MY BLOG
The real benefits of having a website
Consumers in 2007 spent on average £4 Billion online per month, which is 50% above the 2006 amount.
If this isn't enough to show you just how a website could improve your business then check out the following benefits ;-D
Your business can sell it's products/services globally 24/7, 7 days a week Cut out the middle man - You sell directly to your consumers without the middle man involved Increased customer information - Let consumers learn more about you via your website Cheaper than print advertising - Why pay large amounts of money advertising when you can do it freely online? Market expansion - The Internet has allowed businesses to break through the geographical barriers and become accessible, virtually, from any country in the world by a potential customer that has access to the net. Offer Convenience - How many times have you went online to research a product rather than getting in your car, driving somewhere to ask someone information about the product? It is far more convenient to research products online. "£30bn of retail spending in the UK occurs online, a further £20bn of other spending is conducted online and £30bn in offline spending is influenced by internet information or research. [IMRG Index Survey, 2006]" Your web site can save your business time and money. Information like your company news, new product launches, technical info and user guides can be published on your website for viewing and downloading saving you printing and distribution time and money.Are Your Social Network Photos Really Being Deleted?
PC World is pointing to an interesting study that has found that some popular social sites like Bebo and Facebook are not actually deleting your photos when you think they are. When the average user deletes a photo they have posted on one of these social sites, they assume that photo is gone. But is this really the case?
Cambridge University discovered that atleast seven popular sites might still have those photos live for up to thirty days. These seven sites are:
- MySpace
- Bebo
- hi5
- LiveJournal
- SkyRock
- Xanga
However, on the other hand, sites like Photobucket, Windows Live Spaces, Orkut, and Flickr were able to remove photos almost immediately.
In actuality, the offending sites have removed the images from their servers. It's just that the images still resided on content delivery networks, which store them. BBC News quotes a Facebook spokesperson on the matter:
"When a user deletes a photograph from Facebook it is removed from our servers immediately. However, URLs to photographs may continue to exist on the Content Delivery Network (CDN) after users delete them from Facebook, until they are overwritten. Overwriting usually happens after a short period of time."
So, those out there trying to manage their online reputations are going to have to re-consider that their efforts might just not be enough in this case!