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Answered your own question  Just merged your posts together.

Just had to read up on the min wage and NLW as completely confused, ie are they one and the same. Apparently not!

About the new national living wage - gov.uk

A belated welcome aboard Bryan and great intro and discussion. I'm going to move it over to the general business forum as it's pretty interesting.

I'm a bit late to the discussion, but thought I'd add my five pence worth.

I've been a long time cloud cynic after watching the awful early implementations and still have reservations about it in certain areas. But Cloud infrastructure technology is maturing, single points of failure seem to be disappearing and techies are becoming more competent in configuring and partitioning cloud storage. 

I put my our business toe in the cloud waters by moving our email services to a cloud provider a few years ago. Far cheaper and more reliable than the old mail server in the office.

But I've always resisted moving heavy database driven websites to the Cloud and a recent migration experiment failed, so we remain with dedicated servers at Rackspace. But plenty of huge websites live in the cloud, including the likes of iplayer which uses (I believe) Amazon Framework Services, although they do have a wobble from time to time. 

But phones seems a much safer bet and we have been trialling for 6 months a VOIP Cloud service from Vonage. On the back of this we have just replaced all of our office phones and are now using Vonage VOIP cloud services. The cost is a lot cheaper than our old fixed lines, plus we have a mix of high volume call packages and low volume, which work out a lot cheaper than our old landlines. Plus we get a lot more functionality (for free) such as HUNT groups, diverting to a mobile and using your mobile as your landline (ie landline number displayed).

It's still early days, but am very impressed and slowly warming more and more to this Cloud malarkey. I can see why the stats say more business owners are moving to the cloud, particularly smaller businesses. You can give  a big company smoke and mirrors perception for minimal cost with a very flexible and configurable solution.

Residential houses and businesses in the near future won't have any copper wire connected to them, but a direct fibre link, allowing this to power all comms from phones, to internet of things, ie smart devices such as TV's and Fridges! The plain old telephone system (POTS) and public switched telephone network will be consigned to history, even though arguably it's more reliable as POTS will keep going even if you have a power cut (due to the line being boosted by batteries). Something your IP phone won't do!

I'm not sure if that's a compliment or an insult 

On the PC front, processors and memory don't have seem to increased very much over the last few years, but the best thing performance wise has to be SSD's (Solid State Drive). Time to consign the old grinding Hard Disk Drive to the knackers yard.

In Warwickshire we're still waiting for the heatwave  

Summer this year was a week in May and  a week in July. At least the talk of having a drought has gone quiet 

Hi Ray

Sorry mate, just seen this. Jumping straight to https is very dangerous and the web is littered with big sites that screwed it up and lost their traffic.

HTTPS is the way the world is going and Google is encouraging everyone to go this way as it means your web sessions are secure as any data sent to or from your site is encrypted.

But...

Google also sees http://www.website.com as a completely different website to https://www.website.com.

So you need to run both http and https in parrallel. There is a line of code you add to your web page which tells Google and any other search engine or service which web page you would like indexing. This is called a canonical and looks like this:

 <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.website.com/webpage1.html" >

This simply means that if Google lands on your http page, you are telling them to make the https version the primary one. But the http one will remain in Googles index, preserving any rankings until it is re-indexed as a https.

People will tell you different things, but we did this with MLS which had over 3 million pages at the time, we ran the http and https versions in parallel for 6 months. After that we then redirected the http site to the https one and saw no drop in traffic or rankings.

If your web designer tells you they need to redirect your http to https then say no! Having the canonical tag tells Google that you are pointing traffic to your new https site and not to index any more pages using the http version. This tag also stops you getting any duplicate content penalties.

Basically you don't want to redirect your http website to your https one until Google has re-indexed all of your webpages as https, which is why I give the 6 month rule of thumb. This ensures any rankings you have (and therefore web traffic) is unaffected.

Looking at your site, you have redirected straight to https, while there are still some http pages ie your blog (which looks like it's not being used) - http://www.hornseaink.com/blog/

If you are seeing reduced rankings, then I would ask your hosters to stop redirecting to https.  They have added the canonical tag which is good, so Google will still only index https pages. If you see traffic and enquiries recover, then not all of your pages have been indexed by Google yet, so run in parallel (ie http and https) for a few months.

Hope that makes sense, it is an extremely complex issue, but hosting providers should not be forcing or scaremongering ecommerce sites to cut over to https without giving a clear and thought out plan, explaining the issues, pitfalls and mitigating as much risk as possible.

Feel free to ask any questions.

Welcome to Artificial Intelligence (AI), Voice Search and Augmented Reality (AR).

• Are you a business owner trying to market your business online?
• Are you in the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) industry and fighting denial?
• Do you know where search marketing is going and who the players will be tomorrow?

I've done  a blog post to which outlines the changes which are currently happening and the changes that are about to happen:  Its the end of the Search Engine (as we know it)

Let me know if you have any questions, doesn't make sense or want me to expand on any points. Its a deep subject, hopefully broken down into bite size chunks, but it is going to affect anyone who has or markets a website.

In a word yep 

If you can't be bothered to do even some basic fundamental research about a prospective employer, then you are displaying either laziness or a complete lack of initiative.

Two qualities I would definitely steer clear of 

Most of you? I can safely say I have never used Snapchat in my life and have absolutely no idea what it is  Can't even get my head around Snapmap!

Biggest communication issue we had when we were younger, was getting the lock off the telephone 

Hi FAM, I moved you over to your own thread as you had replied to someone else's.

I hear your pain. We operate from a business centre and generally get our mail delivered around 09.30 - 10.00. Home wise I think the delivery is a lot later.

I remember back in the day when the mail used to arrive before you left for work!

Are you office based or home based? I guess you need to factor in the importance of having early mail versus any cost? Is yours a business that is dependant on Royal Mail? Information can't be sent electronically?

Anyone else having grief or unhappy with the postal service?

Although frustrating as I'm trying to order some stuff, it's also refreshing to see even the largest online retailers struggle with gremlins and payment gateways sometimes

Tried to order a couple of monitors this morning off the Amazon site at around 08.00, tried again at 12.30 but still no luck and now get the above error message.

Wonder how much that technical gremlin has cost so far today  More than our annual turnover I bet...