1. Greetings

During August and September we have been working on a range of projects. SchoolDisco, profiled below, was a lot of fun. We have also completed an update to our automated client area. All Imagine clients have a password secure area through which they can view the status of work in progress. This area now enables clients to check their site statistics to see who is visiting their sites and when. We have collected this data for the last ten months and the recent improvements make the stats available online to view at any time. Clients can choose between Basic Stats (£120 per annum) and Full Stats (£450 per annum).

2. SchoolDisco.com

What do the words Top Trumps, bike sheds, Hubba Bubba and detention summon up in your mind? If it's school days and getting into trouble, then SchoolDisco.com is for you! Every Friday and Saturday night, thousands of party-goers migrate to the Hammersmith Palais and the Hanover Grand to reminisce at a night started by Bobby Sanchez in September 1999. The music (70's, 80's, plus the best of the 90's Rock and Pop) and the atmosphere (School Uniform is the dress code) take you back to those unforgettable times had in the school or village hall. SchoolDisco.com chose Imagine to re-develop the website after we produced some design mock-up's and a site development strategy. The navigation is easier to use and more consistent, school branding has been strengthened with new images and the very popular School Photos section is highly automated to reduce update time. The site will evolve non-stop as the night goes national to 4 new cities and the SchoolDisco.com CD is released on October 22nd.

3. Key Stats

You will have a computer network at work but do you have one at home yet? Cahners In-Stat suggests that by 2006, the market for home networking products will have risen to £6 billion from this years £1 billion. That includes hardware and software, residential gateways and home control automation products. Bill Gates has long believed that by combining the telecommunications system, the household electricity circuit and household electrical appliances (including your washing machine, lights and security system) the home can be made more energy efficient, time-saving and technologically advanced. One of the key drivers of this study's findings is wireless networking - the use of radio waves to connect computers rather than traditional wire.

4. Feature - Where it's @

Did you know there is no agreed term for the @ symbol used in email addresses? Most English speaking people call it the AT-Sign, but other languages tend to describe it by comparing it to animals, for example:

• apestaart - Dutch for "monkey's tail"
• snabel - Danish for "elephant's trunk"
• kissanhnta - Finnish for "cat's tail"
• klammeraffe - German for "hanging monkey"
• kukac - Hungarian for "worm"
• dalphaengi - Korean for "snail"
• grisehale - Norwegian for "pig's tail"
• sobachka - Russian for "little dog"

It is suspected that the @ was an abbreviation for the Greek word Amphora which was used as a unit of measurement.

5. Marketing Series Part 4 - Affiliate Marketing

The August Online Advertising feature discussed buying advertising space on other websites. This month we consider Affiliate Marketing, a technically more complex but increasingly popular method of advertising, although the most useful potential Affiliate Marketing holds is achieving the final goal - sales.

Pioneered by Amazon in 1996, Affiliate marketing is simply the payment of commission to sites which refer customers. You will no doubt have seen links to Amazon to buy books as you have been browsing the web. Sites that refer a successful purchase are awarded 15% commission and Amazon wins another customer. It has helped the company raise brand awareness, build loyalty with affiliates and increase sales. Now the UK is catching up and many companies are putting a lot of effort behind winning affiliates.

• Boysstuff - cool gadgets for guys (beer makers, Mikro-Scooters, Laser Robots etc.) offering up to 8% commission.
• Comet - electrical products of all sorts - Comet pays 3% commission on sales of its products.
• Cottages4You - over 9,000 holiday cottages for rental in the UK, France and Ireland paying £7 commission per rental.

To look further into setting up an affiliate scheme, visit ukaffiliates.com, Commission Junction or Trade Doubler.

6. Useful Sites

By 8 October (next Monday), 400,000 companies in the UK (those with more than 5 staff) must have a Stakeholder Pension in place. However, OPRA recently estimated that 40-50% of businesses have yet to implement an appropriate scheme and these companies risk facing a hefty £50,000 fine. In August, we chose our scheme and now share some useful resources for employees and those last-minute employers:

• FSA - Useful information for answering Employee questions.
• DSS - Guide for Employers. Pretty heavy going, but very thorough (Click here to download PDF.)
• HSBC - Good question and answer site for Employers and Employees
• StakeholderPensions.com - If you are really low on time, you can set up a scheme at this site.

7. Website of the month

Did you pay attention in science lessons at school? If not, How Stuff Works is your chance to catch up on that misspent youth. Pretty much any machine or technology you could want to know about is on this site and it is right up-to-date too, with new articles added and answers to questions sent in by site users added every day. More recently they have considered Skyscrapers and Facial Recognition systems but old favourites range from Mobile Phones to Rainforests and Nanotechnology to Computer Viruses.