There is a growing need to help vulnerable, desperate horse owners who care passionately about their horses, to find suitable new owners, sharers and loanees who will give their horse a loving and caring home. Our software team is now developing a bespoke online system to marry unwanted horses with appropriate adopters, for our JV client, Hauctions. We have now entered a consultation phase with The British Horse Society and National Equine Welfare Council and other interested parties ahead of a launch in November.

Rebecca Evans, Vice Chairman of The National Equine Welfare Council (NEWC) has joined the Hauctions team to manage this development. Rebecca has worked in the equine welfare charity sector since 1999, previously working as Equine Welfare and Grants Manager at The Horse Trust where she was responsible for managing a multi million pound programme of welfare grants covering cutting edge scientific research, post graduate scholarships, educational literature and a variety of projects to promote responsible ownership and the welfare of the horse.

The objective is to rehome potentially useful & valuable horses, in particular ex-racehorses, to knowledgeable, experienced, suitable homes.  By implementing a professional screening process, unlike any other online system,

All horses are screened as to their potential usefulness and only those which could be potentially useful as companions or rideable horses will be listed.  All applicants are screened and only those which match the requirements of the horse’s needs and owner’s requirements will be put forward for consideration.   Trials, visits and veterinary exams are strongly encouraged as are home checks.  Loan agreements will be generated to suit the requirements of both parties once a suitable new carer has been found.

By providing this service to help rehome horses where value is not an issue but finding the “right home” is crucial, Horses4Homes will help to significantly reduce the number of healthy horses,  unnecessarily slaughtered each year and reduce the burden on equine charities.

From 1750 to 1900, all human knowledge doubled. Did you know it 
now it doubles every 24 months? Did you know every day the average person transmits the information equivalent of six newspapers and receives 174 newspapers of data? That your IQ falls 10 points when you’re fielding constant emails, text messages, and calls? We have collated these and other startling facts to underline the growing threats that connectivity and this vast data movement present to business productivity.

Challenge us to look study your business’ operations and identify how bespoke software solutions could reduce or eliminate these threats.  Ours is a fully turnkey service. An experienced business consultant will visit businesses across the UK, US and Australasia to analyse and recommend solutions to turn threat to advantage. Our team will then develop such solutions to time and budget. Please contact us to arrange a preliminary online discussion. 

Document Loss
Executives waste six weeks per year searching for lost documents.
[From a survey of 2,600 executives by Esselte, maker of Pendaflex and Dymo, FastCompany Magazine, 8/2004]

In surveying 1000 middle managers of large companies in the U.S. and U.K., 59% miss important information almost every day because it exists within the company but they cannot find it.
[Accenture, Wall Street Journal, 5/14/2007]

15% of all paper handled in businesses is lost
[The Delphi Group, a Boston consultancy]
Solution: Document management system

Commuting Cost
Commuting to work takes average 80 hours / year – two weeks holiday
Solution: Remote working systems

Time Wasting
The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per 8-hour workday, not including lunch and scheduled break-time.
Solution: Time management systems

Information Overload
The world’s capability for storing, communicating and computing information has grown at least 23% annually since 1986. The average person in 2007 was transmitting the information equivalent of six newspapers each day and receiving 174 newspapers of data (much of that reflected in video and photos).
[Dr. Martin Hilbert, Science Magazine, 2/2011]

71% of white-collar workers feel stressed about the amount of information they must process and act on while doing business; 60% feel overwhelmed. 

[Institute of the Future, Menlo Park, CA]
Solution: Project collaboration systems

Data Theft
75% of senior executives in more than 60 countries said they are concerned about data theft and other forms of computer-related reprisals from laid-off employees.
[Ernst & Young, 11/10/2009]
Solution: Online database security audit

Email Waste
Organizations lose around $1,250 per user in annual productivity because of time spent dealing with spam, $1,800 unnecessary emails from co-workers, $2,100 – $4,100 due to poorly written communications.

[Tom Pisello, ITBusinessEdge.com, 12/2008]
Solution: Intranet and helpdesk solutions

Email Litigation
About 24% of companies have had employee emails subpoenaed by a court or regulator, up from 20% two years ago, and 15% have gone to court to defend against lawsuits triggered by an employee email, up from 13%. 
[Wall Street Journal, 7/2006]
Solution: Email monitoring systems

Demands of Recession
The economic downturn is putting pressure on American workers:
–Required to do more work with fewer resources 48%
–Doing the work of two people because of recession, 39%
–Difficulty taking time off from work, 47%
–Feel the need to stay connected,  24/7, 30%

[TNS Research, March 2010, for InterCall]
Solution: Automated processing systems

Electronic Distraction
People who regularly juggle several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memories, or switch from one task to another as well as those who prefer to focus on one thing at a time. Heavy media multitaskers are paying a big price.
[Stanford Report, 8/24/2009, Study by Clifford Nass, Eyal Ophir & Anthony Wagner]

Your IQ falls 10 points when you’re fielding constant emails, text messages, and calls, the same loss you’d experience if you missed an entire night’s sleep and more than double the 4-point loss you’d have after smoking marijuana. On average men fared worse than women because, researchers say, men have more difficulty multitasking.
[
Institute of Psychiatry, London 2005]

Once interrupted, it takes workers 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they return at all. People switch activities, such as making a call, speaking with someone in their cubicle or working on a document, every three minutes on average,
[Betty Lin-Fisher (for Knight Ridder Newspapers), Houston Chronicle, 2/27/2006]

The cost of interruptions to the U.S. economy is estimated at $588 billion a year.
[Jonathan B. Spira, "The Cost of Not Paying Attention," Basex Research, 2005]

62% of at-work email users check work email over the weekend, and 19% check it five or more times in a weekend. More than 50% said they check it on vacation, with the highest amount coming from mobile device users at 78%.

[Erin Gifford, "It's 3am--Are You Checking Email Again?" 
AOL Corporate Newsroom 
Statistic, 45th Annual Email Addiction Survey 2009, AOL]
Solution: Data management systems

Too Many Meetings
45% of senior executives felt that employees would be more productive if meetings were banned once a week.
[Office Team, "Let's Not Meet," 5/7/2009]

Unnecessary meetings cost U.S. businesses approximately $37 billion each year.
[U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005]
Solution: Remote discussion and information exchange systems

Disorganisation
43% of Americans categorize themselves as disorganized, and 21% have missed vital work deadlines. Nearly half say disorganization causes them to work late at least 2 or times each week.

[Boston Globe 3/12/2006
Esselte survey, David Lewis]
Solution: Time management systems

Paper and Filing
More than 40% of printouts are discarded within 24 hours.
[Daniel Lyons, "The Paper Chasers," Newsweek 12/01/09
Statistics, Xerox Research]

Paper has grown consistently over the last three decades. One of the biggest sources of paper growth really is the Internet. It’s the printing of email.
[
Anne Mulcahy, Xerox CEO, "Paper Trail," Wall Street Journal interview, 3/9/09]
Solution: Online data management and retrieval systems

Customised, relevant and up-to-date newsfeeds on a website will improve your search engine ranking and provide a solid connection with your market.  Unique news feeds can also be exploited across other platforms and distribution channels including RSS, email marketing and PR campaigns.

The Benefits of News Feeds
Instant delivery of unique, relevant and topical news feeds will ensure your website is always up-to-date. Those who want to read your articles will keep coming back increasing the number of repeat visitors. Your site will also be seen as the place to go to for news about your industry. With the articles residing on your own website, there will be no need for any more external links to news articles, keeping your hard-won customers on your site.

• Be seen as an ‘authority source’ for your industry
• Important keywords can be included in xml and in the article body copy in order to help identify news pages to the search engines.
• News articles can link to the most profitable internal website pages to aid navigation for readers and to direct web crawlers.
• News can be automatically reformatted for clients, subscribers and readers in the form of an e-newsletter to encourage traffic back to your site.
• News pages are dynamic, which helps search engines regard the site as current.

Levels of service

Research and copywriting For Unique & Frequent Content
We will plan, direct and commission relevant freelancers to prepare unique articles for your site, relevant to your strategic objectives and your specific audience.  Articles are not duplicated in the same form across the World Wide Web, which is important to search engines seeking high quality content.

You, as the client, will have full control over the types of stories written. You can change the brief at anytime and we will ensure that all news feeds will conform to and change with your SEO strategies.

Alternatively, a less expensive system is to publish RSS feeds from news sites.

Publishing
We will develop a system to add a separate static page to your site to encourage search engines to explore and crawl a website more frequently (including important keywords in the news url to help identify the page). Articles can be archived to encourage further crawling of the site, and to provide an invaluable online knowledge resource to site users.

Processing Engine
We can help locate a suitable tailored or RSS feed and develop a processing engine module within your administration console, allowing the site administrator to:

- View all stories
- Search / sort
- Edit / delete / publish/ unpublish
- View how many feeds were received and stories imported
- Persent stats on a realtime chart on the console dashboard

We can also develop dynamic front end photo and video galleries. We can time the delivery of the feed to suit your needs, for example when viewing figures are high or when readers log on in the morning.

Interested?
Please contact us for further information and a range of choices.

Whether it is a phenomenal website, online marketing strategy, complex software solution or mobile app, we guarantee price and delivery date. Our creative team in Cheltenham, UK and our dedicated team of software and website specialists in our Bucharest office work seamlessly together to successfully deliver:

Corporate websites
Document and Content management systems
Online customer helpdesks
Billing and trading systems
Online sales environments
Membership management
Personnel recruitment and administration platforms
Property and sales platforms
Discussion forums and voting systems
URN FMCG promotions
Auctioning systems
Booking and reservation platforms

As marketing becomes increasingly technology led, The Marketing Farm is ideally placed to provide all the marketing disciplines you need under one umbrella, seamlessly integrating great concepts with smashing technology to generate value and results. Contact us to find out how we can help your business.

We develop customised ecommerce solutions, feature packed to meet the very needs of the customer. We now provide three fixed price solutions.

Please contact us for further information. Below is our fixed price menu for the publishing industry.

Standard Package

• Hierarchical category system
• Shopping cart
• PayPal integration
• Static pages
• Users registration
• Users management
• Orders management
• Order status, order history in the user’s account
• Forms (contact, feedback)
• Search facility – by book title, book author, category name
• Books linked to multiple categories
• Books running out of stock listing in the backend
• Books listings with pagination controls and sorting options
• Most popular books listing
• Multiple media files attached to a book (images, audio files, covers)
• Newsletter sign up form
• Newsletter subscribers management and mass mailing with sent emails archive
• Carousel on the homepage with featured titles
• SEO optimized code

Gold Package
The GOLD package has all the features of the STANDARD package, plus:

• Book reviews
• Wish List for logged in users
• ‘Look inside this book’ feature
• Authors listing
• Author dedicated pages (bio, books, image, links)
• Social networks integration (facebook LIKE button, facebook widget, twitter feed)
• Forthcoming Titles listing
• Related Books listing
• Book Bundles – where “bundle” is defined as a group of books that can be presented and sold as a product with his own price, ISBN, etc
• Tag clouds
• Books tags (used for navigation, SEO)
• Ajax forms (inline validation, user feedback)

Premium Package
The PREMIUM package has all the features of the GOLD package, plus:

• Blog system with categories, comments (custom or through the use of Disqus.com or Facebook comments), blog archive, post tags
• RSS feeds
• Discount rules and coupon codes
• Shipping rules
• PayPal Pro Integration (requires SSL)
• Sphinx search which provides search by relevance
• Search terms capturing so admin will know what people want
• Daily database backup
• Website monitoring (uptime, speed)
• Website upgrades (per upgrade or monthly)
  Free hosting

This will be developed to provide a multiple user portal management system, public and partner interfaces with an integrated payment module. This will be delivered in just 8 weeks from commission!

It will provide end users with a “one stop shop” for faculty and international study centres at Universities around the world looking to design and deliver the perfect blend of academic content, cultural experience, travel and adventure activities, and suitable student accommodation for short courses.

Customer Helpdesk Redevelopment
Three years ago we helped our our telecommunications client, Total Ltd., win the prestigious Customer Service Award at last year’s Mobile News Awards with our Helpdesk system. This yielded many benefits for their customers, service teams and management.

We are delighted to have have been recommissioned to redevelop the Helpdesk in php.

The Benefits of Recoding in php
• Faster execution and page response times
• Better security and user input filters
• Email monitoring and central management of these
• The separation of user interface from the admin panel
• The improvement of display (CSS optimization, latest JS libraries, GZIP encoding for faster rendering)
• The use of PHP libraries and frameworks, tested and scalable
• Implement inline page-uploads (several files at once)
• Implement ajax-like notes add (without page reloads)

Enhancements

1. Section email templates
2. System hook to generate automated fully cusomized email triggering
3. Automatically updated ticket notes history
4. Implement powerful SPHINX search http://www.sphinxsearch.com/ in realtime (search as you type, with synonyms, singular/plural matches, excerpts with keyword highlights, SORT BY RELEVANCE or BY DATE, etc)
5. Create RSS notifications for each admin, to track responses and new tickets.

Other Feature Detail

• Create a separate admin panel with real-time updates on the dashboard
• Monitor high-priority tickets,
• Browse through generated emails
• Audit rails/path (view how the system is used by its users – logins, reports used)
• When the server cannot send an email, re-schedule it a couple of times until it’s sent. This will be monitored within the admin panel
• View generated emails for a ticket
• Emails will be generated using HTML format (better visual look – images, colors, etc)
• Rewrite the login module – implement a max number of attempts then lock the account with an admin warning
• Inline upload – popups no longer needed, with visual indicator of progress
• Multiple files selection and upload
• Flash banner – update it on a per ticket category basis&& rewrite the flash banner (configure display time, colors, etc)

Original thinking in terms of SEO is as important as the mundane.. the tagging, keywording, newsfeeds etc. Self content generating sites to feed into your main site are not new. Many businesses will have forums. However, we have spied a growing number of Q&A sites where visitors join to post questions or answer them, and vote accordingly. Unlike forums, there is little competition in this market, but those that are churn out considerable content and hence page ranking and traffic. 

A Q&A site helps your online community to share knowledge. People with questions quickly get the answers they need. The community dynamic is enriched by commenting, voting, notifications, user points and rankings. Any web searches are questions, so Q&A content is also very search-engine friendly, bringing new visitors to your site. They are not beautiful sites, but they put function at for the fore: answers to questions.

Examples include:

http://stackoverflow.com/ with a PageRank of 6

http://serverfault.com/ with a PageRank of 6

http://superuser.com/ with a PageRank of 6

People want to share a question, and people like to answer!

We have today launched one under the name EquineTalk at http://eqtalk.com/ . Our SEO team are now seeding the site with users, questions and answers and once it is rolling on Google we will link it through to feed traffic into our client, Hauctions  http://hauctions.net/ with banners and links.

If you would be interested in a similar Q&A site tailored and customised to your sector as a traffic driver, please contact us.

There is an explosive growth in cybercrime and too little attention is paid to online security. To protect your valuables, you would buy a safe. No matter how big or strong the safe is, there is someone who can break into it. Ideally, you will alarm it, monitor it and provide multiple levels of protection and unique keys. If these are distributed, you need to be full aware of the security implications. When protecting your online treasure – your databases – you need to adopt a similar approach.

1. Surveillance.
Employ a a PCR scanning service. We work with one of the leading internet security sites on the web today, for example, Hacker Safe. Testing is performed to provide information on possible vulnerabilities within the server that could directly affect online purchases and the sensitive information provided by customers. They also provide Trust Guard as a low-cost alternative to Hacker Safe. This provides PCI Scanning combined with their innovative website verification process to create additional security options. By verifying the businesses physical address, phone number, support email, and scanning their website for vulnerabilities, Trust Guard ensures that companies are honestly and accurately portraying themselves to the buying public. By focusing primarily on business that process less than 20,000 transactions a year, Trust Guard is a reduced cost option.

2. Change administrator and privileged access passwords regularly.
As a matter of course, change every time a member of staff with such privileges leaves.

3. Prepare against scams
Implement processes to verify in detail staff or customers or companies that request information over the phone or via e-mail. Ensure your online payment processes and confirmation emails are verifiable.

4. Harden the server
Most hackers target the data held in a database. Therefore the server, where the database resides, needs to be hardened and protected, both physically and logically

Therefore, when reviewing database security, it’s crucial to concentrate on two areas:
1. How well the system has been hardened, and;
ii.  How the data and database access is controlled.

Ideally, the database will be on its own dedicated machine, but it should never reside on a public-facing server, such as a web server. Naturally, all system and database program patches should be installed, and unnecessary features should be removed or disabled. Most database programs have several default accounts and passwords, all of which need to be changed. One of the best ways to determine how well these hardening procedures have been implemented is to run the appropriate Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks and Scoring Tools against both the server OS and the database. The Benchmarks are best practice standards for security configurations that help to determine how your systems measure up.

How Can We Help?
The Software Farm, part of The Marketing Farm Limited, has developed a string of successful online trading, billing and customer management systems for an array of international clients. Our server bases operate in the UK and the US and across Europe. We are also able to provide global 24 hour technical support for the systems we develop, in which automated error messaging systems are embedded. All our systems are security audited to safeguard against all possible fraud scenarios.

An example of our ability and success is highlighted by our Financial Portal Platform Software, developed in conjunction with New York based EMS Financial Services. It is the world’s most advanced and automated escrow system in operation and securely controls millions of dollars of trades every day across the world and around the clock.

Please contact us for advice.

Successful communities have discussion at their core, and our discussion board we developed for our client, New York based EMS Financial Services LLC, is proving a considerable success. Called EMS TrafficBoard, it gives telco buyers a platform on which to post their best rates and to connect with buyers. It is membership based and encourages users to use the EMS portal as their clearing house.

By tailoring and branding an existing software framework, IP.Board, we can help achieve your business goals with a platform that fosters vibrant discussion for a very reasonable cost. Please contact us for further information.

Benefits of Discussion Boards
The initial challenge for most websites is generating traffic. However, the bigger challenge is making sure that once visitors get there, they don’t click away after ten seconds with the impression that your site has nothing to offer. The “stickiness” of your site plays a major role in determining whether your visitors become customers, and whether your site will support itself with measurable value to your business or organization.

Relevant content on your website is the most important factor in keeping your visitors’ attention and discussion provide just that: relevant user generated content.

By adding a discussion board to your website you will be able to communicate with your website visitors and generate and sustain more repeat traffic. One can also learn some important information from the comments made. A Board will help you to understand your visitors’ mind and interest and help you take the lead and steer in their interest. When you will know their interest you can improve your marketing…

Please contact us for advice on how online communities can help your business.

The competition, offers 18-25 year olds the chance to be mentored by top journalists – with one lucky winner getting the chance to have their column printed in The Sun. Find out more here.