With over 100 million users, LinkedIn is the most popular social network for business professionals. Aside from using LinkedIn to find jobs or employees, if you target other businesses, maintaining a presence on LinkedIn can also help you generate leads and customers.

boxChilli Media are looking for a trainee web designer to help aid their expansion. The business is growing rapidly at present so there will be progression opportunities plus the ability to learn contemporary web technologies. You will be working in a dynamic environment who emphasise working as a team to accomplish issues.

We work with a wide range of clients and technologies, so you will experience a varied workday. From online marketing to e-commerce, boxChilli Media pride themselves on the service they can provide for their clients, so you will also need to be confident speaking to high level executives, who are limited by time and budget but need to take their business forward.

If you are excited by web design, want to advance your career and work in a inspirational environment we would love to see your application.

Required Skills:

Previous experience of web design though this does not have to be professionally.
Basic understanding of HTML, CSS
Good people skills
Confident self-starter who is prepared to learn independently

Skills that may give you an advantage:

Professional web design experience.
Understanding of CMS systems.
Awareness of SEO

Application Details

If you would like to apply for the role and believe you are suitable, please send your CV and covering letter to hello@boxchilli.com

So we needed to look for alternative. Matt found www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk and found a mesh banner, it was only £35 so we thought we’d give it a try. So far so good, as the wind just goes right through the mesh. Last week we had a storm hit the boatshed, some other signs came down, along with roof tiles, but the banner held fast.

Definitely worth a look!

Now that we know this type of banner works well for us we are going to get some more ordered.

Anders Bohea – boxChilli Media

This was the statement I first read months ago and thought, this should be quite simple to solve, if not fairly intrusive to the normal browsing experience. Since reading into the privacy law, however, it has become more and more vague about what is required for specific cookies.

What is a cookie?

I know some of you are thinking it is a biscuit with chocolate bits in, like the one favoured by my favourite sesame street character above, however, this is not the case when it comes to web terms. A cookie is a small piece of information created by a website and then stored on your computer. The next time you go to the same website, it can access that cookie and the data inside it.

Where are cookies used?

There are many features within websites which require cookies, and these are outlined below:

Analytics

Analytics is a software package which can be used to track a users journey throughout your site, where they came from and what they do. The most common example of this would be Google Analytics.

Unfortunately the new law means that users have to opt-in before we can start tracking this data.

Advertising

Nearly all web adverts are now tailored towards you based on the sites you have visited and the products you have looked at. All this information is stored in cookies which gets analysed to give you the most targeted advertising possible.

As with Analytics, users will now have to opt-in to allow this data to be stored.

Conversion tracking

This is when you sign up for an affiliated account with, for example, Amazon. A user goes to Amazon with a unique URL which tells Amazon to store a cookie on their computer with this information. If the user chooses to opt-out then you will not receive your percentage of sales which you are sending to Amazon.

Add to basket

When you add items to a shopping basket, a cookie is stored. This however falls under the “strictly necessary” section of the cookie law:

“This exception is a narrow one but might apply, for example, to a cookie you use to ensure that when a user of your site has chosen the goods they wish to buy and clicks the ‘add to basket’ or ‘proceed to checkout’ button, your site ‘remembers’ what they chose on a previous page. You would not need to get consent for this type of activity.”

So this functionality is unaffected by the cookie law.

There are many other ways in which cookies are used, some of which will be affected by this new law.

How will this affect UK-based companies?

As of May 26th 2012, it will be a legal requirement for users to opt-in to third party cookies which are set on a UK based website. Although the fine can be up to £500,000 the actual risk of prosecution is extremely low. Tens of thousands of organisations websites will be affected, and if we look at the statistics for similar laws which have been enforced in the past we can see how unlikely prosecution will be:

Data Protection Act
Cases received: 33,234
Cases closed: 32,714
Prosecutions: 9
Enforcement notices: 15

Freedom of Information Act
Cases received: 3,734
Cases closed: 4,196
Regulatory and enforcement actions: 3

How will this affect EU-based companies?

At the moment the UK is the only country which has provided firm guidance on what is required. All other EU countries will probably begin to adopt the same laws in the future.

Conclusion

Whether many companies enforce this law for their own website is going to be a question we can ask for the early months after the law has been enforced. Where the likelihood of being prosecuted is quite low I don’t think we will see much change in the smaller organisations.

The ICO (who are enforcing the law) have obviously implemented a solution to their website,http://www.ico.gov.uk/, but frankly it is an ugly and clunky solution. If they are setting the trends to enforce this law I think they should be considering a more graceful solution, as they will find that not many people will want to have an ugly notification appear at the top of every page on their website.

Anders Bohea – boxChilli Media

Little Mila, new daughter of our MD Anders and Christina.

Little Mila was born on the 12th, at 3.22 am, weighing 6lbs 9.

Honestly we’ve not put her to work just yet!

Matt.

One of the main aims of a sale is to drive increased volumes of traffic, so the outage suggests that Dixons failed to properly test and prepare its systems in the run up to the event.

It’s too early to say how much traffic Dixons will be losing traffic to its competitors, but at the time of writing the site had been down for several hours so it’s likely that customers will have started to shop elsewhere as a result.

In the event that the site does fall over, there are a number of options open to website owners. For instance they could use scalable servers for rapid deployment, sophisticated load balancing to off-load traffic spikes or utilise a CDN (content delivery network) to offset the load associated with the delivery of images and video.

At the moment Dixons may be considering all or none of these options as it tries to get its site back online.

But in the meantime, every visitor who sees the error message is a potential customer lost to its competitors.

Anders Bohea – boxChilli Media

Wodd Brothers New Website

We have just competed the build of a new website for Wood Brothers in Portsmouth,  Hampshire.

Working alongside one of our partners, TGDH, we have designed and built a completely new website that is structured into the three main areas of their business: building ,  joinery and corporate fit outs.

Wood Brothers are a medium sized construction company specialising in projects that require a high level of management to achieve quality and completion on time.

Built into this brochure site is a blog which will be kept up to date with the latest projects that Wood Brothers are working upon. The blog is custom linked into several social media sites to auto update them when the blog is updated.

We are pleased to have worked on this site for Wood Brothers, they are a very well know Hampshire based construction company woth a reputation second to none, we look forward to contuning to work with them in the future.

Anders Bohea – boxChilli Media

We look forward to seeing the sales benefits this will bring.

They needed a qr code created for they exhibition that will be traveling around the uk.

However, they also needed to be able to track the visitors to their website that used the qr code, they more involved than just creating a simple qr code.

We were able to embed tracking codes into the QR code and website that enables them to see exactly what visitors have used the code and see what the ROI is on their printed material (that one of our partner agencies have created) that the code has been placed.

It will be interesting to see the clicks that they get.

Also: we secretly love the Science Museum !

Anders Bohea – boxChilli Media

Spicers is one of the UK and Ireland’s leading wholsalers of Office Supplies and Office Equipment.

Spicers UK and Ireland have a turnover of £330 million and pride themselves on providing a wide range of services to dealers including:

• Stocking/ supplying a vast product range – with over 16000 stock lines across 300 vendors
• An efficient logistical capability with National coverage -with 8 distribution centres

We are assisting Spicers with a new website for Discount Stationary Supplies based on the BlueSky platform.