There I was singing the virtues of my organic methods for growing Atlas and little did I know I had it all wrong.  Sure we have plenty of delighted clients, a great development team and even a few awards to our name but I was drained and with little sign of an exit plan from the long hard slog it was obvious that I’d soon run out of steam.  The timing of the YesAndClub meeting was perfect and fortunately I knew exactly who I wanted to appoint chairman.  The very next day I drafted a short e-mail to Richard Harwood CFA, a hard working businessman based in Jersey who has been a long standing customer, advocate and friend of Atlas.

Three months later and following some serious due diligence Richard is now appointed as our first external shareholder and chairman.  Myself and the team are working harder than we’ve ever worked before but with a difference, we now have our direction and focus back.  Additionally we have implemented more infrastructure changes since Richard’s appointment than we have implemented in the last year.  Examples off the top of my head include:

• The appointment of a new office manager, to reduce my workload and manage Atlas’ HR, payroll, bookkeeping and reception.  My Mum has filled this role, which will be the subject of a blog post in the future
• New automated processes for generating quotes to our customers, ensuring that I am not a bottle neck when we have a large order pipeline
• A bonus scheme, rewarding staff on the basis of their individual performance and also that of the company
• An intelligent set of monthly management figures.  Our previous figures were not transparent enough
• Formal budgets.  Which has put the stop on expenditure just because I’m in a good mood.

You may say that all of this is fairly rudimentary.  I agree.  Our chairman hasn’t told me anything I didn’t already know but I’ve been so busy letting the business run me that I simply didn’t have the time to make such obvious changes.

I owe a big thank you to Robert Loch for introducing to me to his friends and associates via the YesAndClub and an even bigger thank you to our new chairman Richard Harwood.  I’m excited about the future again and look forward to what it has in store for myself and Atlas.

I’m interested in your feedback, what would you change about your business if you could find the time?

The URI Valet service is useful because at a glance it will notify you of any glaringly obvious problems that could be affecting your SEO ranking such as incorrect server header information, a slow loading page or a lack of W3C validation.  When performing basic SEO these fundamental elements are so often overlooked yet they are incredibly easy to fix and have a serious impact on your rankings.

And if you don’t think page loading times are a factor, check this out

http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=87144

We run a URI Valet as a matter of course for all new customers.  Why not try it on your website, we think you’ll be surprised at the results.

It must be noted that these tests were carried out on clean installs of each operating system and may not entirely reflect the performance when a machine is slightly older with more applications installed.

As you can see above Windows 7 is clearly the better performer, but only just. PC Mag have stated however that these tests were run on a machine built back when XP was the main OS and these tests are purely for people thinking of upgrading their existing XP installs.

For the full list of tests and their results you can view the PC Mag article here.

We’ve made this process much easier using a neat little .Net system tray application we’ve created.  The app runs in your system tray, you click and hold your mouse on its icon, drag over the top of the colour you wish to grab, and then let go to copy the hexadecimal code of your selected colour to your clipboard.  It couldn’t be easier.

Atlas Colour Picker Screenshot

We’ve created a video showing the colour picker in action, here’s the source code if you want to see how it works and/or modify it and here’s the executable if you just want to use it.

Support for RGB colours would be a nice feature to add, as would support for Windows 7 as this isn’t supported due to the new style system tray.  If you do make any changes to the code send it on to us and we’ll make it available via this blog post acknowledging your work individually of course.

Love the Atlas Team.

P.S. We’ve also created a neat Flash WordPress plug in to assist you in modifying your themes via the administration panel that we’ll upload in the coming weeks so keep your eyes peeled for that if you use WordPress.

After months of work we have finally launched our new free SaaS Directory http://www.saaslounge.com.  SaaS means Software as a Service, which is a techie way of saying software delivered via a web browser that does not require any installation.  Google Docs is a popular example of a SaaS application and offers a number of benefits over it’s non-SaaS competitor Microsoft Word.

This a directory with a twist, a few twists actually.  SaaS Lounge offers

• A unique SaaSMetric appraisal system that allows SaaS customers to compare SaaS applications based on SaaS best practices
• A forum for SaaS related conversations
• SaaS Guides for those new to SaaS
• SaaS related news which will be constantly updated

The website is brand new and so we expect to make plenty of improvements to the site over the coming months.  In the meantime, why not add your SaaS application to the directory.  It’ll take five minutes and better still it’s free!

We needed to ensure that all data sent over https://secure.kashguard.co.uk was encrypted but we also needed to have an automatic and graceful redirect should someone try to use regular http.  So what do we do?  We could have added code to all of our pages, or to our base page, or in the global events, to check if https was used, and if not then issue a redirect to https — you could, but we wouldn’t.  Why not?  This required a code change specifically to force SSL which would make it harder for our developers to run the site on their local machines when debugging.  It would also make it harder for us to disable SSL should we have any need to.  Finally it would ignore any non ASP.Net files that we may want to protect with SSL.

So we decided on a very simple IIS trick using host headers and two websites.  Here’s how:

1. We created two sites in IIS, one is configured to use port 80, the other is configured to use port 443 for SSL.
2. The site we created to use port 80 was configured on the Home Directory tab to perform a redirect to https://secure.kashguard.co.uk.  To do this we selected the “A redirection to a URL” option and entered https://secure.kashguard.co.uk in the “Redirect to” box.  We also ticked “A permanent redirection for this resource” which tells search engines that it should not index the non SSL website.

Now any traffic attempting to come in from port 80 is permanently redirected to the actual site on the 443 port.  This avoids placing scripts in a site and took five minutes to implement.  Simples!

Essentially I exposed the University of Essex and their “Business Incubation Centre” as a centre that doesn’t do much in the way of incubation.  If you’d like to know more about my thoughts check out the article:

http://www.echo-news.co.uk/echofeatures/businessnews/4573217.Why_is_uni_failing_businesses_/

I hope that the University takes my comments on board in a positive manner and ensures that other SMEs are in a position to take advantage of what should be an excellent local business resource.  Furthermore the school of entrepreneurship and business and the incubation centre need to align their efforts again to ensure that going forward everybody wins.

Microsoft’s general manager for IE, Amy Bazdukas, let the world know that the folks over at Microsoft do feel our pain. “Friends don’t let friends use IE6″ she said. She stated that they were doing all they could to push IE6 back and get more people using the latest version of IE. “It’s certainly part of our approach to consumers to get them to upgrade to IE8″

Don’t get your hopes up though, Microsoft won’t be ditching IE6 any time soon, they plan to stop all support for it in 2014, at the same time it cuts all ties with the XP operating system. When asked why she thought there are still so many people using IE6 (40% of IE users are using 6, more than both versions 7 and she mentioned piracy in countries such as India and China. “There’s a reluctance [among people using counterfeit Windows] to use Automatic Updates. Rather than download updates, often the solution to problems is to re-image the machine using the pirated, pre-XP SP2 counterfeit. That also helps to drive the persistence of IE6″ she added.

So while Microsoft are aware of our pain and as much as they would like to help us out the situation will remain the same for another 5 years! You can join the fight so stop supporting IE6 at http://idroppedie6.com/

Suite 8, Weston Chambers, Weston Road, Southend-On-Sea, Essex, SS1 1LW

In the current climate it has never been more important to protect everything you do on the web. Online shopping and banking are two very good examples of when you need to be extra careful when giving out your details, and why should emails be any different?

Emails can contain very sensitive and personal information that you may not want others to see. However it’s possible to encrypt your e-mail by digitally signing the content. Sending an unencrypted email is like sending a post card written in pencil (Comodo Email Security explains).  Anybody can change the content.

How do I get an Email Certificate?

Comodo, suppliers of both Email and SSL certificates, are offering a FREE email certificate for personal use only. With this certificate you digitally sign every email you send as well as encrypting them, preventing them from being externally accessed by third parties. To get your free certificate simply choose your operating system from the drop down list on the download page on the Comodo website and press download. A word of warning however, we found that downloading the certificate in Firefox caused some issues so to be safe use Internet Explorer.

How do I install the certificate?

For Microsoft Outlook 2007 once you have downloaded the certificate open up your email client and head to Tools > Trust Center > Email Security. Browse for the certificate you have just downloaded and enable it. It’s that easy!  These steps will vary slightly for other e-mail clients.

You can check to ensure your e-mails are now secure by checking your Sent Items as your outgoing mail will now have a small certificate icon: