We are delighted to announce that the new web site for Specialist Catering Solutions is now live. Following the development of the site, it has now been released and more web traffic is being driven to the site.

Owner of SCS Douglas Watson commented:

"Wicketts are an absolute pleasure to work with. From first contact with James, his team acted quickly with developing my e-commerce site. I cannot fault their development and technical skills when solving any issues that arose and I am looking forward to the site's development over the coming months"

The eCommerce site allows Doug to sell his products across the UK. It benefits from enhanced Search Engine Optimisation settings with a robust and reliable selling platform to accept online orders and payments.

Please take a look at SCS’s new site and let us know what you think: www.specialistcateringsolutions.co.uk

We are pleased to announce that we have just launched two new services for small and start-up businesses.

Business Telephone Number Service

This service is ideal for a small business that wants to project a more professional image. Many people are put off using a company that only lists a normal mobile phone number and so we have developed this new service.

We will provide you with a free 0843 or 0845 telephone number that you can use on your web site, business cards and adverts. You can then choose to have calls to that number redirected to a landline or a mobile telephone number without having to give out your personal numbers.

The service comes with a host of features including open / close timings, forwarding to multiple numbers, on-hold music and call queuing.

Show your customers how professional you are and receive calls 24/7 at any location.

All for just £4.99 a month

Find out more...

Business Start-up Package

Combining our eCommerce and Business Telephone Number services, this option gives you everything you need to get your business up-and-running.

This low-cost package includes:

• An eCommerce web site so that you can sell your products online or a standard site to advertise your business
• Full web site design and set up
• A 0843 / 0845 telephone number which redirects calls to your home or mobile phone
• A web site address such as www.carpet-cleaners.co.uk
• An unlimited number of business e-mail addresses such as info@carpet-cleaners.co.uk and sales@carpet-cleaners.co.uk
• On-going training
• On-going support

All for just £19.99 a month

Find out more...

We have slashed our Web Site Design service costs.

Many of the businesses contacting us were looking for a simple site, with a few pages and we did not feel that £149 was an appropriate price for such a small amount of work. Therefore, from today our charge for a basic web site is just £49.

Should you want something requiring more work then we can provide a quote however to keep our prices fair, we wanted to make this change.

If you are looking for a web site, please do not forget to look at our eCommerce and Web Site Management services that offer a full web site design and on-going support for those that do not have the technical staff in house to keep a site updated.

We are excited to announce that Wicketts is now offering domain name (web site address) registration.

Offering a range of domain types including .co.uk, .com, .net and .biz you can register your domain name from today.

We are also able to offer some of the best prices around, with .co.uk domains at just £4.99!

To register your address, please visit our domain registration page.

We are pleased to announce that we have launched a dedicated eCommerce platform.

Perfect for selling goods online, this new service is not restricted to any number of products or functionality. With our eCommerce store you can offer your clients discount vouchers, guest checkout (so they do not need to register), online payment with PayPal and many other great features.

To keep things simple, we have included everything in the price. The web site address, hosting, web site design, eCommerce set up and on-going support are all included. As is the web site address renewal. You pay just £14.99 a month and that’s it!

We believe this is a truly simple and perfect solution for small businesses. You know exactly how much to pay each month – no hidden fees or extras. We provide a fully-featured eCommerce platform with built-in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), sitting on top of our secure and extremely reliable hosting platform.

For more information, please visit www.wicketts.co.uk/services/ecommerce.html

In recent years the number of people setting up their own business and working from home has continued to grow. Many have failed but many have tried and succeeded. Even for those people who continue to work 9-5 for someone else, the appeal of working from home and for yourself is great.

Setting up an ecommerce web site is much easier today and allows practically anyone with a computer and Internet connection to start selling products online.

There is also a wealth of information available for complete beginners. Sites such as UK Business Labs and My Local Forums are great ways to discuss business related topics with other like-minded people.

From experience, planning is a key requirement. Even if you do not yet know what you want to sell, research how much it will cost to set up the basics of your business - telephone number, web site, support and computer equipment. Once you have done that, decide if a) it's possible to do and b) do you still want to?

Researching your market is key. Do you have an original product? Are you going to be selling the same product as someone else? Why would they choose to buy from you and not your established competitor? What's your USP (Unique Selling Point)?

The best bit of advice I have ever heard is - take it slow! There is no way you are going to build a business and start making a profit within a week. It's likely that you won't start making any profit for three years. Business takes passion, dedication, skill and time!

We are pleased to announce the launch of our new support pages.

We are dedicated to outstanding customer support and to further demonstrate this, we have launched a dedicated area for supporting our customers.

As well as the standard e-mail and telephone support, we have launched a new live help system and customer forums.

We welcome any feedback that you may have - please add it in the forums!

The support pages can be found here.

Wicketts are now offering support for local community and charity groups.

To help advertise the important work that you do, we want to do what we can.

We will build your charity or organisation a free web site. What's the catch? All you have to do is host your web site with us for £1.99 a month - that's it!

More information can be found on our dedicated page that shows our commitment to this. For more information visit our 'Charity and Community Organisations - Free Web Site' page.

Happy new year everyone.

We just wanted to update you on a few recent developments.

Live Support
Today sees the release of our new live customer support system. We appeared to be receiving delays with the previous system and some customers were not getting through to an operator quick enough. As well as transferring to a new system, we have also added ‘live support’ images to every  page of our site so if you have any questions, please get in touch.

Latest Design
Our latest design project went live a couple of days ago. We would like to welcome Fitz2Kleen to the Wicketts family. We have set up and are now hosting their new web site. Their old site can be seen in our portfolio. Let us know what you think of the new design.

We realise that you are probably struggling through the post-new-years-hangover so we will leave it at that for now!