It is always great to be involved with any large event, especially when the motivaition is charitable.
The Paddle Round the Pier beach festival in Brighton has been going since 1996, during which time it has raised over £100,000 for charities. The event was conceived by David Samuel of DSA and was originally surfers just paddling around Brighton’s Pier to raise funds for charity.

Since then the event has grown in size and popularity to become an internationally reknowned event which is rated by the press and visited by 40,000 people a year – and it is free.

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

Brighton based Parsley Productions came to us looking for a simple, yet elegant solution to showcase the company’s long heritage in storyboarding, filming, producing and editing high quality TV for broadcast.

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

Social Media has taken over the world, it is official; last month Facebook™ overtook Google™ in the USA for number of page impressions.
This is indicative of how we are changing the way in which we view the web. We used to search online for information, for products or services.
Nowadays we are more and more likely to visit trusted resources. If I want to know about the history of Brighton Pier my first visit may be Wikipedia; when I want a new surfboard I go to eBay and for car insurance I may consider visiting a well known comparison site.
I get my tide times from Tweets.
What this means in terms of SEM ( search engine marketing ) is that it is increasingly attractive for the website owner to have a strategic position with respect to social media. Leveraging ( this means using simple tools to maximum effect ) such platforms as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook can pay dividends in engaging your customers and attracting new visitors to your site.

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 be working together with a local business to increase targeted traffic to their website.

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.