Online Charity Shop Websites

If you are a charity that has products to sell online you may want to consider having an online shop on your website.

Items such as Christmas cards and gifts can be sold via an easy to use online shop. You can also sell other items to do with your charity and even set up a donations page in order for people to give to your good cause.

This functionality is all possible as part of the design and development of a new website or can be added to an existing website. An online shop can really bring your charity to life on the internet.

Online shops for charities need to contain certain elements and take into account certain factors. When considering the interface, the design needs to be attractive and aimed at the right audience.

The layout must also encourage shoppers to buy and there should be a variety of payment solutions so the customers can easily buy items or make donations.

The online shop should also be easy to control and update. A suite of tools are needed to allow easy management of stock. If the shop is easy to manage, a charity can then concentrate on raising money and not worrying about their website.

Cornish WebServices are experts at providing online shops for charities. We offer easy to use systems that are simple to manage and provide an immediate revenue stream for a charity via its website.

We also provide complete charity website design if you are looking for a new website with which to promote your charity. 

Our web design and development rates are reasonable and we have many years experience of designing charity websites. For more information contact us today.

F-Commerce – the New Facebook Gift Service

Back in September Facebook began offering to a limited audience its new gift service which allows users to send real gifts to Facebook friends directly from within the network.

The system works by allowing users to choose a gift as well as a card to send to friends on Facebook. A gift notice is then posted on the friend's timeline or sent as a PM (private message). 

The friend can then unwrap the gift virtually before receiving the real gift at their address. Gifts can be sent from birthday reminders or from a friend's timeline.

Facebook is also giving the option of paying right away or at a later time plus they also are letting friends exchange gifts for something else if they wish.

The gift service is being roll out to Facebook members globally over the next few weeks.

If successful this shift towards ecommerce or rather F-Commerce could spark a big change in the way users interact with Facebook. We already know that social network users tend to prefer to interact as much as possible within the network with an increasing tendency to even search and review products, companies and organisations solely using the internal search and friends and family recommendations.

Currently Facebook is working to attract big brands and is already working with retailers including babyGap, Fab, Brookstone, Dean & Deluca, L'Occitane, Lindt, ProFlowers, Random House, Inc. and NARS Cosmetics. How the service will develop and what opportunities there will be for smaller and more niche retailers remains to be seen.

In the short term it is now becoming even more important for B2C companies to ensure they have a positive social presence. For a nonsense practical approach to social media and online marketing talk to Extra Digital on +44 (0)330 555 5790 or visit http://extradigital.co.uk/

Fun Things to do This Autumn

I love Autumn! Why? Because even though it can be wet and cold there are so many great things to do especially as a family. 

Last year I was lucky enough to be able to take the Autumn half term holiday off work and spend it with my children we had such a great time so I decided this year I would work all summer and have Autumn half term off instead. 

Today I started to think about all the great things I could do to take full advantage of the season and came up with following list. What will you be doing this Autumn?

1. Go apple picking and make homemade toffee apples

2. Build a tent with the children using blankets & chairs

3. Plant bulbs for spring

4. Sort out and donate old clothing to a charity

5. Host an indoor picnic

6. Take a walk and collect leaves, pine cones etc…then make an autumn display at home 

7. Make a pine cone bird feeder

8. Have a bonfire, bake jacket potatoes and toast marshmallows

9. Carve a Pumpkin

10. Share a scary story with the children

11. Do some autumn crafts

12. Give yourself a spa night at home

13. Stay in your pyjamas all day long

14. Host a Halloween Party

Make Time for Fun

As a working mum I know its isn’t always easy to make time for fun even when you’ve finished work your time can often be swallowed up with lots of domestic chores.  

One of the best investments we made as a family was to employ a cleaner. Knowing that the kitchen floor has been washed and the house hovered and dusted has lifted the burden of home cleaning off my shoulders and really frees up my time to spend with the children.

If you live in the Cambridge, Suffolk or North Hertfordshire Brighters provide trustworthy, reliable and conscientious home cleaners from 2 hours per week and can cover a wide range of domestic chores including hoovering, cleaning floors and interior windows, dusting, polishing and ironing.

You can contact them on 0845 644 8214 or visit http://www.brighters.co.uk for more information.

Creating Character Cross Stitch

If you are looking for a new hobby, how about trying needlecraft? Hobbies like cross stitch, embroidery, tapestry, crochet and knitting are all very creative and absorbing – plus they give you the chance to make something special for friends and family.

It is a great opportunity to create really personal gifts for loved ones or make a beautiful decorative gift for your home. A lot of these needlecraft hobbies are fairly simple to pick up and you can buy kits that contain all the instructions and materials you need to get you started. 

Cross stitch is a really simple needlecraft technique to start off with. You just follow a simple pattern to create a wonderful picture or decorative item like a cushion cover. There are plenty of different designs available with cross stitch so you will never get bored and if you are making a cross stitch gift, you can choose an appropriate pattern for the person.

For instance there are plenty of cross stitch patterns available for children, featuring their favourite cartoon character or animal. There are also wonderful floral patterns and commemorative designs as well as something a bit more unusual like oriental designs.

A great place to buy cross stitch kits is a fantastic craft website called Readicut Crafts. This website has been recently redeveloped and is really user friendly, containing lots of wonderful craft items and creative ideas for you or your family.

Readicut Crafts is an online shop so you can buy directly from the site and have your cross stitch items delivered to your door. So why not have a browse of Readicut Crafts and see if it inspires you to get creative with needlecraft.

What Is Home Cinema?

Cinema Entertainment At Home

The term gets tossed around a lot in electronics shops and online, but what actually is home cinema and why should everyone be getting so worked up about it?

Home cinema is a type of home entertainment set-up that tries to reproduce a movie theater or public cinema experience and mood in a private home, usually with the use of specialist video and audio equipment. Did you know that it is also sometimes called home theatre? Strange considering few people can afford to have live performances in their homes!

History of Home Movies

Home movies first became popular in the 1950s as film projector equipment became affordable to ordinary people. In the 1980s, multi-channel audio systems and laser discs took home cinema to new levels. In the early to mid 90s, a typical home cinema setup would probably have had a laser disc or VHS player fed through to a large television set, although some people were already using expensive front projectors in a darkened room. Since then home cinema technology has progressed rapidly with the development of DVD videos, surround sound speakers, high definition television, 3D home cinema and Blu-Ray discs.

Home Cinema Today

Today, the term "home cinema" covers a wide range of systems designed for watching films at home. A basic setup, by modern standards, would be a large screen television with at least a 27" screen, a DVD player and a surround sound speaker system. More expensive setups might include Blu-ray disc players, a home theater PC or HTPC computer (or similar digital receiver streaming devices), a high definition (HD) video projecdtor and a projection screen, five to seven surround sound speakers and a subwoofer for bass effects. The most advanced home cinema sytems are 3D enabled, using 3D television sets and projectors as well as Blu-ray 3D players which use special glasses so viewers can see 3D movies.

Home Cinema Setups

Home theater means different things to different people. Home cinema designs and layouts are personal choices and the only known minimum set of requirements for a home theater are a television or projector, speakers for surround sound and some form of DVD player (sometimes a dedicated machine, but it is common in lower budget setups to have multi-function devices which also play DVDs, such as personal computers or games consoles).

High end home cinema setups, which can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, have expensive digital projectors and projection screens, and often custom-built screening rooms which include cinema-style chairs and top-grade sound equipment designed to mimic commercial cinema performance.

If you are interested in home cinema setups and would like to speak to an expect on the subject, consider visiting www.grahams.co.uk.

Wedding Photo Frame Gifts

A photo frame is a very adaptable gift which is why there are such a wide variety of photo frames, including personalised ones and engraved photo frames which can be given as wedding presents, birthday gifts or at more or less any other occasion.

A nice occasional photo frame can be an excellent wedding gift. Weddings are about memories, so giving a wedding photo frame means that those special "Kodak moments" captured during the day - be it at the reception, the wedding itself or the official photographs taken by hired professionals - can be enjoyed in a lovely presentation for years to come.

Since the proliferation of digital cameras, photographs are only rarely developed and printed off en masse, so presents such as photo albums are largely unneeded these days as they are simply uploaded online to social networking sites or photo sharing services such as Flickr and Facebook.

People still like to have pictures at home, however, and a wedding photo frame gift allows the happy couple to pick out their favourite shot of the big day to keep in pride of place on the mantelpiece and share with each other and their friends and family. Simply printing off a digital photograph and popping it into a generic frame simply does not do justice to the occasion, so a proper wedding themed photo frame makes the activity far more special.

A wedding frame gift with a photo from the big day is a meaningful and personal gift that can be treasured as a keepsake and displayed proudly for many years afterwards. Some places offer engraving or further personalisation services, or you can get autograph photo frames to be signed by the bride and groom with their sentiments, or even for the guests to leave notes and congratulations messages on the event. You can also get engagement photo frame gifts and even wedding anniversary photo frames which can make a lovely regular gift so the couple ends up with a beautiful themed gallery charting their relationship over the years!

Photo frames are very versatile as presents and can be given for almost any occasion, from weddings and engagements to birthdays, christenings and graduations. Don't settle for just a frame, either; you can also get photo trinket boxes, themed photo albums and other photo gifts which can be themed and personalised to any special day or event. Even better, these presents are often inexpensive when compared to impersonal gifts like flowers or chocolates, as well as showing a far greater amount of thought and care in selecting the gift.