We're pleased to announce that we have been working hard over the past three weeks to upgrade all of the websites in the 4xtra family.

We know that "fashion" in website design changes. As new techniques appear and new versions of standards are released, perfectly good old sites become a little stale and tired looking.

Don't believe the scam artists who tell you that they can get your site to the top og Google's listings in a week. Yes, a mass of links from booster sites works temporarily (until the search engines notice and mark the site down) and any fresh design and change will promote a site - and that's the real answr.

What is needs is fresh, interesting content. Unless a site is the ultimate reference for a particular topic (and probably even if it is) it needs to evolve. As I said abovve, new standards emerge, new ideas appear. What seemed new and exciting two years ago is now commonplace and dull. If the site doesn't change do visitors even know you are still in business?

While eagerly updating our clients' sites, we realised that many of our own were a little, who shall I put it - boring? So we have relaunched all of the 4xtra related sites over the past three weeks.

All have been switched to a new CMS platform. Most have been given new CSS based designs. The content on them all has been rewritten to bring it up to date.

finally, we've decided to take our own medicine. This isn't a once of job, from now on it's part of a continuous process. All of our sites will be receiving regular updates, publishing news items or producing e-mail newsletters.

All part of our continuing efforts to keep our customers satisfied.

Website involved

• 4xtra
• HMw computing
• EverWare
• Agile Approach
• AppsDrives
• SchoolEmail

Additionally we've updated all of our demonstration applications at Try This Out and, naturally, our wiki at Access Office has been updated, but I'm afraid most of that is for internal or client use only.

I've also used the same CMS to set up Stone Bell, my new personal blog site.

Lastly and again on a personal note, I've worked on Mac-A-Million and Freya Hogan's Personal Website which are used to chart the progress of rehabilitation of an injured horse. Not relevant to work perhaps, but it does illustrate the flexibility of the CMS approach.