Increasingly everywhere you go you see little black and while QR Codes or quick response codes. On signs and posters, in magazines, T-shirts, badges, business cards, adverts, flyers and leaflets. But what are those things?

Our web design team are concerned about the number of small businesses who legally don't own their company's domain name. Most business owners are shocked to learn that they don't legally own their own domain names. After all, they paid to have the website created in the first place, plus pay ongoing fees for web hosting and domain registration. How can they not be the owner if they're paying all the bills?

PayPal announced today that it will expand its buyer protections for shoppers just in time for the busy Christmas shopping season. Beginning 1 November 2010, shoppers around the world will have expanded buyer protection when they make purchases at the millions of retailers that accept PayPal.

If you’ve noticed changes this morning when you've gone to search for your weekend night out, its not just your eyes, search has changed from today. When you go to www.google.co.uk you will notice a huge difference to the way you search. Google has introduced a new product called Google Instant.

Having a sale, giving a discount for new customers, or creating a discount voucher is an excellent way of boosting sales to your online shop. Magento comes with an excellent set of tools for creating discount rules quickly and easily.

We recently upgraded our Magento ecommerce stores to version 1.4, starting with our new projects Bumble&bailey and Sound Affects Music. We always integrate all our websites with Google Analytics to keep track of website performance and conversion rates, but we started noticing some serious anomalies with the reporting for both these websites. We where receiving data for the Sound Affects website but not the online shop, and Bumble&bailey was showing a 98% bounce rate and just 1 visitor, data that we knew was just plain wrong. As we use Magento's built in Google Analytics integration we had a look at the tracking code, and sure enough that's where the problem lies.

As well as being hard at work on recent projects for our clients the Creative Hub have also been doing a spot of writing. 

We've got some really big changes happening at Creative Hub HQ happening over the next few weeks.

To increase your conversion rate you must reassure your customers that your website is safe to buy from and that you offer secure payment options. Make sure you offer payment methods that inspire trust and make it easy for your customers to check out. 

Could your business be losing out if it doesn't have an internet presence? A recent report by IMRG (Interactive Media in Retail Group) shows online shoppers spent a massive £132 million on Christmas Day last year, up 29% on the previous year.