Last year we were involved with the coordination of the Paddle Something Unusual where a series of unlikely floats took to the seas. This year we set out to improve the website. Last year’s website was a slick and comprehensive affair but it was not readily editable by the many volunteers who comprise the paddle team.

The Paddle is a social event and so required the facility to bring together all the online threads and make it the focal point of a community.

We built the site using a page structure which echoes the various areas of action such as water events, land events, kids, entertainment and music. The music area of the site was given a custom menu as it is almost an event in its own right. Wordpress’ post functionality allows us to add press releases and news in a separate format and with RSS feed generated for simple syndication. Additionaly the website’s URL structure was improved upon with clean addresses and a simple navigational structure. We were also able to repoint old web addresses to the new ones via 301 permanent redirection so that bookmarked pages and backlinks could still find the requested content. The site is a rich source of accessible information and is fully SEO optimised.

Social media plugins were implemented on each page to read from the feeds generated by the event’s various outlets such as Twitter, YouTube , Facebook and Flickr. We were also able to echo the structure of the Flickr galleries onto the gallery page on the website.

The site’s IA (Information Architecture) was agreed upon through meetings with the Volunteer team , A1Surf and DSA ;whilst Mayermedia and Bionic Graphics provided both branding and graphical direction.

The result has been an engaging and feature rich website which allows a disparate team to add content as the festival grows, which looks great.

Further Information is, of course, available at www.paddleroundthepier.com
The event takes place on Hove Lawns, Brighton, East Sussex on the weekend of July 2^nd and 3^rd this year – 2011

If you are a charity event which wants help in any way with your online ventures then please contact us, if we have free time we will be happy to help.

Aloha

Jeremy Hoye

Jeremy Hoye is a ‘cutting edge’ designer Jeweller based in the heart of Brighton’s Lanes, his work is of world renown and his designs range from the classic to the contemporary, though all have his distinctive eye and originality applied to them.
Our favourite items are his hand crafted and very collectable charms : » Silver Charms

Telephones Online

Telephones Online regularly have special offers on a host of telephones and other consumer electronics. They are one of the longest established online retailers of Cordless phones, having been selling them on line since last century : » Cordless Phones

Of course, it is crucial to any marketing campaign to be able to track it. We are able to produce reports from our email client and Google Analytics which show who clicked on what link and when. And, of course, sales revenue generated directly from the email marketing campaigns.

Wishing to have the site simple to edit for Parsley we decided upon Joomla – an open source content management system. This allows the website owner to have full control over the content and structure of the site.
Although this was the first time we have used Joomla, we found it simple and clean to install. Designs were also easily incorporated into the structure. Though initially we found the hierarchy of content in the Joomla back office a little daunting, it was not long before we had it pinned down.

The site was developed and built on a development server supplied by Rightclick and then moved to its final point, tested and launched.

We were unlucky launching the site just as the ‘hactivism’ reached its peak as the site’s new server was affected by the Wikileaks/ DOS attacks and we found the site sluggish initially.

Thankfully this soon cleared up and the site was live and kicking.

Apart from the obvious bonus of having the site content managed Parsley are able to use 3rd party content on the site also.
They have their Twitter feed on the home page and make use of YouTube to allow their video work to be streamed onto the website.

A SEF ( search engine friendly URL Structure ) was applied to the site, via Joomla back office, and it was integrated with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to give Parsley the best chance of analysing the site’s performance ( in terms of traffic, SEO, profile and content).

Parsley Productions

We built a handcoded website using their existing hosting on Freeola in php. The site was beautifully optimised, following extensive ( though not expensive ) keyword research so as to ensure that the website attracted the visitors it deserves.

It was designed with a clear fresh look and allowed the integration of Flickr feeds to increase the exposure of the website as well as allowing the client to update the website’s content via Flickr Upload.

Google Analytics was installed on the site so that the progress of the venture may be quantified.

The subject was a great one, the home – Chestnut House in Crickhowell – being a lovingly restored and luxury holiday home in the heart of the Brecon Beacons.

So if you are off to Wales for a weekend check out the website, or if you would like to discuss improving your online presence – speak to us.

Holiday Home in Crickhowell

The original website was launched in the final decade of the last century.
Their site was in its second functional incarnation. It having been based upon two different eCommerce technologies over the course of time.

As eCommerce evolved and so did their routes to market. Telephones Online had to look for another solution to accurately control all their merchandising avenues. An increasing percentage of their sales were coming from alternative routes as more and more online shopping activity centred on stores like eBay and Amazon.

So, after careful consideration it was decided that eSeller pro could provide the basis for this venture. This system allows a full inventory control for the merchant selling online, you can choose which products are sold through which channels ( i.e., tick the eBay box, tick the Amazon box, select which website etc )

The biggest benefit of using eSellerPro is that product can be sold across multiple channels from a single inventory. Their channel profile feature automatically manages the stock levels across channels according to user specified rules (e.g. percentage of available stock or a fixed quantity). Once channel profiles have been created there is never any need to manage stock levels on different channels.

quote from tamebay

eSeller Pro has delivered a superb backoffice which is allowing the merchants to manage all their routes to market and inventories under one, easily accessible login.

The new site has been optimised sensibly with relation to the major search engines with a series of 301 redirects from cached pages from the previous site and new Pay per Click campaign initiated with Google and other search partners.

Telephones Online site makes for a clear and easy process for the customer to find, and buy cordless phones online.

Site is at : Telephones Online

The brief was to design a site in keeping with their current branding but to have an identity of its own.

The site incorporates a hand coded folder structure for a clean SEO perspective, making the site both accessible and usable. Main elements were brought out using sIFR, a technology which allows Flash replacement of text. (CSS3 will eventually make this unnecessary).

Site may be seen at : Paediatric Training Courses

Currently the site runs its online booking of first aid training courses through paypal, but in the near future we expect to roll out further sophistication site wide, making the site easier to use for everyone concerned – as that is our goal.

Nowadays the art has evolved and much of this is thanks to the ever fluctuating but ever dependable algorithm which Google devised to support its own raison d’être. You see that Google’s very existence is down the fact that it delivers good search results. I shudder when I use Bing as I know that it may well throw up ludicrous and unusable results in its results. Google is king because the first page or two you come to after performing a search will include pretty much all the best sources for solving your query. If any search engine failed to meet this criterion it would soon be dropped by the savvy public.

Hence, and this is clarity and beauty of the highest order, Google makes sure that the searcher (their client to be precise) will be satisfied with their product.

What makes a good website ?

• Clear Identity – “it does what it says on the box”
• Good navigational structure
• Clearly defined sections
• Loads at reasonable speed
• Is accessible
• Can be said to be a useful source of information/ services
• Is recognised by others as a good website

These are some of the things that Google places a high importance upon when considering the validity of your website in its sphere so these are the things you, and your SEO/ SEM agency need to consider when either building a new site or attempting to increase traffic to an existing one.

It is no longer a dark art, SEO you know, it is serving us all, it drives us to create better, more relevant and richer websites, it is the good influence on web site designers and coders, it is the force of natural selection driving the evolution of websites today.

an aside – if Google decided that any website with a huge black circle in the middle of their home page would automatically go to page one in the search results for their <title> tag keywords, do you think that anyone would follow…….

There is another side, however, which has been labelled with the acronym of GMOOT – get me one of those.
This is where a webmaster/ site owner decides that they “just outta have some social media” on their website.
They want the colourful little icons which associate them with youth, Web 2.0 and cool. So, they may get an account on each of these platforms, but then what?

Does your flower store really expect to have fans on Facebook? Should your iphone case emporium expect to have so much to say that people will follow your Tweets? In many cases the answer is a resounding no and it is not long before these pretty icons lead off to pages last updated a year ago with the text “Wow, we are on Twitter at last” or suchlike.

However, there is no doubt that a strong and well organised social media presence can do wonders for your online marketing strategy. If you have a product or service which can be regularly updated in some way, that has a real place in the world of frequent updates, Diggs and suchlike then it really is worth investigating how best to present your company on these ‘new’ stages.

Like so many things online, and indeed in life, it is worth doing only if you are going to do it well.

We will start off by analysing the current situation of the website, looking at visitor origin and behaviour so that we are well positioned to both learn from current traffic and improve upon it.

This initiation will be followed by an extensive period of analysis of the industry in general and the best performing sites of their competitors, it is important to see what other people are doing in your arena and to learn from them.

As a result of the industry analysis we will define a list of keywords, commonly used search terms, and implement these into the website’s content and code.

Some websites are lacking in content in general so content creation can come into play at this stage.

The good thing about following ethical SEO techniques is that they, in fact, are good for all concerned. In the old days SEO’s played silly games with hidden text and excessive keyword densities aimed at fooling the search engine spiders. Now the major search engines are sophisticated enough not to fall for this trickery ( and will commonly penalise/ blacklist sites which try it).
This has resulted in the formation of a SEO strategy that requires webmasters to create easily navigable and accessible websites with useful content – this is how we need the web to evolve after all.

Back to my story – as the website in question has several geographic locations which will need optimisation we will be looking to have the site listed in local directories and blogs. It is quite likely that we will be recommending a period of press releases at some stage so that the site’s presence and new code and content is brought to the attention of the search engines with more frequency and weight.

This entire process is a FOR>NEXT LOOP of course, as the whole process is iterative. On needs to tune a search engine optimisation campaign, analysing the effects of the work you have done and honing the site so that you get nearer and nearer to a site which fulfills all that their customers may be searching for,

Once your website is worthy of a place high up in the search results it will make its way up there.