Newly formed digital agency group, The Digital Maze, announced their latest partnership with Bloomberg & Square Mile Sport to create a web application for a new energy saving scheme – Bloomberg PWR Ride.
Bloomberg PWR Ride is a scheme whereby staff from their office in London create their own energy using cutting edge static bikes. The RE:GEN bike founded by UK-based company Energym, is a first-of-its kind static bike, featuring a generator unit that transfers the energy output from a person’s workout into stored renewable electrical power. Not only will this project promote a greener, more sustainable environment, cutting down on Bloomberg’s carbon footprint, exercise at work has also shown to stimulate creative thinking and help employees get over the 2pm slump by increasing blood flow to the brain. Rob Twells, Commercial Director of The Digital Maze said: “We’re delighted to be working in partnership with Bloomberg on this exciting initiative. As we’ve grown and developed as a brand over the last year, sustainability is something that is high on our agenda, so we’re confident that The Digital Maze and Bloomberg are an excellent fit. We’re proud to be providing the tech behind what is hoped to be a global initiative for Bloomberg and their sustainability journey in partnership with Square Mile Sport.” For this project, Bloomberg consulted with the Frogspark team at The Digital Maze to create a web application that enables their staff to book a bike, track their performance, see how much energy they’ve created and show a leaderboard per person and per office. The Digital Maze team will be creating a user-friendly application using Laravel to ensure a smooth, modern interface that is both easy to use and powerful. James Walsh, Head of Web Design at The Digital Maze, said: “Bloomberg PWR ride is an exciting brand – and not just from a sustainability perspective. Globally, the visual language around climate and green energy is in danger of becoming stale, at a time when it needs to cut through more than ever. The tone that Bloomberg PWR ride and Energym’s branding has brought to the table feels crucial and fresh; there’s as much high-powered energy here as there is in the bikes themselves. I’m stoked to be leading the design team that gets to translate this dynamism into a web app, and I’m looking forward to what we can create as a team.”
Multi-award-winning digital search agency The SEO Works have been selected to manage the organic SEO, Google PPC, and forthcoming new website migration for leading independent luxury watch retailer Luxe Watches.
Having spent over a decade assisting clients with finding their ideal luxury timepieces, Luxe Watches will soon be launching a completely revamped ecommerce website and also opening their brand new boutique store in early July 2021. Meanwhile, their existing Essex store will be converted into a dedicated watch service centre to meet rising demand.
This ambitious development for the leading watch retailer will be supplemented with sophisticated Organic SEO and Google PPC strategies, created by the Sheffield-based agency. Combining a new website migration with the development of these approaches, Luxe Watches hope to supercharge their digital presence, as well as drive awareness of their new offerings.
“We’re currently seeing demand outstrip supply in the luxury watch world, but our expert sourcing team can locate and source watches matching our customer’s wish lists. Combined with this, it’s imperative that our website exemplifies the quality service that we offer our clients, and also our ability to be found via our strong SEO and PPC positioning. The SEO Works demonstrated a real desire to want to work with us and have a pedigree matching ours that has taken over a decade to establish”, said Nick Hickey, Managing Director and Founder of Luxe Watches.
Alex Hill, Director at The SEO Works added: “Nick and his team at Luxe Watches deal only with the best and most luxurious and aspirational products in their field, and they deserve a digital service and online shopfront that matches that and drives the right pedigree of customer to them. The combined launch of their new website and new boutique store will provide us with the perfect ammunition to deliver on the campaigns and drive huge success for them.”
The SEO Works specialises in SEO, PPC, Web and Paid Social advertising and has many clients within the Luxury items and Ecommerce sector, including Decathlon, TJ Hughes, Denby, Rab, Towsure and many others.
Great Places Housing Groups’ construction services framework Innovation Chain North (ICN) has embarked on a digital transformation project with award-winning digital agency The SEO Works.
The partnership, beginning over a year ago, involves multiple projects that will help transform the face of the framework. The first was the launch of a brand-new ICN marketing website, designed and delivered by the web team at The SEO Works.
The most recent project is however is the most elaborate – the launch of a full portal for the framework. This has been created by the award-winning web design and development team and will become the new home for supplier selection, tenders and all documentation for ICN – saving hundreds of hours of work for both users and the client.
Commenting on the ongoing partnership, Helen Spencer, Director of Development at Great Places, said:
“We selected The SEO Works due to their experience in our sector and the quality of response to our brief. Alongside the ICN Team, they have helped to deliver a first-class website and portal which has transformed the client and supplier experience with a variety of new features.”
“The news online forms, live project view, and profile pages give our clients even greater control when it comes to managing their ICN framework account, and we know based on feedback are welcome additions.”
Graham Jones, Web Team Leader of The SEO Works added, “We are very excited to see the major projects in this partnerships live – the portal has been one of our most ambitious Web projects to date, and we’re very happy that Great Places and ICN have entrusted such an exciting project with us. We’re proud that we’ve delivered something truly special for them.”
With other projects still to come in the partnership, both parties are looking forward to an exciting and successful future. The news marks another exciting appointment for the award-winning Web team at The SEO Works.
The SEO Works specialises in SEO, PPC, web and paid social advertising and has clients including; Decathlon, Rab, Mondaine, Weldricks Pharmacy, the NHS and Denby Pottery.
Secure technologies provider ISDM Solutions has unveiled a rebrand as well as a brand new website, designed and built by digital agency The SEO Works.
The SEO Works, working alongside branding partner Blunt Crayon, have created a completely new look for the internationally recognised business, and have also been chosen to manage the organic and paid search strategies going forward.
The Sheffield-based agency will look to deliver growth through these organic and PPC approaches, helping to cement ISDM’s place in the secure technology space (underpinned by ISDM’s own technology partnerships with Cisco, Zoom, Pexip and Microsoft Teams).
“We’ve been working closely with The SEO Works now for nearly 12 months on the full rebrand and website delivery and the whole team are delighted with the results. Their branding and web teams understood our brief and nailed the branding exercise to a tee, which we now expect the new website to promote very successfully” said Eamon Lenehan, Chief Marketing Officer of ISDM Solutions.
Alex Hill, Director at The SEO Works added: “It’s been a really great project so far, with still so much potential with the ensuing SEO and PPC projects. We’re delighted with the branding and new website, but even more delighted that the ISDM Solutions team are so pleased with the result.”
The SEO Works specialises in SEO, PPC, Web and paid social advertising and has clients including; Decathlon, Rab, Mondaine, Weldricks Pharmacy, the NHS and Denby Pottery.
Paul Lyons, owner of North Wales Web Design company, DesignWeb, discusses the small steps website owners can take to reduce their risk of falling victim to the growing threat of hacking
We’ve been established for more than 20 years in North Wales, have an excellent reputation and have worked with businesses of all sizes to build their online presence with web design.
Unfortunately, these days we are used to receiving calls from concerned website owners who have had their website hacked. I’m relieved to say, most of these calls are not from our clients but from people with older sites who are in urgent need of assistance – and we normally can and do help even if it wasn’t a website we built.
These days, hacking is a huge risk for businesses. To put it in perspective, by lunchtime today more than 66,000 websites worldwide will fall victim to a hacker – many of them attacking from miles away, often overseas and usually unconnected in any way to your business, attacking your website purely because they can.
How do businesses react when their website gets hacked
The first response from most website owners when their site gets hacked is disbelief. Common reactions include ‘but why would they target me? I’m just a local church/football club/small e-commerce website/local business website? I’m not NASA!”
It causes upset and disruption to your business and many people take it personally – but targeted website attacks are thankfully extremely rare. It’s likely your website was chosen purely because a remote hacker has done a worldwide scan using a specialist hacking tool and found they could get into yours. Here’s just some of the reasons your local website may be seen as a target:
Every website is hosted on a server, by hacking the website they may be able to take advantage of the server resources;
Your website may have an excellent reputation online, so they can hijack it to use it for their own sales projects;
Your website may contain business or customer data they can use;
In some cases, hackers just want to impress each other – they have automated tools that scan and highlight vulnerable websites and yours was chosen by such a tool.
Why it is probably not your web designer’s fault
The second reaction from website owners is to blame the company who designed your website, but that’s like buying a car and blaming the manufacturer if your car gets stolen. As with car criminals, there are communities of hackers out there just looking for websites to hack. Like car criminals, web criminals do what they do, they are clever and continually explore new ways to commit their crime. Like car manufacturers, website designers will build your website to the latest available standards, however technology is changing at a rapid pace and unfortunately hackers are upping their game at a similar pace. The honest truth is that no website protection is foolproof and the most determined hackers have even secured access to huge financial institutions who have spent billions on protection. However, there are simple steps you can take which will prevent your website from being an easy target.
What happens during a hacking attack?
Unfortunately, this depends entirely on the hacker – once they have control of your website it is up to them what they choose to do.
Sometimes, a hacker will just change a picture or content on your landing page and do little else.
However, some hacks can be incredibly damaging, stealing your client data, hijacking browser search results for your website and diverting your clients to a nefarious site, utilizing your web server for cryptomining, destroying your data and more. Some hackers will lock your data and hold it to ransom (don’t ever pay, in most cases they won’t restore your site anyway).
The good news is that most websites can be recovered to some degree, but it is not always possible to fully recover a hacked site.
In many cases however, hackers will leave some kind of back door for easy future access – which is why we always recommend choosing a professional to recover your site.
However even seasoned professionals may not spot them – hackers are experts at finding ways to make their code hidden and looking innocuous. Our advice is to take sensible precautions to avoid being hacked in the first place and to regularly scan the website after any hack has taken place.
How can I protect my website from being hacked?
Nobody can 100% protect their website from hackers – it boils down to how much time, assets and acumen the hacker chooses to invest to hack your site. Huge corporates, Government associations and financial institutions are continually investing in cyber security and many of them have still been hacked. Cybersecurity experts talk about creating layers of security – staff awareness, best practice, strong passwords will each offer an additional layer of protection.
Taking just a few small steps will reduce your risk substantially. We recommend all website owners:
Have a SSL authentication
The SSL adds additional encryption to your site, making it harder to hack. It also has a useful side benefit of helping your web ranking, as Google prefers sites with SSL certification.
Choose Secure website hosting
You can find cheap website hosting for £1 a month, or pay thousands per month. They don’t all offer the same service and you get what you pay for. Web Design specialists like DesignWeb will have spent time choosing a reliable, secure web host for their site owners and security will be one of their key considerations. Regular site backups are important too, check whether your website host includes this.
Do website software updates
While your website will have been built in line with up-to-date recommendations, both website hackers and technology are continually evolving.
WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world – powering more than 75 million websites worldwide. Keeping the platform up to date to offer protection from hackers is literally a daily challenge and for this reason, WordPress issues updates to plug ins, themes and settings almost daily. Most people ignore the warnings on the WordPress dashboard but keeping WordPress updates up to date is essential in the fight against hackers. Other popular platforms like Joomla and Drupal are the same.
Once a vulnerability is uncovered, hackers usually spread the word very quickly, so it is an ongoing battle to issue updates in a timely fashion.
Most web designers will offer a premium service where they take care of things like Joomla and WordPress updates for you. It can seem like a cost saving to say no, but it’s worth the time you will save to keep your website secure. It’s certain a service we’ve found popular among our clients.
Very old custom-built websites are particularly vulnerable, as they will not have received regular patches and updates. Many website designers will offer a free website review – take advantage of that and then listen to their advice.
WordPress has some good plug-ins that will reduce your vulnerability. Talk to your website designer about whether one would benefit your website.
Choose secure passwords and educate your staff to do the same
You’d be amazed how quickly a techie can guess your passwords from a quick glance at your Facebook page. Pet names, kids names, friends names all make for terrible passwords. Also common names and passwords get added to hacker databases which automatically scan your site for vulnerabilities – so avoid them, too. Most hackers use a ‘brute force’ technique which keeps trying for common words in a database… so ‘motoracing’ or ‘rugbyfan’ is not so clever as you hoped!
A secure password is harder to crack.
A good password should not include names, have a mix of capital and lower case letters, numbers and special characters, and ideally at least 12 characters long.
Educate staff on real-life cyber security awareness
You don’t just need to protect yourself online, but in the real world too. Sometimes hackers will get into your website via telephoning your business and questioning your staff. An example of this type of hack is someone calling and saying they want to check your system is working now, can they just take your password and login? (we’ve heard of this being used to get bank details too.) It’s highly unusual for any bank, IT company or web designer to call a client for this type of information, so instruct your staff to challenge this and not to give this information to anyone on an incoming call. Instruct staff to tell the caller politely you will take their number and call them back – then call the company they are purporting to be from, on the number you normally reach them on. Your genuine web design or IT company will not mind you doing this – in fact, they will be relieved you have the presence of mind to do so.
Change passwords when staff leave
Remember I said targeted attacks were rare? They are, but ex employees, particularly someone who may have a grudge, represent a potential risk. Good practice can eliminate that risk altogether – simply change all passwords when people leave, no matter how much you ‘trust’ them. Trust is great, but secure practices are a firmer guarantee to avoid disruption or a data leak from your business.
Monitor your website
Often, businesses will check their email but only glance at their own website occasionally. It’s worth making sure someone in your organisation has the responsibility to check the front-end of your website at least once per day – largely because there is nothing worse than a customer calling you to let you know your website now announces your proud support of Al Qaida…. and yes, that really did happen to a local businessman in South Wales who had built his own website. Doing a quick visual check once per day means that should you fall victim to a hack, you can report it to your website support team and get it resolved before it damages your business reputation. Website security is a huge topic and of course, we can’t cover every detail in a short article.
However, taking these basic steps will avoid your site being an easy target and give you the ability to respond to any threats quickly. For more information and advice, please call us on 01745 508588 or visit our website: https://www.designweb.co.uk.
