Accountant Cheshire

We are having some real issues trying to find a decent accountant, the first accountant that was recommended to us what pretty useless and turned out not to be a qualified accountant in this country therefore at the most could just offer us expensive book keeping services.

The second Cheshire accountant that was recommended to us by another SEO Company turned out to be the worst prefessional experience I have had in my life! With blatant rudeness and I felt sexist attitude towards myself since he was incredibly condescending to me and my husbands mum who was helping us with bookkeeping but not so bad with my husband.

This accountant would continue to come round for meetings unprepared even though I had specifically emailed him to confirm what needed to be done and brought by him to the meeting. He claimed he never made notes as it was 'all up here' in his head however he didn't listen to us even on the simplest things and I worried he wasn't actually able to do the job.

This seems to have been a valid concern as he messed up some very simple accounting tasks and we are unsure if he set up our PAYE properly. We asked him for 3 weeks to sort the VAT return but in the end my husband ended up doing it as he left it too late then accused us of not giving him the information to do it.

Anyway long story short and we are not using him anymore- after a very unprofessional scene by him on our doorstep!

I'm starting to wonder if the other seo company that recommended him to us to try to sabbotage us as he is soo bad!

Video Animation on North Londonshire

As an old fan of Paddington bear I found this video on You tube and loved it!

Have a look at the full sized version on You tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wNweSXa1o8
It is about a controversial re branding of the Northamptonshire area to North Londonshire which is about 90 miles from London. It is being promoted as a good place to live with good schools and jobs and if you live in London commutable in an hour. Much cheaper and bigger houses than London.
However people of Northamptonshire aren't to pleased about being called North Londonshire. It doesn't look like it actually is a re brand more a promotion and many people are annoyed that public money is paying for this although after a bit of digging I found that actually it is a Development company paying for the promotion.

I'm not taking sides in this debate but I do love this video so take a look and let me know what you all think.

You can also do a personalised version of this video and sending to your friends at http://www.northlondonshire.co.uk/a-place-for-you

Deleting Posts

I hate deleting posts as I feel they are a good representation of my feelings at the time of writing and if my opinion changes I will happily update the original blog wothout taking it down.

However I have just been forced to remove a blog from this site due to my employers recieving a solicitors letter from a large company who are bullying the into speaking the truth. They wrote a factual blog to which many people viewed and commented and I wrote about it here as it was topical.

They have removed their blog and have forced me to remove mine.
May I remind you that this blog is my opinion and nothing to do with my employers now or in the past.

I love it that a large company will bully a smaller company who merely reported something they were doing which turned out to upset thousands of people.

Good to see propaganda and censorship is still booming!

SASCon

SASCon is Manchesters first proper grown up conference for SEO, Analytics and Social (SAS - get it) and I attended on Wednesday.

This was my first conference of the year and probably the only one I'll have time for this year but I really enjoyed the one day event.

It was really good to meet SEO and Social heroes that I follow on Twitter and hear their points on the changes facing us as Google and users change the way the internet and search engines are used.

The keynote was from You Tube and had some good stats on how video is being used more and more on the web. Got me very enthusiastic about changes to the You tube site and potential opportunities for clients.

I also really enjoyed the black hat white hat panel - unlike other conferences, people spoke openly about tactics and what will continue to work.

I really enjoyed the social media panels there were a few of them but each of the speakers managed to find new points so it never got boring!

I really enjoyed the day and for once decided to be sociable in real life and stayed out for the comedy night and pie and chips mmmm

Was great to meet people in real life and I got very boozy having geeky conversations about the event. For my full review check out my recent SASCon blog.

Ouse Bridge House, Bassenthwaite, nr Cockermouth, Cumbria,

Ouse Bridge House

My sister in law experienced the worst BnB experience in Cumbria last night when she was turned away after 5 1/2 hours on the road stuck in traffic.

Bed and Breakfast Cumbria

I am originally from Cumbria and went to School in Cockermouth and always rave about what a lovely place it is and how friendly the people are! However my Sister in law got a completely different impression of Cumbria from Stephen and Katie.

My sister in law was visiting Cumbria on a business trip to actually take photos of north Cumbria for her work. She had an early start but as she was working the day before had a late start. She set off as soon as she finished work but even with good traffic it is a 3-4 hour drive. Unfortunately it was not good traffic and their were road works and accidents meaning she was running late. She new she would arrive late and had told Katie of Ouse Bridge House that she expected to arrive at 10.30. However with the traffic accidents on the M6 she was running late so rang Ouse Bridge House to let them know she would be around abother 40 mins to an hour so 11.30 at the latest...

Ouse Bridge House - Unacceptable

When she spoke to Katie at Ouse Bridge House, Katie informed her that this was unacceptable and she had to find alternative accomodation. My sister in law had no money - end of the working month and had paid up front. She does not know the area, is tired from driving for over 5 hours already- understandably she is upset!

Arguing with Katie my sister in law got very upset on the phone and raised her voice in distress at which point Ouse Bridge House hung up on her and refused to answer the phone. She left an angry message on their answer phone and proceeded to phone everyone she knew to go online and find accomodation in the area.

She was struggling with her phone signal so her fiancee rang around, everywhere was booked up and time was ticking, the thought of being alone in a place she didn't know with expensive equipment in the car making her feel even more vulnerable was distressing enough and the temperature was dropping.

Luckily she did find alternative accomodation although had to drive an extra 30 miles out of her way.

Ouse Bridge House Reviews

We are all happy she is ok although they emailed a respoinse to her trying to turn this around on her. Well mt sister in law works for a web company who do SEO as well and she knows the value of online reputation. Ouse Bridge House and their complete disregard for her safety obviously don't understand the value of online reputation as she is making sure every Ouse House review has her story on it, she is even blogging about it on a Cockermouth Bed and Breakfast blog .

The Times Disappears from Google

The times is one of the most powerful websites for publishing news and content in the UK and today it disapeared from Google!

Many other internet explorers spotted this and commented as this could be a trial for when the paywall comes up. Murdoch wants Google to stop stealing his websites content.

Having looked at the website their was no obvious tags such as no index in the robots.txt or the METAs which would cause the site to not be crawled. I don't know what happened but this afternoon the times went from having no pages indexed to 250,000 pages indexed. This could be a technical blip, a trial for the paywall, or has Google spat it's dummy out and decided to show the Times how much they really need Google.

The funny thing was Google news was still picking up the stories and some of the subdomains were still getting cached and indexed.

More problems with Fasthosts

After my recent rant about Fasthosts I hoped I wouldn't have to deal with them again, but we built a website for a builders in Staffordshire. We put up an SEO friendly holding page on the domain they had, but throughout development the client decided to use another domain. Webuild the site and sent it live but needded to get the holding page down as there was some duplicate content and the holiding page was actually ranking better than the new site.

This holding page was on a fasthosts server - yes here we go again!

My husband Luke called fasthosts and they said they would call him back - after a week and no call (even though he explained it was urgent as if was affecting the SEO campaign), I advised Twitter as this was how I got my issue resolved. He Tweeted them but no reply.
The client Tweeted Fasthosts - but no reply
I tweeted my annoyance at Fasthosts(to my 600 + followers) and they finally got in touch - 2 weeks aftetr the initial call and still no phone call from Customer service as promised.

My client tweeted the details but nothing happened.

After another week I complined to Fasthosts via Twitter again and the Twitter team got back in contact, my client was getting frustrated and asked they deal directly with my husband.

Yesterday after numerous calls, and Tweets and Emails we finally got the small issue of removing the account and forwarding the domain name to the new site.

Such a small job but took four weeks of constant pestering to get this sorted reinforcing that you should never use fasthosts!!