Company name: 4little1s.com
Company website: www.4little1s.com
Company contact: sales@4littles.com

How did you start your business?

I set up 4little1s.com to juggle a busy home life with children and pay school fees. I looked at some part time jobs but just could not work out a good home/work balance. Starting a business seemed a good idea and thought I should at least work in an area I know about from experience

What products or services does your business offer?

We offer a wide range baby gifts for new parents, ranging from a little keepsake box, wooden and soft toys as well as our very popular baby hampers. One of our favourites are the baby clothing bouquets, a wonderful bunch of flowers with baby clothes in them. Finally, we have recently added a range of modern and contemporary nursery furniture which is proofing to be very successful.

What were the main challenges you faced when setting up your business?

The main challenges were along the lines of finding a web designer that we felt comfortable with in terms of price but also understanding of what we were looking to achieve. Also refining the behind the scenes processes such as Terms and Conditions and the delivery process took a lot longer than we initially thought

How would you rate the success you've achieved?

When we look back at the sheer volume of work completed in such a short space of time we can hardly believe it. We are very proud to have achieved the point we are currently at and continue to strive towards the future. I don’t think any business can afford to stand still

Why should customers and clients use your services?

We are competitively priced, knowledgeable of our products and reliable. Our ‘handmade for you’ products are made exclusively for us in California and we ship them to your door in the UK. If you are looking for a unique product, this range offers it.

How has UK Business Forums benefited your business?

UK Business Forums has benefited us in a number of ways. It has been an excellent area to learn and find out about new ideas, get people’s opinions and share information with a community of like minded people. Finally, a number of contacts and networking opportunities have been used.

What are your plans for the future?

We would like to build the business further and negotiate some better deals to buy at wholesale. I would like to get out more to source products and attend more trade fairs to see what is available. Designing our own brand and range of baby bedding is another idea.

What are your three tips for business success?

I guess to pinch a well know sports trainers strap line, ‘Just do it’ would have to be my first, don’t underestimate the sheer volume of work to get going would be the second. Finally, the third would probably be to do something you enjoy.

4little1s.com can be found at http://www.4little1s.com for all your baby gifts and Izziwotnot nursery furniture

Search engines and Robots

Starting at the beginning

Robots are pieces of software that explore the Internet to discover, review and index what they find. You have very little control over them and are also known as trawlers, crawlers, spiders, wanderers and worms.

Robots come in 3 varieties, the good, the bad and the ugly. The good ones search and index the Internet and register the information it finds. The most common being the search engines such as Google or Yahoo which sends them out to explore. These then go through your website to assist in classifying and applying a rank to your site. Other robots simply check your web site for errors and report back on omissions, errors on links and any content that has been updated – there are others but the list goes on and on. That’s it for the goodies, what about the baddies…….

Bad and ugly ones look to cause havoc by searching for weaknesses in your code and then extract information from you without your knowledge. The most common occurrence of this being to spam you or 'harvest' your email address to then sell on to other people….very annoying. As per the goodies there are others and the list goes on and on.

Very interesting, but so what ?

Well, in order to get listed in the search engines naturally and get as much targeted traffic to you as possible, you need to know this, so read on…..

Most indexing is done automatically with the notable exception of two really important directories, DMOZ and the Yahoo Directory. Believe it or not, these are reviewed by humans and as a result, take longer. Note: The DMOZ submission is free but it can take many months to get listed.

Robots are a good thing so make your site available for them

What should you do?

On the assumption you do want a robot to visit your site, you must encourage them and make it easy for them to trawl your site. Finally see below for the top must do points:

• Add your URL to the Search Engines
• Submit to DMOZ (it free! But takes months)
• Submit to the Yahoo Directory (Not free but can be listed in a couple of weeks)
• Make a site map (search for Xml sitemaps)
• Link it to your Home Page
• ………wait

Remember that robots like to see

·          Links (internal and external)

·          Text (lots of it)

·          ALT Tags on your pictures

·          Site Maps (on your pages + uploaded to the search engines)

·          Page titles

·          Meta descriptions

·          Meta keywords

Robots don’t like to see

·          Java script

·          FLASH

·          Most animations

·          Images (for the moment)

I’m scared of spiders and don’t want them

Probably not the best thing in the world, but you can prevent spiders coming to see you. If you create a file called robots.txt, you have the ability to tell the robots what not to spider. This does have its uses, for example, if you have a telephone list on your site that you didn’t realize was suddenly going to made public once the spiders came to town, add the exclusion to this file.

How do I know if they have been?

The easiest way is to look at your server logs, certain IP addresses can even tell you what type of spider came to visit. There are third party utilities that can extract your logs and make them more readable and friendly.

Author: 4little1s.com

Terms: This document can be copied as long as the links below stay intact.

4little1s.com is an online UK baby gifts, baby clothes and Izziwotnotnursery furniture web site located at http://www.4little1s.com

A ex city banker and now a busy mum of 2 living in Surrey explains how she has started up a small online web business called 4little1s.com, the initial intention being to pay for school fees:-

I decided to start up a home based online web business to provide an income to cover school fees. Being a mum at home and looking after 2 small children means that during the day, while they are at school I have a few hours that can be used to work.  Trying to get a part time job proved difficult.  I want to be around for my children, to take them to school and to pick them up at the end of the day and be there when they are not well.  A home based part time business seemed the ideal opportunity and would fit in around my available time.

I decided to start a business that I had hands on experience of at home.  Initially the plan was to create some really lovely gift sets for newly arrived little ones.  I wanted to make it easy to do, providing baby gifts, clothes, shoes, cards and also matching gifts for siblings too.  I am now working on including pampering items and furniture all for new mums and babies on our website www.4little1s.com

I will be offering a wide variety of products, some handmade and sourced locally in the UK, some specifically hand crafted and made to order for us in California, others being more unusual items from around the world.  I have been attending trade shows and am continually on the look out for new innovative and inspiring products.  Where I can support fair-trade and organic produce I will do and I am also conscious of the volume of unnecessary packaging, so I aim to manage this well. 

So where am I now?  Well, it is 6 months since the idea was born and we are trading and sales are coming as our name gets known. Marketing has been via Google Ad words and MS Ad Centre which is working well. Suppliers are in place and established, as are all the banking and company registration information.  We decided on using a web design company and a well know product for E commerce called Actinic to build the site with us managing the day to day running of it with product uploads etc.  Maintenance of the website, general paperwork administration and orders keep me busy for around 4 hours a day, which fits in around my day just right.  We have a number of interesting opportunities and ideas and can’t wait to pursue them!

Top tips: