Assalamu Alaikum

Alhamdulillah, by the will and grace of Allah, we have been fortunate enough to have helped many of our fellow Muslim brothers and sisters in setting up, or expanding, their businesses onto the online world. With either their first ever website, or, in some cases, just a revamp of an older site by refreshing it with a new, modern look.

And through our years of experience in helping our Ummah establish their online presence, it has come to our attention that many of these businesses aren’t always aware of what other useful techniques are out there that can help their businesses grow & prosper further. So, in noticing this, the Ummah Design Team have decided to share some of our secrets, (yes… SECRETS!) regarding business growth, by introducing a series of posts with simple, yet effective tips. For example how a mission or visual statement (or both) can improve your profitability.

So, if you are also one of these new inexperienced businesses, where, you’ve successfully set up your business website, established your online presence or even a well established one that’s lacking that inspiration for improvement and are now left wondering ‘OK, what next, what else can I do to promote my business & increase my earnings?

This is DEFINITELY the series for you. So what exactly are you waiting for? Subscribe now to make sure to don’t miss the first or any of this unique and very helpful series on how you can make your business grow.

Wassalaam

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We are delighted to announce that the workshop we organised last week (full details are here) went very well. Everybody who participated in the workshop left very satisfied alhamdulillah.  It’s been such a wonderful experience to meet different Muslim business representatives, share their thoughts and network with them, mashallah.

The following Muslim businesses have participated in our workshop held on Saturday, 30th of January:

• Jobs Middle East

• The Islamic Establishment

• The Educational Hajj & Umrah Ltd

• Birmingham Central Mosque

• Al Hijrah Library

• Faith Old Coins

• Alhambra Networks

• Lightimage Photography Gallery

• Kreative Designer

• Al-Firdous Publications

• Green Globe

• Ummah Vouchers (Guest Speaker)

Our appologies for those who wanted to come for Saturday session but because of the space limitations could not book themselves in. Inshallah, we will be repeating the same course this month so please keep checking our website inshallah :- ).  To guarantee your place please send us your details to workshop{at}ummah-design.com and we will add you to our waiting list IA.

Here are some pictures from the workshop:

We will post the video from the workshop as soon as we get it ready IA. So stay tuned. :- )

Please let us know if you want to particiupate in our next training workshop inshallah.  Any comments, suggestions or feedback -  please let us know.

Wassalamu alaykum.

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Want to hit back the recession and market your business effectively?

Have you ever heard about “Social Media Marketing”, “Facebook”, “Twitter”, “Blogs”, “SEO” , “Google Adwords”?

Have you ever wondered how they could affect your business?

Then book yourself in for one of our business workshops to find out the answers and enrich your knowledge before applying them into your business with full confidence, inshallah.

2.5 Hour Workshop / Power Point Presentation / Paper Hand-Outs / Live Demos / Case Studies / Questions And Answers / Free Drinks And Refreshments / Business Networking / 12 People Per Session / £30.00 Per Attendee

The workshop will be held in our office at 9 Glenavon Road, Birmingham, B14 5DD, West Midlands

You can book yourself in for any of the following dates:

• 26 January 2010. Tuesday, 09:30 – 12.00
• 28 January 2010. Thursday, 09:30 – 12.00
• 30 January 2010. Saturday, 09:30 – 12.00

Detailed information can be found here.

20% off for our blog readers. Quote UDBWRKSHP.

Hope to see you there inshallah.

Ummah-Design.com Team

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On my previous post I touched upon Islamic Insurance. Today I wanted to share this diagram that I got  from Islamic Finance Roadshow yesterday. The diagram beautifully explains how the conventional insurance and Islamic Insurance (Takaful) work.  As the proverb says “a picture is worth thousand words”

Courtesy of Salaam Halal Insurance

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These days whichever site you go to, you may see this icon or something similar to it:

You can see it even in our blog . Look at the top right hand corner! Some of us may know what it is and how to utilize it but the majority don’t, believe me they don’t!

So what is RSS?

According to Wikipedia RSS (abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.

Any Simpler Explanation to RSS?

OK. There is a very useful video I found in YouTube that explains RSS in very plain English. After watching this video you may want to use RSS more often, inshallah.  And don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS too

Ok ok, enough talking,  here is the video:

Any comments? Share them with us.

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You probably heard about Twitter. If not, keep on reading

Twitter is an online service for everyone: friends, colleagues, customers and families to communicate  through the exchange of quick, short (up to 140 characters) and frequent answers to one single question: 

What Are You Doing?

People (as well as businesses) use Twitter to “follow” their friends (or customers) as well as  to keep their “followers” updated on their life or activities. For example,  you can tweet about what you are reading, who you are meeting with,  what project you are working on, what have you just achieved and so on.

I joined myself yesterday and found it very very interesting.

I also found this video on  YouTube and I would highly recommend it to everyone who does not have any knowledge about Twitter. It explains about Twitter in Plain English so there is no chance you may not understand the main purpose of this wonderful online service.

Hope you enjoyed it, inshallah.

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Ever wondered whether the Internet is evolving, how many domain names were registered, how many emails were sent  etc.  in 2008? Here is the compilation (courtesy of www.pingdom.com) for your attention.

Email

• 1.3 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 210 billion – The number of emails sent per day in 2008.
• 70% – The percentage of emails that are spam.
• 53.8 trillion – The number of spam emails sent in 2008 (assuming 70% are spam).

Websites

• 186,727,854 – The number of websites on the Internet in December 2008.
• 31.5 million – The number of websites added during 2008.

Web servers

• 24.4% – The growth of Apache websites in 2008.
• 13.7% – The growth of IIS websites in 2008.
• 22.2% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2008.
• 336.8% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2008.
• 100.3% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2008.

Domain names

• 77.5 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2008.
• 11.8 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2008.
• 7.2 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2008.
• 174 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains.
• 19% – The increase in the number of domain names in 2008.

Internet users

• 1,463,632,361 – The number of Internet users worldwide (June 2008).
• 578,538,257 – Internet users in Asia  (39.5%).
• 384,633,765 – Internet users in Europe (26.3%).
  
• 248,241,969 – Internet users in North America (17.00%).
• 139,009,209 – Internet users in Latin America/Caribbean (9.5%).
• 51,065,630 – Internet users in Africa (3.5%).
• 41,939,200 – Internet users in the Middle East (2.9%).
• 20,204,331 – Internet users in Oceania/Australia (1.4%).

Blogs

• 133 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by Technorati).
• 900,000 – The number of new blog posts in a day.
• 329 million – The number of blog posts in 2008.

Images

• 10 billion – Photos hosted by Facebook (October 2008).
• 3 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (November 2008).
• 6.2 billion – Photos hosted by Photobucket (October 2008).

Videos

• 12.7 billion – The number of online videos watched by American Internet users in a month (November 2008).
• 87 – The number of online videos viewed per month per Internet user in USA.
• 34% – The increase in viewing of online video in USA compared to 2007.
• 3.1 – The number of minutes of an average online video.

Malicious software

• 1 million – The number of computer viruses in April 2008.
• 468% – The increase in malicious code compared to 2007.

Data sources: Compiled by www.Pingdom.com. Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Blog stats from Technorati. Email stats from Radicati Group via About.com. Spam stats from DCC. Virus stats from Symantec via Times Online. Online video stats from Comscore. Photo stats from CNET and Flickr.

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Some of us may have heard the term “Organic Listing”. The Organic Listing is to appear on the search results of the search engine natuarally i.e. by not paying a single penny. To illustrate, if someone types in and searches “Muslim Web Design Company” keyword on the Google, the Google will bring up all the relevant websites as a list.  For example:

The more your website is optimised for the search engines and the more you have links to your website – the higher is the chance that your website will appear on the first pages of the search results. And you don’t have to pay a penny to the Google. This is called an Organic Listing.

With Pay Per Click (PPC) however, your website doesn’t have to be search engine optimised and you have to pay everytime an Internet user clicks on your advert. The best example is Google AdWords.

If you ever noticed, every time you search something in Google, it brings up a list of advert boxes under the Sponsored Links on the right hand side or sometimes on the top, just before your search results.
Here is an example (click on image to enlarge):

This is a clear example of PPC. You don’t pay anything to advertise on that section. You only pay for a click starting from £0.01! (I will try cover the Google AdWords in more details very soon inshallah. )

A well thought and clever Google AdWords campaign can bring lots of potential customers into you website.  However before you opt for AdWords campaign you need to do everything you can to make sure that your website is search engine friendly anyway! Run your campaign, but make sure that you are maximising your site’s performance in the organic listing too.

Ideally, your main target should be to come up high in search engine results (organic listing) and be listed in the AdWords listings – because two listings on page 1 of Google is always goingto look stronger than just a single one!

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When an Internet user is unable, or unwilling, to guess your website address they will use a search engine to find you. Now, of all the website visits conducted in the UK and US that were immediately preceded by a search engine search, Google is responsible for the majority. Google is by far the most widely used search engine and the biggest referrer of visitors in the UK (70% of all searches) and the US (60% of all searches).

Google, like Hoover, has achieved a dominance so great, in such a short period of time, that the company name is often used to mean Internet searching. Single execs, looking for companionship, ‘google’ potential dates before committing to a meal. Parents google a school to decide whether it’s suitable for their kids’ education. Job applicants google the interview staff to learn any interesting snippets that they can bring up at interview (and vice versa). Internet users use Google – a lot. Google, certainly at the moment, owns the Internet.

A lot of companies want the same thing – good exposure on Google. But there is no magic switch, there is no instant cure; becoming good fellows with Google takes time; you want instant gratification and Google’s more interested in pursuing a long-term relationship with you. Commit seriously to Google and it will commit right back, and when that relationship is forged, it’s not just strong, it’s really strong.

The material taken from “Get into bed with Google” book by J. Smith

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There has been much speculation about the legislation introduced in the UK, which is intended to ensure that websites are accessible to people with disabilities.

The Disability Discrimination Act does not mention web site design.

Part III of the Disability Discrimination Act refers to the provision of goods, facilities and services, yet does not mention websites. You need to refer to the associated code of practice for specific details about web sites.

• The Act makes it unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide any service which it provides to members of the public.
• From 1st October 1999 a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services.
• For people with visual impairments, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include accessible websites.
• For people with hearing disabilities, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include accessible websites.

Click here for the article source.

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