Foreign Perspectives

One topic that was hotly debated up until quite recently was whether or not there was an effect on your site traffic related to where you hosted your site. It has since been confirmed by google that they use the IP address of your hosting service as a factor in prioritising the search results.

This means that one very easy way to increase the traffic on your site is to ensure that either your site is hosted in the country in which your main customers are based. So, if you target the UK then your site should ideally be hosted in the UK.

Changing hosts can be a hassle and isn’t something to be done at your busy time of year. However, one simple change that you can do in minutes is simply to tell google that the site is targetted at the appropriate country. To do this, you need to sign up for google’s webmaster tools, claim the domain, verify that it’s yours and then tell them what country it’s appropriate to. Sounds complicated, but really it’s very easy and quick.

The improvement in traffic can be very dramatic and kicks in within a week or two. In our own case, one domain had THIRTY times the site traffic when it was moved from an American host to a UK one.

There are loads of devices around these days that can display video but few people seem to realise that almost all the devices can display the videos from almost all of the other devices and seem amazed when you can take, say, a video from youtube and play it on a PSP or for that matter record a TV programme and play it on their phone.

And yet, it’s usually fairly simple. Granted, youtube aren’t too keen on people recording the videos as such but if you can see it on your PC screen you can definitely record it. Once you have it recorded on the PC then you’ll find that there are a whole range of programs dedicated to changing video formats and thereby letting you copy it onto an iPOD or PSP or DVD.

Going from a broadcast TV programme is a little more complex in that you need a little item of hardware (cost: around £60) to let the computer record the programmes but once you have it on the PC you can move it on elsewhere.

The one thing that’s usually pointless is moving mobile phone videos to other devices with larger screens. It’s not that you can’t do it, just that the resolution isn’t high enough. In general, it’s best to move from high resolution devices to equal or lower resolution ones eg TV to/from PC and from these to smaller devices. Going in the other direction is usually a disappointment.

Once we get into the summer season, there’s really no chance of us keeping up with anything that isn’t essential to the day to day running of the place and one of those “non-essential” things is keeping the accounts up to date.

It’s not that we’ve no idea what money is coming in and going out as we go along, just that the formal accounts don’t get kept up to date over the summer period. This year is particularly bad as there was a lot of additional work needing doing with our UK side of the business and so it’s really only now that we’re getting settled down to get the finances up to date.

Naturally, that long period since the relevant transactions makes life more difficult as it’s that much easier to lose the odd document along the way of course and getting the whole lot into a sensible sequence takes a whole lot longer than it would do if we were keeping up to date as we went along.

Having said that, overall it seems to take us a lot less time to do when we do the whole lot in bulk. This morning we went through the majority of the receipts over a couple of hours for instance whereas doing it a little bit at a time would consume a lot more time when you added it all up. In fact the biggest downside is that the whole thing feels much more like a chore when you’ve a big heap of documentations to work through than when you’ve only a couple of bills to mark off.

Fingers crossed, we’ll have tidied it all up by next week and then it’s off to the accountant with it.

Winter is the time when we get around to looking in detail at our various sites and so it was only yesterday that we noticed that one of them wasn’t nearly so complete as it could be.

An easy thing to fix and as from this afternoon our Holiday Rental Homes site now lists all the properties that it should have been listing all along. The effect of this is that the site should have a much greater profile than it did before with hundreds of new pages under it’s wing.

Whether it’ll make any difference with the search engines is something that we’ll just have to wait and see.

One of the questions that’s in the back of our minds at the moment is “where should we go after here?” and the answer is far from simple.

Our first complication is that since we’re selling both a business and a home at the same time and likely to be moving to another country, the synchronisation of the move will be quite complex. Consequently, our current thinking is that the bulk of our possessions will go to storage somewhere whilst we rent an interim home elsewhere. To simplify our lives tax-wise, it’s probably going to be a little easier if the interim spot isn’t in France as that’ll create a clean-ish break from the French tax system sooner than if our interim spot were in France.

With the sedate pace of French property sales, we’d have anything from three to six months from the “I’ll take it” until the cheque clears in our bank account so there should be lots of time to arrange that interim move. In fact, probably enough to skip the interim stage but synchronising a sale in France with a purchase elsewhere would be next to impossible hence the interim stage.

Where to go after that though? Whilst we’ve not yet settled on a single spot, a number of requirements are already apparent:

1. We’d like the kids to grow up english speaking;
2. We want a country that is broadly pro-business.

The first point doesn’t actually rule out non-english speaking countries as you might think as there are many countries with bilingual schools and in fact the possibility of a bilingual education would be quite a plus point for us.

We’re saying pro-business basically because we’ve experienced a broadly anti-business environment over the last four years and it makes life a lot more difficult at every stage of running a business. France is changing, but not quickly enough for us.

I’m sure that we’ll add many more requirements over the months to come!