Laser Technik Ltd
Providing Internet services for over a quarter of a century.
“Your business is important to us“: How many times have you heard that recorded message when you’ve phoned a “customer service help desk”? And how long have you been left in that cell queue “on hold”? And how often is the issue resolved in a helpful, effective and timely manner?
When you hear that you just know you’re in for a long wait on-hold before speaking to someone only capable of addressing the simplest of problems.
Your business IS important to you and it IS important to us. Let’s talk about what is important to you, we will do our best to deliver.
How often are you told “We’ll call you back”. By now you’ll know that means “your question is too difficult” and you’ll wait in vain for that call. We will always get back to you as soon as practicable. If there’s something we can’t help with we’ll tell you and will aim to suggest how you might find some help or a resolution.
We’ve got a great track record: Our technical leader has been working on internet technologies since 1990, before web-sites existed. We still undertake work for clients dating back to 1995 when we first started creating commercial web sites.
Web sites
Well over 1000 completed website projects of all sizes from individuals, micro-businesses, SMEs and charities to HMRC and global banks.
Hosting & email
We aim for 99.99% service availability, and speedily loading web sites while maintaining competitive costs.
Support
Expert prompt and inexpensive maintenance and support. No task is too small and every task is as important to us as it is to you.
Costs
The competitive price we quote is the price you pay. We aim for a “no surprises” deal (as long as your requirements remain unchanged).
MS Office
Not everyone finds Microsoft Office products as “easy to use” as advertised. Let an IT professional build your document or spreadsheet.
We are who you need…
- If you need a website in days or weeks rather than months.
- If you or you are having difficulties making changes to what was sold as an “easy to update” web site, we can usually help, promptly and inexpensively
- If your web designer is slow to make a change, proposes a surprisingly high cost, is difficult or impossible to contact, give us a call.
- If you’ve been told “it can’t be done” we have a long track record of solving even those technical problems nobody else has been able to resolve.
- If you think the annual renewal costs are excessive after 25 years we continue to provide high performance website hosting with better than 99.99% availabilty at highly competitive rates.
- If you are afraid of moving web-host because of the complexity of the task or the risk of downtime we can usually handle it.
- If you’re fed up with trying to deal with minimum-wage unskilled help desk staff, perhaps off-shore in a low-wage country and with challenging accents or a poor grasp of English.
- If you don’t like waiting for ages in call queueing systems with annoying “music on hold”, interrupted with messages saying “Your call is important to us”.
- If you are unsure of what you are being told by someone else we can provide an authoritative opinion for a small fee. My advice may prevent you paying someone else for something you don’t need either because they don’t really understand or because they are taking advantage of your limited understanding.
To us support is a priority not an expense to be minimised. When we say “we’ll call you back” we mean it. We don’t pass you to “an expert” who then asks all the same questions: tell us once. We don’t have “first line support”, your response will be from an expert.
You’ve got a brilliant idea, just need a web site to promote it:
You have a genius idea today, don’t delay, we can get a micro-web site online affordably, often within hours.
You’ve got a web site but there’s a problem…
Contact us, we specialise in fast affordable problem solving. It doesn’t matter who created the site, unlike some others we won’t propose that you “throw it away and start again”. If all you need is a “sticking plaster” or a helping hand with a DIY website drop us an email at loading... .
Need impartial advice?
There is no meaningful “qualification” for website design, anyone with some basic knowledge can call themselves a “web designer”.
As someone wanting web services you are spoilt for choice and there’s no way of telling if your choice is a sound one – until things go wrong. How do you tell who to trust? What reassurance can Laser Technik give? 30 years experience as internet technician at a major global bank since the early 1990s and concurrently for a much of that time as the technical director and later sole proprietor at the predecessor company to Laser Technik, one of the first Web Design companies in UK. Experience of working with the internet long before the advent of websites and web-browsers (using long forgotten internet technologies like archie, irc, gopher, veronica, usenet).
Small programming tasks
Typically writing or customising program code to handle a specific need, for example a custom calculation or adding features to an embedded Google map or whatever else you’d like to see.
Larger tasks
We specialise in the smaller “quick fix” tasks for clients who need responsive support and urgent attention. We are selective about taking on larger pieces of work. If your task falls within our core skill-set without compromising our ability to respond promptly, then we will undertake larger tasks. Please feel welcome to give us a call, we can at least discuss and advise.
Need a bit of help with a DIY website?
You can’t have missed the adverts for packaged self-build website services like Wix, Squarespace, Shopify. Maybe you’ve fallen for the hype and the loss-leader initial price and found it’s not as simple as you thought.
Now you’ve hit a problem: it’s harder than you thought; you want a feature that’s not available in the package; there’s a technical issue you don’t understand; the instructions are hard to understand or too complicated.
Perhaps you don’t like that inflexible “walled garden”, “one size fits all” approach and you’ve chosen instead to do it all yourself: buy a domain name, buy some web site hosting space, get a web-site design tool and have full control. Now you’ve found it gets a bit “technical” in places.
Don’t understand how to route your domain name to your web site and email – DNS records, Nameservers: what? It’s just demanding too much time to learn the system and create the site.
One answer is to be choosy about the web host and software you use, my recommentations are Siteground hosting, with (free) WordPress software using Divi theme and visual page builder. Siteground includes an easy to use WordPress installer and some added WordPress specific features. That’s a powerful environment and is easier to use than many alternatives but not the cheapest – and there’s still a learning curve.
Maybe you have built your own web site, it’s fine but whenever you need to make changes you need to refresh your understanding and it just takes time you should be spending improving your core business services, looking after your customers, improving your product, marketing your services, doing the VAT return, invoices, accounts, payroll. Running a business you face so many demands and need so many different skills, do you really have the time to become a web designer and internet technician too? You need our maintenance service – no committment, no subscription, just a small charge for each task depending on the complexity.
If you are just considering your options, of course “free” sounds good, but of course there’s no such thing. Nobody gives anything away, there are costs in providing any service and there will be an intention to recover that from you one way or another. Worse still, “free” means “provided as cheaply as possible”, there will be features missing, performance will be poor, help will only come at a high cost.
The next step up is “all for a simple small monthly fee”, probably little better that the free options but do multiply that monthly fee by 12. Check that the price won’t leap in year 2. Check out the “optional extras”, I’ve seen people end up paying hundreds of pounds a year for extras they don’t even need. One example: some hosts charge £50p.a. for each email account that isn’t even as good as the free ones you can get at Gmail or Outlook.
At face value the most cost-effective and the most versatile approach is to source all the component parts yourself and build your own website. The problem is that you also need a basket of unfamiliar skills and most importantly the time to devote to the task. Even just choosing the best hosting package and software will (or should) take hours of research if you don’t want to make poor choices. I’m not going to tell you not to try if that’s your choice but do remember lasertechnik.co.uk When you come unstuck we’ll still be here to help.
Help file library
Whenever I encounter a new query or problem I document the solution. That library runs to hundreds of documents from under one page to some quite lengthy and detailed technical explanations (those sometimes start with a “busy reader’s summary”). That means I have stock answers ready so I can give a rapid response at a reasonable cost. But I always enjoy the challenge of a new problem to solve.