I have been working towards climbing the ranks with the search term “Web Designer Essex” for the last 4 months, it’s been an interesting learning process and a surprisingly competitive keyword phrase. We started off on page 5 and have been slowly climbing up ever since until *sound the trumpets*, today is the day we feature on page one of Google.com for Web Designer Essex. I feel a glass of vino is in order.
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We are heading off to the big smoke for 2 days as of tomorrow for the Future of Web Design Conference in Kensington. It promises to be a who’s who of the Web Design World with great speakers such as Elliot Jay Stocks, Jina Bolton, Andy Budd and Paul Boag to name but a few, we’re off to learn what great tricks of the trade we can implement on your sites and in our creative processes as a whole.
The ratio of men to women is ridiculous - it seems Web Design is still very predominately male, so I won’t be hard to spot wandering around!
Thursday is a full day of conferences whilst Friday deems to be really exciting - a workshop full of extra goodies to take away and learn. I’m personally attending workshops by Elliot Jay Stocks in the am. and Paul Boags in the afternoon. It promises to be a really invaluable couple of days, for both networking and learning. I can’t wait.
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This week has been manic to say the least - so much client work to do and all the time the phone is ringing off the hook. So I thought, why not get a PA? So I did. Her name is Hannah, she’s super friendly and will be about to answer all calls so that we can do what we do best, your projects!
Hannah will get to know you all over the coming weeks and she will feel like part of the team in no time, the aim is for us to work really hard during the day, uninterrupted, and then phone back anything that needs to be answered at 3pm everyday. If this time does not suit you simply tell Hannah.
We’re really looking forward to all the great productive benefits Hannah will bring the business and hope you all see an increase in productivity over the coming weeks!
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We’ve launched a record number of new sites this week, and phew - it’s been a busy week. First off we have the launch of the new “Diamond Diva’s” website, this should be well on it’s way to bringing them new clients for their corporate entertainment style Opera shows. Then we have R3 who launched Thursday - a site that has been worked on since October, with many changes and twist and turns, it’s now online, yippee. They are a great bunch over at R3 and we can highly recommend them if you’re looking to get into any of the Retail sector.
Anywoo - then onto Acre Landscapes, we had the pleasure of working with this landscape gardener from Cambridge, his simple brochure style site will suit his sector well and we hope will bring him lots of new business.
So there we have it, it’s Friday, we’re shutting our office doors for the weekend after a completely fulfilling, yet tiring week.
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Channel 4 have got me scratching my head. First we had a young lady planted in Hollyoaks that then got magically placed as the latest Maria in the West End’s “Sound of Music” consequently opening up a whole new range of audience for Sir Lloyd Webber (cha-ching!). Now we have, what I feel, is their new, very cleverly put together PR stunt - Willy’s Wonky Chocolate Factory.
I watched the first episode last night and the more I watched, the more it concreted my feelings that this was a cleverly put together “documentary” ultimately promoting this new pure cacao cooking bar. Probably financed by Selfridges. So many alarm bells went off whilst watching it, Willy himself was far too camera aware and his presenting skills were exceptional for someone plucked from oblivion just trying to make a documentary about his struggles to finance his chocolate dream. The cookery segments were slick, the pans used were the same as Marco Pierre White on “Hells Kitchen” (££££!), the “arguments” between him and his wife were so staged and scripted, a camera crew just happened to be filming at just the right angle through a window from the outside… in the rain….what a coincidence!
For someone who had “given up everything” - he was renting a blooming great house in the country - I can’t help but feel the rent on that alone could have purchased his cacao bean grinder!
The farmers market was the segment that ultimately showed up the actors in this film, switching between Willy and then the general public, it was obvious Willy was not just average joe but someone cleverly picked for whatever purpose this “documentary” has been commissioned, the jury is out on that one at the moment but my money would be on this cacao bar hitting the shelves just at the time this series finishes, tantalizing the British public who are known chocolate lovers with various recipes (all available for download on the Channel 4 website!) using this cacao bar.
I’m going to keep watching but both myself, and my partner who has worked in television in the past, both thought it was extremely staged and heading towards a PR Stunt of some sort, I’m hoping Channel 4 haven’t stooped this low but something is telling me to watch this space….
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Well, after 5 years it was time for a re-brand. We just felt like the old logo wasn’t working now with our name, we kept looking at it thinking it was too corporate for such a quirky name, so….we changed it! The decision was to change it to lettering that had more of a “fun” element to it, rather than using San Serif fonts as previous to maintain quite a corporate looking image.
We really like it, it’s got much more scope than the last, we can do some really funky things with it and we can now finally get all of our stationery re-printed after the move to the studio. Whoopeeee!
If you’re interested in following how we came up with it and what processes we go through, drop us a comment and we might even make a youtube video for you.
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As sad as this sounds…I do love getting clients to page one of Google, it’s a very satisfying feeling to see that website address pop up on page one after all those weeks of work. We’ve just done it again for another client, Nick Burrett of discos.co.uk. He asked us to work on list of keywords to do with Wedding DJ and his specified area. So we did. We waved our magic wand, used our proven formula of work methods and hey presto, we’ve just checked on this sunny February morning and *ping* there he is - for all of his specified keywords bar 2 he is on page one.
Try it, type in “Wedding DJ Somerset” - and see who comes up!
This is just another great example of how SEO can work, and will continue to gain momentum over the coming months as we work on the site.
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I saw David Gormans new show advertised on TV last night - which led me think about Google which led me back to thinking about our search engine optimisation service…it’s sometimes hard to switch off with web design!
As some of you may know we officially launched our Search Engine Optimisation service in January 2008. We have seen some fabulous results from the clients websites who have undertaken this service and it’s a great feeling to see the sites we’ve built get great results on Google too. This is really helping us stand out from the competition as we can finally be full service and get the results our sites deserve!
Search Engine Optimisation is an additional bolt on to our web design service. We can’t stress the importance of search engine optimisation if you are selling a product or service. You need to scream from the rooftops what you do and your website should instil confidence in people to spend their money with you and not anyone else!
Have a look on our services page to see what we’ve been doing over the past month for our clients, we’d love to take on your site too.
ps. if you find you have a few minutes to spare why not try Googlewhacking? A past time made famous by David Gorman of the book “Googlewhack” - find two words, that only produce one result in the results page in Google. These words must be found in the dictionary. For example, one that was found many years ago was ” ambidextrous scallywags” If you manage to find one, you’ve found a Googlewhack!
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This is our new addition, and as he is still a puppy he’s got a little bed under my desk where he likes to listen to the whirr of the computers. He practically sleeps all day until about lunch time when he gets up for scrambled egg and then goes back to sleep for the afternoon.
We’ll have him html coding and css’ing in no time!
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I’m thrilled to have been asked to get together a talk for students on the 19th March 08, it’s been set up by The SCOLLAR Trust and I think it’s a fabulous idea to give young people a heads up of exactly what is expected of you in a real working environment and exactly what skills and mindsets are needed to go into all aspects of web design.
I have yet to put together my programme at the moment but I want to give lots of real world examples and make it a really fun, interesting couple of hours for them.
From what I understand it’s only open to 20 students so for any of you coming onto the site to check us out, register for the talk as soon as you can.
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