Press Release

You need to consider the logistics of delivery across the UK and possible enquiries from abroad. How would you have sent those candlesticks to Ma Baker in Michigan? Is Ma Baker going to pay you in Ecu's ? No, she won't want to do that. She will want to pay online with her credit card.

Having said that, whilst the candlesticks may not be the best selling product on the internet they may be the best way of encouraging people to visit your shop having seen the beauty of their design and the keen prices that you offer.

So, if your web site is for selling a product then you need a lot of careful planning and consideration before you get started. Now, it may be that you fall into the category of the wannabee's who just have to have that web site because Joe Bloggs across the road has one and you are miffed because you don't. You feel out of touch and missing out on things and besides you want to dip your toes in the water and register your company domain name before someone else grabs it. That's fine but don't spend a fortune doing it. Start of with something very basic and read the rest of this article to find out more about how it all works.

Perhaps your company would like to save money over the internet? Does this sound daft? Well, a web site designed the right way and for the right purpose can cut company costs considerably. For example, if you send out a thousand leaflets by post this would cost you around £250. By comparison if you sent them by email and depending on the means by which you send them you are talking pence not pounds. The saving is enhanced every time someone rings your company and is directed to your web site to view your products rather than waiting days for the post to arrive and the chance of losing an order.

The internet is not just about web sites either. Email is the fastest and most efficient means of forwarding information possible. If you are skeptical about web sites please do yourself a favour and purchase a computer even if only for email purposes. In this day and age you will get left out without it. Your customers will not be impressed either. Personally, the very thought of walking over to a fax machine, inserting a piece of paper, dialling the number and waiting until connection and the slow trundling of paper begins just makes us come out in goose bumps. How old fashioned. We can send 20 emails to 20 different companies in the time it takes you to walk to the fax machine and dial the number. Now how important is your time?

You should also consider the cost difference between the sending a fax vs email. Consider the graphics designer in Solihull who was driving to Halesowen twice a week to deliver his precious documents for printing. Although a graphics designer he was just coming round to the wonders of IT and the internet. Costs for petrol and time per annum spent travelling were estimated at £2,200. Enter one low spec computer at a cost of £300 and an internet connection with a local ISP. No more travelling to Halesowen. The graphics were forwarded by email. Problem solved.

The golden rule in setting up your website is to establish what you want it to do for you. Time spent now in formulating a plan is money saved later.

Supplied by: Andy Staveley, www.birminghamuk.com

Computer Hardware
Most people buy their first computer to carry out a specific function, whether it be word processing, spreadsheets or running an financial package, and it will carry out that function indefinitely just as well as it did the day you bought it. What changes is the demand you start to put on the PC as you realise just what else you could be using it for, and as software applications become more sophisticated in their later incarnations thus demanding more from the host PC.

Within a couple of years, your PC is bulging at the seams, its hard drive chattering away every time you click your mouse for anything, and giving you long enough to make a cup of tea and post your letters before it'll open your sales forecasting spreadsheet. Keen not to make the same mistake again, the temptation is to buy the latest of everything in the hope that it'll do you for as long as possible, and if it doesn't, you'll be able to upgrade it to cope.

Just like wide screen TVs, mini disc players and aluminium scooters, you always pay a premium for the latest, fastest, smallest gadget, and to be honest an entry level PC will carry out all of your PC requirements in sleep mode. What drives PC specification is GAMES. If you're buying the PC for work, you really don't need anything like the spec. the likes of Dell, Tiny, PC World and the others are trying to persuade you to buy.

These days, the lowest spec PC you can buy will have a processor approaching 1.0GHz, a 20GB hard drive and at least 128MB RAM. Features such as DVD players may seem attractive, but do you really want to watch a two hour movie on a 17" screen, instead of your 32" superflat wide screen digital TV with surround sound you paid ?3000 for last year, and your neighbour's just picked up for a grand? CD Rewriters are a good idea, especially if you want to copy all your CDs so you can listen to them in your car as well as at home, but I'd recommend keeping the CD Rom as well, since it makes for much faster copying of your disks if you have two drives.

What you really want to concentrate on is the motherboard. If you've got to pay for someone else to install a new one two years down the line, you may as well throw your PC away and buy a new one with a 12 month guarantee. Make sure it will support a separate graphics card, even if when you buy it, it uses an on board graphics chip. Make sure it will support the latest processors, even if it comes with a slower (and much cheaper) chip as standard. If you're buying an AMD based machine instead of Intel Pentium IV, and I would recommend you do, as you'll save yourself at least a couple of hundred quid, make sure the motherboard will support Athlon XP processors, and ideally DDR (Double Data Rate) RAM (memory) as well.

It's worth spending a few extra pounds buying a good monitor. Don't bother with a 15". The visible area will be under 14" diagonally, and for anything like full time use, you will end up with eye strain. 17" monitors are good, but remember that as they get wider, so they get deeper, and if you're in a small room, it'll end up pinning you against the back wall!. TFT monitors (very thin, LCD monitors) are coming down in price very quickly as the technology gets cheaper. CRT monitors (the normal, heavy, big ones) are a little cheaper in an attempt to complete, but soon they will reach the bottom and the gap will really narrow between the two types. It's worth remembering that a 15" TFT monitor will be between 15 and 15.3 inches diagonally, and a 17" CRT will be approximately 15.9", so when looking at prices, go down a size for the equivalent TFT. Expect to pay around ?110 +VAT for a 17" CRT and around ?240 + VAT for a 15" TFT.

In short, if you're paying much more than ?600 + VAT for a general purpose office PC, you're making someone very very happy.