During the promotional period all new customers choosing our Business Pro account using the discount code bizpro1 will get their first month’s web hosting for £1.

The Business Pro package includes access to unlimited web space, bandwidth, MySQL databases and Email boxes, as well as the ability to host multiple websites on one account. It also comes with a full version of website building software Serif WebPlus X5, an iPhone/ Android web hosting control panel and a library of over 65 one click install web apps including WordPress, Joomla and OpenCart.

Find out more about our web hosting and why choosing the right web host matters.

Already a customer?

Use our “refer a friend” program to alert your friends, colleagues or family to this great offer, and we will pay you up to £60 per referral as well. Referring a friend is easy, and there are no limits to how many people you can refer:
1.    Log-in to your Heart Internet Control panel
2.    Click on ‘Refer a Friend’
3.    Enter the email addresses of the people you want to refer
4.    Click on “Refer A Friend Now!”

Name:Matthew Telfer

About:Matthew is Heart Internet's Marketing Manager, and has held senior marketing positions in the web hosting industry for 5 years. With a passion for online marketing, Matthew is responsible for shaping strategy and developing the Heart Internet brand.

Posts by Matthew (242)

Textpattern

Textpattern is a standards-compliant content management system with an intuitive admin control panel and an active community. It’s surprisingly powerful yet simple to use, and benefits from a wide range of plugins and unlimited authors per install.

Read more about the features or try the demo.

Pixelpost

If you’re into photography yourself or have clients who want a gallery or photoblog, then Pixelpost may be the perfect solution. You can get set up and running in seconds with our one-click install, and there are plenty of free templates to choose from if you don’t want to create your own.

Check out the demo.

Mantis

Need to track bugs within your internal systems or for the software you create? Mantis is a great free bug tracking system with a large array of features.

Play with the demo or have a look at the feature list.

PHProjekt

Looking for a way to get more organised? PHProjekt is a full-scale project management system ideal for agencies and businesses who have multiple projects on the go. PHProjekt is extremely well-structured and ideal for tracking project progress and keeping all the team members up to date with developments.

Take PHProjekt for a test drive.

phpMyFAQ

Add an FAQ or knowledge base to your website in seconds with phpMyFAQ. It’s easy to get set up and running, and you retain full control over the look, feel and functionality as it’s self-hosted.

Take a look at a site using phpMyFAQ.

We’re always taking requests for (non-Magento!) one-click installs, so please leave a comment below if there are any one-clicks you’d like to see.

Name:Ben Scott

About:As Senior Web Designer, Ben oversees all of Heart Internet's design, usability, SEO and conversion optimisation. Since joining the team in 2009, Ben has redesigned the Heart Internet website as well as the newsletters, HostPay templates, control panel and much more.

Posts by Ben (92)

When you log in to eXtend you will see a new icon in the “Web Tools” section called “Manage multi-sites”.

This will take you to the management page where you can set up your additional websites.

If you are already a Business Pro customer, you don’t need to do anything to qualify for this change; we have already automatically added it to your account.

Upgrade your hosting
If you are a Starter pro or Home pro customer and you want to upgrade to a Business Pro, simply go to ‘Upgrade hosting’ in your customer control panel, choose the Business Pro account, and you are done. It is as simple, as that.

Name:Matthew Telfer

About:Matthew is Heart Internet's Marketing Manager, and has held senior marketing positions in the web hosting industry for 5 years. With a passion for online marketing, Matthew is responsible for shaping strategy and developing the Heart Internet brand.

Posts by Matthew (242)

What is OpenCart?

OpenCart is a powerful ecommerce solution packed with features so you can create your own online shop. If you’ve thought about selling online – or your customers have – then OpenCart is an attractive and user-friendly way to create a store and start making money.

Some of OpenCart’s many features include:

• Unlimited products and categories
• Multi-currency support
• Product reviews and ratings
• Template designs
• More than 20 payment options and 8 shipping options
• Integrated discount code system
• SEO benefits
• Sales reports and printable invoices
• Back up and restore tools
• Automatic image resizing
• Guest checkouts

Try the demo here

How do I install OpenCart?
If you’re a web hosting customer, simply log into eXtend and scroll down to the Ecommerce section to install OpenCart.

If you’re a reseller, you can also offer a one-click install of OpenCart to your customers. To activate OpenCart installs for your customers, you will need to edit the hosting package(s) in question. Choose the package you want to add OpenCart to, then check the ‘Synchronise accounts’ box, and scroll down to the OpenCart checkbox and check it. At the bottom of the page, save your changes.

Name:Craig Cotter

About:As Product Manager, Craig's role is to put our customers at the heart of all our decision making and ensure that our products continue to lead the market, through product development and testing, along with consulting with our focus groups.

Posts by Craig (22)

Previously capped at 20GB of space, 100 MySQL databases and 60GB of bandwidth usage per month, you can now develop your website to its full potential without worrying about hitting limits.

If you’re already a Home Pro web hosting customer, you’ve now been upgraded completely free of charge! You don’t need to do anything beyond exploring all the possibilities that our unlimited hosting has to offer.

If you currently have a Starter Pro web hosting package, now is a great time to upgrade to the unlimited bandwidth, web space and databases that our Home Pro package has to offer. In addition to unlimited web hosting, you can take advantage of features such as 10,000 mailboxes, 10,000 additional FTP logins, 10,000 subdomains, free one-click installs of popular software such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, and much more. Both existing and new customers can buy Home Pro web hosting packages for just £8.99 per month.

Find out more about our Home Pro web hosting package.

Name:Jenni Brown

About:Jenni is Heart Internet's SEO & Social Media Marketing Executive. Responsible for blogging, SEO and Heart Internet's Twitter and Facebook engagement, Jenni is a social network enthusiast and has been blogging for a decade.

Posts by Jennifer (99)

You’ll learn how to change headings, link colours and also be given a brief overview of how to change button styles within the user control panel. This video will also demonstrate the effectiveness of Firebug and how applying this tool could shave hours off your website development time.

As usual, all the videos can be found within the video section of your customer control panel or alternatively you can check out our YouTube channel (Make sure you subscribe to be the first to know about new video releases).

Remember, you need to have HostPay installed before you can follow this tutorial, luckily we have a demonstration on that as well! – Check that out here.

Customising HostPay: Part 3

Any questions or feedback please leave them in the comments box below!

Name:Ben Scott

About:As Senior Web Designer, Ben oversees all of Heart Internet's design, usability, SEO and conversion optimisation. Since joining the team in 2009, Ben has redesigned the Heart Internet website as well as the newsletters, HostPay templates, control panel and much more.

Posts by Ben (92)

Out with the old

The beginning of the year is a great time to do an in-depth assessment of your website. What could be improved? What’s missing or broken? What needs updating? Check your stats and ask visitors for feedback to improve their experience on your website. Make sure there are no dead ends causing visitors to leave; offer them something new on every page and provide a clear call to action so they don’t feel lost.

It’s also a good idea to do a review of your website’s sitemap. Are there any links you need to add, remove or redirect? What does your website’s structure look like? Check each link for errors, and keep an ‘off the record’ document with a link to every page of your website if you’re deliberately excluding pages from your sitemap for any reason.

Markup is a great tool to annotate webpages. As well as making reminders for yourself, you can highlight aspects of your site that need refreshing without the hassle and waste of printing pages. It’s relevant whether you’re a writer, designer, developer, or all of those things, because you can differentiate between changes using the various colours on offer. Markup is also useful for team collaboration and explaining changes to freelancers and agencies.

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In with the new

Organisational tools such as Workflowy and Remember the Milk are ideal for keeping track of what needs doing and what you’ve completed.

Planning your content in advance can save a lot of hassle, particularly if you work with other people. If you’re outsourcing any design or content, then planning at least two or three months ahead can also have a positive impact on your budget. If you do all your own design and content, then create a schedule with deadlines to maximise your use of time and help you stay motivated.

If you have pages of your website which are outdated but still provide SEO value, then consider what content you can add to give them new value, or how to best refer visitors to the important core pages of your site.

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Bridging the gap

2010’s been and gone – but don’t write it off just yet. Now’s your chance to review what you achieved and make a note of areas which still offer potential. Think about:

• What was successful? (e.g. a great marketing campaign, an increase in hits, a comment-rich blog post, an improved design)
• What did you achieve as a result? (e.g. a new client, more visitors, a valuable contact, a great backlink)
• What didn’t you get round to doing? (add it to your 2011 list!)
• What could be improved? (e.g. number of 404s, small design details, social media strategy)
• What do you need to get rid of? (e.g. pages that compete and conflict with each other, pages which have no SEO or visitor value, old/outdated promotional pages and images)

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Developing your action plan

Divide your website into key aspects or areas (e.g. design, content, promotion), and then make a list of improvements and additions to make in each. Although there will be some overlap, dealing with one section at a time helps create more manageable chunks and stops you feeling overwhelmed. It’s also a good way to brainstorm fresh ideas. Spending more planning time on areas you’ve neglected or put off in 2010 can help you get to grips with carrying out your actions in 2011.

Make some new year’s resolutions for yourself as well as your website. Perhaps you’re thinking about making a commitment to blog more, or learn a new skill, or get familiar with new software. Take advantage of all the lists and round-ups of helpful resources that are posted around the web at this time of year by picking out the most useful and bookmarking them.

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Finally…

If you’re a web hosting customer

Why not explore the range of add-ons and free one-installs we offer? Kick off your new year by getting to grips with a new forum or CMS, or quickly create a mobile-friendly version of your site with goMobi mobile website builder.

If you’re a reseller hosting customer

Refresh your products and services with planned new year marketing and promotions. Offer a discount to kick start sales, and extend your reach by offering more add-ons to your customers such as Hosted Exchange, SSL Certificates, dedicated servers and mobile website builder software.

If you have a dedicated server

Have a spring clean. Make sure all your scripts are up to date, and delete anything you aren’t using any more to improve space, speed and security… and don’t forget about the backups!

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Name:Jenni Brown

About:Jenni is Heart Internet's SEO & Social Media Marketing Executive. Responsible for blogging, SEO and Heart Internet's Twitter and Facebook engagement, Jenni is a social network enthusiast and has been blogging for a decade.

Posts by Jennifer (99)

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What is Concrete5?

Concrete5 is a content management system (CMS) with a lot to offer. It’s open source but managed by a small team of developers, creating a happy medium of being flexible but not sprawling. The added benefit is that everything from themes to add-ons ‘just works’, without security issues, slowdown or abandoned projects. Add to that a growing community offering tips, support and developer jobs, and Concrete5 is an excellent foundation for your website. Concrete5 hosting at Heart Internet includes all our standard advantages such as free set up, 24/7 UK support, a UK-based data centre and unlimited other one-click installs from our large script library.

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Why Concrete5 hosting?

Concrete5 provides you with the building blocks to create your website exactly how you want it. The clever architecture means you can add components easily without endless editing to make features behave how you intended. Whether you’re creating an ecommerce store, a blog, forums, a portfolio, a gallery, or any other type of website, Concrete5 hosting provides everything you need to create your ideal website.

Other benefits include:

• In-context WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing – Great if you’re building websites for clients who will need to go on and make changes themselves.
• Extensive online community – Get support whenever you need it, and even post jobs and find developers. Concrete5′s Karma points system with badges and weekly raffles ensures a growing community.
• Ideal for websites of all sizes – Concrete5 is used by everyone from individual bloggers to governments, universities and large companies world-wide.
• SEO shortcuts – Concrete5 makes it easy to install Google Analytics and track stats without touching code. Our Concrete5 hosting also provides SEO benefits to websites with UK audiences.
• Design flexibility – Give your website a unique and professional finish rather than a CMS feel. If design isn’t your strong point, there are plenty of themes to choose from or you could get one custom-made.
• Tried and tested add ons – Concrete5 state that ‘each add-on is tested by a peer review board and follows an architecture that will keep the rest of your site safe’.
• Cheap, straightforward Concrete5 hosting – Take advantage of our feature-rich Concrete5 hosting, which includes an easy, free set up and 24/7 web hosting support.

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Concrete5 hosting & installation

Concrete5 hosting is available for all our Home Pro, Business Pro and reseller hosting customers via a simple one-click install which will get you up and running in seconds. Setting up Concrete5 with us is completely free. Furthermore, we provide UK Concrete5 hosting so that your website has a ranking advantage in national search engines such as Google UK.

Heart Internet resellers can activate Concrete5 hosting via the reseller control centre (you’ll need to check the ‘Synchronise’ box to activate it) – your customers can then install Concrete5 via the one-click install in eXtend. Web hosting customers can install Concrete5 within seconds via the eXtend control panel as well. If you’re not yet a customer, check out our web hosting packages to get started.

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Name:Jenni Brown

About:Jenni is Heart Internet's SEO & Social Media Marketing Executive. Responsible for blogging, SEO and Heart Internet's Twitter and Facebook engagement, Jenni is a social network enthusiast and has been blogging for a decade.

Posts by Jennifer (99)

Purpose

Why are you offering resources? It might be for link building, website promotion, increasing visitors, search engine optimisation, personal reputation or a combination of several of those, but consider which factors are the most important. Outlining your main purpose(s) will help you answer questions such as how much time you want to dedicate, how many resources you want to offer, whether they will be free or paid and so on.

Producing

An obvious question, but what resources are you going to offer? Popular freebies include fonts, Photoshop brushes and textures, WordPress themes, buttons, banners, wallpapers and icons, but the possibilities are endless. This is where ‘purpose’ resurfaces; if your resources are for minimum effort (e.g. page building or SEO), then buttons and banners are a quick and easy way to get content up. If you’re in it for the long haul or looking to make money, then it’s worth going to the effort of creating themes and fonts.

Check old files and folders on your computer to see if you have any forgotten or unused resources that you could tweak, develop into a collection, or get inspiration from. You may also want to consider which types of resources fit in best with the rest of your website’s content for SEO purposes, and what text and keywords you can include on the page(s).

Finally, will you be creating resources regularly, or are these a one-off? If regularly, you might want to think about how they will fit into your schedule and how much work is required.

Presentation

Where will you put your resources on your website, and how will visitors get to them? If your website has simple navigation, then it may be a case of adding a simple page link in your menu. For larger websites (particularly commercial ones), you may be faced with the issue of how to incorporate your resources without detracting from your other content whilst making them easy for your visitor to find and come back to. No small task! Promoting your resources will help, but try not to bury them too deep into your website, and include at least two links in different, logical places where possible. If you’re offering a variety of different resources, it might be worth giving them their own section or even setting up a subdomain for them.

How will your resources look on the page? You’ll need to incorporate a title, description, image and download/payment link, but what about organisation using page anchors, in-page navigation etc.? Will you use thumbnails, screenshots, previews, a gallery…?

Make sure you keep your downloads as consistent as the page(s) you display them on. For example, if you’re using zip files, keep the subdirectories and locations of images, readme file and so on consistent throughout all your downloads. Label subfolders, pages and images clearly, and include instructions and explanations in a text file where necessary.

The documentation you include with your download should also detail what the user can do with your work in terms of modification and redistribution. There are six Creative Commons licences available for you to choose from. Requiring a link back to your website is great for promotion and link building. Furthermore, for resources such as themes and scripts, you can incorporate a specific string of text and set up a Google Alert to alert you when someone’s using it so you can check they’ve kept your link intact.

If you’re offering paid resources, how do you want people to buy them – a full checkout process, PayPal, emailing you, etc.? You also need to decide whether you’re offering multiple downloads of resources or not, and price them accordingly. If you have a large library of resources, you might want to use scripts to display the most popular downloads, latest uploads and so on to make browsing faster.

Promoting

Even the highest-quality resources need some promotion behind them, so factor in extra time for this. Depending on your ‘purpose’, promoting your content may take a few minutes or continuing hours of work, so here are a few ideas to mix and match:

• Blog – A quick and obvious choice, mention your resources in your blog and any updates pages or feeds you have.
• Twitter & Facebook – Post a link, politely ask people to retweet or share it or even ask for opinions if you’re feeling brave.
• Submit to community sites such as The Web Blend, Digg and StumbleUpon. Already being an active member can be a big advantage and is worth spending time on if you produce a good amount of content.
• Forums – Promote your resources (without spamming, and only if there’s a relevant section) on web design message boards.
• Research collectives and galleries to showcase and promote your resources, for example Theme Forest.
• Include Twitter, Facebook and other social networking buttons next to each resource set so people can share them easily. These are also useful for stats.

Track downloads using Google Analytics or proudly display them. These stats can help you prune resources, removing less popular ones and adding more of the same type or style.

Final tips…

• It’s tedious after you’ve spent ages designing, coding and uploading, but go through the process of browsing, downloading, extracting (and installing, if relevant), all your resources as a visitor would, to check everything works as expected.
• Keep instructions and download links obvious on your resource pages. Link your screenshot or thumbnail to your download URL where possible, as they are often more tempting to click than text.
• Make any limitations clear before download – for example if the font you’ve created is for PCs and not compatible with Macs – and offer compatible versions where possible.
• Check all licences and copyright information for fonts and images before using them in your resources to make sure their requirements correlate with your usage.

Name:Jenni Brown

About:Jenni is Heart Internet's SEO & Social Media Marketing Executive. Responsible for blogging, SEO and Heart Internet's Twitter and Facebook engagement, Jenni is a social network enthusiast and has been blogging for a decade.

Posts by Jennifer (99)

In this video you’ll find out how to create gradient images, change the background colours of page elements, changing bullet styles and also how to change button colours.

In the third and final installment of this video series, we’ll be finishing off the skinning of the front-end template and also how to make changes within the control panel. Part 3 will be coming soon!

As usual, all the videos can be found within the video section of your customer control panel or alternatively you can check out our YouTube channel (Make sure you subscribe to be the first to know about new video releases).

Remember, you need to have HostPay installed before you can follow this tutorial, luckily we have a demonstration on that as well! – Check that out here.

Customising HostPay: Part 2

Any questions or feedback please leave them in the comments box below!

Cheers

Name:Ben Scott

About:As Senior Web Designer, Ben oversees all of Heart Internet's design, usability, SEO and conversion optimisation. Since joining the team in 2009, Ben has redesigned the Heart Internet website as well as the newsletters, HostPay templates, control panel and much more.

Posts by Ben (92)