With no call-out fee and a no-fix-no-fee policy Caspian I.T. provides computer and laptop, repairs and services for the Croydon, Crawley and Brighton areas.

Rates are charged at £40 + VAT per hour; most issues are resolved within the first hour. Collect & Return service also available.

Every service for your computer. From a simple home laptop repair to a complex server network; Caspian IT offer a truly high quality service to help you keep your home and business running smoothly.

Our experienced and professional network engineers are available when you need them: We come to your home or office. We also offer a collect and return service with a fixed price labour charge.

An efficient fast and stable computer network is the bedrock of business success. I.T. can make a huge difference to a small company – helping you get it right the first time is what Caspian IT do.”

If you’re wondering whether Caspian IT can help you with a computer problem you might have, the answer is most probably yes.

We normally deal with home users or the owners of small and medium sized businesses.

We not only repair broken laptops and desktop computers, we diagnose faults that might be caused by a virus or spyware. Caspian IT also offer a series of highly configured servers for sale that can provide you with an assortment of online services that maximise the flow of information in your organisation.

See article: Simon Nicol on the Capricorn 15 project.

On-Site

You can expect an efficient and professional service – you have a Windows expert on demand!

Home customers
You can book an engineer now by calling:

08000 949 177. Depending on the time of day and distance we can normally book a visit within a few hours. Rates are £40.00 per hour excluding VAT. Most problems are resolved within the first hour.

Business customers
With a friendly face and an expert knowldge of computers networks. Caspian IT can install, configure, diagnose and repair Windows based server networks. Caspian IT have a broad client base generally comprised of small local businesses, but we also provide area-wide support for larger clients.

Outsourcing your IT support is the most cost effective way to maintain your network.

Rates for businesses the on-site service are nominally set to £40 p/h but can be £75 p/h for advanced or multi-server configurations.

Caspian IT offer you a home for your IT needs – call our free hotline now for your future needs and the needs of the now.

30th June 2009 – Google data centres are the key here. I’ve been working on SEO for this website for over a year now honing and tweaking and I’ve found that different browsers do indeed provide different search results in Google.

I’ve read some other pages on the Internet about this but I wasn’t entirely in agreement with some of the conclusions drawn.

I have noticed that using IE 8 I’ve got top position for my chosen ‘key words’ but using Safari, Fire Fox and Chrome I am getting varying results, one thing I did notice though, now that I’m getting crawled by Google on a regular basis (I’m listed in about 10 minutes after creating a post) that the results I was getting from Google were at least a day older using Safari and Firefox than they were when using IE. The only way this makes any sense is to assume that the search results being returned are coming from a different Google data centre.

Oh dear.

I think it’s about time I explained a few basics about Internet marketing. I’ve just been looking at my Facebook account and unbelievably I had received a spam email that was forwarded to me by a friend that had fallen for what I had seen for the obvious publicity scam that it was…

The 21st Century Gold Rush.

Yup. They say that history repeats itself and today I have witnessed a fine example that it really does though not necessarily in exactly the same form.

Today I have finally managed to get myself ranked in Google as #1 (for a specific number of key words that I will not divulge here, but let’s just say they’re a good choice of words for my line of work and there’s a reasonable amount of competition for them).

A year ago I was half way down the third page, then after a bit of a struggle I managed to get myself to the bottom of the first page (I even remember being happy about that) and in being on the first page on Google I thought I was bound to get busy… nope.

After months of tweaking the wording and honing my SEO skills I managed to get my site to position #3. This I was quite happy with, however I was still not getting any calls - there was a little bit of traffic to my site but not much, there were signs of life, but I honestly would have thought I’d have received a lot more traffic than I was getting. No I’m not about to tell you that all of a sudden with this new amazing scheme X you’ll suddenly be getting millions of hits and make a fortune.

In fact what I’m about to tell you is rather dull.

After a year of struggling with mastering SEO  I’m finally at #1 and you know what?

So what.

There, that’s it. I’m at #1 and I still get just a dribble of traffic. When I was at position #3 and only had a few visits per day I thought to myself that somehow people must only be clicking on the top link, that somehow it must only be the person in top place that gets the lions share of the ‘clicks’ however I’m now there and it’s just not true.

I apologise to give you this information but I thought it might be nice if someone wrote an article that was actually the truth.

In fact writing this post made me remember the great Californian ‘Gold Rush’ and of all the stories of how someone went to California dug up a bit of mud, found a gold mine and now they make 8 billion pounds per nanosecond for doing absolutely nothing.

If I knew where £10 of gold was buried, I’d be silly to set up a business that all it did was tell other people where the gold is when I could be helping myself. It seems to be that the actual ‘gold’ is telling people where the gold is. (I hope that makes sense)

For example if £10 of gold were buried I would be better off telling 1000 people that I know where the gold is buried and charging them each 2p for the information. It does seem a little deflating to know that being 1st place in Google doesn’t make a lot of difference, certainly if you receive a sales call from some silly man who wants to charge you a few hundred quid for being on the first page in Google (or even 1st place!) You can tell him to forget it.

(What you could actually do is find out exactly how much the words you want cost using Google AdWords and then only offering them a fraction of the price.)

The only magic is the sales pitch of a website that’s all, by getting people to believe, or rather leading people to believe that one is uber successful online actually does make one become so, or to put it another way ‘Other peoples belief becomes your reality’. That’s the way it seems to me as to how to be successful online – Holding up a wooden sign with an arrow saying “Californian Gold Rush -> THIS WAY!” and charging a small amount of money to point the sojourner in the direction of California.

I was watching a YouTube video online earlier today which was a link from one of these ‘get rich quick’ type pages and it was so obvious to me that this guy was totally lying it was shocking – He had every classic tel-tale sign of lying. Some of these marketers have the ability to talk for hours on end about absolutely nothing. Honestly give them one sentence that vaguely means something and these guys can spin it out to a 19 volume presentation, multi-series video diary. (It’s a bit like making ‘Rice Crispies’ – sorry I don’t know what they’re called in America or elsewhere, but it’s basically taking a single grain of rice and expanding it with hot air into something to make it look like it’s more than it really is).

The economy I’m afraid to say is exactly the same online as it is offline.

The moral of this story is: “The people who successfully make a living online are the people who get others to believe they are making a successful living online and will let you in on their ‘little secret’.”

Hopefully my next posting will be less negative, but I would rather write the truth and explain reality to others that be another proponent of this supposed online ‘gold rush’.

I dumped Microsoft Exchange a year ago in favour of Google Apps and I’m very glad I did.

Google are the best at email without doubt. It’s true to say that a lot can be done with Microsoft Exchange, but getting anything working with Exchange is so much more work. With Exchange, there’s a lot more to take care of with spam filtering, this connector, that service.

Once you start using Google Apps you’ll thank God that you did. I do like the thought of self-hosted email and a self hosted website for security purposes, but Google Apps is stunningly convenient. I think there’s still many improvements that could be made, but there email system is undeniably excellent.

Posted in response to an article written by Larry Dignan of ZD-Net