Sizzle Media web design Manchester, lend their support to Manchester charity Five Stars Appeal, in their bid to raise £1000,000 to buy a new MRI scanner to be housed at The Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital.

Every year nearly 200,000 children suffering from cancer and other serious illnesses in the North West and beyond receive treatment at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital. For over thirty years Five Stars Appeal charity has been raising funds and providing the hospital with essential equipment and refurbishments. To ensure that the children receive the best possible care it is vital that the hospital has access to the latest technology. The new MRI Scanner will cut the time of a standard scan from 45 minutes to 15 minutes and will aid doctors in diagnosing cancer and cancer related illnesses more quickly, enabling them to provide early treatment that will ultimately save children’s lives.

Aftab Ali, Sizzle Media's Creative Director said “We created a highly visual email newsletter campaign to help Five stars appeal raise the profile for their Celebration Ball on the 17th October. The event will be attended by celebrities all lending their support to help raise the remaining £250,000 required to purchase the much needed MRI Scanner. We feel it’s our duty to help worthy causes like Five Stars Appeal, and have in the past conducted an intensive 6 month email marketing campaign for Many Hands Campaign to help raise awareness for The New Children’s Hospital appeal after hearing an passionate appeal by Dragons Den star Theo Paphitis.”

Nicola Smith from Five Stars Appeal said “Sizzle Media have been very generous in their support creating an amazing email campaign aimed at business owners across the North West. Hopefully This will help us book enough tables at our star studded Celebration Ball to raise the remaining £250k to hit our £1M target”

http://www.fivestarsappeal.co.uk

It’s been a very exciting year for us at Sizzle Media web design Manchester, we’ve surfed the high and lows of the economy, battled against the sever bite of the credit crunch and attempts from competitors to poach clients and staff. Through all this Sizzle Media has continued to grow and refine a market leading web design service.

Our main base of operations has been in the home of the co-op, Rochdale and after 18 months of steady progress Sizzle Media have created a large client base that is mainly based in the Manchester area. Our hard working sales team have clocked up thousands of miles travelling between Manchester and Rochdale, and we have finally decided that it’s time move our team to Manchester to best serve our clients and be more accessible to new clients and opportunities.

After a lengthy search for suitable offices, from various REGUS offices, city centre locations, we struggled to justify the costs that some of these locations sought. They lacked parking and charged for every single add-on conceivable. We then came across and office environment that we all instantly took a shine too, plenty of parking, lively atmosphere, accessible and looked really cool.

We will be disclosing our new Manchester office location very soon, once we have completed our paperwork and got ourselves plugged in. Needless to say, we are all very excited about this new move and are really looking forward to continuing our success and bringing some Sizzle in to Manchester.

As more and more retail businesses feel the pressure from the ongoing recession, all is not lost - there are reports emerging of dramatic increases in business being conducted online, with online retail and travel sales looking to be at the forefront of online growth.

http://tinyurl.com/cdt9w3

Forrester Research expects that by 2014 UK online shoppers will number 37 million accounting for around £56bn in online transactions.

Sizzle Media web design Manchester have noticed this increase in online ecommerce activity, and proof of this is we are currently working on over 35 concurrent ecommerce website projects. The greatest demand coming from retail outlets in the clothing and fashion sector.

As people prefer to shop around for a bargain, the first point of call is the Internet. Shoppers will first try their preferred store to find what they are looking for, however if you don't have an effective ecommerce site not only are you losing a sale, but potentially also losing a valuable customer.

Ecommerce websites are no longer expensive or time consuming projects. An ecommerce website built on our Lava Commerce Platform starts from just £995 and is fully loaded with all the features your online business requires, and can be up and running in a few days providing you have an internet merchant number and control over your domain name.

Call Sizzle Media web design Manchester on freephone 0808 14 333 00 or email info@sizzlemedia.co.uk, and find out how we can help your business leverage the power the internet.

A centre piece of Rochdale business, Lovicks furniture has stood proud for 90 years, through 3 recessions and a World War, they have seen ‘Empires’ come and go. It was only natural for Lovicks to choose a professional and reliable web design company.

Sizzle Media | web design Manchester are proud to announce that Lovicks have chosen us as their web design agency, joining our rapidly growing number of Greater Manchester web design clients.

Serving our customers in Manchester, Rochdale, Bury and Oldham Sizzle Media have quickly establishing themselves as the leading choice for businesses looking for an affordable yet professional web design service.

Our collective experience in working with major household brands has allowed Sizzle Media to deliver a high level creative service, backed by over 15 years corporate branding experience to offer a complete, affordable business package from logo design, branding, right through to high traffic ecommerce developments and online marketing such as SEO, PPC and Email marketing, driving quality targeted traffic to your new or existing website.

Contact our office today on freephone 0808 14 333 00 and discover how Sizzle media web design Manchester can help your business succeed through the recession.

The recent launch of our affordable web platform LAVA Commerce has been a huge and rather unexpected success. To reach those of you who are tucked away beyond the boundaries of the creative web design hub that is the North, we have been steadily increasing our Manchester web design and development team, and have had to vacate our shoe box offices for a more spacious abode; to accommodate new members and an increasing number of visiting clients.

We recently placed a job ad in the Manchester Evening News, stating Manchester's leading web design agency is looking for 'experienced' sales executives and web designers, the response was phenomenal. We received over 150 applications in two weeks, with one verbally colourful CV from ‘The World’s Greatest Salesman’ called Thrust, taking pride of place on our wall! Unfortunately Thrust put the wrong phone number on his CV which was such a shame. Thrust dude, you have no idea how much we wanted to interview you.

After whittling down the likely candidates, we triple vetted, cross checked and re-interviewed and recruited some newbies. We would like to welcome three new members to our studio. Paul Cooke who joins us from Oldham on sales and has brought an abundance of energy to the Sizzle web design studio. Paul’s a ex-designer, finance manager, sales man and football historian all rolled in to one neat package. Paul has found a friend in Stefan our resident football expert .

We also have Tim Edwards hailing from Cheshire, who is a very cool cat and races a Lotus Elise with his sibling brother and shares our Creative Director’s adoration of the iconic Nissan GTR. And finally we welcome Ramzan Ali, trained by crayon wielding Jedis, Ramzan has a natural flair for web design and is now considered our Creative Directors new Padawan.

We are still interviewing for sales people, designers and developers so if you know anyone who has good web foo, then let us know or email us on jobs@sizzlemedia.co.uk

It's finally here: NOISE 5 - the latest edition of the world-renowned series of design books by our friends at the Attik. As far as big design studio monographs go, the Noise series has a huge international following and each issue has become a collectors' edition.

Self-published with only a 3000 limited run, each book has cost over £200 to produce, resulting in a visual feast of experimental design and extensive print techniques. The book showcases over 250 pages of stunning design, using 9 different kinds of paper stocks and over 40 print finishes including hot foils, scratch-off inks, hi-build gloss varnishes, embossing and heat sensitive inks, and the result is a very tactile and very beautiful piece of work.

This book has been 3 years in the making so you can imagine that it's very hot property for those lucky enough to pre-order a copy. But since we're not just any old web design studio, no, Sizzle Media are one of the very few privileged enough to get a complimentary copy well before the book hits the stores!

Having pored over it since its arrival, we absolutely love it. It really is a work of art and has everything a designer could wish for and more. It's absolutely saturated with creativity and you genuinely sense the attention and effort that has gone in to the production – not to mention it cost a small fortune to produce!

Overall it’s a landmark piece of work by the Attik and a highly recommended purchase for any print or web designer when it does eventually hit the book stores.

Thanks to the Attik for our copy :)

Around November last year, Sizzle Manchester looked into some of the free and upcoming open source platforms available for e-commerce websites as cheaper, off-the-shelf alternatives to bespoke websites for our clients. One that stood out as a forerunner and possible osCommerce/Zen Cart competitor was the very new, very shiny, and very impressive Magento.

Magento is written in PHP and built upon the Zend framework. For those of you who still don’t know what Magento is or what it can do, go here now... It’s ok... We’ll wait. Back?

Magento supports tons of payment options (Protx, Google Checkout, and Paypal), and the Magento community provides tonnes of new additions, modules, and proprietary add-ons every day.

We originally looked at GoDaddy for a temporary test hosting solution, as they had recently added PHP 5.2 support and they support .htaccess files to override certain hosting features. However, we still had some problems getting it to work straight from the box, although a quick search of the internet and Magento forums brought the majority of answers we needed, so we’ve decided to put together a quick start guide to getting Magento up and running on GoDaddy!

We have used both the economy and deluxe Linux packages available on GoDaddy successfully, including the free hosting provided with a domain (although you should beaware that GoDaddy puts rather intrusive advertisements on the free hosting). Step by step:

1. To start with we downloaded the Magento 1.2.0.2 package.

2. In the root folder we opened the .htaccess file and added the following line under the CGI options section:

AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php

3. At this point we were able to get to the install screen, however some users have reported that the php.ini file needs to be renamed php5.ini and the following line changed from:

#cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1 to cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

4. Once installed and running, we hit one more snag - The administration panel didn’t work in any browser! Again, a quick search of brought us the solution and we have provided the package from the Magento Forums here for you to download and use. You should unzip this and place this over the head.php file in “app\code\core\Mage\Adminhtml\Block\Page” Hopefully later versions of Magento will address this.

Using this technique we were able to get Magento installed on three separate test accounts (Free Hosting, Economy and Deluxe), although the website performance did vary dependent on which account we were on, the deluxe package obviously fared slightly better.

Hopefully this is all you’ll need in order to get Magento up and running on GoDaddy Linux hosting. We have also provided the pre-modified 1.2.0.2 solution we used to install it here. Once installed you should be able to update to the latest version without any problems.

So there we go. Hopefully, in the very near future, and once we’ve got our head around the design and skinning aspects, Sizzle Manchester will be able to offer Magento solutions, and despite our success and more importantly the community’s success, they will be hosted on our own dedicated servers, not GoDaddy’s.

Please note that Sizzle Media takes no responsibility for the use of these files, nor does it claim any copyright to them.

UPDATE: LifeBlue.com have provided instructions for v1.3.2.1 of Magento on Godaddy here