When your looking for Highly Secure, High Performance, load balanced, fault tolerant hosting for Applications such as ASP, PHP, Joomla, Wordpress or more, let us quote you.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engine Optimisation is no longer something that can be automated nor scripted and because of the way results are now tailored to your browsing history then 'ranking' no longer has any relevance. That doesn't mean that you can no longer optimise your site for search engines, but it does mean that the days of "Get Rank 1 in Google for $49" and similar nonsense are long gone.
Search engine optimisation starts with the keywords. Use Google and Bing to search for, and select the keywords you're looking to attract to your site. If the keywords bring up your top competitors then your on the right track. You can also use the keywords tool in Google Adsense to find variations of your chosen keywords if you're in a saturated marketplace.
Now move on to the website content, crafting its pages and content to maximise relevance in the keywords your want to attract. This doesn't need expensive third party services and can be done yourself with some care following these simple rules:
- Make sure your keyword(s) for the current page are also in a <h1> heading 1 tag. That's important.
- Make sure your keywords(s) for the current page are in the pages title (<title> in <head>)
- Ensure your keyword9s) appear in the body of the content but don't repeat it excessively.
- If your using a lot of images then make sure the ALT tag is set for all of them with a reasonable description of the image.
- Stay well clear of Flash or any other format that search engines cannot index.
When you're satisfied with your pages then why not ask one of our SEO experts for an opinion before continuing? Its free (for websites hosted with us) and may help guide your progress.
Next we move on to Links, and a process aptly named 'Linkbuilding'. Links pointing to your site from relevant content are the single biggest boost to your ranking, but likewise a link from an unrelated or spammy site can equally damage your ranking, so this process will take time and involve considerable effort. We can of course do this for you, but at a premium due to the amount of work needed.
Finally, Social Media is starting to have a real impact on search ranking and so you must too consider its use within your site. This will often involve setting up accounts with Google+, Twitter, Facebook, instagram, etc and then creating 'company' pages. Create links from your website footer into these pages, and likewise links from content on social media platforms pages back to your site. If applicable find 'Channels' that will review or endorse your products or services and ask them to 'link' to you.
If your product or service is something that can be marketed on social media, and not all are, then social media marketing might be something you should consider, either yourself, in conjunction with us or we can do the entire thing. Social Media Marketing isn't free even if you do it yourself, there will be money involved in generating high quality ad's, and marketing them to your chosen demographics but if your product or service is marketable in this way then you will find a fairly reasonable conversion from marketing spend to sales revenue.
Finally, don't overlook traditional local and national marketing channels such as Radio, TV, Leafleting, etc if your products or services are suitable, many companies overlook these in favour of internet marketing which isn't always cheaper or more effective.
If you would like to chat to one of our Account Managers about SEO then use the contact us form and we'll give you a call right back.
Joomla CMS Development
There's no doubt that Wordpress is easier to learn, quicker to deploy and more popular for those reasons alone, but Joomla is undoubtably more powerful as a solution and if your willing to accept that its more complex to setup and maintian then the benefits can far outweight this.
Joomla, at its heart allows for complete customisation of the experience whether that by via CSS, templates, styles, or through modules, embedded plugins and even embedded PHP and JS directly into the render. When your looking for a CMS solution that can take your business to any destination then Joomla is the one to select.
There are many examples online showcasing the flexability of Joomla, but we prefer to just say, whatever you want, we can do. A good example of this would be a recent customer portal entirely in Joomla, with data extracted from a SQL Server database over the Secure WAN and presented to customers via interactive tables, graphs and downloadable content.
So, if you have a CMS project and want to advice, just drop us a message. If you've already got a site in Wordpress or Drupal and are looking to go a step further, again just drop us a message.
Limited Time Special £999 fixed price website with CMS
For a limited time you can have your website migrated from HTML to Joomla CMS for £999 ex VAT including one year support and hosting. But that's not all, the £999 is payable in 12 instalments of £83.25 ex VAT over the first year of service and support, and after than can be reduced to £199 annually for continued hosting.
We'll take you current website and build the new one on Joomla CMS with one of 12 standard base templates and then work with you to finalise the design and content. Once your happy, then the year of service and support begins.
This service is available for a limited time only and all work is subject to survey.
All work is taken on subject to survey. Your website must exist in a format which we can utilise, that's plain HTML4 or HTML5 with no server side programming or client side javascript. You can select from 12 base templates for your new site. Additional or custom templates will be charged extra. You can supply additional artwork and content at design time. A maximum of 100 support requests during the first year.
Secure FTP (SFTP and SSHFTP)
FTP or File Transfer Protocol has been around since the 70's as a robust file transfer mechanism and despite the move towards rsync and WebDAV (See our WebDrive Service) FTP is still commonplace today. At GEN we can offer single or multi user FTP, Secure FTP (SFTP) or SSHFTP (FTP over SSH) with varying storage allowances for distributing software and data. With Multiple SFTP Services we can provide redundancy and mirroring to ensure 100% uptime.
Want more security? then combine this with cutting edge filesystem level encryption to further protect your data.
- FTP is supported in most browsers and even most mobile devices.
- SFTP is supported in common software such as FileZilla, Transport etc.
- SSHFTP is supported in FileZilla and some select software packages and provides outstanding two stage encryption.
With any GEN Hosted File Transfer Service you can further enhance the solution with data synchronisation between rsync, windows or more contemporary services such as WebDAV.
With a FTP Service from GEN you can use any or all of the available protocols in endless combinations to provide exactly the service needed. Contact us Today to discuss your needs.
Web Presence Design and Development
With almost all businesses looking to promote themselves on the Internet Website Design is big businesses, but not all design companies offer the same services. There are in fact many channels to an internet presence and choosing the correct channel can have a significant impact on its success. A website is often considered to be just a website, but in fact there are many variables to consider when contracting a design house and I'll deal with a few of these below.
Static or dynamic?
Do you want a website that just provides a portfolio of your services much in the same way a conventional brochure would? or do you want a website that in some way connects the customer to your services in a more dynamic way? And example of a dynamic website would be a quoting tool, or online ordering but that's by no means the full scope. We recently developed a website for a solar provider which in realtime shows the current Kwh being generated from their solar estate.
Developer or Customer Supported?
Whilst the initial cost of the website design may be significant, there must be thought given to its maintenance especially where it has dynamic functions. Many design companies will offer some sort of maintenance on a monthly or annual basis, but managing this long term financial commitment requires careful consideration. We always look to involve customers as much as possible in the future maintenance of their web presence but are always there to help as required.
Automation?
A website can with some additional development interface with third party systems, such as an ordering system or a contact management system. Making these decisions at the outset can significantly reduce development timescales and costs. A good example would be a system to allow your customers to track their orders, or raise help requests etc. Our system allows our customers to access their quotes, invoices, tickets, etc.
So, why are we different? Well its this simple, we WILL consult with you to develop a design specification to work to. We WILL do all the work without asking you for anything up front and ONLY charge you maintenance, and we WILL support your ongoing needs in all aspects of your IT Infrastructure.
Professional Website Hosting
We offer a comprehensive range of shared or dedicated hosting services to business customers. Our cluster based Hosting servers offer a full range of configurations such as:
- DAUNTLESS - High capacity, High Volume Multi-homed Shared Hosting Cluster for the high end of the market.
- DEFIANT - High capacity .net Hosting Cluster with centralised SQL 2014 Enterprise server powering applications.
- ANDROMEDA - Windows based Hosting for legacy ASP / ASP.net applications based on SQL 2005.
- FARPOINT - Mid range Linux shared Hosting Cluster for non-standard configurations
- DAKOTA - Mid range Linux shared Hosting Cluster for standard hosting configurations, Apache, MySQL, with optional AWSTATS, PIWIK, etc.
- RELIANCE - Messaging platform
Our common configurations are below:
Shared or Dedicated Hosting on Linux, Apache Webserver, MariaDB 10, PHP 5 or 7 and optionally PERL/Ruby. Access to shared webspace by FTP/SFTP or WebDAV.
CentOS 7 
Shared or Dedicated Hosting on Linux, Apache Tomcat and JVM. Access to shared webspace by FTP/SFTP or WebDAV CentOS 7 
Shared or Dedicated Hosting on Linux with Joomla 3.5 and write access to install your own modules, templates or plug-ins. Full and unrestricted access to the Joomla Extensions Directory. CentOS 7 
Shared or Dedicated Hosting on Windows Server with IIS, .net Framework, ASP. SQL Server 2014 or MariaDB 10. Dedicated configurations are built to order and where CAL's are required they can be added as you go. Server 2012 With dedicated servers, we can take management of the OS, patching, updates, and security or you can have complete autonomy as required. Backups are provided as standard for all shared hosting, and optional for dedicated hosting. Websites can be hosted in the UK, USA or Europe and where required high availability can be established with two or more mirrors. In more complex environments, MariaDB clustering can be setup to provide distributed database processing for high volume sites.