Frequently asked questions

Professional web sites always have their own domain name (e.g. www.microsoft.com). It will also allow you to have your own business email addresses (e.g. bill@microsoft.com). It normally takes us 72 hours to get your domain registered and activated across the web.

Your business email accounts start working as soon as we get your domain activated (typically within 72 hours).

We will have two meetings, the first to discuss what you want on your web site and the second to review the site before we publish it. You will be responsible for providing the web site content in the form of text, photos and any special graphics.

Customers will only be able to find your site after it has been submitted to their favourite search engine.

Warning, there is normally a delay of around 12 weeks before every search engine will get around to indexing your site!

20 pence per transaction plus 3.40% when monthly turnover is between £0 and £1,500, 2.90% for turnovers between £1,500 and £6,000, 2.40% for £6,000 to £15,000, 1.90% for £15,000 to £55,000 and 1.40% for monthly turnovers over £55,000. Please see the PayPal site for the current detailed cost breakdown.

We use PayPal, just like on e-Bay, to handle all the sensitive customer and credit card information. We also encrypt the e-commerce buttons on your web site to hide your PayPal account name and other transaction details. This makes it very difficult for a third party to set up their own bogus transactions. So for example, if you were selling photographic images on your web site, then you don't want people to be able to set their own (low) price before they download the photos.

There has been an increase in the number of local directories on the internet - BT, Yellow Pages and many others. To make it easier for visitors to find your site, you should be listed in as many of these directories as possible.

You will get more new customers visiting your site, if you can encourage your suppliers, partners and customers to link their web site to yours. The benefits are:

• New customers will find out about your business from one of your partner sites
• Search engines will rate your site more highly as there are other web sites linking to your site.

Links to your site are treated as recommendations. In general, sites with more incoming links get higher ratings and appear nearer the top of the search results.

You should establish how your competitors are using the web and find out what products and services they offer. We provide a 'Competitor Analysis' service where we can identify:

• Which other companies are they working with?
• Find out which web sites are promoting your competitors and find out if they will also promote your business.
• Keep up-to-date on how well you and your competitors are being ranked by the search engines.

Your competitors will continue to evolve and change the way that they use the internet. Periodically, you should take time to check to see what new things they are doing.

We keep the textual content of the site separate from the look and feel of the site. The look and feel is stored in a compact format within a 'style sheet' that is only downloaded to the PC once. Also, we save time by only downloading images that are the exact size needed to fit into the space on the web page.

Many large companies and institutions install older versions of Microsoft software, because they want to have all their employees using the same consistent software versions. This means that your web site needs to support the latest and some of the previous versions of Internet Explorer. Also, 10% of internet users don't even use Internet Explorer, instead many of them choose Firefox. That's why at Spiky Hedgehog, we make your web site work on IE6, IE5.5 and Firefox.

Out of date web sites are a real turn-off, especially for potential new customers. To keep your web site up to date you need to choose our Silver Support.

Your customers will experience slow performance and site unavailable errors if you choose an unreliable service provider.

Professional web sites have a consistent look and feel on all their web pages. Using a template imposes the same appearance, layout and colours on your site. Any future change to the look and feel can then be applied in one place, to the template, and cascaded throughout your site.

There is nothing more off-putting for a new customer than to arrive on a web site and see a 'page not found' or 'error detected' message. We thoroughly test your web site before and after publishing. We use a combination of:

• Automated testing - takes a couple of minutes to run through all our standard tests and highlight any problems.
• Browser testing - we manually check your site works in the current versions of Internet Explorer (6.0 and 5.5) and Firefox.

Google calculates the importance of each page using a measure known as PageRank. The calculation is the basis for all of Google's web search tools. It uses a number of a factors including the number of links coming into and going out of a specific page.

How can we get a higher page rank?
The more links coming into your site the better. Also, we ensure that all duplicate addresses point to the same place. So for example, the following addresses should all automatically resolve to the same http://www.spikyhedgehog.com/ address.

• http://www.spikyhedgehog.com
• http://www.spikyhedgehog.com/index.php
• http://spikyhedgehog.com
• http://spikyhedgehog.com/index.html

Otherwise, there is a danger that the rank for the home page is reduced as it is shared across many different addresses.

Both Google and Yahoo now use site maps to get a better understanding of a web site's content and a quick way to know when it was last changed. Google typically uses a file named sitemap.xml, while Yahoo uses a file called urllist.txt.

We include both site maps on all our customer web sites.

Web 2.0 is transforming the web, away from static brochure web sites, into a better interactive experience. The underlying technologies are AJAX, Javascript and CSS. The things to consider are:

• It may take longer to display your web pages, as it will take extra time to download all the Javascript and CSS files.
• Not all browsers support Javascript, so it is important to ensure that your web site still works for these customers.

We display web pages quicker by using zip compression to make the files smaller and faster to download. We also cache your web pages so customers re-displaying the same page, get it instantly (i.e. no waiting for the page to re-downloaded).

The typical scenarios that produce these errors are:

• The web site has an internal link to a page that does not exist - a 'broken internal link'
• An external web site links to a page that does not exist - a 'broken external link'
• A mistake is made typing an address, so for example the spelling error in www.spikyhedgehog.com/custumerz.php

'Broken internal links' are detected and removed before the web site goes live. The other scenarios are immediately detected on the live web site and the customer is automatically re-routed onto your home page.

Spiky - adjective (spikier, spikiest)
1: like a spike or spikes or having many spikes (our interpretation of the word).
2: informal easily annoyed; irritable (not true of us though!).
DERIVATIVES: spikily adverb spikiness noun. (Compact Oxford English Dictionary)

Where as Spikey Hedgehog refers to:
1: A cocktail drink made of 1 oz grenadine syrup, 1 oz cranberry juice, 1 dash lime juice, fill with club soda and add ice.
2: Hogarth's (Spikey) Hedgehog Rescue Centre in Leicestershire.
3. Our www.spikeyhedgehog.com web site