Hello

Suzanne here at HotScot with the HotScot January newsletter. Time flies and here we are already well in to 2007. Here is some useful information on Company Websites, advice on emails and a warning about the taxman phishing...........................

• New Company Legislation
• Beware too many links
• Vista and Office 2007
• The Phishing Taxman scam

• Hints and Tips
• And Finally
• Feedback
• Unsubscribe

If you are a Limited Company this is very important!

Limited companies in the UK must include certain regulatory information on their websites and in their e-mails from 1 January this year or risk breaching the Companies Act 1985. Every company now has to list its registration number, place of registration and registered office address in legible characters somewhere on its website (not on every page). The information must also appear in e-mails and online order forms. This data is already required on business letters but the duty has been extended to websites, order forms and electronic documents by an amendment to the law.

Legal news service Out-Law has published a brief guide to the new rules at:
/www.out-law.com/page-7594

However do not panic! We will add this information to your contact details on your website free of charge if you let us have the information. As for emails we suggest you create a signature with the information so that it is automatically added to outgoing mail. Your email software help files will tell you how to do this.

Apparently many spam and junk filters will now classify an email as spam if it contains more than three links in the body of the message.

If like us you use links in your email signatures then we are all going to have to be more careful about adding too many links in to messages in future. Apparently this filtering is responsible for more than 90% of emails that seem to disappear into cyberspace.

Vista? Microsoft have now launched their new operating system "Vista". This promises additional security and many benefits from improved workflow and collaboration, however it needs a 1GB of RAM to operate with all the new system features and so it not going to be feasible for everyone to use. See the BBC News review of Vista here

We recommend that clients should wait at least six months before considering installing this new system so that all the inevitable teething problems are sorted out. Microsoft usually issue a Service Pack to update their software and until this happens we shall be monitoring progress and advising our clients when we think it will appropriate to upgrade if required.

Office. We are test driving the new version of Office, Office 2007. Initial reaction is that while it has a lot of new features it takes a few weeks to get used to the new interface. A "Ribbon" navigation replaces the familiar drop down menus and finding where they have hidden favourite tools takes some rooting out! One drawback it that Office 2007 files are not backward compatible with Office 2003 so if you are sharing files with users that have not upgraded there could be issues. If you have any questions on Office 2007 have a word (no pun intended) with Robert Hawkes on 01397 700924..

There is a very convincing "Phishing" scam doing the rounds at the moment. You get an email that looks very much like it comes from the taxman at our old friends HMRC, the sender's email address and all the graphics are exceptionally convincing. The scam is you are informed that you have a tax refund due and they want you to enter your credit card account details so that they can make the refund direct. They then walk off with your details and spend all your money before you know what has happened.

The email comes from "admin@hmrc.gsi.gov.uk" and you can find out more about the scam here on the Avira website .

What are Alt Tags and Title Tags used for? the alt tag and title tag have different functions and it is not a matter of copying content of the alt tag in to the title tag so the mouse over looks the same in Firefox. The alt tag is the text “alternative” to the image and needs to describe the image so that a visually impaired user can imagine what the image looks like, whereas the title tag is just that and can be short and concise. Whether or not a mouse over is displayed in the browser it is the alt tag that has the influence on search engines.

No Reply? Emails from automated contact forms often seem to come from a "Noreply@..." address. Remember if you just click "reply" to this your email will not go to the person that filled the form in and will often bounce back or just disappear. Noreply means just that - don't reply! On our own contact forms you can get round this by copy/pasting the enquirer's email address from the body of the form into the recipient's address. This sound like hassle but is a necessary measure to reduce spammers using the form to send their own emails out in bulk.

Link Link Link! Quality inbound links and fresh content are the two most important factors you can influence to help your site perform better on search engines. So spend time sourcing quality links in to your site and keep content up to date. Links from any old site will not help much at all, you need to find sites that are relevant to your area of business and well ranked themselves. If you need a content managed module such as a text block or links module to help you manage this yourself just get in touch and we can add one quickly to any site.

In the mid-1980s, it was predicted that by 2000 there would be 900,000 mobile phones worldwide.

That year came, and actually 900,000 phones were being sold every 19 hours. (Daily Telegraph, 11 January 2007.)

Any ideas on articles to include in future Newsletters - ring us on 01397 700924 or email us on

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