As one of a series of articles to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of GWS Media (back on September 25th, 2000) I have put together a short article about the main things I've learnt over 25 years running a business. I hope that some of them will be useful to aspiring entrepreneurs, or people who have already taken the plunge and started their own business. Good luck whatever you are doing - and don't forget that small businesses (SMEs) employ the majority of people in the UK economy - you are making a real difference.

David Graves - Creative Director

Ten additional types of website.

Written content producers have become increasingly concerned since 2024 over the way that AI systems (including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini) have been trawling through their text and using it to train their large language model systems, leading to that content potentially being reproduced (in adapted form) with no attribution to or payment for the original creator.

AI (artificial intelligence) image generation has advanced significantly over the last two years in terms of quality of output and practical usefulness. Having developed from somewhat shaky beginnings, it is now a technology that cannot be ignored by creatives or anyone requiring imagery for work. There is now a range of options to choose from at different price points; and while none of them is perfect, and they may never have the unique character of human-generated photographs and artwork, the level of competition in the marketplace has led to constant improvements.

What is PCI DSS?

PCI DSS stands for the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. It is a set of standards and guidelines put together by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) in order to protect sensitive customer data.

It sets out practices for businesses that process or require payment card information (or other sensitive personal information) to follow.

What is website maintenance?

Website maintenance is used to describe any actions that may be needed to keep a website running reliably and working correctly. To this end, periodically checking that your website is delivering the expected outputs at each stage of the user or customer journey is strongly recommended. For a simple website, this might just involve submitting contact forms to ensure those are all received, or dialling phone numbers to ensure those come through to the correct company or contact.

Low-carbon websites are websites that do not generate significant carbon dioxide emissions when they are viewed.

Why do websites generate carbon dioxide emissions? That is a longer story – basically, it is because of the energy that is used by the data centres that host a website, by the interconnected systems that make up the internet and that allow the data making up that website to be transmitted to the computer or other device on which you are viewing the site, and also by that computer or device in itself, which will likewise be using energy.

The first in our series of articles looking at Social Media of Today

The first in our series of articles looking at Social Media of Today