BUSINESS GRANT SUPPORT
Some of the Welsh Government’s money is made available by way of grants to fund schemes and initiatives that deliver the Welsh Government’s priorities.

We can tailor advice to your needs, helping to develop a funding package enabling you to start up, expand, modernise, restructure, or to develop new products or processes.

We have details of the following:

  • discretionary grants for capital investments
  • a scheme to help create new products or processes
  • a capital investment grant for tourism businesses
  • implementation grants to launch or expand firms supplying environmental goods and services
  • a capital grant to build new premises or extend existing property
  • a capital grant to help refurbish, extend or fit-out  existing or new premises.

Strong, innovative and competitive businesses are essential for the economy of Wales.

How can the grant help my business?
  • Business Mentoring
  • Market Research and Planning
  • Business Planning
  • Specialist Projects
  • Employment Mentoring

Am I eligible?
Assisted Areas are the most economically disadvantaged areas where regional aid for economic development may be granted under European Community Law. The scheme is discretionary and the grants in Wales if offered will relate to individual circumstances, including the location of the project and will always be the minimum amount needed for the project to proceed.

Business Planning
A business plan is essential for your enterprise. For your business expansion, the business plan is the roadmap for this future development. It is a key document when you are looking for business funding in Wales - whether applying for a simple overdraft or looking for new investment or capital.

The business plan helps potential funders understand your vision and goals for the business, how you are going to spend the invested or borrowed money, and how this will benefit the business and potential funding providers in Wales. It is the first source of information that most providers of funding or grants in Wales see about a company and is crucial in getting their attention and interest.

Market Planning
As a Marketing Plan is a key part of your business success, it forms a major part of the Business Plan. You need to decide which customers to target. You need to work out how you will reach and win new customers. You need to make sure that you keep existing customers happy. And you need to keep reviewing and improving everything you do to stay ahead of the competition.

To find out if you are eligible Contact Design Four.

BUSINESS GRANT SUPPORT
Some of the Welsh Government’s money is made available by way of grants to fund schemes and initiatives that deliver the Welsh Government’s priorities.

We can tailor advice to your needs, helping to develop a funding package enabling you to start up, expand, modernise, restructure, or to develop new products or processes.

We have details of the following:

  • discretionary grants for capital investments
  • a scheme to help create new products or processes
  • a capital investment grant for tourism businesses
  • implementation grants to launch or expand firms supplying environmental goods and services
  • a capital grant to build new premises or extend existing property
  • a capital grant to help refurbish, extend or fit-out  existing or new premises.

Strong, innovative and competitive businesses are essential for the economy of Wales.

How can the grant help my business?
  • Business Mentoring
  • Market Research and Planning
  • Business Planning
  • Specialist Projects
  • Employment Mentoring

Am I eligible?
Assisted Areas are the most economically disadvantaged areas where regional aid for economic development may be granted under European Community Law. The scheme is discretionary and the grants in Wales if offered will relate to individual circumstances, including the location of the project and will always be the minimum amount needed for the project to proceed.

Business Planning
A business plan is essential for your enterprise. For your business expansion, the business plan is the roadmap for this future development. It is a key document when you are looking for business funding in Wales - whether applying for a simple overdraft or looking for new investment or capital.

The business plan helps potential funders understand your vision and goals for the business, how you are going to spend the invested or borrowed money, and how this will benefit the business and potential funding providers in Wales. It is the first source of information that most providers of funding or grants in Wales see about a company and is crucial in getting their attention and interest.

Market Planning
As a Marketing Plan is a key part of your business success, it forms a major part of the Business Plan. You need to decide which customers to target. You need to work out how you will reach and win new customers. You need to make sure that you keep existing customers happy. And you need to keep reviewing and improving everything you do to stay ahead of the competition.

To find out if you are eligible Contact Design Four.

Design Four New Services

We have a host of exciting announcements for the New Year that can benefit your business and now at competitive new prices.

New improvements include:
- Multiple websites: manage 100s of websites via ONE master website. Ideal for franchising
- Image galleries, slideshows and videos right out of the box, everything you need for your website!
- Easier maintenance, content and image changes
- Easier copying and movement of articles and pages
- Improved search menu options
- Add background images
- Optimised for mobility! Dedicated rich mobile theme for Apple iPhones and Google Android mobiles
- Improved social media links including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin
- Improved search engine optimisation techniques including Google sitemap, keywords and phrases

Design Four now offer FREE online training as well as one-to-one training programmes. Sign up today by visiting our website at www.designfour.co.uk or call our web advice line.

What is Joomla?

Joomla is a 'framework' for building websites. Joomla provides a 'content management system' (CMS) for organizing and maintaining your website. Joomla is 'extendable', which means you can choose from thousands of Joomla extensions that easily 'plug-in' to enhance the appearance, expand the power and maximize the results of your website. Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everybody. The term 'free' can be misleading. Joomla is free to download. The web designer will then allocate time for the following:

  • provide a clear work report with total costs
  • interpreting the client's brief
  • look at the competition websites
  • search for domain availability before purchasing name
  • set-up hosting account
  • set-up email accounts
  • set-up a database to control the website content
  • design the layout of pages, logos, text and images
  • add extensions, plugins, components, modules
  • liase with client and provide 'off-line' proof design stages
  • amend the design, test and de-bug
  • complete all internal and external text and image links
  • provide search engine optimisation solutions
  • provide training
  • go 'live'
  • provide ongoing support services
  • provide future advanced web developments

Why choose Joomla?

Design Four are specialist in Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, osCommerce and Magento. We also work in Actinic, ColdFusion and build bespoke designs. We work in PHP and ASP languages. We have made a business decision to promote our Joomla services. There are several reasons for this decision but the main reasons are: system stability, ease of use, fastest growning CMS system, good support, exciting new developments, professional template designs, training programme support.

Which Joomla version should I use?

Design Four are currently upgrading all our client websites to Joomla 1.7 ready for major releases in 2012. There are a number of clients' still using Joomla 1.5. The latest version is 1.5.23. The main reason for this is that certain sites are using extensions that are not fully supported by Joomla 1.6 or 1.7. This will change in the next few years for most developers are now busy programming extensions to be compatible with 1.7 and beyond. Our advice would be to upgrade to the latest version 1.5.23 if you have an existing website. This version is then ready for a major upgrade to 1.7. If you are developing a website then do consider Joomla 1.7. We would not recommend 1.6 for this has now been replaced by 1.7

Introducing Joomla 1.7

The skies the limit! In case you had not heard, Joomla 1.7 was released on July 19, 2011. The new version now allows designers and developers exciting opportunities to produce professional, technical cutting edge designs. As well as retaining the core functions we enjoyed with Joomla 1.5 we now can extend our creativity in implementing new extensions, such as, image galleries, slideshows, videos and animation. Improved ease of use, download times, design flexibility are now in place.

How long does a website take to design?

A simple site can take as little as 2 to 3 days. More complex sites can take a month or more to develop. A shopping cart site containing 1,000s of products can be very time consuming. Design Four provide popular training programmes to allow clients' to control the administration of the site themselves. Clients' can ask the designer to maintain the website so they can concentrate on their core business. Help and support can be provided once the website goes 'live'. There are a number of scenarios which will determine how long a designer will allocate to a project. It is this time that needs to be charged for. Design companies should to be clear about their hourly charges and their support packages in order for clients' to stay within their budget.

What is a Joomla template?

You have probably seen 1,000s if not 10s of 1,000s of Joomla templates advertised on the internet. Some are free while others are obtained by a one-off charge or you are encourage to join a membership. You may have seen TV advertising offering you a domain name, hosting and website package using an automated website builder. These types of offers can help you set-up your website quickly and fairly easily by completing the design tasks yourself. If you require a very simple website then these packages maybe all you require. Be careful? Most are not cheap. Most hook you into an annual contract so fees are payable every 12 months. Changing the design layout can be complicated or not possible. Nearly ALL will not allow you to expand as your business expands in the future. Design Four do not offer these types of sites. Instead, we offer a personal service that can brand, customise and support your business website at a price which will suit your budget.

Should I upgrade from 1.5 and 1.6 to 1.7?

Should I update my Joomla 1.6 site to Joomla 1.7?
Absolutely you should. In fact, you must. Joomla 1.6 will reach the end of its life in August 2011, just a month away. After that, Joomla 1.6 will have no further security updates, meaning that if a security problem is discovered, it will not be addressed. And that means if your site is hacked due to a 1.6 vulnerability, you will have no recourse to fix the site, other than to move it to 1.7 anyway. You might as well move it sooner than later!

Will my Joomla 1.6 site continue to run if I don't upgrade?
Yes, if you don't upgrade your site, your site will run just fine ... for now. See the security updates issue above. Extensions builders will be building to the current version of Joomla, so if you ever want to add another extension to your 1.6 site, or you want to change the template, you will find some difficulty going forward.

How do I upgrade from 1.6 to 1.7?
First, if you're running Joomla 1.6, make sure you are running 1.6.5. This was released in late June, and it is the only version of Joomla 1.6 which will allow moving to 1.7.

Are my Joomla 1.6 extensions and templates compatible in Joomla 1.7?
We have been told that all extensions that are currently 1.6 compatible should not have an issue running in Joomla 1.7. As always, you will want to test this first. We strongly recommend making a copy of your site, upgrading it to 1.7, and testing the entire site thoroughly to make sure it works correctly, including the 3rd party extensions.

What new features and functionality can I expect in Joomla 1.7?
The team of people who brought you Joomla 1.6, after working for 3 years on the project, have brought you Joomla 1.7 in just 6 months. Obviously, this release does not have as many features in it, since there was significantly less development time involved with this release.

From a site builder's perspective, there are some minor improvements, such as the ability to add a background image to the custom HTML module, the ability to specify the site name before or after the page title, and a 'remove installation folder' button as part of the installation process.

From a developer's perspective, the changes are more significant. Joomla's framework is separated from the CMS, meaning that it's possible to build new applications with the Joomla framework. There were also over 300 bugs squashed with this release.

Should I update my Joomla 1.5 site to Joomla 1.7?
As always, the answer is 'it depends'. However, if your Joomla 1.5 site is working well, I would not move it yet. Joomla 1.5 will be supported through April 2012. Joomla 1.8 will be released in January 2012, and it is a long-term release, meaning it will be supported for 18 months instead of 6 months.

If I'm building a new site, should I build it in 1.5 or 1.7?
At this point in time, you will ultimately need to move your site to Joomla 1.8 in 6 months or so, whether it's in Joomla 1.5 or in Joomla 1.7. However, the move from 1.7 to 1.8 should be less painful than the move from 1.5 to 1.7. Less pain means less cost, so from a client's perspective, building in 1.7 makes a lot of sense at this point. (Source: The Joomla! Community Portal)