Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

Copper Phoenix is approaching its 10th anniversary and it was high time to update the website which had become a little unused and unloved due to long term contracts taking up my work time.

The fact I had long term contracts is no excuse to have a slightly dated website and it was with some quiet internal embarrassment I was advising clients that they needed to update their own websites, make sure they are mobile compliant and ideally have an HTTPS security certificate etc, when I knew I was not practising what I preached.

So, it was time to head back to my web designer Andrew Eberlin at Brighter Side for a revamp and after the always efficient and courteous service from Andrew, the new Copper Phoenix website is now launched.

Thinking back over the 10 years to when I first started my business made me realise how some technology has changed but that starting out in a new business venture will still require some basic tech savvy to get started and stay safe. Or if you don't think you know, you at least know who to ask about it.

Here’s a quick guide to what you need to know at start up:

Protect your data

This may seem obvious, but business owners may not think about it until they can no longer retrieve missing data. There’s not necessarily a fully running IT Department who can get you out of the fix. You will have invested your time and money in getting started so you need to protect your data from bugs, viruses and anyone else who may find your data useful to them.

The simplest way is to back your data up to the Cloud, so you can retrieve it should you need to on to alternative devices. This is best if your laptop or tablet go “bang” and you have to start with new equipment (or you forget to take it to that vital client meeting…). 

Make sure your devices are encrypted or password protected too, with a decent password that isn’t easily guessed, using upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters.

Another option is to back up data to an external hard drive or memory sticks but that means the backup data is only available in one place, unlike the Cloud option.

Make sure your website is HTTPS

HTTPS websites are more secure, and will add an extra layer of security, especially if you are selling anything online. They are trusted by both search engines and customers, as more people recognise the additional security level in this post GDPR world.

Google prioritises HTTPS websites over the older HTTP websites in its search algorithms, so you may be missing out on SEO by not being HTTPS and therefore not being found by your prospective clients.

Your web developer will know more about this (and far more than me) so ask them how to get the best security for your important “window on the world”.

Be smart with your smartphone

As well as being a telephone our smartphones contain vast amounts of data. Sometimes your smartphone can double as your laptop for retrieving and sending information or even showing presentations.

Take steps to ensure this is protected with strong passwords and all apps that contain sensitive data are protected too.

Should your smartphone be lost or stolen make sure you have systems in place to manage the risk of data or personal information being lost. Mobile Device Management (MDM) software is available to help businesses manage the security of their mobile IT and business equipment.

Avoid public WiFi

Like many small businesses I have spent a lot of time in coffee shops in between meetings or when out and about, as they are great places to meet, network or get a sugar/caffeine hit. It is tempting to use the often free public WiFi for emails and other work related online activities but these networks are rarely secure, so be warned.

If you are sending/receiving any sensitive data then consider using your mobile phone tethered to your laptop to get a secure internet connection, even if it means using your mobile data.

Email – help a Nigerian prince smuggle his millions of dollars.

I think most of us will recognise this type of scam. The badly worded email, the amazing rewards for helping the “prince” out, most of us will be able to recognise this for what it is and avoid.

But some emails are craftier, some even seem to come from colleagues or suppliers with attachments.

Be careful. If you think you recognise an email by sender, just check the email address is the one you are expecting to see, check that their grammar/writing style is consistent with their usual emails and that messages are not too short and vague. These could be Impersonation emails and sent with ill intent.

If you have any doubts ring before opening or clicking on anything, especially when you are asked for money or to pay an urgent invoice. It may be that your supplier was rushing to catch a train and sent a disjointed email via their smartphone at speed, or it could be malware or ransomware.

In my first 10 years with Copper Phoenix I have been lucky in not having much go wrong with my IT; email possibly hacked once (changed password and upped security), laptop going pop before a presentation.

Get good understanding of the IT basics and good support from IT professionals - then you can concentrate on running and growing your business.

If you would like some help in marketing or promotion then have a look at Our Services to see how we can help you.

Heritage: from chocolate box to concrete box

Series 1 Land Rover, Lacock: B&W
Originally uploaded by CopperPhoenix

From The Times
August 19, 2009
Heritage has democratised and rightly even includes pig-ugly buildings, says the man behind Saving Britain’s Past

Tom Dyckhoff

Heritage used to be easy. It was stately homes. It was cathedrals. It was tea towels in the gift shop and buttered crumpets in a National Trust café. It was nostalgia. Not any more. Over the past 50 years, during which British society and our towns and cities have been utterly transformed, ordinary people have fought to save the streets, buildings and landscapes that mean so much to them. In doing so they have completely revolutionised what we mean by heritage.

Heritage has democratised. These days, it can mean pretty much anything: a coalmine, the childhood homes of the Beatles (now owned by the National Trust), that little café down the road with an interior straight out of Expresso Bongo. It can even be a building which to many is pig-ugly.

Take Robin Hood Gardens. For the past year a battle has been raging in East London over plans by Tower Hamlets to demolish and redevelop this 1960s Brutalist housing estate. Passions run high. Architects and preservationists are pitted against council and developer. Yet if, 40 years ago, you’d have said that this slab of concrete was heritage you’d have been laughed out of the planning department.

To understand how heritage went from chocolate box to concrete box, I’ve been filming a seven-part TV series for BBC Two, Saving Britain’s Past. It was the experience of the Second World War that created our basic understanding of heritage. Before the Blitz there were, astonishingly, no proper systems or records for preserving our buildings and landscapes. There had never been any need, because the British landscape, at least the oldest, most cherished parts of it, had changed so slowly.

Admittedly the Industrial Revolution had so transformed much of the country that the glimmers of a conservation movement emerged through campaigners such as William Morris and his Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, aghast at the modern world’s impact on the old. But compared with what was about to happen, the industrial revolution was small fry.

That all changed when Hitler embarked on not only the Blitz, but also the infamous “Baedeker raids”, a bombing campaign targeting not military or industrial sites, but those of cultural value listed in Baedeker’s guide books. Cities such as York, Exeter, Canterbury and Bath were bombed just because they were beautiful. Looking at the archive footage of Bath’s destruction in April 1942 is a grim task. Besides the human suffering, 19,000 of the city’s buildings were wrecked, including such gems as the Royal Crescent and the Circus.

The attack sent the country into panic, triggering a sense of collective ownership of our landscapes, the same drive that brought into being the welfare state and the NHS. John Betjeman proposed a national buildings record, the Ministry of Works began a salvage scheme of historic buildings that needed urgent repair, and the 1944 Town and Country Planning Act gave birth to the lists — Britain’s first inventory of buildings of national or historic importance, graded I, II and III according to their significance, to be protected.

Heritage was born. The Ministry of Works appointed 30 architectural historians to compile the lists. These were traditional, nostalgic, conservative. Things not quite up to scratch included architecture from most of the previous century, certainly all things vulgarly industrial. But at least it meant that what Britain looked like in the future would no longer be left to chance or be so vulnerable to attack.
What is remarkable is not simply the country’s speedy acceptance of the idea of saving heritage, but how enthusiastically we have done so. We are an intensely nostalgic country, especially in our post-imperial decline. Yet conservation is not always conservative. It can be downright radical.

Ever since it was invented, this cosy idea of heritage has been whittled away by those it excluded. Just as our understanding of history has diversified from kings, queens and great men to the social history of ordinary people, so what we choose to feel passionate about has shifted from cathedrals and castles to the 1950s cafés in which our quiffed teenaged mums and dads tried to be cool; to the coalmines some slaved in, and the council estates many lived in. My heritage wasn’t a 14th-century village church or a Georgian mansion but a postwar school built by the Hertfordshire schools building programme, a strikingly modern place jam-packed with welfare-state optimism. Can’t that be preserved alongside the 14th-century village church? Why can’t the everyday landscapes most of us live in be heritage?

These ideas began to arise in the mid-1960s just when British society was loosening up and admitting grammar-school politicians, gay playwrights and working-class pop starlets to its higher echelons. They even came up in Bath. As the council started tearing down Grade III listed Georgian streets — the only grade then not legally protected — not even the nascent heritage bodies noticed. But ordinary people did. In the mid-1960s Peter Coard began drawing the little human quirks of the artisans’ cottages and shopfronts disappearing around him and co-founded the Bath Buildings Record. It took another decade for cultural grandees such as Kenneth Clark to catch up with this battle by the little people. Coard unearthed a brutal fact: there was a class system in heritage.
In London John Betjeman became the first secretary of the Victorian Society in 1958, but it took another decade for the Victorian to be thought of as anything but vulgarly industrial. In early 1970s London an alliance as radical as CND or the antiVietnam rallies, of Marxist activists, gentrifiers, old market porters and West End actors inflicted the first big defeat against the planning establishment, saving Covent Garden from being transformed by the Greater London Council into Alphaville.

Since then, we’ve started listing everything, and Britain has become a museum obsessed with its past. The real turning point came in the 1970s when economic decline slowed the pace of the wrecking ball. “A recession,” Roy Strong whispered to me, “is terribly good for heritage.”

Today a recession is proving good for heritage once more. Cranes have stopped swinging in our cities. Visits to National Trust properties this year are up an incredible 24 per cent. Battles, though, are still raging. The front line these days might be Brutalist bruisers such as Robin Hood Gardens. It might be with the kinds of histories we tell through our buildings. In February, the environmentalist George Monbiot launched an excoriating attack on the cute “tea towel” histories told in too many stately homes, which ignore the hidden tales of land seizure and fortunes made through slavery. One thing’s for certain though. We now know that heritage isn’t so much about what we preserve, but why we preserve it. It isn’t just about architecture. It’s about the people who live in it.

Getting the Web Bit Right

Websites are so important that it is amazing that so many tourism organisations still get it wrong.

Getting started

Develop your own website including your information in other famous tourism websites.

Do a cost benefit analysis and don’t forget to include the cost of keeping your website up-to-date.

Work with an experienced or professional website developer, it pays to pay for this.

Ensure they deliver an easy to navigate website that is best value for your needs and budget.

Online consumers are reluctant to read large amounts of text but while images can be very effective, too many images will slow down the time it takes for the consumer to see the page on the screen.

Ensure your site is accessible to all types of users – some people have slow computers, slow Internet access, and small monitors or could be visually impaired.

Highlight your contact details and maintain pricing and make sure you reply to any enquiries within 24 hours!

Site Promotion

A majority of website traffic is delivered via search engines. Your site should be built by a reputable developer who can also make it search-engine friendly.

Ensure all literature, emails etc refers to your website address.

Consider expanding the reach of your product online through community, government, and commercial website partners.

You should include your information on other websites such as Local Tourism Associations, regional tourism organisations, etc.

You could consider marketing through advertising on non-travel-specific websites and commercial travel sites. Common social sites like Face Book and Twitter also provide a platform where one can easily reach a big audience with the products on offer.

Post travel happenings and stories to the social media sites. The post will go to all fans and be seen by those who visit your site. Ensure you drop a comment with a link to your website.

Maintain your website

Ensure that technically your site is ‘available’ to Internet users all or close to all of the time.

Your content must be accurate, current, relevant and compelling – this will be a site visitor's initial experience of your busines, your professionalism and your product.

Online bookings and payments if managed effectively can help your business, if they dont work it will reflect badly on you.

Develop arrangements to ensure bookings and payments made online are secure. Decide which payment options will be accepted and illustrate it fully on the website booking form.

Simple steps but so, so importantto getting the right image and utilisation!

For help with your website see www.copperphoenix.co.uk