News

With the current situation, many small businesses will be looking at their cash flow.

Hightrees have just setup Stripe payments for our invoices, so if you need to pay by credit or debit card securely, you can do that.

Starting from April 10th, any invoices issued can be paid for, securely via Stripe if you need to. The link will be included in your invoice.

Been busy over the last couple of days sorting out a VoIP system to help the Pewsey Coronavirus Community Association.

The PCCA has been setup to help the local community deal with the local problems in the current Covid-19 situation.

From arranging meds/prescriptions to food parcels, general help and advice to dog walking – the group is aiming to help their local community in anyway they can.

We noticed a Facebook post and the problems they were having trying to operate with a single landline so we said we could try and help out.

In essence, we have created a new phone number and built a glorified answering machine. This relatively simple system will take the pressure off manning a physical line and taking messages.

The new answering service operates a menu system and voicemails are forwarded to the “team leads” for each particular service.

We’ll be looking at adding softphones remotely so callers can talk to a real person, especially important when lots of people are self isolating and contact with others is limited.

Sunday 29th March Update

After raiding the old/spare kit cupboard we’ve managed to persuade some old VoIP handsets into service. The network cable length are a bit of a guess-timate but should be good enough to allow the PCCA to operate from their central location at The Little Lunch Box in Pewsey.

Every day is a school day…..

There have been a few working weekends this year, due to clients moving services to Hightrees.

A range of projects, from Email migrations to E-Commerce to Office365.
Instead of watching 1’s & 0’s move, the time was used to catch up on some online training.

First on the cards was a refresher on Google Analytics Qualification. A very powerful tool that is often not used to its full potential via many Small Businesses. Not sure if this is down to the technical nature of the software or a lack of understanding of what you can do.

Sticking with the Google theme, a “quick” refresh on Digital Marketing Fundamentals, via Google Digital Garage. This course covers quite a broad range of topics, not all of which will be applicable to all businesses, but full of handy knowledge.

Next up, as they were on “Special Offer”, were a couple of Digital Marketing, Content Marketing and Copywriting courses on Udemy.

One of the biggest things we picked up from this range of courses, was the power of words and their use. It is very easy to get bogged down in SEO, keywords and trying to hit all the technical targets that you forget about the person reading it.

Running a Readability check on www.hightrees.org showed a lot of the pages were for Grade 13+, whereas the target is a lot lower. It also sticks two fingers up to our policy of trying to keep our IT Small Business solutions user friendly and simple to understand.

Over the coming weeks, the aim is to to be more people orientated and make things easier to read.
It sounds simple right ? but trying to juggle the balance so far is proving to be ‘interesting’ !
We’ve started revamping the website to make things less wordy and more user friendly.
It will be interesting to see how a difference in writing style reflects in the behind the scenes in Google Analytics

Watch this space…..

The Purdey and Sloane team have been busy working on their new website which launched July 2019.

Purdey and Sloane are a British company based in Wiltshire manufacturing a range of luxury, natural skincare products for those people who spend time outside enjoying the outdoor lifestyle.

Hightrees is currently working with LighenUpgrade to create a new website and online store.

LightenUpgrade is a market leader in LED upgrade kits for motorcycle dashboards and clocks as well as an authorised HEL manufacturer.