Networking in Pontyclun – Grow your business

Come to Pontyclun Networking!

Every other Wednesday AmberCouch meet up with other local businesses from the Pontyclun area at Sovereign Connect. We joined this group at the very end of 2014, maybe you have read the other article we wrote when we were undecided what to do. For us the process of networking wasn’t something we were used to. We have never needed to go out and find work, it all comes through our own website or word of mouth. However, we are a husband and wife team and we work at home, we thought it was a good idea if one of us occasionally left to meet some real people face to face. The novelty!
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Force HTTPS on Apache with .htaccess

Here is a gist to force https access of your site through .htaccess. Just add this to your .htaccess file at the route of your site and users will be redirected to https if they do not specify the protocol or try to use http.
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Which Responsive Carousel Slider?

Love them or hate them a responsive carousel slider is still a thing. Of course it needs to be a responsive and touch enabled, but apart from that, which carousel should you use?
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Poster Design – Chapter Maibock Beerfest!

Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff is know for it's seasonal beer festivals. Next up is the popular Maibock beer festival which will take place at Chapter at the end of May, 20th - 24th. There will be a tasty selection of new brews, established favourites and authentic BBQ food specials to celebrate the transition from winter to spring. Enjoy a pint of well-crafted German beer in the spring sun! Each beer festival Ambercouch create a new poster design - always different from the one before. Although we do always include something from a previous poster, we started doing this years ago and now including something from a previous poster has become an in office challenge. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes it is the tiniest detail that I doubt nobody notices.
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Web Development Ground Zero – Text Editors

This is the first in a series of posts / screencasts documenting how to install, what you need (what I use) to develop web sites. This is a vast topic so I will be keeping things as brief as possible and including further reading links when I can.

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Facebook Promoted Posts Trial – Day 2 & 3

After a slow start during the first 24hrs, I was expecting a surge of action. This didn’t happen. Apart from the fact that the reach is gaining numbers by the day, (from 566 to 1203) this doesn’t really mean anything if there is no engagement.
There was a flicker of engagement in the form of someone ‘liking’ the post. There was also a few links to the site from the post and yes, there was a marginal increase in the traffic to our site on that day. These actions though could have been achieved from just re-posting the same post on a chosen day. At the moment, although what we have spent is low, is is hard to tell if there has been any extra benefit from paying for the ads instead of just sending it out organically. The reach has definitely improved but there has been less engagement through the paid advertising than there was when it was posted organically the first time round.
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Facebook Promoted Posts Trial – Day 1

Most people who own a company Facebook page would have noticed quite a reduction in organic reach. For many small business that don’t have a monthly marketing budget and rely on the exposure they get through their page, this is not good news.
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I want to be number one in Google.

The million dollar question. From every client we hear – “Can you make me number one in Google?” Although there is no doubt that being on the first page of Google helps with traffic to your site and potentially will get you new work, if the site the user ends up on is out of date, hard to use and simply not appealing to them, what’s the point?
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Business Networking – to do or not to do?

Business networking is something that has confused me for a while now. In theory it seems like a good idea to form new relationships with other businesses, be social and get away from your own environment and hopefully at some point gain some extra work because of it. I’ve tried a few over the last year and my overall conclusion was that I didn’t need to go. The extra hours required to put into it and the overall expectation of group contribution did not come out in favour once I compared this with how much work I could do and what I would earn in the same amount of time. However – these meetings are at stupid o clock in the morning, 6.30am, in fact. So the likely hood of me being at my at my desk actually earning money at this time of day are slim to none. I’m leaning further towards none.
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