Welcome to the LCNews

Dear %%FNAME%%,

A New Year and a new start? A whole 12 months in front of us to do and achieve the things we want. Even if you didn't make a resolution this year, you can still plan new exciting projects. To ensure you succeed check out our points for The Success Factor. If you prefer to reflect on the years past the January Past section looks at history made over the years in January. To ensure you get 2004 off with a swing LCN have improved the Admin section on the site to give you more options. You can now request your hosting setup email to be re-sent to you and upgrade your hosting packages via the Admin section.

I hope you enjoy reading the newsletter and if you have any comments or suggestions please email feedback@lcn.biz.

Many thanks

LCN's Editor

IN THIS ISSUE...

More admin.

There's now more to the LCN Admin section. We have added the option in the drop down menus to enable you to re-send your hosting set-up details. So if you've bought hosting recently and accidentally deleted or mislaid the email with the set up instructions and password then you can simply visit the admin section on the LCN site and have it re-sent to your email address. http://www.lcn.com/admin.asp

The LCN admin section is available to anyone who has bought a domain name and set up an account. Customers can use the admin section for all of the following actions:-

Add hosting to your domain name

View invoices

Set up email forwarding

Modify nameserves / release your domain name

Generate a gift certificate.

You should visit your admin section regularly to ensure you keep your details up to date. Your details in the account and in particular your email and mobile number are used to keep you informed when your hosting or domain name is due to expire. Mobile numbers are used if you have subscribed to the SMS reminder section.

Hosting is the web space (package) you will needed to power your web site and handle your e-email. There are several options available to LCN customers for hosting accounts starting from just £30 per year.

You can obviously use free space to power your website but you will be sharing the space allocated with several other 100s or even 1'000s of people and this will impact on the speed and accessibility of your site.

LCN offers two world class web hosting solutions, NT and Unix. Both are available with 20mb, 80mb or 200mb of space to fit your requirements.

NT is designed as an introduction package, while Unix is geared for more demanding web sites, and therefore includes the extra features.

At LCN we do not believe in tying customers down or restricting options so if you find that you outgrow your hosting package then you can simply upgrade.

Simple Upgrades

As we believe in all things being as simple and painless as possible we have added a further option to the admin section which allows customers to upgrade their hosting from one plan to another.

The option is called "Upgrade Hosting" and is also on the drop down menu. This new options ensures that if customers purchase one package and then decide that they wish to change they can do so via the website at anytime of the day or night.

For example if you buy the basic NT1 hosting package with 20mb of space for £30 and then decide you want to add more images to your site, through the admin panel you can "upgrade" to the NT2 just paying the difference in package price of £20.

Similarly if you have purchased NT2 with 80mb of space for £50 and then decided you would like to access your email from any computer and want to see who is visiting your site you can "upgrade" through the admin panel to UN2. UN2 includes Web mail and Web Statistics options which allow you to do both of these tasks. The price difference is just £30.

The UN packages are particularly popular for customers wishing to count the number of visitors to their site. Instead of having a clumsy hit counter on the site you can view how many customers you have had in any one day, week or month with Web Statistics. The Web Statistics also offers many more options for you to track visitors.

To find out more about LCN's web hosting options visit the hosting section on the LCN site http://www.lcn.biz/web-hosting.asp

Here,s an at a glance comparison:-

New Year's Resolutions

Who Invented New Year's Resolutions??

The Babylonians celebrated New Years Day over four thousand years ago, although their celebration was in March rather than in January, coinciding with the spring planting of crops.

The New Year, no matter when people have celebrated it, has always been a time for looking back to the past, and more importantly, forward to the coming year. It's time to reflect on the changes we want, or often need, if we're to have the motivation to move forward.  Resolutions are a reflection of the Babylonians' belief that what a person does on the first day of the New Year will have an effect throughout the entire year.

Making a New Year's Resolution

The tradition is as old as the hills. Just as its traditional to eat turkey on Christmas Day (since the beginning of the 1900s) it's traditional to make a resolutions for the New Year. It's hard for most people not to get the resolution urge on New Year's Eve. The New Year is seen as a new beginning, clean slate, and a time to start again. The most common resolutions are the ones that correct the things you did wrong last year, including undoing those bad habits, or the promises and goals you would like to make for the next 12 months. Even if last year's resolutions didn't make it past the first week of January, this year will be different, right?

Most of us don't have a clue how to make a reasonable resolution, which is why most of us fail to keep the ones we make. We set high goals for ourselves, and then wonder why we never attain them. So we either stop setting goals (never a good choice), or make resolutions that are ridiculously easy to keep.

How many of you have joined a gym in the first week of January signing up for a full years fees only to find that in March or April the only thing that is still going strong is the monthly payments and that you haven't actually been inside the place for weeks?

This year try harder to make reasonable resolutions.

The Success Factor

The way to succeed in your New Year's Resolutions is to have a plan. Be realistic in your goals. Write out a step by step action plan which you can follow.

For example if you'd like to launch a web site in 2004 for your business, hobby or a new venture follow our plan below.

1. Think about the name for your site. You can register your name (domain name) from as little as £3.75 per year at www.lcn.biz
2. Draw up a brief for your site. (see our example below)
3. Write the content and find suitable images or picture for your site.
4. Get a quote for your site. The LCN design team would be happy to help with 5 pages sites starting from just £399.99.
5. If you want to design your own site find a suitable hosting plan to run the site on. LCN's hosting plans start from £30 per year.
6. Review - check that you achieved all your goals.

Design Brief

Background

Overview of the material or literature already available for the business.

What do you want to achieve?

Why do you want a web site?

Objectives

Launch a site that gives customers information about the products and services you provide.

An introduction to your business that is accessible 24 hours a day.

Do you want customers to purchase on line?

Site content

Introduction to company / service

Comprehensive list of products / services

"How to find us" downloadable map

Contact details ( including click to call option )

The option to print off information about the company / service

Tasks

To provide a timing plan for implementation

Content needs to be created including a number of images.

Timing

When do you want the site up and running? Ready for viewing?

Budget

How much do you have to spend?

PC resolutions.

Not Politically Correct - the computer version - PC resolutions. You'll find these goals are easier to keep than cleaning out the garage, losing weight, or quitting smoking.

Boost Security

To ensure you're playing it safe you'll need to be vigilant all year-round. It's important to keep up on the latest viruses and protect your PC from Internet threats. Look at installing a firewall for extra protection.

Fix Broken Windows

If you received a new PC this Christmas or just got a new digital camera or other peripheral, or even new software, it may be time to give your PC a tune-up. Doing so is a good dose of preventative medicine that can head off problems when you add new programs or peripherals. For example, you might want to check whether your PC has up-to-date drivers and all the latest software patches.

Get in Shape

Here is a chance to follow through on the empty promise of getting in shape: Tune up your PC instead, and don't break a sweat.

Clean the Digital Basement

PCs can be a lot like a basement. Before you know it, you can collect piles of electronic dust bunnies, Your hard drive is likely littered with megabytes of useless .bak files, which many programs generate as emergency data backups. Other common drivel are .chk files, often generated by disk-repair utilities.

In this age of 40GB drives it's hard to get too concerned about these files and cookie .txt files that take up less that 100MB. Still, you may want to launch a search-and-delete mission to free up some space.

The real burden on your system may be active rubbish. Check out the common programs that load into your PC's memory every time you boot up. Most people start with only a few programs that load into your system memory. Over time, the number can easily hit the double digits, making even the fastest PC run like an old 286.

Feel Better

Are you suffering from eye fatigue and a painful crick in your neck? Be kind to yourself by taking the time to learn proper work place ergonomics. Sit properly at your desk. Do you have the right chair, is your computer set up correct for the chair or desk height?

Job Complete

Come May, when normal people who made New Year's resolutions like "learn to play the guitar" or "save money" complain they had to sell their guitar to pay the rent, you can smugly tell them you nailed all your resolutions before February.

January past

January 2000: World celebrates New Millennium. Billions of people around the world welcomed in the New Millennium with some of the most spectacular celebrations ever seen. The first people to witness the dawn of the new era were Pacific Islanders - among the last were the Americans.

And fears that the dreaded Millennium Bug would cause computer meltdown around the world failed to materialise to the relief of those who have invested billions in trying to avert a potential crisis.

18th January 1996: Green groups join by-pass battle. Six major environmental organisations added their support to the growing anti-bypass campaign in Newbury, Berkshire. Friends of the Earth, the Council for British Archaeology, Greenpeace UK, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Wildlife Trusts and the World Wide Fund for Nature all voiced disapproval of the new road scheme.

3rd January 1987: - Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducts Aretha Franklin the first female artist.

1st January 1973: Britain joins the EEC. The United Kingdom has become a fully-fledged member of the European Economic Community. Although we still haven't succumbed to the Euro.

20th January 1961: John F Kennedy was sworn in as US president. The Democrat John F Kennedy was sworn in as the youngest ever elected president of the United States. The 43-year-old Roman Catholic was inaugurated as the 35th president on a snow-covered Capitol Hill in Washington. He took over from the oldest president in American history, General Dwight Eisenhower, who bowed out aged 70.

9th January 1956: 'Rawhide' staring Client Eastwood first showed on TV.

1st January 1908: - Times Square ball, signifying New Year, dropped for first time.

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LCN would like to thank you in advance for your continued support.

Kind regards

The LCN Team