigh-Jones and Paul Froome from www.kittiwake.com and www.krystallon.com.

Similar to last year, Local Web Solutions | LWS Creative sponsored Red Anywhere’s Red Golf Day 2009.  The event was held at Manning’s Heath Golf Club on Tuesday 14th July in order to raise money for Sussex Autistic Society and Worthing Churches Homeless Projects.

The day was a complete success, with pleny of fun being had and money being raised for the two charities.  he prize draw raised £1,580  with the Prize Tree raising £490, both totalling £1,035 for each charity.  The Auction with a Twist provided a pledge of £1,455 for Sussex Autistic Society and £718.50 for Worthing Churches Homeless Project.

Although Local Web Solutions | LWS Creative were not the winners this year we were still proud to be sponsors and to take part.  Congratulations to this years winners, SJA International.

The beautiful Eastlands Estate near Billingshurst was the venue for a vibrant networking event hosted by Bennett Griffin Solicitors (www.bennett-griffin.co.uk). The focus of the evening entitled: “Building bricks -Building relationships” was to highlight the St Barnabas house Building A Dream appeal. The Worthing-based hospice has the challenge of raising £3 million in the next 12 months to complete their project of building a new state-of-the-art hospice. The team at Bennett Griffin have been long-standing supporters and fundraisers for St Barnabas House, and are proud to be sponsoring the first stone to be laid in The Walk of Life - the pathway that will welcome patients and visitors to the new hospice.

After 30 minutes of animated networking, guests listened to Hugh Lowson, CEO of St Barnabas House. Hugh showed a poignant, inspiring film in which Desmond Lynam OBE explained the need for a new hospice and the bold but not impossible task facing the fundraising team. The final £3 million will enable the new hospice to be completed next year.

It was then the turn of Ian Macara, Partner at Bennett Griffin and Head of Business for private clients and Peter Bennett, Partner and Head of BG Commercial to inspire the audience. Both men spoke passionately about the client focused ethos of Bennett Griffin. It was also revealed by the compere, Dee Blick that one of Ian’s personal ambitions is to trek in the foothills of the Himalayas with his family, whilst Peter is planning to walk the length and breadth of France after completing his Open University studies in evolution.

Guests were then treated to a superb cookery demonstration by Dan Clark, Master Chef of Great Britain. Dan captivated the audience with his culinary skills. His risotto and the other scrumptious dishes he created were polished off in minutes.

A thoroughly enjoyable evening was drawn to a close by Stephen Hollamby, Managing Partner at Bennett Griffin. Stephen thanked both the guests for attending and the organisers LWS Creative for their hard work. He also spoke eloquently of the need for local businesses like Bennett Griffin to continue giving back to their local communities and he reaffirmed Bennett Griffin’s commitment to continue with their fundraising activities for St Barnabas House.

All in all it was a perfect evening and each guest left in good spirits, knowing a little more about St Barnabas House and how they could become involved in the Building A Dream Appeal.

For further information including images, and high resolution visuals please contact Claire Love Jones of LWS Creative on 01903 785568.

“Firstly I would like to thank you and your team for an excellent evening. You organised a fist class event in a stunning location with superb speakers and Dan’s amazing food, all for such a worthwhile cause.

Before last night I had only heard of St. Barnabas, and I was very moved to find about their great work. This was all the more poignant as cancer has been a big part of our family’s life.  I think now that as a Company, we will be supporting St. Barnabas and the fantastic service they provide.

I met some great people and forged some good contacts. I have even developed a new cake from discussions last night. This was an added bonus to a very worthwhile evening aimed at raising the awareness of such a needed charity. Well Done.”

Sean Tullett, Country Farm Cakes

Ratcliffe Creative website

Ratcliffe Creative provide music and drama services for groups, individuals, local authorities and charities.

Ratcliffe Creative has signed with Local Web Solutions | LWS Creative and has been provided with a brand new web design and build.

Kittiwake website

Kittiwake are experts in monitoring machinery and analysing fuel and lube oil as well being the starters of research and development of technology solutions.  Kittiwake also have other website within the Kittiwake group including Krystallon, LinerSCAN, ANALEXAlert and Kittiwake Hellas.

Local Web Solutions | LWS Creative provided the web design and build for the new Kittiwake website.  Web design was also provided by LWS for Krystallon, LinerSCAN, ANALEXAlert and Kittiwake Hellas within the Kittiwake Group.  Local Web Solutions | LWS Creative also provided Kittiwake with a new corporate identity which included a new logo design and business cards.

HD Tribe website

HD Tribe, a Sussex based funeral directors have recently add the ability for their funeral services to be broadcast over the internet.

This now allows relatives that can’t make it to the service, but have a computer, to still be able to say a final farewell to their loved ones.

The webcasts are password protected for privacy reasons, so before a service, the password would be sent to relatives so they could log on a watch the ceremony.

Modified Performance website

Modified Performance is a standard, modified and performance car, bike and van club/forum based in the South East.  They accept vehicles of all ranges including standard ones.  It is one of very few clubs which attend meets and shows that have a no babe policy, making it ideal for both men and women.  As the motto says “It’s about the cars, not the babes”.

Local Web Solutions | LWS Creative have given Modified Performance a brand new website design and built it as part of a relaunch.

Sandra would like to thank all those at Local Web Solutions and sponsoring clients for their kind donations.

The evening included a great dinner, charity auction, a few interesting plays around the masked ball theme and a fair bit of dancing too (great band).

Great to go along and have some fun but also support a great local charity.

Aneela was one of the sponsors of the event which was organised by the lovely guys at Cadia, Jeremy and Leanne (we do  the CADIA website www.cadia.org.uk).

Our partner company Fresh Egg www.freshegg.com were up for an award and we all had a really great night.

Here’s looking forward to next year.

Looking forward to the next one!

The Original Doll website

LWS has signed Arundel based online jewellery and accessory store, The Original Doll.

Tim Duggan Rees’s online business, which has an ex Top Shop buying team in the background, has an existing website (created by Tim) but he wanted to take the site and the business to the next level so  looked to LWS and it’s expert e-commerce team to make this move.

The site uses open source code called OSCommerce and the plan is to implement a new bespoke Content Management System (CMS) to allows Tim to manipulate the site more easily. We’ll also be designing some  and some fancy new  pages to make the site more interactive and we’ll running a Google Adwords campaign over the next few months too.

Thanks to Andy and Holly Heggenden from Sparks Yard in Arundel who recommended us to Tim following their attendance at the our launch party for Arundel businesses.

Roofer in Rustington?  Builder in Bognor?  Windows in Worthing? Sports shop in Sussex? 

Whatever your business - if it’s local like us - we can get you great results on the search engines for your area. 

Hide or Search?
If your website doesn’t come up when people are looking for your kind of products or services on the web, you’re in danger of underselling yourself and you’re missing out on sales that could be falling into your competitors’ laps. The good news is that you don’t have to be a techie to improve the ranking of your website on Google. In fact there are some pretty simple and effective things that you can do to your website so that it becomes more visible on the web. To get started, all you need is a little guidance and some great tips from us. Then, if you want to take it further we’ll help you. 

Here are three cracking search packages. If you like the sound of any one of them or you’re just curious about the whole area of search, please get in touch with us at info@lws-uk.com or call us on 01903 785568 now!

1. Off the Starting Blocks!
Intensive 3 Hour One-To-One Search coaching £149 (introductory offer - save 33%)
If you’re one of those people that likes to get results from having a good go yourself then you will love this session!�
Get off those starting blocks and into action with this one-to-one session held at our lovely offices in Arundel (coffee and cakes thrown in!) where we’ll cover:

• what search is all about and how it can benefit your website
• how you can really get the most from your Content Management System (CMS) for search purposes. We’ll look at page titles, keywords and descriptions; how to use fresh content and news. (Unlike many competitors’ CMS systems, our CMS system enables you to optimise your website.)
• how to use links within your site and how to build genuine inbound links
• how to make use of many of Google’s free tools including Google Page Rank and Google maps

We’ll also give you loads of extra tips and hints in a handy fact sheet. Look upon this as your one to one personal fitness training session for your website! We’ll inspire you; we’ll show you step-by-step what you have to do to get results and we’ll even get you started. You can then crack on with it yourself or you can go one step further and take advantage of…

2. Your ongoing tailored search fitness programme!
6 monthly sessions at £99 per month (introductory offer - save 33%)
If you’re a busy person and you need more motivation and guidance to get results than one session, you’ll really benefit from downing tools every few weeks and heading to our offices (here come those cakes again!). Once there, we’ll work alongside you in powerful 2 hour sessions where you can put all those tips and strategies that you learned in that first intensive session into practice. Ideally the sessions should be spaced 4 weeks apart to allow enough time for your efforts to yield results. You’ll get our undivided attention throughout each session and we’ll review your progress at the start of each one so you know you’re on the right tracks. Make search your regular habit and watch those results come in!

3. The Full Monty - we do the search on your behalf
From £200 per month (introductory offer - normally £295 per month)
Okay, you like what you’ve read so far… But you don’t want to get involved in improving the search engine ranking of your website even though you know it has to be done. Let us give you an assessment of the monthly commitment we think that your website needs and we’ll  quote a fixed monthly fee for doing the search on your behalf.

Get your business found locally - email us now on info@lws-uk.com or call 01903 785568 for more details!

Aneela and her expert team will be working with LWS and their clients for the forthcoming year. Aneela has just signed up with Stuart and the boys at Vagg Flooring www.vaggflooring.co.uk so while Aneela is getting their name out there we will be improving their website.

Rowan Business Solutions website

Rowan Business Solutions create Benchmark Reports for Industry financial analysis.  Their financial reports are for major business sectors in the UK and provide essential information for management. 

They have, to date, created two publications - UK Non alcoholic beverages manufacturers and suppliers  and UK Medical, dental and surgical equipment manufacturers these are reports which analyse over 95 leading companies in specific industries showing an overall picture of growing sales, and healthy margins, but declining profitability and relatively meagre returns on the capital and assets employed.

Local Web Solutions | LWS Creative have worked very closely with Rowan Business Solutions to create them a professional and eye catching brand and web design that can follow through to their publications, newsletters and also on their website.

Deans Place website

Deans Place Country Hotel, based in Alfristion, is the ideal place to stay being surrounded by Sussex Countryside.  They have 35 rooms, all of which have been nicely decorated and have all the latest facilities you could need including Wi-Fi, satellite tv and DVD player to name a few.  The place is ideal for various events such as business meeting and weddings as well as other events.

Local Web Solutions | LWS Creative would like to think Michael and Sheryl from The Chatsworth Hotel in Worthing for asking us to do another website for the Steyne Hotels group.

The new Deans Place website has been provided with a fresh web design and built by LWS with reservation and updates facilities to keep you up-to-date with special offers and events.

Our event at Sylvan Oak in Findon last week was fantastic - thank you so much to all the team there - I’ve been bombarded with emails about it! Alot of good food and drink, not too much business talk on the night but some serious business has been passed since between our clients which is great news.

On Monday the Red Golf Day committee met to discuss the latest events - with the guys from Worthing Churches Homeless Projects and the Sussex Autistic Society on board too -can’t wait for the day at Mannings Heath Golf Club in July. See the Red Golf Day site for more details.

Tuesday I had my first full day in the office for weeks - with no morning, lunchtime or evening networking - quite a revelation! The sister site to the Chatsworth Hotel in Worthing - Deans Place Hotel in Alfriston went live this week - really excited about this as a challenging but rewarding project - nice to work with you again Sheryl and Michael.

Wednesday I was up at 5.30am going back to the coal face to get the new website live for Worthing Business Circle - prior to our visitors day at 7.30am! We had a tight deadline to meet so for once it was me updating the site before go live rather than one of the team (at least I can still do it!). Worthing Business Circle is a great group and we focus on ‘building business, building relationships and building the community’. At lunchtime I met with our client Lou from Melrose Care Home in Worthing - arguably one of the best nursing homes in Worthing and one of only 2 with a 3 star care rating. We had a great lunch - sorry - business meeting at The Fish Factory.

Wednesday evening brings the first of our LWS ‘Get trained and be Entertained’ nights with Masterchef Dan Clarke doing a great demo while our clients learn all about blogging! They seemed to enjoy it!

On Thursday I’m off to visit new clients and Friday I am training for Business Link for my regular ‘I’m in Business - I need a website’ course which I love doing - it’s great to meet people starting their new businesses and hear all about their ideas as well as being able to offer them advise on how to set up a website - whether they do it for free or go for a company.

Looking forward to my friend Shelley’s 30th birthday party on Saturday then hopefully a bit of R and R on Sunday…

Night to Remember 2009 website

Night to Remember is a Ladies only half marathon night walk starting at Midnight on Saturday 20th June 2009 from Worthing Leisure Centre to raise money for St Barnabas House Hospice.  Last year the walk raised nearly £200,000.

Local Web Solutions | LWS Creative, who built last year’s site for Night to Remember as well, have built this years web design which has now gone live

City Gardens, who are already a client of Local Web Solutions | LWS Creative, will be provided with a brand new website design and rebuild.

Recently Dragon Boat Events signed with Local Web Solutions | LWS Creative who will be proving the web design and building them a new site.

Thanks to Geoff Tricker for this excellent referral.