5 things you must look for when choosing business broadband

There are many broadband solutions on the market - some are great but some cause huge amounts of downtime and loss in productivity.
 
Your business will usually have to subscribe to a broadband service for a minimum of 12 months so you'd better make sure you do your homework before you take the plunge.

Here are 5 things to consider about your supplier and their services before making your decision about any broadband or Internet service they offer: 

• Business Class SLAs – Are their business broadband services backed with SLAs to ensure you receive only the best broadband service and support?
• Quality Support – Are their support technicians fully trained and accredited to provide the highest level of technical and customer support covering all aspects of their business broadband service?
• Dedicated Account Manager – Will you have a dedicated account manager who has a complete understanding of your broadband service and is there to ensure any queries or issues you may have are resolved?
• In-House Engineers – Can they supply their own engineers to resolve any issues or do they outsource your support?
• Reputation – How long have they been supplying quality broadband services to customers?

If you'd like advice on selecting the right broadband service for your business please contact us via email at info@sovision.com or call us on 0845 450 3669.

soVision - Complete IT Services Provider

Professional and friendly IT Support Services to businesses across Bristol, Bath and throughout the South West responding quickly to fix all your IT problems.

IT SERVICES | BUSINESS IT SUPPORT | BESPOKE WEBSITE DESIGN | CLOUD COMPUTING

soVision gets the contract to host soLearn!

We have been awarded the hosting contract for soLearn, providing a robust and resilient hosting environment bespoke solution tailored specifically to meet our latest client's requirements.

Our ability to provide a supported and managed email and hosting service by our in-house technical experts was a key factor in soLearn selecting us as their hosting platform of choice.

soLearn offers the management tool to enable you to obtain a positive return on one of your most expensive investments - your human resources.

Their software provides corporate knowledge retention and industry-standard testing and proof of learning with customisable reports and statistical analysis data to meet your requirements for compliance reporting.

The company's services enable your organisation to test employee awareness and knowledge of company policy and procedures, health and safety, sales force behaviours and policies or any business process which requires training and testing to protect your employee welfare or business reputation.

They can also provide you with up-to-date trend validation of knowledge awareness for your essential processes over extended periods, snapshot campaigns for testing the knowledge of your workforce for immediate feedback, for social media purposes or workforce opinion. 

Simple, effective, performance improvement - soLearn provides the new industry-standard for workforce training and testing.

For further information about soLearn and the services they provide call 0117 968 2194 or visit their website at www.solearn.com. 

soVision - Complete IT Services Provider

Professional and friendly IT Support Services to businesses across Bristol, Bath and throughout the UK responding quickly to fix all your IT problems.

IT SERVICES | BUSINESS IT SUPPORT | BESPOKE WEBSITE DESIGN | CLOUD COMPUTING

Our top 5 tips for creating a great website – Part 2: Design

In the fast moving competitive world of the web an attractive website design is a major factor in winning customers.   

Unless your website is charitably giving away free information out of the goodness of your heart, then there’s a very strong chance your website is selling in one way or another.

Whether you're selling products and taking payments online or just promoting your expertise and knowledge - you're selling something all the same.

Your website design will help people decide very quickly if what you’re selling is of interest to them. 

Graphic Design: Over the web the majority of companies are anonymous to the user as a quick search gives people multiple results for the same thing. 

Our websites are our shop windows and window shopping is alive and well on the web.

Just like in high street retail - your shop window needs to entice people through the door. 

A strong brand and a professional website design will help build trust with your users.

User Friendliness: If you’ve ever been trying to find something without luck in a shop you have the chance of asking someone on the shop floor. 

The politeness and helpfulness of that person can really make a difference to your shopping experience. 

Unless you have 24-hour online chat your website is like an unmanned shop floor, so you need to direct people to find what they're looking for by themselves. 

A logical website structure with an intuitive navigation and interface will guide your users in the right direction. 

If they can’t find what they’re after they’ll be off looking through the next window before you know it.

Aesthetics: As an extension of design, aesthetics have an element of philosophy and science which takes into account the placement of elements within your web pages. 

The success of a good design can be measured by how much the design is not noticed.

A well-designed website will help the user flow through the website and find what they are looking for without even thinking about it.

Alignment and Layout: Neat and tidy, tidy and neat. You don’t want the elements of your website jumping around the place from page to page. 

A consistent, logical layout with a place for everything and everything in its place will enhance your user's experience and add to the overall aesthetics of your website design.

Integration: Your website has the ability to interact with many elements around it - perhaps loading a YouTube video onto your web page or embedding a Google Map. 

Or the contemporart trend of linking your site to Facebook, Twitter or to weather or stock market widgets within your website's design.

Most of these elements are customizable to a degree and ensuring they look like an integral part of your website and making them look as though they are supposed to be there to add value to and not detract from your website is important in providing a complete user experience.

FREE Website Rating

Look out for our next instalment focusing on website content but if you can’t wait and would like to submit your website for a FREE website rating then visit our Web Design section on our website and enter your details in the form on the left-hand side of the page. 

Our content management system - soCMS - coupled with our website design and development skills will give you a fully functional website, increasing your visitors and improving your conversion rates.

soVision - Complete IT Services Provider

Professional and friendly IT Support Services to businesses across Bristol, Bath and throughout the UK responding quickly to fix all your IT problems.

IT SERVICES | BUSINESS IT SUPPORT | BESPOKE WEBSITE DESIGN | CLOUD COMPUTING

soVision forms strategic alliance with Novus Group - Leading Virtualisation Provider

We have cemented our partnership with Novus Group after working with them on several successful virtualisation projects. 


This will enhance our abilities to deliver leading edge end-to-end server virtualisation, desktop VDI and mobile computing solutions.

Novus Networks - part of The Novus Group - are the Number 1 provider of virtualisation and VDI solutions in the UK.
 
The company was formed in 1999 and specialises in the delivery of innovative and market leading application delivery technologies - including a wide range of thin-client and virtualised solutions.

Their focus on desktop and application virtualisation means they have built up an unparalleled knowledge of specialist software packages enabling the widest possible adoption of virtualised solutions.

These skills are backed up by a wealth of experience in the underlying server and storage infrastructure technologies and they have a number of respected industry accreditations proving their qualifications in providing high-quality virtualisation solutions

To find out more information about our partnership with Novus or our virtualisation or any other IT Services please contact us via email at info@sovision.com or call us on 0845 450 3669.

Our top 5 tips for creating a great website - Part 1: Functionality

People access the web in many ways not just on a PC or Mac. 

Whether it’s a lifestyle choice or through necessity you may find visitors to your website using any of the following devises:

• A screen reader because of visual impairment
• A smartphone, 
• An iphone, ipod or ipad simply because of a busy lifestyle 
• A games console 

Therefore, it’s important your website functions as well as possible on as many different platforms as you can reasonably account for. 

If you hosting company supplies web stats you might be surprised to find out exactly how many different ways people have already tried to browse your site. 

Accessibility: The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has developed a series of accessibility standards and guidelines to make the web accessibly to people with disabilities. 

Following these standards will ensure your website content is visible to all. 

Speed and Bandwidth: In today’s age of super-fast broadband you might think this isn’t an issue anymore. 

Well it’s not such a big deal as it used to be but that doesn’t mean speed should be taken for granted. 

You never know what set up your website visitor is going to have, how many people might be sharing a connection, how far a rural community might be from an exchange or even the technology limitations of far-off countries? 

With rich media, video, audio, animations and high-quality graphics all playing a part in making your website look the business it’s all going to go to be wasted effort if a potential customer is put off waiting for your page to load. 

Quality: How your website looks and behaves is all down to the programming language telling the browser how and what to display. 

With WYSIWYG tools and online website templates making website creation easy you don’t have to be a website developer to make a website anymore.

But how do you know that the website that gets spat out the other end is any good? 

Errors in the code could prevent the information being displayed properly or hinder a search engine form indexing your site. 

Navigation and Links: This is one of the most important parts of a website. 

If your website is packed full of great content but it’s difficult to access due to a complex navigation system or if your website is riddled with broken links your visitors will be off looking at your competitors before you know it. 

Legality: Are you aware that as a limited company it is a legal requirement to display certain company registration information on your website? 

If you collect user data through your website, if you take payments through your website, there are various rules of conduct that you must adhere to. 

FREE Website Rating 

Look out for our next instalment focusing on website design but if you can’t wait and would like to submit your website for a FREE website rating then visit our Website Design Services section on our website and enter your details in the form on the left-hand side of the page.

Our content management system - soCMS - coupled with our website design and development skills will give you a fully functional website, increasing your visitors and improving your conversion rates.

We also offer a brand new soCMS pay monthly website design package giving you a brand new website with no upfront cost.

We are conveniently located right between Bristol and Bath providing services for local businesses. Click the following link to find out more about our Website Design Services for Bristol and Bath

soVision - Complete IT Services Provider

Professional and friendly IT Support Services to businesses across Bristol, Bath and throughout the UK responding quickly to fix all your IT problems.

IT SERVICES | BUSINESS IT SUPPORT | BESPOKE WEBSITE DESIGN | CLOUD COMPUTING

soVision Partner with Lorensbergs to deliver Library Wi-Fi Services....

We have entered a strategic partnership with Lorensbergs UK to deliver onsite installation and web filtering services for their public sector wi-fi customers.  

Lorensbergs' wi-fi module is designed to enable public sector locations - such as libraries, learning centres and schools - to extend their existing authentication systems and Internet feeds to wi-fi users.

We're extremely pleased to be working with Lorensbergs to deliver these services.

We have a strong background in delivering, designing and architecting wireless networks from small customers with a single access point to large multi-site deployments in both the public and private sectors.

To find out more information about our wireless network or any of our IT Services please contact us via email at info@sovision.com or call us on 0845 450 3669.

soVision - Complete IT Services Provider

Professional and friendly IT Support Services to businesses across Bristol, Bath and throughout the UK responding quickly to fix all your IT problems.

IT SERVICES | BUSINESS IT SUPPORT | BESPOKE WEBSITE DESIGN | CLOUD COMPUTING

Get a Free laptop for the holidays



We'd like to offer you a Free laptop for the holidays. 

For a limited time during the month of December* soVision is pleased to offer you a free laptop valued at £550 if you can provide us with a successful business referral for us to provide our 360 Managed IT Services.

If you know someone that would benefit from our proactive services, reduced costs and a more reliable network, then please let us know as one of our friendly and knowledgeable experts would be happy to help them.

To refer someone to us simply contact us to confirm their details. 

Many thanks and Happy Holidays! 

Your committed technology partner, soVision 

* Your referral must subscribe to our services within the month of December. Some exceptions would apply.

soVision - Complete IT Services Provider

Professional and friendly IT Support Services to businesses across Bristol, Bath and throughout the UK responding quickly to fix all your IT problems.

IT SERVICES | BUSINESS IT SUPPORT | BESPOKE WEBSITE DESIGN | CLOUD COMPUTING

Save money with Windows 2008 RDS

Did you know you can save your company money by deploying Windows 2008 RDS as opposed to Citrix Xen App. 

The often overlooked RDS has almost identical features to Xen App - and let's not forget Citrix uses RDS to run many of its Remote Desktop Tasks. 

If you're using Windows 2003 Terminal Services you'll be amazed at the difference.

In summary Windows 2008 RDS requires less capital cost, no software maintenance, supports clustering, is a full Microsoft Solution, has VDI facilities, has web access portal and fully integrates with the new Windows 7 Remote Desktop Client. 

To find out more please contact us via email at info@sovision.com or call us on 0845 450 3669.

soVision - Complete IT Services Provider

Professional and friendly IT Support Services to businesses across Bristol, Bath and throughout the UK responding quickly to fix all your IT problems.

IT SERVICES | BUSINESS IT SUPPORT | BESPOKE WEBSITE DESIGN | CLOUD COMPUTING

New soVision website launches today at 3pm GMT

We're excited to announce that after 3pm today you can access our new fully-featured and more functional website.

With plenty of new produts and services and a renewed promise to all of our highly-valued existing and new technology partners - it's our mission to provide you with the HIGHEST level of proactive service and the most competitve pricing!

Visit our website later this afternoon at www.sovision.com.

soVision - Complete IT Services Provider

Professional and friendly IT Support Services to businesses across Bristol, Bath and throughout the UK responding quickly to fix all your IT problems.

IT SERVICES | BUSINESS IT SUPPORT | BESPOKE WEBSITE DESIGN | CLOUD COMPUTING

MP Web Awards Success ... nearly!

On Monday 15th November 2010 the BCS The Chartered Institute for IT held the MP Web Awards at the House of Commons.

The website for Derek Twigg, MP for Halton, designed and developed by soVision, and powered by our very own content management system (soCMS) was shortlisted for an award in the accessibility category. 

Unfortunately, we weren't able to repeat our 2007 success with Paul Flynn MP where we scooped the Design Award for the best MP website.

soVision - Complete IT Services Provider

Professional and friendly IT Support Services to businesses across Bristol, Bath and throughout the UK responding quickly to fix all your IT problems.

IT SERVICES | BUSINESS IT SUPPORT | BESPOKE WEBSITE DESIGN | CLOUD COMPUTING