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June has a little something sporting for everyone across the globe – from Wimbledon to World Cup Qualifiers, Rugby Union to Royal Ascot, Twenty20 Cricket to Grand Prix. So this month Mr Site is honoring all things active... |
Website of the Month:Following our fitness theme, Website of the Month belongs to Emma Boffo, who runs Boffos Bootcamp in Middlesex, UK. Boffo's Bootcamp is a four week course open to anyone serious about committing to a healthier lifestyle. Emma has always been very passionate about fitness and wanting to educate others, so started her website in November 2008 to promote the Boffos Bootcamp services online. Alongside exercise, Emma also offers advice on nutritional plans to achieve maximum fat loss, personal training and even specialist sessions for yummy mummies! |
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Give us your feedback and you could win a years free subscription!Following several customer enquiries, Mr Site is thinking of implementing a
new bespoke logo and header design service. We may also introduce a Mr Site
'Kick-Start' package; whereby Mr Site will build your Takeaway Website for
you if you don't have the time or inclination to do it yourself. |
IMPORTANT CHANGES:You may already have seen information about some important changes we made to the Mr Site email service at the end of May. If you haven't seen this, please read on as there is one change that will directly affect you. Due to high levels of spam being received by our servers, we have taken new measures that mean you should immediately see reduced amounts of junk and phishing emails. You will need to follow the instructions below to guarantee your service continues to run smoothly. We will no longer be able to offer the option of forwarding emails from your Mr Site account to a third party account, such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Googlemail, etc. There are several options available to you: • Access your WebMail directly at http://mail.yourwebsitename.com • Configure an email application, such as Outlook or Apple Mail to take advantage of your Mr Site POP3 Service • Configure your third party mailbox to retrieve email from your Mr Site Account. So in effect, you are not getting Mr Site to 'push' your emails to your other mailbox, but you'll be getting your other mailbox to 'pull' the messages from Mr Site If you already use Outlook Express (or any other mail client such as Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Windows Mail etc.) or would like to, you will also need to provide us with some details to ensure your Mr Site emails are received correctly. Please click here to send us your details and get further information on how to configure a third party email. |
Charity website competition winnersThank you to everyone who submitted their charity stories to us. We've seen some inspirational websites for some very worthy causes and it's great to see that Mr Site has been able to help promote your fundraising. This month we have joint winners – two websites set up separately for Cancer Research's 'Relay for Life'. Mr Site will be donating this month's prize to each worthy charity. Jackie Morgan, from Relay for Life Aylesbury Committee, explains more about the charity: "Relay for Life is an opportunity for teams of friends, family, neighbours and colleagues who have fundraised for Cancer Research UK within their local communities throughout the year to get together for a great overnight party of celebration and commemoration. During the relay, team members take it in turns to walk round the track (at our local rugby club) and there's lots of entertainment lined up to keep everyone occupied! This is the very first time the town will have held an event of this kind, so we were looking for a way of promoting it locally and keeping in touch with teams who are participating – hence a Mr Site Beginners website seemed a great way to fulfil our needs." Cancer Research Relay for Life and is taking place in Aylesbury on 4/5 July. 
Andy Graham is a volunteer fundraiser for Relay For Life – Bury Lancashire, which takes place from 27 June: "One area where we were struggling with our event was with getting local businesses to donate goods or services (or even give discounts) for our cause! However that has all changing since I built the website dedicated to publicising our efforts. www.relayforlifebury.org is really proving to be a powerful tool in persuading business people in the Bury area to give a little more and so help us to raise as much cash as possible for this most deserving of charities." 
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Competition: Tell us about your sports club websiteThis month, Mr Site is calling out to sporting clubs across the world. Following our get fit theme, if you have built a website for your cricket club, your local football team, extreme frisbee troupe, kayaking crew… whatever it is, we want to know about it! We´ll feature your story on the Mr Site website and in the next newsletter. Winners will receive a fabulous luxury hamper, so tell us about yourself and your website by emailing stories@mrsite.co.uk And remember – we‘re always looking out for interesting stories… so don‘t stop sending them through. |
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Mr Site on TwitterA little bird has told us that Mr Site is now on Twitter! Come follow us at www.twitter.com/mr_site |
Useful tips: How to make your website look good!There are lots of thing you can do to help make your website look good – try some of the design tips below to get you going: Be consistentMake sure that the text on every page of your website is consistent in size and colour – create your own set of design guidelines and stick to them. For example, you may decide that all headings on your website will be font size 14 in black and all normal text will be font size 12 in grey. Make sure your font is easily legible – Arial, Verdana and Times New Roman are used almost exclusively on web pages throughout the Internet and these fonts can be guaranteed to appear on all computers. |
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Choose colours carefullyYou might think that a technicolour website looks great, but a lot of your visitors won‘t agree. Try to use neutral colours and imagery as much as possible. Choosing the right colours is similar to decorating a house – certain colours that work offscreen often work equally well onscreen. Also, bear in mind that around 10% of people suffer from colour blindness with varying degrees of severity. Colours with high contrast, such as black on white are therefore recommended. Red on green would be a bad choice as they both have the same levels of contrast and will be virtually indistinguishable to someone suffering from colour blindness. |
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It is recommended that you choose background colours that are neutral and easy on the eye. Avoid using complicated pictures, photos or artwork as the basis of your web page background as this could make it look messy. Choose something simple and neutral, which is complimentary to your subject matter. The same applies for your header – again, avoid using a photo on your header unless it is minimal and/or sparse in nature. Plan aheadBefore you get started, it is a good idea to sit down and plan how you want your website to be organised. Instead of creating 50 separate pages with small pieces of content on each one, you could condense this content into 10 or 20 pages. This will give you lots of room to develop your website later on. Break up your pagesIt is easy to completely fill up a web page with text. As informative as this text may be, visitors to your website may be overwhelmed by it and as a result may skip over this page completely. It is recommended that you break up any heavy pieces of text with some images, headings and paragraphs. This will make your page a lot easier to digest and encourage visitors to your site to read through the information. Remember, web page visitors tend to ‘browse’ rather than ‘read’. Don‘t leave empty pagesWhen you begin creating your website there is no need to select 50 pages straight away. Adding lots of pages in one go will make your site look unfinished and unprofessional. Only add pages when you need them and never leave blank pages showing as ‘Empty’. Walk before you runIt‘s easy to get carried away and create an overly ambitious site that may end up looking complicated and confusing. It is recommended that you start creating your website in ‘Simple Mode’ then later, when you are feeling more confident, move to ‘Creative Mode”. |
Resize your photographsFirst when you insert photos into your web pages it always pays to resize them first. Images taken with a digital camera are such high quality that a single photograph would require three or four computer screens to display it at its natural size. It will take a huge amount of time for visitors to your website to download such a photo and will eat up a huge amount of your web space, requiring you to upgrade sooner. Resize your photos using your favourite image editing package. A lot of cameras come with a cut down version of the popular paint programme Photoshop, however you may prefer to use another package. One package Mr Site recommends is Google‘s Picassa, available for free from www.picasa.google.com |
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