Spam. Everyone hates it, and it’s become a fact of life for personal and business users alike. Many accounts come with anti-spam programs that run the risk of cutting out genuine emails using overzealous filters; and many more users sift through mountains of spam in search of genuine emails (sound familiar?!). There has to be a better way – and guess what, there is.

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So now we carry on with Part Two of our guide to different kinds of Web Hosting, kindly illustrated by the adventures of a man called Dave*.

In the last part, Dave has had experience with Free and Shared Hosting, but he’s now looking at getting advanced Web Hosting to offer him greater control and performance from his eCommerce store. Below are several of the options available to Dave. Continue reading

There have been more than a few updates to Magento in the last 2 months or so, and unless you’ve just installed it or haven’t worked on it, an update is going to be a bit of an annoyance. You certainly don’t want to reinstall Magento and copy or, even worse, add all your products and skin changes all over again.

The best way by far to update Magento is to use the Magento Downloader facility. To do that, all you need is a paper, pencil, a die… no, wait. You need Magento installed and an Internet connection. An FTP client and/or a helpful Web Host will come in handy as well. Continue reading

Choosing the right Web Hosting package for you can be a bewildering task. With so many packages, prices, terms, conditions, companies and countries vying for your business, it’s important that you understand what you need, so you can choose a company who can give you what you want.

So here’s a list of the major types of Web Hosting available on the market – what they are, and what they’re suitable for. And to make it a bit easier, we’ll follow the career of Dave*, a budding web entrepreneur making his first forays into the world of Web Hosting. Continue reading

Google AdWords. Love it or hate it, there is no denying the potential marketing power that having an advert placed next to a given search term in the most popular search engine in the world can give you.

I’ve been running several campaigns myself for a few months, and it’s certainly been a learning process (not always positive, sadly). Here are a few tips and tricks I’ve picked up from my recent experiences Continue reading

For Web Developers, text editors are like football - you love your team even though in your heart of hearts you know they’re rubbish. So what happens when you are forced to pick a new team - how do you choose? This is my current predicament - when I’m developing at home I live on my Mac, but after failing to convince the guys here at NuBlue that Macs are superior, I need to find a text editor for Windows that does it for me.

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This is the first part of what will be a series of guides on using the new eCommerce system, Magento. The best place to start is always the beginning, so the initial subject will be Installing Magento in your web space. This guide will include the Installation Guide, a brief Troubleshooting Section, and finally some Useful Links Continue reading

As a developer I always have in the back of my mind the importance of new technologies, and I am constantly thinking – “what should I learn next?” There is no doubt that web technologies move quickly - that’s a given - but after its initial release in 2004, why is PHP5 only just starting to take off? Well, ever since the release of our new PHP5 hosting platform I’ve been doing my research. Continue reading

While comparing our new PHP5 Magento Hosting we found this speed test site. Although UK based Magento eCommerce Hosts are, for the moment, few in number, we thought we would create a Spreadsheet Tool to use the Internet Supervision speed test to compare our speed against other Hosting providers. The calculator allows you to run speed tests on a Web Hosts Demo Magento site (most Hosts have an example Hosted Magento site, for examples see the Magento forums) and compare them against each other. Continue reading

There can be two very different schools of thought when something new comes out. On one side, you have the people who have to have the latest as soon as it arrives, and will happily be out with the old in favour of the new. Then you have their opposites, the people who cling tenaciously to the tried and tested, refusing to move on whilst clinging to an ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it’ mentality. Of course many of us meander somewhere in the middle, and it often takes a major event or Continue reading