For many the BBC News website is a staple read while they munch on a sandwich at lunch time.  Those devoted fans have been treated to a redesign in the last couple of weeks, but I must confess I've been pretty busy of late so today was the first time I really had a good poke around the new site.

I'm a little bit set in my ways, I know what I'm interested in and I know where in the site to find it.  So in the past when the Beeb have redesigned the site it's taken me a few months to learn to love the site again.  But, this most recent redesign suits me very well, the navigation is tidied up, and the typography is very clear.

However, one thing I noticed today which has changed significantly is the related links panel.  In the previous design this was on the right hand panel towards the top.  In the redesign it's now moved to the foot of the story, more along the lines of Wikipedia.

The key question this raises for me is what impact this will have on users who follow the links.  One of my clients, the Road Safety Foundation, regularly publishes stories that make it onto the BBC News Homepage, these articles usually link back to the Foundation website and we see a terrific increase in visitors from the BBC.

My feeling is that moving these links to the bottom of the page, makes them blend in with the story and will be less likely to be followed.  But I'm eagerly awaiting the next RSF press release that really makes it big to see what affect the redesign has.  Show me the data!

If you've followed our blog for a while you'll know that we're noisy supporters of the Getting British Business Online Campaign.  It's a great opportunity for the over 2 million small businesses in Britain that currently don't have a website.  Business owners can register a domain name, and build a website in under an hour for free.

But as with most things technology related, the GBBO tools don't always go strictly to plan.  Well now business owners can get help from a new technical support website from BT.  The site call Community-powered support for Getting British Business Online enables users to read Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) as well as post their own queries and issues to get support both from GBBO staff as well as members of the GBBO community.

The GBBO support site is built using BT Tradespace which makes it really easy for businesses to create a space where they can advertise their products and services to over 350,000 for free.  Tradespaces are a great tool for driving traffic to your main website, not only from the 350,000 Tradespace members but also because creating a Tradespace can improve the search engine ranking of your main site.

Lastly, back to GBBO, don't forget that we're running a Getting Business Online Workshop to support small businesses in using the GBBO toolkit.  Find out more on our Facebook event page.

This morning I went to a workshop by Nick Bettes and Sam Swinstead from Nick Bettes Consulting and Challenge Manager on the The Challenges of Growth.  Targeted at owner managers of small businesses the workshop had a particular focus on the people management aspects of business growth.

In an interactive session Nick lead the group towards identifying the importance of growth in a business.  In a short summary Nick then covered some of the key challenges to strategy and direction, marketing, sales, operations and finance.

In the second half of the workshop Sam looked at the people management challenges of growth.  In small group sessions the delegates broke out to discuss where our own businesses may benefit from an extra "pair of hands", before joining together to discuss recruitment processes, legislation relating to recruitment, performance management and team building.

Useful sources of information that were outlined in the workshop included:

• ACAS - information about policies and procedures for employers
• Direct Gov - information from an employee's point of view about rights and entitlements in plain english

To which I'd add:

• Business Link - great information from an employers perspective including a great tool to create a Written Statement of Employment.
• Graduate Jobs South - advertising and funding for graduate placements which is a great way to recruit new grads.

All in all it was a great workshop and I'd recommend any business owner-manager get onto Nick's email list and attend the next workshop.

I love this info graphic.

Infographic by PPC Blog

Back in May we talked about joining the Getting British Business Online Campaign.  We think this is a great opportunity for the many small businesses that don't have a website to trade online.

With that in mind we've now booked a slot for the first of what we hope will be a series of workshops aimed at providing some help and guidance for people in using the tools that the campaign is providing for free.

We'll spend a short time introducing the campaign, then it'll be over to you for a hands on workshop where you will have the opportunity to build your website. All you need is a laptop, your mobile phone and a few details about your business. By the end of the workshop you'll have a fully working website.

The Getting British Business Online Workshop will take place on Wednesday 25th August 2010 from 10:00 to 12:00 our offices in The Hub, IQ Farnborough.

If you're interested in joining us then please show your attendance on our Facebook event, our LinkedIn event, or give us a call.

After a couple of weeks swanning to conferences in Copenhagen and taking some time off, I'll be hitting the Business Networking scene in earnest again next week.

On Tuesday I'll be at the IODHR event at Surrey Sports Park, which is being organised by Richard Maybury.  On Wednesday I'll be hitting 4N Farnham for the first time, and straight afterwards I'm going to try to make my first TVSMC in Reading.  Then on Thursday I'll be back at 4N Bracknell.

Marc will also be on the 4N trail as well next week.  He'll be at 4N Haslemere on Thursday.

So if you're out and about next week and heading to any of these events please come over and say hello.  Also we keep an fairly up to date list of the events we're attending on our Facebook page.

Win a free, professionally designed and managed website for your firm, in a new competition!

Orcare has teamed up with Guildford-based Mainstream Marketing, and Guildfordeye, to offer this valuable prize for local businesses.

The winner will receive a managed, high quality design, website, complete with a .uk domain name and hosting for one year.

The prize will include:

• High quality templated design, customised with your company logo and brand built using our favourite CMS Umbraco.
• Homepage and unlimited number of internal pages.
• News and Events Database
• Project Portfolio Database
• Integration with Flickr and YouTube for Photo and Video Galleries
• CMS Powered Search Engine
• Business Blogging Platform
• iPhone compatible mobile site design
• Automatic Twitter Integration
• Google Analytics

On top of all this, Mainstream Marketing and Orcare will produce a Search Engine Optimisation and Marketing (SEO and SEM) strategy based on your business's particular needs along with an outline of an ongoing maintenance plan which you will be able to implement to ensure that your site is properly positioned in Google and the other major search engines.

To enter the competition find out more information on the competition homepage at Guildfordeye.

It's been a very busy week here at Orcare HQ, with three major developments going live.

At the start of the week a three month project to redesign the Sports Leaders UK website went live.  As part of the project we designed new visuals with some help from from Melon Creative.  We also worked hard to improve the navigation on the site which had previously been heavily criticised by users, to do this we introduced new menu layouts and improved the information architecture so that the Umbraco back end better represented the logical structure of the site.  We've had some great feedbackfrom the Comms team at Sports Leaders UK who we worked with throughout the project as well as other internal teams as well as external users of the site.  So we're rather pleased with that.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we supported EuroRAP and the Road Safety Foundation with the launch of their latest GB road safety results.  While for us the work load was fairly small, the impact was massive this year.  The story received a huge amount of press attention including in the Telegraph, Mirror and Irish Times, and also made it to the most read story on the BBC News website.  Consequently the two websites got a huge amount of attention in a small time, an increase of 2,000% in terms of the numbers of visitors to the site compared to normal.  We're pleased to report that the servers kept on running!!

Lastly today we put live our first Facebook Application for Umbraco.  The application was designed for Stop the Traffik on their Freedom Ticket for Life microsite.  As part of the site users are able to pledge to run in aid of Stop the Traffik and then build their own Free:Me avatar.  Our new FB application then enables the user to post their Free:Me to their Facebook photo album and then select it as their profile picture.  The Facebook application was a joint development by Orcare and Ben at Code Gecko.

Today saw the release of our latest project, a microsite for Stop the Traffik's Freedom Ticket for Life campaign, which aims to raise money to give girls in some of the worlds poorest countries an education and a chance to avoid being trafficked.  The campaign will raise money by encouraging people to run in organised events around the world.

From a technical point of view the site uses Umbraco Content Management System, including it's membership management tools to enable prospective runners to register, choose a project to support, pledge a number of miles to run and then finally build a downloadable avatar character, called a Free:Me, which can be uploaded to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Like all our projects this was a collaboration, and we'd like to name check Dan at BrandTastic for producing a stunning design for the site and creating such great cartoons for the Free:Me's.  On this project we also worked for the first time with Ecological Hosting who provide totally solar powered hosting for Stop the Traffik.  These guys are great and I think we might be working together again.

I also want to mention that the project is product of Thames Valley Social Media Hub, because it came about during a coffee fueled chat between myself and @caalie one tvsmc meetup at The Village in Farnborough.  Don't let anyone tell you that Twitter can't bring people together to do great work.

An update to the site will follow shortly which will enable users to directly upload their Free:Me to Facebook.

It's hard to believe that over 2,000,000 businesses in the UK don't have a website.  But what's hard to consider is the real business case that justifies why they should be online.  When I was challenged last week, my answer was "well, just because".

Upon reflection, and with the help of the Getting British Business Online campaign, and also some very nice people on the 4Networking forum, I've managed to pull together what I hope is a more coherent argument for why every business should have a website.

You'll find my thoughts on the 4Networking website article bank.