Sizzle Media, Rochdale Web design giants have been growing steadily through the worst recession in living memory. By simply tightening our belts, using a bit of common sense and rallying together as a team, we have continued to develop in to one the region’s leading web design agencies.

Due to a sharp increase in business over the last 3 months, Sizzle Media have recruited another web designer, Tom Harding who joins us from our peers at PH Media in Manchester. Based at our Rochdale office, Tom has been tasked with the job of supporting our Creative team in delivering stunning websites for our growing client base.

On visiting Sizzle Media Tom said “I was surprised at the relaxed atmosphere at Sizzle, but the work rate is very intense with lots of communication between departments. Everyone seems to be completely focused on doing their best and I found this very appealing”

Sizzle Media plan to open an office in Manchester city centre in the next 2 months to meet the demands of their growing Manchester customer base, with further plans to open an office in Liverpool towards the end of the year.

For the moment we are content with our status as a leading Rochdale web design agency and are looking forward to productive year; delivering high quality websites and online marketing services to small and medium enterprises around the North West.

If your business requires a re-brand, online marketing strategy, corporate website or you just need some advice. Feel free to contact us on 01706 715 344 or email us info@sizzlemedia.co.uk

Rochdale's latest paper the Independent did a full feature on Sizzle Media web design Rochdale this week. The new publications has been a fantastic addition to the stands of Rochdale and can be picked up free at ASDA, TESCO and your local fuel stops. With a philosophy to promote positive news in the region, the Indepedent features stories of successful businesses, community news and general feel good articles. Sizzle Media web design Rochdale were very pleased to be featured in the March issue and the feedback has been excellent.

Red-hot name in web design.

Born out of the recession and credit crunch, Sizzle Media has grown rapidly since its formation 18 months ago and now employs a team of eight advisers, designers and developers at its offices in the Evans Business Centre off Dane Street, near the ASDA in Rochdale.

This innovative Rochdale web design company offers a complete support package to businesses at unbelievable value for money.

Sizzle Media's mission is to harness the power of the Internet to help clients gain maximum results through stunning web design and targeted online marketing. Sizzle Media MD Zulf Ali is a member of the Rochdale Development Agency Board and chairman of the Kashmir Youth Project, a governor of two schools, as well as being the recipient of the Queens Award for Enterprise Promotion in 2009.

Creative Director Aftab Ali, who had previously designed the Rochdale Council, Hopwood Hall and J21 websites said: “Basically, these days, if you don’t have a quality website you don’t have a business. At Sizzle Media we demystify the internet and take away the mumbo jumbo often associated with internet technology".

Aftab, who has worked on creating corporate identities for huge brands such as Kelloggs and Moulinex, said: “We give service with a personal touch and believe that the customer always comes first!

Brothers Aftab and Zulf Ali were brought up and educated in Rochdale and are now keen to put something back into the local business community.

Sales manager Ian Henry said “In today’s competitive business environment, a strong online presence is critical for any business to succeed, especially a new one. We can help businesses gain a foothold on the web by creating a vibrant corporate identity, online advertising campaigns and designing stunning websites.

Project Manager Tim Edwards added, “We take your business requirements and wrap it all up to give our clients a complete ‘Brand’ helping them to stand out in the marketplace. And we don’t stop there. Rather than hold back our marketing secrets, we teach our clients how to maintain and promote their websites themselves once up and running, offering exceptional value for money and return on investment.

The company was named Business of the Year in 2008 and their clients regularly win industry awards, such as the Indian Ocean Restaurant in Ashton Under Lyne, who have won over 15 business awards since partnering with Sizzle Media.

But perhaps the best recommendation comes in testimonials from customers.

Jo Gore of Limon Ivy wrote: “From my first meeting with Sizzle Media they took the time to listen to my concept and translated it into an outstanding website. With amazing artwork, design and expertise in the business, the whole team showed tremendous dedication to my project. The amount of support on branding and search engine optimisation far exceeded my expectations. They genuinely care about and want their customers to succeed in business and they don't close their door once your site is up and running.”

And Emma Jex of Whitestone Solicitors said: “Sizzle Media has worked with us since we opened our doors in 2005, developing everything from our logo through to our website, managing our marketing budget and advising us on all areas of our brand.

“We are now a national brand and offer a wide portfolio of legal services, and this has all happened with Sizzle Media by our side.”.

So if you are setting up a new business or wanting to expand an existing one, Sizzle Media can give you that effective online presence that is now so vital in business.

And that name Sizzle Media? “We’ve had our fingers burned a few times”, smiled Aftab,” We’ve learned from our mistakes and now focus on helping our customers to avoid the same pitfalls of being in business.”

We're back in the office here at Sizzle after a long, hard Easter spent basking in Manchester's glorious sunshine and catching up on our beauty sleep. We're well-rested, pumped-up, and ready to get cracking, providing the best web design services in Manchester. We've a new sales team member on board (the lovely Janet), a new internal project management system, and a fresh jar of super-strength coffee (ideal for hardcore web development grinds).

In tech news, we've been happy to hear about the EU making a full investigation into Phorm, the very sneaky and somehow-not-totally-illegal technology designed to inject targeted adverts into home users' web browsing. You can read more about Phorm on its Wikipedia entry.

There's also been a fair amount of hubbub over Confiker, the mysterious worm (a network-propagating type of computer program) which, it seems, is up to something mysterious. But we can't tell exactly what, since everything it does is majorly obfuscated. Its end package could be anything from mass-website-hacking through to less harmful (but still annoying) popup advertisements. Spooky stuff!

And finally, it seems we've dropped a couple of places in our bid for the elusive 'web design manchester' search engine ranking. Google works in mysterious ways, so it might be a while before we can figure out exactly what's happened, but we're working on it! Not that it's necessarily the end of the world - the site's getting more visitors than ever recently!

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

It's nearly the end of the year, and it's been an exciting time for the gang here at Sizzle Media. We've grown, we've shrunk, we've moved offices, we've got great new clients, a swanky new website, and we're looking forward to creating some stunning websites in 2009. We're still on-track for our goal of providing the best, most comprehensive web design Rochdale (and Manchester!) has to offer, and we've got some innovations coming up that'll blow your socks off, allowing us to provide web development at a level of affordability never before seen.

We hope you have a tremendous Christmas and we hope Santa brings you everything you've wanted. See you in 2009!