Hi All,

Today I would like to help you get the most of our excellent support offerings. This information will be helpful for all clients: those with domain names only, hosting accounts, reseller hosting, or dedicated servers. Firstly and something that is very much overlooked is ensuring up-to-date address information on file.

Whenever we need to send you important emails about your renewals or accounts we use the email supplied on our systems. We all know that people move providers and so their email addresses periodically change. So the first thing to be sure of is that we have your correct physical address, phone number and most importantly your email address.

The way to check this is to log in to https://www.34sp.com/login using the last email address you set with us. This will be the one supplied at sign up if you have never amended it.
Once logged in click on ‘Account details’ on the right hand menu. Amend your details as required and then click ‘submit’.

We offer a number of support mechanisms all designed to help in certain ways. I am going to explain how best to use these to get the quickest and most appropriate resolve to any of your issues.

For any issues which require us to make a change to your account, email or site or require us to provide password or other sensitive information. The best way to contact us is using the built in contact form on our website. Simply login to: https://www.34sp.com/login using your registered email and password and then click ‘contact’.

Because you used this form we know you are the account holder and can get on with the request without the need for further security checks. This helps speed up your request. This method is also very handy if you cannot send emails but can use websites. If you are having issues receiving emails please make sure you provide us an alternative email address or a phone number in the support request so that we can contact you.

If your enquiry is general or for some reason you cannot log in or have lost your login details. Send us an email to support. You can use our contact form here to send email as well. Put your domain name in the subject and a brief description of the issue. Then explain in the main mail what we can assist you with. Don’t forget to give us contact details as this helps to ensure you will get a prompt reply.

Our live chat facility is there for instant assistance with one of our staff. This service is only able to offer quick and easy support such as reminders of details, general technical questions or general account support. If a case requires an engineer, a support ticket will be raised for you. Live chat is best used to contact us if your mail, site or services are not working. We can quickly evaluate the cause and if it is involved we can raise you a ticket for engineers to look at. When using Live Chat it asks for a question. Simply type in the domain name / site name you want to talk about and a brief summary of the issue.

If a case requires Advanced Support it is handled by email only. Advanced Support is not available via Live Chat or Phone. If you need an update or need to add more to a case please reply to the email as this is the quickest way for them to be able to reply and assist you.

Should you need to speak to someone then you can use our telephone service. When contacting us by telephone or by Live Chat we will ask you for your security question. Please have this ready as we cannot assist you without it. Not sure what you set? Simply log into: https://www.34sp.com/login and click on ‘Account Details’ to check or change it.

Also when calling us please have your customer reference number to hand as this speeds up the search for you account and avoids delays in finding it.

We pride ourselves on our support and we want to assist you to use it to its best to get the quickest and most appropriate help.

Here is a quick summary of our support channels.

In order of speed and relevance:

For a quick answer on basic issues or to check status of account etc use our Live Chat facility between the hours of 8 to 8 weekdays.
For changes to accounts or more in depth issues log into your account at: https://www.34sp.com/login and use the contact form.
If unable to login or access our website send us an email to support. You can email us 24 x 7 x 365.
In the case of any support contact, be sure to put the domain name / website in the subject with brief summary of issue.
Always be sure to give us contact details so we can get back to the right person as quickly as possible.
If you need to talk to someone you can call us on 0161 200 1855 between the hours of 8 to 8 weekdays.

And last but not least periodically check your details with us to ensure accuracy. This will assist you when contacting us and also avoid any missed renewal notices.

I hope this guide helps you to enjoy our support at its best, and also to help us to continue to provide you with first class support.

Many of our clients create their own websites – either for themselves, or on behalf of clients. Whether you are a small business owner creating an ecommerce site via a Professional Hosting account, or a designer creating client sites with a reseller hosting account, you’ve probably used tables in your designs.

Over the past few years many changes have been made in the way people design and build websites. One of the most widely discussed change is the use of DIVs over the tables for the structure of websites. In this article I’ll explain why we shouldn’t be using tables and how to implement alternative methods using DIVs.

Tables are confusing
Tables require considerably more code than DIVs. If you compare the table:

<table>
<tr>
<td>This is the content</td>
</tr>
<table>

With the DIV:

<div>This is the content</div>

You’ll see the table can quickly get complicated as much more code is required. This means with a huge number of tags it’s far easier to make mistakes and once the website is complete they’re much harder to maintain and amend. More code also means the website takes longer to load, that means using more bandwidth, meaning the website is potentially more expensive to run.

Tables are for data
Tables are meant to be used for tabular data storage so using them for layout structures means they’re being used incorrectly. They should only be used for displaying data, i.e. a table of product features or a shopping basket.

Tables are not accessible
Tables destroy the logical flow of the web page, especially when tables are nested within other tables. When people use screen readers, the web page is read out in the order it’s coded. When using tables, the content isn’t necessarily coded in the order it’s displayed on the page, for example: the content first, then the navigation, then the footer. This means users can get confused and lost navigating around the website.

The alternative
The much more accessible, usable and easy alternative to tables are box elements, i.e. DIVs, styled using CSS. You can specify the size (i.e. 800px x 200px) and position (i.e. 25px from the left, 10px from the top) of the DIV allowing you to easily build up the page without the complex coding of tables.

In terms of search engine optimization (SEO), SEO friendly elements such as headings, paragraphs and lists can be used to specify different types of content and text – meaning a potentially higher ranking in Google and other search engines. Box elements are coded in a logical order meaning they are easily understood by screen readers which increases accessibility.For further reading about why tables are bad, plus box elements and how to use them I recommend the following links:

http://webdesign.about.com/od/htmltags/ss/aa121602a.htm

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/08/from-table-hell-to-div-hell