We are pleased to announce the launch of the X-Fire Design Labs. The labs is the area of our site that we have set aside for current developments and work in progress. Many of our clients have been asking for this for a while, and we have finally found a great way of implementing it. It allows us to showcase our current experiments, and creates an easy place for all our clients to find their projects that we are currently working on.

The Labs can be accessed by visiting labs.x-fire.co.uk or using the link on the main website. Each client will have a folder with their current work in, which can be password protected if you would like. All of the artwork we create, and pages we code, will be put into these files so that you can download anything you need right from our website. When a new website is being coded it will be uploaded here for testing and proofing before uploaded to the final server, this gives us chance to make sure that everything is working great before we go live.

In the coming months you will see this area of the site quickly fill up, as more and more projects come in. We will also be experimenting with a few projects of our own, which will appear at some time so keep a look out!

Thats all for now, I would also like to take the chance to wish you all (a little late) happy New Year, 2010 is going to be great!

J

Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Myspace, they are all great websites with millions of visits every day. In recent months all of these companies have started to produce some features aimed at companies and brands helping them to get their word out. This means that there are hundreds of new ways to tell your prospective clients what you are doing at that very moment.  We have started using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for ourselves and some of our clients, this has been a great success and has allowed us to generate new clients and new interest in the company.

Twitter

Twitter is a great little site, well I say little, it gets over 100 people joining the site every day, with well over 5 million accounts world wide, it has become quite a phenomenon. The site simply asks ‘What’s happening?’ and allows you to sent a ‘tweet’ of 140 characters to anybody who wishes to follow you. At this very moment, according to TweeSpeed Twitter is averaging 26304 tweets per minute. That is pretty amazing!

Twitter also has an API which allows developers to create applications, websites, mobile apps and more to integrate Twitter, you might have seen some of this around our site with our streams, and we also use a few different programs, on our iPhones and Desktops to keep us updated with Twitter and post to it.

So what do we use Twitter for? Well we use it to keep people updated with the company, post links to new blog posts, and also make new friends. It also helps us to update our clients on any server problems, new hints and tips and any offers we have on at the moment. It is an incredible platform and we highly recommend it to our clients who are looking to expand their business.

Follow us on Twitter here >> www.twitter.com/XFire_Design

Facebook

Facebook has been around for a while now, started in a student house to keep in contact with the rest of his class at school. It soon became a world wide success. The site boasts on it’s own statistics page that it has over 350 million active users. That is actually a crazy number, impossible to get your head around it if you think about it. It also states that the average user spends 55 minutes on the site each day, this is also an impressive figure. So with all that user presence it is not surprising that many major companies have joined the site recently to promote their products and services.

Facebook allows a company to create a page, which then allows users to become fans of your company, find out what it is about, get updates, blog information, upload pictures, give reviews and a lot more. This tool means that a start up company can quickly get new clients, and build up a great online reputation. The site also makes it really easy to create personalised adverts, which will be displayed allowing users to join your page and tell them who else is joining. This ads come in quite cheap for the amount of exposure you gain.

Our Facebook page is relatively new, but we use a service call TwitterFeed to send all of our Tweets to our Facebook page. This means that both of the networks are in sync in keeping our ‘fans’ informed. We hope to grow the page and include more information very soon, it will become a great resource.

Visit our Facebook page here

YouTube

YouTube was developed in 2005, by a few employees of PayPal who wanted to share some videos of a family dinner. Over the years, and a nice acquisition by Google Inc. it now reports that 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute to it servers. Millions of viewers and registered users view thousands of hours of video every hour, with millions of comments being made on the videos each day it is easy to see why it is such an important network for companies to get in on.

We have had a YouTube ‘Channel’ for a while now, we use it to host some of the videos on the Manchester Cathedral Visitor Centre site. We are starting to use it more and more now though, with ideas of instruction guides for our services, help with our client area and for promotion.

Visit our YouTube Channel Here >> www.youtube.com/user/XfireDesign

We are starting to roll out more Social Networking solutions to our clients everyday, so if you would like a hand or some advice to get you started then get in touch!

That’s all for now.

J

We have just updated our Client Area to V1.4. This is a big update, mainly to the support system. Before this update the Client Area included a form which could be submitted to send an email to us, with information about a problem or concern. We have got rid of this frankly rubbish solution and have integrated a fully functional support desk.

The support desk allows our users to create a support ticket for a relevant department, keep up to date with support announcements and also look at articles in our knowledge base, which is currently being written. The knowledge base will be filled with common problems, server settings, and quick solutions. The system will search the knowledge base for similar problems before it creates a ticket to keep down the number of tickets created for common problems, we hope this means our support can be used to its full efficiency.

All of our present Client Areas have been added to the system, you can access it by clicking on Support once logged in. Any new users will be added to the system when their accounts are created. Guest tickets can be opened when emailed to support@x-fire.co.uk

We hope that you enjoy using the system as much as we enjoyed creating it for you.

J

After the summer break I am pleased to let you all know X-Fire Design is back up and running at full strength! The summer was a productive time for the company, making lots of new contacts, and continuing with the rest of our clients. We have been working closely with Manchester Cathedral again in setting up new design ideas for an overhaul of their Visitor Centre and also how to attract more people to their physical structure and online presence.

The new clients we have started to work with have given us some good projects to get into, including websites and design for print, in a lot of different fields, which we are very excited about. We cannot wait to get stuck into the projects on offer!

In other news, we have had an upgrade of the networking system at the data centre holding our websites, which means that the web pages we host are now delivered at lightening speed, and with the same up time you have come to know and love! The client area has been a huge success as we have said before, we recently added the remaining clients to the system and updated it with older invoices so that we can track all of our invoices.

More news on the exciting new projects will be released as soon as we can, and we will be sure to keep you updated on anything happening at the company. Also watch out for some new deals coming up for the Christmas Season!

More coming soon!

J

Well the blog hasn’t been updated for a while due to me being away in the USA for the summer. Having a bit of a break and looking into new projects at the same time, my return to the UK looks set to be very busy!

At the moment we are still working closely with Manchester Cathedral, and the other recent companies, updating and redesigning websites and corporate documents. New projects in the pipeline look very promising and we look forward to getting stuck into them very soon.

The client area launch has been a huge success, we have been monitoring usage and are blown away with how much it is actually used by our clients. We have had great feedback saying how well design the area is and ease of use, which where our main areas of interest in the design stage.

Just a short update today, hopefully will have more time soon to get some more updates in.

That’s all for now.

J

There has been a few delays with our new client area, mainly the fact we haven’t had much time to work on it with our busy clients giving us new work, and we wanted to make sure that it was functioning as we wanted. It has been built from the ground up, by ourselves, to for fill the needs of us and our users.

Your account details will be emailed to you shortly, and we ask that you check and update the information we have inputted on the system, including your address and telephone number. This will help us keep you updated, and allow us to contact you ASAP if we have any problems that may effect your account. We suggest that you use an external email address for use with our client area so that we can contact you if the server is ever down.

There are a few different types of account on our client area, each giving a few different options, but mainly you can view invoices, get support and check on our server status. If you have a hosted website with us you can also view statistics for your domain and login to the cPanel if that is enabled on our account. If you think you should have an option you don’t, then please let us know, it will probably just be a slight error with our inputting of users.

We hope you enjoy using the area as much as we enjoyed creating it, we will keep updating the area all the time to accomodate new functions and requirements. If you would like to see something included that we have forgotten then please get in touch!

J

We have set up an account on twitter, to keep you all updated on what we are getting on with at X-Fire Design. We will update it with little bits of news, what we are working on and any updates on server status, we recommend all our clients use this service to get the insider knowledge on us.

Twitter is a free service which allows micro-blogging and news feeds for users to update as often as they like. To follow us visit www.twitter.com/xfire_design.

J

Well its taken its time coming, but it is finally here! X-Fire Design V4.0 has taken quite a while to create, mainly due to us starting from scratch, the actually design stage was the longest, getting our ideas together and working out what we, and our clients, wanted from the site.

The site design is simple and easy to use, which means every visitor can get to the right place within a matter of seconds. We have had people testing it recently and the response have been great.

Our new client area has been built totally inhouse, and with our clients in mind. It is currently being tested by a few of our clients and we are constantly updating it. We plan to release the rest of the accounts very shortly, in around a weeks time our clients should receive an email with all their account details included.

On a few of the pages we now have testimonies, so if you would like to tell us how you feel about X-Fire Design please email us at info@x-fire.co.uk and we will add your testimony to our site.

So there you have it, I personally hope you enjoy visiting and using our site, we all hope that it helps you when working with us, and also helps you choose a design company that is right for you – X-Fire Design.

Please let us know what you think of the site, or if you have any problems accessing any part of it.

That’s all for now!

J

Our new website will launch on Monday May 5th , we hope you enjoy the new site and please feel free to let us know what you think.

As it is a new era for X-Fire we are giving 10% off any orders you place between the launch and the end of May!

J

As you may know the site has been down for a couple of weeks, this is due to a complete redesign of the site, and a new design on the way we operate.

X-Fire Design was created 4 years ago when I (Jack) first got into web design after some time working at a design agency, I had the domain from a little project I had been trying (and failing) to get off the ground so thought I might as well put it to good use, so X-Fire Design was born.

In the first few weeks I designed about 3 websites, for myself, my band and a local company. I had little experience to start off with and learnt on the job, meaning all my mistakes (there were a lot) helped me learn something new. After 3 months I had designed 6 websites, all of which are now discontinued, and I was very proud of myself, but felt I needed a new website myself, as I quickly found it boring and repetative.

V2.0 was a total redesign, and it was very green (I clearly liked the colour at the time!). At this time I also joined together with one of my friends, who wanted to help out with some of the graphic design side of things. He had been working on some interesting 3D work and I thought I could make good use of him on the team. The new website also required a new hosting package, which led me to a hosting company in American (webhostingboy.com if I recall). Their prices where very cheap, so I rented half a server off them to host the sites I had created, and some I had in the pipe line. I then realised why they were so cheap, the server was forever down, problems with disk management and also with their customer support, which appeared to be non existent, so I was very relieved when the company was taken over by someone new (I cannot actually remember the name of the company, all I know was they weren’t much better to be honest!).

After my contract had run out, I began searching for a new host, and in the end decided to get a server of my own, currently hosted in Chicago and running around 50 sites at the moment. I also fancied a change of website (I had designed around 15 more sites at this point and wanted to add to my portfolio and clear out the old sites). V3.0 was a great success, I loved the layout, the text, the images and the ease of use, as did most of my clients. I added in a client area, with varied success, and started a blog, which eventually ended up not being updated as much as I would have liked. This is when I landed some of my bigger clients, and with the help of a few more friends created some very well received sites. Other commitments meant that I wasn’t always around when the clients needed me, and being a stickler for perfection meant that I felt I was letting people down.

V4.0 will change all that, I want to make X-Fire Design more than it is today, I want to make it grow and fill the needs of our clients, and I know this can be done. I have recently met with some larger design companies, had meetings with web experts and specialists in web marketing, and feel fully equipped to bringing X-Fire Design to where I want it to be.

The new site is still under wraps, being designed with the new ideas in mind, a new client area built from scratch, a clean interface and fully web standards compliant, the new website guarantees to deliver. At the moment the site is scheduled for a May 1st launch, but we will keep this updated.

[EDIT]The site will be launched May 4th 09:00pm!

As a last note (I know this is a long post) I just want to say thank you to our customers and clients who have helped X-Fire Design become what it is and what it is to be in the very near future.

Happy Easter to All!!

J