Our new sister company, Tactus 360, which provides virtual tours using 360 x 180 degree technology, has been launched in Scandinavia and northern Europe.

Virtual imaging is the best way of showing your product or facilities, whether you are a hotel, an estate agent, or selling any other product or services. Forget about expensive advertisements in glossy magazines, TV or radio. The Internet has the power to reach a wider range of customers for a wider range of reasons, and interactive advertising is quickly proving to be the most effective tool. See “A few facts and figures” below for more information.

Virtual Tours can similarly be used by Museums, Charities, Historical Societies or other organisations who wish to increase awareness of preservation projects, historical buildings, etc.

Private customers might want to use Virtual Tours of their property if they are looking to rent or sell it. Or they might want to share a virtual tour of their beautiful house or a special spot with their friends or relatives on the other side of the world! The possibilities are endless…

Some examples of customers who would benefit from our services include:

• Estate Agents and Property Developers – allow potential clients and investors to view your properties 24/7 through high quality, interactive virtual tours. Interactive floorplans allow the viewer to take a virtual walk through the property; these can be custom designed or created using CAD drawings. Elegant presentation CDs featuring a selection of properties can also be created, which can be mailed to potential buyers,
• Hotels, Cruise Ships and Conference Centres – attract potential guests and make sure they choose you over your competitors by adding eye-catching virtual tours of your rooms, reception area, bar & restaurant, leisure facilities, etc. High Definition presentation CDs with your virtual tours can complement your brochures perfectly, which in turn can link directly to your website.
• Spas, Gyms and Leisure Centres – attract potential new members or visitors by offering a virtual visit of your facilities from your website. Special areas or equipment can be designed to provide extra information when selected by the viewer.
• Commercial Centres and Shops – create a virtual display of your products. These can be made clickable within the virtual images, providing additional information to your buyers thereby a truly virtual shopping experience. A virtual tour of your shopping centre can be created using interactive maps.
• Museums, Art Galleries and Exhibition Centres – attract visitors, artists and art dealers by facilitating the planning of visits and exhibitions. Individual paintings or objects could be magnified when clicked on and additional information displayed. High Definition virtual tours can be created on presentation CDs to be sold to visitors in gift shops, or distributed to potential exhibitors.
• Schools, Colleges and University Campuses – attract prospective students and their parents by providing guided virtual tours of your campus, lecture rooms, libraries, accommodation, dining and recreation areas, sports facilities etc. These can be integrated into your website or distributed together with your brochures as High Definition presentation CDs
• Theatres and Concert Halls – attract audiences or promote the use of your facilities with event organisers by adding a fully immersive view of your halls and other facilities.
• Engineers, Architects and Interior Designers – display your portfolio as an impressive collection virtual images and tours, incorporating where appropriate original CAD drawings and designs to be used as interactive maps and floorplans.
• Historical Societies, Monuments and Tourism – increase awareness and provide information to visitors about buildings, places of local interest. Interactive maps and satellite imagery can help locate all the different locations, buildings or scenic spots in order to help promote tourism.
• Offices – your office spaces can be captured as virtual images to impress potential clients and reinforce the image of your company.
• Law Enforcement & Insurance – crime or accident scenes can be captured in High Definition for forensic purposes or for use in Court rooms.

But it doesn’t finish there. A report in 2006 in the magazine website Clickz.com shows that over 50% of adult Internet users have taken a virtual tour. Since then, the accessibility of broadband has increased the statistic considerably. Virtual imagery owners have seen web statistics increase: one customer, for whom we have provided the front-end of his own virtual images has seen his site statistics increase tenfold in two years.

A few facts and figures

Virtual tours reduce the amount of wasted viewings by 40% (source: Property Week) 

If you are unsure whether virtual imaging is right addition to your online advertising campaign, please read the following facts: 

The estimated Return on Investment (ROI) for virtual imaging is less than 4 weeks

While only 15% of all hotel bookings are made over the Internet, 65% of all travel bookings are researched online.

Virtual imaging increases on-line bookings by up to 85%

75% of those surveyed, visited 3-4 hotel web sites before making their choice.

Unlike most other marketing tools, virtual imaging continues to earn you revenue until you refurbish!

The Internet has become the top choice for consumers to investigate travel destinations, whether for business or leisure.

Full virtual imaging will increase your sales!

96.2% of travellers use the Internet as a source of information when planning a trip.

Virtual Tours Get OVER 5 Million Visits a Day.

80% of Internet shoppers say images are imperative when deciding to buy or use a company’s product or services. (2006, Pew Internet & American Life Study)

A compelling use of virtual technology will keep visitors on your site, and will also keep them coming back.

80% of consumers search for information online. That means at least 60% of your marketing dollars should be spent optimizing your company online.

47% said virtual tours were very important to a listing. 

“Statistics from realtor.com show that listings with virtual tours get clicked on 40% more than listings without virtual tours.” Susan Barber in the Business Development section of RISMedia’s Real Estate magazine (May 2006).

At Tactus, we are committed to providing you with the best service possible, not only when it comes to the design and appearance of your website, but also in a continual monitoring and upgrading of soft and hardware.

December saw us migrating all our websites to a new, faster server, using better technology and safer from hackers and DNS attacks.

Remember that hosting with us provides you with a dedicated server and a team that is also dedicated to providing you with a 99.9% uptime and continual monitoring.

 . . . are due to the Nord Østerdal begravelesesbyrå (Undertakers) on a new site that helps who have lost someone close. We are proud of the site’s dignity and ease of use, as well as page-flip programmes and brochures.

Although in Norwegian, we hope that our flexibile system and pleasing design will help you decide how a Tactus Design website is your only solution.

Check it out at http://bbno.no.

Here are just a few of the cool site tools and effects some of our customers have used:

Audio Player 

There are a huge number of audio players available as web plugins, but this has proved to be popular with musicians, since it is small and easy to program. All you have to do is add the following text to your page: [ audio:your_file_name.mp3 ]

It looks neat, and you can choose whether or not you want to add a title in the track runner.

There are other audio players, including some that will allow multiple tracks, webcasts etc.

You Tuber

Good web designers have a problem. Trying to develop a customers ideas and build them into a website in a short period of time often results in shortcuts being made. In the past, this was not all that important, since if they worked, they worked. However, as in all industries, there has become a series of standards that designers and programmers are expected to work towards, which have been developed to make your website cross-browser compliant – sometimes, what works with Internet Explorer doesn’t with Firefox, and vice versa.

The biggest problems come with such media objects as Flash and Quicktime, since these employ codes that, simply, are not cross-browser compliant. Such scripts need to be properly embedded into the page so that everyone has a chance to see them. This little plugin allows this with just a single bracketed command, as in this example: [ youtube ]last_part_of_url[ /youtube ].

Lightbox

This is a wonderful way of displaying your pictures, especially in photoblogs or commercial sites. You might have noticed the effect from other pictures on the site, if not, just click on the picture below and see it for the first time.

The Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool

It is not just with visual effects that you have control with such add-ons . . . Many deal with administrative issues and are designed to appear in the sidebars of the website, such as the text box found in the far right column of this website, or the Cumulus tag-cloud that can be seen at Photonorge’s  website.

Here is a list of a few more:

• Security Scan – helps to make your website more secure against hackers, etc.
• External links – makes all outgoing links from your website open in a new window.
• Automatic upgrade – enables you to upgrade the base program of your website with just a few mouse clicks
• Flipping book - provides a Flash book with pages that turn to display your pictures
• Contact Form – allows you to create forms for all manner of purposes, from simple contact forms to complex booking forms
• Facebook/Twitter etc - puts links into posts for appropriate social networking sites.
• Online invoice – allows you to create invoices online to send to customers
• Google Ads – Allows you to integrate advertising into your website

And so the list goes on. If you have a request of Tatus Design, we can nearly always provide it and tailor it to suit your needs and the needs of your website.

Make sure you don't get a duck-billed platypus!

To make sure that you get Man, rather than a duck-billed platypus, you should try to have a complete overview of what you want in your site long before you get around to putting in the order.

Here are a few things you should bare in mind:

1. What is the message you want your site to convey? You really need to have an idea of layout, design, colours, even text style to reflect your tastes. Although many websites have the fingerprints of their designer, the overall look should reflect your wishes. If a designer thinks this is not possible or might look terrible, then perhaps you should listen and revise your ideas, but you must always remember that it is YOUR site! You call the shots. If you are uncertain of what you want, it is useful to surf the net and come up with a list of sites of which you like the look. This always acts as a good starting point.
2. Never let your designer boggle you with science. The art of web-building can be extremely difficult and there is a lot of jargon involved. However, jargon can be an effective tool for getting you to pay that little extra. Always ask what something your designer says means in laymen’s terms and insist you understand fully what the designer says. This will reduce the problems later.
3. What sort of information do you want on your site? Is it a blog? A news’n'views sort of website? A commercial website? Always think about how many pages you are going to need and make it very clear for the designer. Sometimes, poor communication at this level can result in the designer having to scrap all his/her plans and begin again. This could, ultimately, cost you money (unless your designer is kind, as we are at Tactus Design).
4. Add-ons: what do you think you will need as extras on the site? Will you want, for example, a picture gallery? How do you want it to work? Will you be using your site for commercial products? How do you want them displaying? What sort of payment processes do you want to use? If you are unsure about any of these, ask your designer at the outset, rather than at the end of the whole process, since by not doing so, you could ruin many hours of programming and design work.
5. Ask your designer how big you think your site is going to be from the outset so that you can budget hosting accordingly. Quite often, people ask for the minimum allotment and find immediately that their site is too large or cumbersome to work effectively with this amount. Then an upgrade is required and, with some hosts (not Tactus), this can cost considerably. You should have at least double the amount of webspace that the site takes up, if only to ensure that backups can be made and upgrades effectively installed.
6. Is your design concept really practical? I know this might sound a little strange, but often people have the most outlandish design ideas which, although wonderful, can make them terribly difficult to maintain. Not to mention the problems that can arise from having to use scripts that are not always stable. If your designer thinks your ideas are far off the mark and says so, you should trust his judgement. He is the one who has to make sure it is working for at least the next few years and, if it is constantly breaking, due to instability that cannot be avoided because of initial demands, he is not going to be happy!
7. Always write down a detailed job description and give this to your designer. Make sure your description is clear, since this will avoid problems later on, and is produced point by point. This gives a good point for discussion, and always provides you with a safety net to fall back on, should your designer get carried away with his own thoughts and feelings.
8. Always check your designer’s portfolio carefully to see not only that the sites are well designed, but that they also work properly. Some designers actually have just screenshots as their portfolio, which should beg an important question . . .
9. NEVER decide that it is all going to cost too much and you will ask the boy or girl down the road instead. There are more websites on the Internet that look as though they were made by someone with a little knowledge than by someone with a lot! Although little Jimmy might be flattered, the chances are that his skills and taste are not quite as developed as you would want them to be. And since they are cheap, or even free, it is very difficult to say how you really feel.
10. REMEMBER that your site reflects you. If you want to present a dynamic image to impress people, be specific to your web designer. If you don’t like what s/he produces, say so. We are all a little nerdish and very thick skinned, so it is easy for you to assert yourself!

Above all, you should ask your designer:

• When the site is finished, published on the Net and working properly, what resposibility will you take for making sure it continues to work well?At Tactus Design, for customers using one of our hosting plans, your site is continually reviewed and, where poor formatting (on the part of the customer, since we never do that) occurs, or when new scripts or ideas arise that could be used, we go into the site and change things. We never charge for this, we see it as a part of our duty.
• What sort of after-sales support will you get?At Tactus Design, we visit the customer where possible, or run telephone courses in maintenance. We also have help files that we send every customer, so that they are able to take care of things accordingly. And we never let a customer down.

All sites hosted on our server are provided with CPanel, a state-of-the-art control panel, providing you with more control of your website and, ultimately cutting your costs. CPanel is not provided by many cheaper hosts, simply because it increases the cost of the hosting considerably. Yet, after our editing and administrative suites, it is one of the most useful aspects of any website.

With Tactus hosting comes a dedicated and effective control panel, providing you with ultimate control over so many aspects of your website.

With relative ease, you can:

• Upload and manage files
• Backup your website
• Create and delete email accounts
• Create mailing lists
• Set up spam filters
• Use webmail dedicated to your domain name
• See statistics of visitors to your site, their point of origin, IP address, etc.
• See how many sites have links to yours
• Password protect pages and directories on your website

With many more advanced features, hosting with Tactus Design provides you with more control of your website, providing you with greater peace of mind. With ultimate control, web management becomes simple and cost-effective, cutting out the unnecessary expense of webmasters and web managers.

The answer is that we can! But we don’t for one simple reason . . . We want our customers to have the best possible uptime so that their readers can access a site at any time of the day without any problems, which means that we cannot afford to flood expensive server space with as many sites as we can. Cheap hosts simply cannot do that.

Let’s use an analogy: imagine a car park that has places for fifty cars. The owner, however, lets space to one hundred users, knowing that not all customers will want to use the car park at the same time. He will probably be safe for the majority of the time.

But what happens when more than fifty cars turn up? What happens when they are all trying to get into the park, get out, or generally navigate their way around? Chaos!

Your web host is pretty much like a car park. Oversold servers result in chaos! Do you want your visitors to be confronted with this?

Web hosting is pretty much the same. When you use one of the cheaper $5.00 per month hosts, you might think you have a good deal, but you are, in fact, in exactly the same situation as the car park customers. Cheap hosting companies oversell their space, thinking that not everyone will be visiting their server at the same time. When they do, everything becomes slower: when you are surfing, how many times do you get a 404 message, saying that the page is not available, or get frustrated when trying to pay for goods online, only to see the whole thing crash before your eyes, leaving you worried about whether you have paid or not?  

Usually, the cause is a server overload, and with many sites, that is often caused by too many people trying to access too many webs on the same server at the same time.

This makes cheap hosting the worse possible deal. Websites are more often than not used as a point of sale, whether they be their owners skills or wares. We all know that, in these days of quick service, we all navigate to another site if the one we are trying to view is slow to load.

At Tactus, we lease you as much server space as is suitable for your website. We never loan a portion of that to others. What you pay for is exclusively yours and belongs to no one else.

This means that your website will be available 24/7, with an uptime of 99.9%. In fact, the only time your website will be down is when important upgrades are being installed on the server, and this is usually for a short period.

Your custom is important to Tactus Design. We think our websites are individual and pride ourselves in their exclusivity. They deserve to be seen by as many as possible, and hosting with our company ensures that this will always happen!

Two RNCM graduates who have turned their keyboard skills to a different purpose, are celebrating their sixth year of business with a surprising offer to RNCM students and graduates.Former SKS students Nami Kani and Jon Baxendale formed Tactus Design in September 2002, a web-solutions company that specialises in web projects for musicians. Since the company was formed, their clientele has grown from just a few musician friends to a network of professional musicians and students throughout the world. Customers familiar to the concert rooms and corridors of the RNCM include former organ tutor Kevin Bowyer, pianist Ave Krupp, organist Tom Bell and Manchester-based string quartet The Bacchus Quartet.

“With new technologies, building and maintaining websites has never been easier than today,” reported Jon. “Previously, it was necessary to have a considerable knowledge of HTML coding to be able to maintain a website, but now, all that is necessary is to have word-processor skills. You just log on and edit the site online. It’s never been easier!”

To mark their sixth year in business, Nami and Jon have decided to offer a limited number of free websites to students and alumni of the college. More information can be gained directly from them by contacting info@tactusdesign.com.

Tactus Design, a small web solutions company based in England and Scandinavia, is pleased to be associated with The Sorabji Organ Project and has been equally pleased to offer its services in designing and maintaining the Sorabji Organ Project without charge.

Founded by former musicians, Tactus Design has a reputation for designing bespoke websites for musicians and are pleased to have Kevin Bowyer, amongst others, as one of its clients.

Unusually for web designers, Tactus Design wish to say something about the inspiration behind this particular design, since it is based on the 1925 Curwen Edition of Sorabji’s Organ Symphony (then the first of the three and therefore, without number).

The font employed is a modern digital copy of the original typeface developed in the 1920s by Rudolf Koch and used by Curwen in the imprint. Similarly, the colours reflect the style of the cover.

Behind the text on each page, the background image is of a manuscript page from the Second Organ Symphony.

More importantly, the header of each page contains a copy of Sorabji’s signature, kindly supplied by The Sorabji Archive.

Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to wish The Sorabji Organ Project and Kevin Bowyer our best wishes for this monumental venture, and look forward to continuing our relationship with the project for the full course of its run.

Our largest and most complex project, the website for the church at Tynset in Norway includes virtual tours, information pages in different languages, film clips and photo albums and mp3s.

Den norske kirke, for whom we have developed several websites, has singled out the Tactus Design website at Tynset church in Hedmark as being an example of an excellent website.

Developed in line with the church’s requirements, the site provides news items, archives, virtual tours and information pages in both English and Norwegian. It utilizes a web editing portal, administration possibilities that include the ability to create and delete email addresses and accounts and cross-browser coding that is in line with current W3C requirements.

“Tynset church is an important website for Tactus”, says managing partner Jon Baxendale. “In fact, we used the site as a bit of a showpiece for company: it was the first of several websites for the Church of Norway and we have enhanced it on behalf of the church to give others the chance to see how useful a church website can be.”

Tactus particularly enjoy developing information sites, and offer not only expert construction and coding, but also the chance to develop a graphic profile to suit customers’ needs. In this case, the church wanted a series of virtual tours, which we were happy to include in the package. For those interested in these, they should visit the site and click on the link Besøk kirkene våre in the top menu.