Inside the Igloo

We're in the middle of a heatwave here in Scotland, which is most unusual, even for July! We have blue sky, hot sunshine, and here we are, slaving away inside to bring you this latest edition of the Hot Igloo newsletter - now that's dedication for you!

This month's newsletter is a little bit late, but for very good reason. Our latest website design client, Apollo Colours, is based in Greece, and last week they flew Terry and myself out to Athens for a series of meetings to discuss both the website build and some internet marketing which we'll be carrying out for them. It was a hectic couple of days, but we still managed to fit in a couple of hours at the beach, plus a lot of Greek food, so definitely well worth the trip!

Planning the new Apollo site has kept us pretty busy this month, but we've also been working hard on www.WritingWorld.org, our site for freelance writers, editors and proofreaders, as well as developing new websites for Verdi Marketing, Prize Boom, Inspirations, Call the Butler, and a few others. Despite all of this, Terry has still somehow found time to start designing a new incarnation of the Hot Igloo website, so keep a look out for that, too.

Oh, and we almost lost several thousand pounds to con artists - read about it in the article below.

Hope everyone's having a great summer!

Amber

Protecting your business from Fraud

So far we've been pretty lucky with our clients. They've all paid us on time, responded to our questions, and generally been great to deal with. Of course, it's not always like that in business, and this month we found ourselves targeted by the worst kind of customer a business can have - one that just wants to steal your money,.

It started fairly innocuously, with an email received via our website, asking for a quote on website design.

We replied to the "client" straight away with our quote, and he accepted it just as quickly, saying that he'd like to pay in advance, so could we please send him our address. In the website design business clients who want to pay in advance are rare (most pay upon completion of the website, or, in the case of very large projects, in installments), but not unheard of. We gave him the address, and headed off to Greece for the weekend, thinking no more about it.

We returned to an email from the "client", who said that he was acting on behalf of someone else, and that this mysterious "someone else" had made a mistake when he wrote out the cheque, and had overpaid us by several thousand pounds. "When you receive it," he told us, "Just bank it, and await further instructions."

It was at this point that alarm bells started ringing. Why on earth would they want us to bank a cheque for more money than they actually owed us? Why not simply cancel the cheque and issue another one? Suspecting money laundering of some kind, we contacted our solicitor, who confirmed that this is a well known scam. Had we banked the cheque and sent the over payment to the client, the likelihood is that the original cheque would have bounced some weeks later - leaving us thousands of pounds out of pocket.

We wrote back to the "client" and said that we would return his cheque and let him send us a new one. He reacted very badly to this, saying that "this isn't how business is done" (well, no, not by con artists, anyway!), which further confirmed our suspicions - as did the arrival of a very obviously fake cheque the next day!

Since then our "client" appears to have lost interest in website design altogether, and has been focusing his energies on trying to persuade us to cash the suspect cheque. We were very lucky in that we realized that this was a scam right away: if we hadn't, we could have stood to loose a lot of money, though, and it's pretty sad to think that other businesses could be targeted in the same way.

The moral of the story is: sometimes it pays to be cynical. If something seems even a little bit strange to you, check it out, or ask for advice - you could save yourself a lot of money.

The one thing you need to know about press releases

We get a lot of people asking us to prepare and distribute press releases for them. Probably the most frequent piece of advice we give to these people is "don't!".

The thing that most people fail to really understand about the media, is that although their business is immensely interesting to them, in most cases it's just not that interesting to anyone else. Think about it: would you pick up a newspaper or magazine just to read the groundbreaking news that a new corner shop was opening in town? (assuming that you weren't desperately in need of a corner shop at the time) Of course not.

The fact is that thousands of new businesses open every day: unless yours really is unique, it's not going to attract any more interest than the rest of them. This is the mistake most new business owners make. They want to put out press releases which say, "I've opened a new business", then they wonder why they never hear back from the journalists and editors who receive them.

The bottom line is that unless you have a good enough story to tell in your press release, you may as well not bother.

That's the bad news. The good news is that if you don't have a good story for your press release, you can always make one up. Try running a competition, hosting an event, sponsoring someone, or having someone sponsor you: try anything you can think of to create a newsworthy angle. If you can do that, you're more than halfway to creating a winning press release, and gaining some great publicity for your new business!

Weird Web
Our roundup of the wacky, wonderful and downright weird side of the world wide web

The Dialectizer
Translates your website into redneck, jive, cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, moron and hacker.

Check out Hot Igloo's £50 website offer in Redneck: "Hot Igloo brin's yo' this hyar amazin' offer, an' yessuh it pow'ful is only £50! Fry mah hide! This hyar includes a cestom design, hostin' an' a .co.uk domain name fo' a whole year. It pow'ful ain't too fine t'be true, jest click hyar fo' th' full details!"

News of the Weird
Proof that truth really is stranger than fiction.

Lost Socks
News from the Bureau of Missing Socks