Author: Olly

  • New wheels on my caddy!

    Work on the caddy is coming along nicely, its literally been about 7 years in the making but im finally starting to see some kind of light at the end of the tunnel. I would love for it to be at nationals next weekend but there is SO much to do still.

    Anyway, a mate of mine (Big up Dubmodder! aka Paul) took a set of 13″ alloy wheels off a mk3 golf he has ended up with – they were WAY too small for the MK3, but they are perfect for my MK1 caddy! 🙂

    My step dad has given me a Autoglym wheel brush thing and at some point this week im going to try and get the pitted brake dust off the wheels – and i recon they will look awesome! They’ve got a nice almost-polished surface under all that muck! 🙂 Honest!

  • Crystal View Windows Nottingham

    We were approached by a chap who was working on behalf of Crystalview windows Nottingham – and he had been tasked with getting brochures and flyers made up to spam peoples post boxes with.

    Anyway, the first thing he said on the phone was how shit this other company he was dealing with, was. He said they had been left with the stuff for a week and not done any work on it (i now know why!) and were very unprofessional (this is coming from a guy who looked and spoke about as professional as a turd)

    He then proceeded to explain to me roughly (VERY roughly) what it is he wanted and gave me a flyer that wouldn’t of looked out of place at the bottom of a trash can. He showed me some login details he had for Synseal as they don’t actually make windows, they just buy them cheap and claim to make them.

    And that was it!

    He then expected me to design an 8 page brochure (in one day, with NOTHING to work with) send it him, and then print it before the end of the week.

    Our printing prices weren’t bad, and i had to put a bit on top as i wasn’t prepared to spend a day doing this for nothing. But he proceeded to tell me our prices were shit, and that he would still go with the brochures as we seemed more professional than this other company. So i knocked him a front page design up using the very limited things i was left with and sent him a lo-res version of the front page.

    He then replied with very rude comments, the design was un-imaginative and was only the front page not the whole 8 pages.

    I then proceeded to explain that unless i had a deposit i wasn’t prepared to do any more work on it. He spat his dummy out, said how his company will do free designs and that i should – im not a bloody charity – and basically acted like a total child because i wouldn’t bend over backwards and meet his every demand.

    Now im all up for customer service, our long-serving customers are more like friends now – but i ain’t nobody’s slave – and if he thinks for a minute im going to rip myself off just to do what he wants me to do – he needs to get his head checked!

    Printing is old hat anyway!

    So if this chap is anything like the rest of the company, id go with someone like Everseal – their motto is “Choose Professionals” but i think it should read “As long as you dont choose crystal view windows Nottingham its all good”

    Crystal view windows Nottingham = steer clear!

    He reminded me of that twat of an owner of Il Rosso in Mansfield – he’s a fat fucking oxygen thief too!

    Edit – woops, cached in google just below their website! 🙂

  • All i lack is concentration

    Sometimes i find myself simply unable to concentrate enough to make any headway on work that i have outstanding. Our business is growing, as is our little internal network of people we have – yet after nearly 3 years at it im still as dis-organised as i was when i started.

    I often wonder how much more produtive i’d be if i actually planned my days out better.

    Can anyone recommend some decent software or something that allows me to manage my time and manage projects efficiently?

    All the software i have ever tried is built to help people manage tasks and appointments, but it only works for your typical salesman or something, who’s workload and outstanding jobs can be easily planned out etc – due to the diverse work i do, i can never plan a day out as something will always crop up and knock it all out of sync.

    I use a combination of gmail, my blackberry, a page-a-day-diary and a scribble pad. If i could merge the lot into one i would – maybe the answer is with addon software for the ‘berry? Or maybe i just need to hold on to the hope one day google will make the tasks lab feature shareable between users on the same google apps domain – ARE YOU LISTENING GOOGLE?

    Anyway, off to try and organise my bitch ass.

    Rice.

  • Search engine optimisation

    Me and dave have been offering SEO as a service to our customers for well over a year now, and its only really been recently that i have started getting my head round it.

    Its so confusing when you start looking into it, there are so many tools, websites and people that claim to be able to help you do this, and get to the top – the fact of the matter is, you will struggle to get to the top unless your site sells those particular keywords to google.

    So i would struggle to get to the top of google with this site, for say, debt management – because aside from my ramblings about banks screwing me over there aint anything on this site about debt – so no matter how many links i point here with the keyword debt management is irrelevant.

    When we first started the SEO we could of probably been described as black hat, as all we did was buy links from link brokers – AND THAT WAS IT! We soon learnt by our mistakes and slowly but surely we are starting to paint over the black with a nice shade of GREEN.

    I say green as apposed to white, because we are trying to get people to the top of google with minimal inbound links, and just purely based on the relevance of the site and its content. And of course by building the site with all the relevant jigsaw pieces required by the search engines.

    I’d welcome any pointers in regards software to manage my SEO efforts, and also ways to get decent links that are not frowned upon – as i find it very hard to get in touch with people who have the most relevant websites.

    Do you do SEO?

    What do you charge?

    Do you make any guarantees?