Follow us on Twitter to receive daily advice on the small things you can do that can make a BIG difference. We’ll also be posting a series of articles here, along with a whole host other surprises, so keep checking back for our extravaganza starting next Thursday…

“Why bother” you may ask? Increasing you visibility can only really have a positive effect…

Tip: If you have a niggling question about anything web, get in touch and we’ll try to give you the answer you’ve been looking for

Have a great weekend, you deserve it!

Tweet – a post or update of no more than 140 characters. Think of it of a text message that everyone can see.

Retweet (RT) – a reposting of someone else’s Tweet, usually because it’s interesting or useful.  Being Retweeted means more exposure and visibility.

Follow/Following – Following somebody means you’ll be able to receive/read their tweets as they’re posted in real-time.  If they Follow you, they will read what you Tweet.

@Replies -these are  a direct  reference/Tweet at a specific Twitter user.  This is done by putting their username directly after the @ symbol) at the start of your Tweet. @TurboLemonMedia, for example.  This encourages dialogue and conversation.

@Mention – Much like the @Reply, though an @Mention is inserted at any point except the beginning of a Tweet.

Hashtags – by adding a #hashtag before a keyword in your Tweet, it adds context and metadata to it, making organisation and searches much simpler. It’s Twitter’s version of a tag.

Direct Message (DM) – this is a private message sent to another Twitter user who must be following you in order to receive it.

Twitter List – a user-compiled list that displays that group/lists Tweets. A benefit of a Following a Twitter List is that you don’t have to Follow all the List’s members to see the stream of updates.

Trending Topics – these are a snapshot of what’s popular in Twitter at any given point in time. You can set your Trending Topics to be local to the UK (instead of global popularity).

Search – does what it says on the tin, using Twitter Search to bring real-time results from peoples’ Tweets.

Automation – using existing tools to automatically Retweet, Follow or Direct Message users.

#followfriday – is a recurring Trending Topic whereby user recommend you follow other users. Good practice is to say who to follow and a little bit about why.

So here how starting a business usually works:

1. You have an amazing idea.
2. You obsess about the ins and outs of your amazing idea.
3. You think of a name for your new business.
4. You start putting your amazing ideas into practice.
5. Business cards! Everyone loves business cards. Yours haven’t got a logo yet, but you have a business card. Probably with your Hotmail email address.
6. You’re kind-of trading and now you think you probably need to look more professional. Time for a logo!
7. You find someone – anyone – who can knock out a logo for as little as possible. Even better, for free!  Probably a friend of a friend.
8. You get new business cards with your new logo so the old ones are put in the bottom drawer for prosperity.
9. The kind-of trading is getting more serious and you’re thinking maybe you should have a website.
10. You start shopping around and sweet Jesus! you’re surprised at the cost of a proper website. Template website it is.
11. You email your logo designer for your logo so you can pop it in your new template site. That’ll be extra then.
12. You’ve heard social media bandied around so you start a blog. It’s not attached to your site but sod it, it’s a start.
13. Trading is going well, but the website seems to have done little. And now you’re sending out invoices. Letterheaded paper and compliment slips, here we come.

And after all that hard work, you’re probably thinking you could probably do with a better website, an email address that looks more professional, a logo that look less like boardroom poster clip art, and ideally, less companies involved in your brand so your presence online and offline was congruent.
An obvious cue for our introduction that and an awfully gratuitous sell of our special offer, but why not? It really is special. Our Business Start Up Everything Package will save you serious money. We’ve done our sums and what we’re offering means you’re saving well over £400. That’s a whacking great big 25% off the usual £1675.

So what do you actually get? Deep breath:
For your graphics needs, you will get:

1. professional logo design,
2. business card design
3. 250 matt laminated, full colour (single sided) business cards
4. business stationery design
5. 1000 A4 full colour (single sided) letterheads
6. 500 full colour (single sided) compliment slips

And we’ll kick-start your online presence by giving you:

1. professional, original web design (not a template)
2. CMS functionality (giving you control of your site for a fraction of the cost)
3. blogging capabilities (to help you keep on top of the search engines)
4. comments, tag clouds and categories
5. email contact form (so your potential clients can email you straight from your site)
6. RSS / Atom syndication feed (for your clients to see when you’ve updated your site)
7. HTML 5, CSS 3 standards compliant coding (trust us, it’s good!)
8. .org.uk or a .co.uk for the first year
9. one year’s hosting, including set-up
10. analytics installation (giving you a unique insight your visitors to help you better market yourself)
11. submission of your site to all major search engines and directories (to get you found)
12. xml site map submitted to Google (to really get you found)
13. one year’s email hosting giving you an e-mail inbox (accessible via web-mail, POP or IMAP)

And as if all that wasn’t enough, we’re a company that actually cares. We care about your business being a success and we care about creating relationships that work. And we care about how we go about our business too. We’re down to earth, we’re fair and we have a social conscious that grows more robust by the day.

So get in touch with us and let’s get these great ideas underway!

Having grilled him at interview, we thought it was only fair and just to make his first day really comfortable. We did this by asking him more questions. James, meet the people. People, meet James (whose opinion is his own and not Turbo Lemon’s… yet):

What do you hope to get from your internship at Turbo Lemon Media?
I’m hoping the internship with Turbo Lemon Media will give me experience of working within an exciting and upcoming design agency, where I’ll be given an opportunity to work on interesting projects, which I’ll have the opportunity to leave my stamp on.

Pet web design hates?
Websites which use a third party service for their blog; the main reason being that it gives me an unprofessional feeling, but also it kind of frustrates me when I’m diverted from a website to another service.

What’s your favourite font ? Why ?
Georgia. It’s completely different from the norm of Arial or Helvetica ,whilst at the same time being a smart/clean font.   It’s seeing an increasing online presence, featuring in many modern website designs with impressive results.

What do you/will you bring to Turbo Lemon Towers?
Aside from student debts, a desire to prove my skills within a creative environment, which I’ve previously not had the chance to do.

Facebook versus Twitter ?
Well I have use both for completely different reasons, Facebook is used to network with family and friends, where as Twitter is used to network with people I’ve never met, who have an interest in the same field of work as myself.

You can follow James on Twitter and see more of his work on his site.

And, being that we’ve shared James’ Q & A, you can have a look at at the  Q&A Lancashire Business View magazine did with us.

2010. It’s exciting!

Turbo Lemon Media is on a mission to look beyond the sunny confines of Preston, Lancashire to find work.  More specifically, we’re heading to the Twitterverse.

Simple premise: can we acquire work through using Twitter?

We’ll be applying the much-touted theory that’s out there.   Whether we’re building followers or  following trends, we’re hoping to discover the real power of Twitter for SMEs like us.

So, follow Turbo Lemon Media on Twitter and let’s see what all the fuss is about!

Actually, the answer for both of these is, ‘it depends.’ It’s a pertinent and perfectly acceptable question but not one we can ever answer easily. You think we’re copping out, we’re not. Let’s say we told you we could build it for x amount. Great. You don’t have any images? Right, so that’ll be a little bit more. You wanted to be able to update your front page? Okay, that’ll be more. You never mentioned you wanted a form for newsletter sign-ups and data capture. We can do it, but suddenly, that amount we mentioned looks bigger and now you think we’re being a bit sneaky.

So how about we rethink the question: what is your website for?

Is it a shop window? A place to herald your existence to the market at large? Somewhere for people to verify your existence and integrity? In which case, the odds are that you’re looking at a simple static site; a website with fixed content which can only be updated by your web guys (that’ll be us then). There are super-cheap solutions for static sites. There are even free options, but if you’re hoping to look a little less identikit and more astute and professional, then you should think about bespoke web design (that’ll be us then. How convenient!). By bespoke web design, we mean looking at aesthetics designed to reflect your brand, navigation to best suit your customers and functionality that has been given thorough consideration. We start from scratch with you. We don’t do bish-bash-bosh (though there are lots of people who do).

We’ve found that our clients are becoming more savvy with this interweb guff, and are increasingly learning that content is king. They want to add to and update pages themselves. It may be some or all pages, but what we’re talking about here is a Content Management System, which is bandied around more commonly as a CMS. You manage the content. We make it look pretty. There are existing off-the-shelf solutions (free or chargeable) – Joomla anyone? For the technophobic amongst us, these can be quite intimidating – all those buttons, options, things to break – which is why sometimes, a bespoke CMS could be for you. They are likely to cost you more but if they’re built to your exact needs and requirements, you could save a lot of time, which you could otherwise spend selling or doing what you do for your business. For example (gratuitous up-sell of ourselves coming right up), we built an eCommerce site for a client. Somewhere to add items, take payment, get emails for newsletters, somewhere to show off the kind words customers had to say and somewhere change the written parts of the site. Our Turbo Lemon CMS was used to fulfil these exact requirements. When our client came back to us explaining the woes of managing stock levels on a spreadsheet, we developed an integrated stock and customer account management system as part of her site. We saw the pain, we fixed the pain.

So we’ll ask again, what is your website for?

Once you’ve established what you want it to do, odds are you might get excited by the myriad of other things you could do with your site. And all these other interesting little nuggets are likely increase the price tag of your website. A forum, an RSS feed, a Twitter feed, audio, video, file downloads, photo gallery/slideshows, a guest book, press releases, commenting/feedback, specialised calculators, contact forms, polls/surveys, site search, chat, user accounts, multi-lingual support, links – it all adds up.

These are all the things we get our clients to think about. We don’t just build their site, we help to plan it so it’s everything it ought to be.

What about my web name thingy?

Your URL. That’s going to cost you and will depend on how many variations you buy (.com, .co.uk etc) and where you buy them from. Some companies will buy and manage them for you, and in most cases you can go somewhere like 123reg.co.uk and buy your own from as little as £2.99.

So I’ve planned my site. I know what it’s for now and I know what it’s going to be called. What next?

Well, it’s worth asking your web guys/gals what level of SEO they’ll integrate at the point of building your site. SEO helps you to be seen by more people. More people means more contact means more sales. We can help identify the right keywords for your site, optimise your site and get your site seen. Bingo. You’ll need to keep on top of if your SEO is effective, which is why we include analytical tools to allow you to track visitors, page popularity and to see where your visitors are coming in from. Once you understand this, you can meld your site to better suit their needs.

At the very least, you should be asking if and where your site is going to be submitted to once it’s live. Be ready to market your site yourself, or, be ready to pay somebody to market for you. Yes, more potential costs.

The cost that usually surprises people is hosting, which in essence is rent for the space your where your website will live. ‘Why should I pay for hosting?’ is a question I’ve heard from a few irritated faces. Well, probably for the same reason you pay for your phone line. Are you expecting billions of people to visit? Maybe then you should set a few more pennies aside to allow for the sheer volume of traffic. Talk to your web guys about your options. If you’re a local business, touting for local people, then you could assume that you don’t need the all singing, all dancing cloud computing, versatile solution. See what’s out there. For example, our hosting starts at £125 per year (including an e-mail inbox, accessible via web-mail, POP or IMAP, ad-hoc basic support by e-mail and phone, configuration of domain name (DNS), co-located file and database backups). That was another plug, but it gives you an idea that you should be looking at what’s included in your costs. Don’t be scared to ask questions.

It costs how much??

We know your mate or your cousin’s mate’s Dad’s workmate can build it for a seeming fraction of what we might propose. We know that you could get a template and try do it yourself. What sets us apart is the level of service, expertise, skill and experience. From small sites to larger complex projects, we have the know-how. There is no doubt that your site is going to take longer to build than what you had hoped (we don’t do bish-bash-bosh, remember?) People often underestimate (and often perilously so) this crucial element of the design process. As much as you might hate to hear it, yours won’t be the only project the team is committing themselves to while it’s being built. That doesn’t mean it will receive any less attention than it deserves – what it means is that we won’t be delivering your site in the 3 weeks from now date you first had in mind.

We have overheads to pay too. Okay, so that isn’t the most mind-boggling revelation but people do overlook this. When we can, we want to meet you face to face and understand you and your business. We prepare for those meetings, we meet at those meetings and then we learn from those meeting – that’s a few hours right there to factor in.

So when you’ve built it you’ll add bits to it for me, right?

Of course we will, as per our Service Level Agreement (SLA). In short, this is a document we develop which outlines a mutual agreement regarding subsequent update costs, services, priorities, responsibilities, guarantees and warranties. Our SLA’s are tailored to our client’s needs and requirements to ensure everyone’s happy. For example, we might factor in x amount of updates to be included in the initial build cost, or we might offer a fixed amount of updates at a reduced rate. This is definitely an area to bear in mind if you’ve found yourself an űber-cheap designer to knock your page up.

How much does a website cost then?

If you want a site that is designed, coded and implemented by qualified experts, that takes into account usability, functionality and accessibility, which complies with current regulations and applies current techniques, then you’ll be looking at very similar costs to ours! If we seem reluctant to give a price, it’s because we are. If you’re still wondering, get in touch with us and we can have a chat about what you want, what you need and indeed, what it might cost.

After much fretting, to-ing and fro-ing, I decided to do it.  The mission was for the UK British Council delegation (handpicked from Buckinghamshire New University, University of Central Lancashire, University of Durham, Leeds Metropolitan University, Sheffield Hallam University and  University of Plymouth) to help to develop Sri Lankan awareness about graduate entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education as part of the National Enterprise Week in Sri Lanka.

This would involve going to a large conference (scuppering my no public places plan) with lots of important government cabinet ministers (scuppering my public or potential targets plan), as well as presenting Turbo Lemon Media and my own experiences to a few hundred people. Turbo Lemon Nerves.

A rare sight, in trousers and tie.

What not a lot of us knew, was that also as part of this, we were to be partake in ‘Ideators,’ which is loosely the Sri Lankan equivalent of The Apprentice (minus the firing, no pun intended). So having just about gotten over those thoughts of war=dangerous, I had to then deal with having a camera poking around my orange face (courtesy of the crew’s make-up team).  Turbo Orange Face.

Two teams pitched against each other: the brief, to design and make a shoe that would fix the lulling sales of a particular demographic, undertake the market research and then come up with the long term marketing strategy, graphic visuals and financial forecast for it.  Then present it to the board of Sri Lanka’s largest shoe manufacturer, DSI.  In three days. Turbo Lemon Sleep-Deprivation.

I won’t say much more about it as you can, to the utter horror and embarrassment of my shyer-alter-ego, watch Ideators below.  What I will say is that as well as it being a difficult and tiring experience, it was also quite incredible, learning from the Sri Lankan students and indeed, working with other UK graduates.  I say working – I jumped in as Orange (how apt) leader and, as best I could, let others lead where their strengths allowed them to do so.

An amazing opportunity, an amazing country, an amazing experience with amazing people.  All superfluous language, utterly justified!

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 That’s not to say it’s been an easy start.  Any SME has a slog to get through and avoid being part of the 50% that fail in the first year.  It’s certainly been an eventful first year.  Along with the smiles, successes and Turbo Lemon Goodness have been the stresses, the difficulties and the I-can’t-remember-what-my-house-looks-like-because-I’ve-been-in-the-studio-too-long moments.  It’s our birthday and we’ll cry if we want to.  But we’re not going to, because we have some rather good brilliant news.

Turbo Lemon Media has been named as one of the Top 100 businesses in the 2009 Barclays Trading Places Awards   (let’s hope there weren’t only 101 applicants!).  And what is this Trading Places Awards I’ve never heard of, my cynical ear hears you ask?  Well, Barclays Marketing Director for Local Business, John Davis, explains:  “Trading Places is a celebration of businesses that have struggled through adversity, which is even more relevant today in our turbulent economic times and have turned their lives around for them and their families.”

We're in the Top 100, honest!

Other Turbo Lemon Goodness comes in the news that we have moved ( slightly).  We’re still housed in £15m Media Factory in Preston, Lancashire, but now we have our very own dedicated design studio.  A really hub of inspiration where we get can stuck knee-deep in our web and graphic design; a place for the reams of magazines and stacks of books; somewhere we can have music playing and somewhere that is conducive to attain the creativity we crave. Writing, thinking, designing, coding, making, breaking – it’s an excellent place to be.

 An eventful year indeed then – so eventful, we’ve not yet been able to share the Sri Lankan Apprentice (Ideators) experience or told you about our ever-growing social conscience, working with local schools, colleges and universities.  We’ve not even celebrated our ventures into innovative research and development!

Now we’re older, we’ll be better at blogging. Promise.

Take for example our server hosting, which is based on the Linux distribution Ubuntu: the very popular operating system which is very well supported by a global community. Our web services are also made up of cleverly integrated open source solutions, including the e-mail, web server and connectivity software.

Our day-to-day routine is a trail of open source too; development is primarily checked against Mozilla Firefox and patched for other less supportive web browsers. Our PHP coders work from Eclipse Ganymede, which is a fully-featured, Java based development environment and in fact, Zend Studio for Eclipse is a commercial variant of the same software, with some useful tweaks and official support. I’m even writing this in Open Office.

Open/Closed

The choice for open source isn’t driven solely by financial purposes; as forward thinking developers, we like the idea that using an open-source solution offers full freedom to improve the software, unlike commercial alternatives. If you have a light bulb moment and think of a feature that the software doesn’t provide, you can download the code and be proactive about it.

Companies that make open-source viable for business do so through providing support for their particular platform. Warranty is big tipping point for big businesses; given that open source software is released without any form of warranty, a lot of businesses are apprehensive. Not us; we embrace the challenge and have the in-house technical knowledge to provide support in what we offer.

The Good, the Bad and the GNU GPL

We’re aware that the main limitations of open source are the various licenses that software can be released under. One of the most common is the GNU GPL which aims to keep software free. What this means to us as a business is that we can’t make a commercial version of the original software and keep our modified code private. An alternative, the GNU LGPL, allows us to use code as a library within our commercial application, but any modifications to the original code must also be made available to the public according to the license. Then there are the funny ones, like the license used for the MySQL database. It is provided under a bespoke open-source license, but under certain circumstances it is necessary for companies to purchase licenses.

Open source helped us to lower the barrier for entry into web development. It allows us to concentrate on much more important things like working on the web. We know that it’s not the answer to everything, but it is the answer to a lot – it may even be alive and kicking in your living room right now.

For each piece of costly commercial software there are usually several open alternatives. Don’t let us tell you how good it is; download it, install it for free, and make your own decision.

We’re award winning!

Turbo Lemon Media were announced as March’s Business of the Month, which to us is a big deal. Not just because of the nice monetary prize that comes along with it, and nor for the throng of publicity we can ride on the back of. It’s a big deal because it’s a big slap on the back that we’re getting it right.

The award comes from Northern Lights, which provides support businesses throughout Preston, Lancashire and the Northwest of England. There are a lot of people involved with Northern Lights. Big names and big money too, which is why that big slap on the back so rewarding.

Cheesy Grins and Comedy Cheques

So what have we done to deserve such an award? Besides working ridiculously hard in our design and development, I like to think it’s because we’re tenacious in achieving what we aim to do: producing web and graphics that we’re always incredibly proud of while doggedly retaining the focus to steer Turbo Lemon Media in the right direction.

Winning investment has allowed us to do this. Flirting with publicity has allowed us to do this. Getting involved in the pedagogy of entrepreneurship has allowed us to do this. But up there, trouncing the lot, is that fact we have had our clients’ belief in our vision and the luck to work with the people that people are talking about.

The only disappointment? I had no jokes ready for the comedy- sized cheque