Tim support guru

Tim Cooke has been Support Manager at Slightly Different for over three years, he deals day to day with any issues or problems our clients have and does a very good job too!

He’s one of those all round great blokes really, he’d do anything for anyone and he’ll regularly be in the office well after office hours if it means he can solve a problem and make  a client happy.

We wanted to introduce Tim to you, put a face to that voice, show you how many phones he can hold and answer at once! I got Tim to give me a few minutes of his very sought after time today to see what really makes him Tick.

Me:  So Tim, what exactly does your job involve?

Tim:  Ensuring your web business continuity by providing solutions to customers on support contracts

Me:  Which part of your job do you most enjoy?

Tim:  Providing better support than clients anticipate.

Me:  I can vouch for that!  So which part of your job is the most challenging?

Tim:  Unravelling clients’ inherited tangled collection of websites, domains, and email accounts, educating them to feel more informed and empowered rather than confused and frustrated.

Me:  I guess that must get pretty stressful at times then? Do you ever loose your cool?

Tim:  No, I’m a very pragmatic bloke really, no point in getting stressed, technology has a way of doing that to people, sometimes, all I offer is another viewpoint on a problem and that’s all it takes..

Me:  Ok, this ones for the star prize, what makes you Slightly Different?

Tim:  Patience ?……

Tim can be found hard at work at the Slightly Different offices in Falmouth Monday to Friday, he isn’t available for weddings or Bar Mitzvah’s! And you can’t have him he’s ours!  But if you are a Slightly Different client, we’ll lend him to you Monday to Friday, we think that’s reasonable.

Have a look at our other newsletter articles, follow the links on the right

Some of you may have noticed that Google has implemented it’s real time search facility, but what does this actually mean? Basically, Google has slipped in a ‘live news” feed which is updated as more news on the subject is found. These results appear near the top of the search which means other results have now all taken a bump downwards. For an example of this in action, take a look at this link, and check out the results changing in real time, by clicking on this search for ‘Big Brother‘.

Photographer: Danny Sullivan

There is, however, an advantage to this. If you use Twitter, have a blog or a news section on your site which is updated on a regular basis, chances are it’s going to be found before your competitors who don’t.

If your competitors aren’t doing it yet, you can bet they soon will be. Adding a blog to your site will add oodles of marketing goodness to your site, so why not get in touch to find out how we can help you come out on top?

Read more from our February newsletter, check out the links on the right for more articles full of priceless gems and untold secrets…

Trew Care have been providing personalised care and support services in Cornwall for over fifteen years. Their dedicated team of nurses and domiciliary care staff work around the clock, come rain or snow! to ensure their clients are safe, comfortable and cared for.

Recent changes in legislation have meant that people now have more financial control over their own care budgets. Trew Care have responded quickly to ensure that their clients are well informed and aware of every service they offer including payroll and budget management, personal assistant training, holiday and sickness cover and CRB checking.

The website has been updated to reflect these changes, with a new section dedicated to Personal Choice, this is being expanded upon currently with new tools and helpful resources on the way, watch this space…

Also worth a mention, is that Trew Care is a family run business, Diane and Stephen Dyckhoff and their daughter Naomi are all dedicated to the business. Recently we found out that the family donated a very generous sum of money to help set up a hospital at Orange Farm in South Africa for orphans suffering from HIV and Aids.  I spoke to Diane about this just before Christmas and she told me about their aim to also build a village for the children so that they could feel that they lived in a community rather than an istitution, often babies and teenagers alike shared the same rooms.  This I thought was typical of Diane and her family, to look past the disease and focus on the children and their needs as human beings.

Diane, we salute you!

For more information on the Orange Farm project, have a look at this website The Global Natural Healthcare Trust

Want more? Have a look at our other newsletter articles, follow the links on the right

Many of you already use Firefox as your browser of choice. So for those of you who have made the jump [of course - some of you may have been there at the beginning - so no jump required!], here are some incredibly useful plugins.

[For those of you have yet to jump, maybe the sheer unbridled usefulness of these plugins will help make the case for switching]

Scribefire

For those of you who are managing the content of your sites and/or blogs with WordPress, Scribefire is a real time saver. It will allow you to easily post to WordPress from the safety of any web page – no more explicitly logging in to WordPress required.

Screenshot Pimp

This plugin will allow you to take a screenshot of an entire web page regardless of whether the page scrolls – need I say more? Hope not – as it really doesn’t do much else – and why should it – as negating the need to take multiple screenshots of a single web page should be enough for anyone! So when one of the SD team asks you to send a screenshot – you will now have no excuse!

ColorZilla

A very nifty little tool this one. It does a very many good things – with the highlight being the provision of an in-browser eyedropper. If you see a colour you like, but it is slap bang in the middle of a complex image, you now have a way of selecting it and then telling SD all about it.

Scrapbook

Saving the best for last – Scrapbook allows you to highlight the text and/or add post-it notes to a web page and then send the resulting page to someone else. So when asking SD to make changes to your website, no more needing to come up with elaborate and convoluted ways of expressing exactly which part of the layout you are referring to or which text you want changed – no more ’1000 words’ required!

As a web development company that prides itself on developing solutions that work cross-platform, we use, and have experience of, just about every browser there is – but Firefox is always the browser we choose when we are not testing, but simply using a browser as God intended…

Want more? Follow the links on the right.  You know you want to.

These often take the format similar to this

Dear user of {your company}.com mailing service!

We are informing you that because of the security upgrade of the mailing service your mailbox (your.name@your company.com) settings were changed. In order to apply the new set of settings click on the following link:

http://{your company.com}/owa/service_directory/settings.php?email=******blah blah ….

Best regards, {your company}.com Technical Support.

The links within these emails take you to an apparent login page where you are asked for a new password and to confirm it is you by re-entering your old one – these criminals are really only interested in your ‘old’ password which they then use to access your webmail and search for bank details and any other financially or commercially sensitive information available

Even if you feel the request is perfectly valid, always look at the URL = website address of any link you go to from any email – this will not be what you expect and is usually composed of:

not_what_you_expected.com/gibberish

or

legitimate_bank.not_what_you_expected.com/gibberish

Do not proceed any further – Quit that page and bin the email

Most anti-spam filters are quite good at recognising these and shunt them into your Spam / Junk folder plus frequently the grammar used in these emails is poor and incorrectly spelt

From the Slightly Different perspective -

Firstly we set your password, you cannot change it independently, so you would not get such a mail from us;

Secondly, any similar type request would have our email signature or another obvious reference identifying Slightly Different

Thirdly, we would only change your password after prior consultation with you, and so clients can drop us an email at support@slightlydifferent.co.uk or phone if uncertain;

Hope this helps to keep your private data safe.

Want more? Go on take it, it’s there on the right.

DNA Screening law

American flag

There’s an interesting law that’s just been passed in the US innocently called GINA – the Genetic Non-Discrimination Act – which is interesting as it revolves around the fact that employers are no longer allowed to screen job candidates based on their genetic DNA profile. Apparently you aren’t allowed to refuse someone a job on the basis that they are predisposed to develop a disease in 20 years that could cost your company money in sickness benefits. Unbelievable, but true. What next, screening for potential employees who may commit a crime in the future??

More newslettery goodness on the right folks.

As is the way in Art & Design, Trends influence the way our visual World is presented to us. Though often short-lived they are revisited time and time again. One trend that is emerging in the Online World at present, is that of vintage or retro design. Elements of 50′s/60′s/70′s print design are now being re-utilised by web designers to make a stand against the clean-cut ‘apple-esque’ style of websites. Anything from signage, movie posters even to American diner menu’s are inspiring this latest trend!

But what is the point, I hear you ask? Well in many cases, it is simply to look cool. However used effectively and directed towards the right audience, they are used to encourage a sense of nostalgia and therefore engage with the intended audience.

Now whether or not we at Slightly Different are going to create any ‘vintage’ websites is undecided at this point, yet one thing is clear: we think they look darn cool!

Take a look at these examples to see exactly what we’re on about:

http://www.kultika.de/

http://www.allstarlanes.co.uk/

http://thisisgrow.com/archive/bigstategames/

http://www.dollardreadful.com/

http://www.annyas.com/screenshots/

There are more links just over there to the right, that’s right, just there.

Well done to those people who became seriously wealthy in the last decade, and leave some room for the rest of us, because this is our time. Regardless what the rest of the economy is doing, and which Government’s are going down the pan this week, we’re fighting fit and raring to go.

Our 10th year has started exceptionally well, with a team reshuffle and two new members of the team since I last wrote, and another new designer being hunted as you read this. We’ve got a new office in London (yes, a real one, not one of these virtual things), and some fantastic new clients to go with our fantastic old ones, including recently a teddy bear company, a London based specialist care provider, an international shipping organisation, and a smokehouse in the New Forest producing the most amazing smoked foods.

It’s a fact that not one of our clients has disappeared because of the recession, and I put that down to the fact that we only work with the very best. We wouldn’t be here without our clients, and I’d like to thank you all for being Slightly Different.

I think 2010 is going to be an outstanding year for us all. Let’s keep in touch.

Cheers!

More links from our newsletter over there on the right.