Welcome to the Escape Blog

Craig and Rob are going to Relate next week. No, their relationship hasn’t hit the rocks, it’s a client meeting for a potential new website.

Simon learnt what a portfolio was this week when Andy and Dan were tasked by a client to show off their design history and what made them the designer they are today - nice challenge! It was quite a task for Dan though, designer man and boy and all that. I did learn though looking through them that Dan is a great artist, so you learn something new every day.

Simon landed his first new client (with support of strategic partner Les Love), securing a project with Magna Housing Group for their "Best in The West" Service Review.

Another boomerang client this week to develop - Two Guy’s!

Four referrals from our website this week is surely worth a big shout too!

If someone sent you a company brochure, you may read it, if it gets to you. You may skim through it or, if it’s worth it, you may read it from laminated cover to laminated cover. You probably won’t read it again though.

It’s the same with websites. If you put your brochure on-line, is anyone really that interested? Will they come back or reference your site? Probably not. They will more likely reference BBC, Google or Yahoo, because they offer something worth referencing, something that we need, ie. search or news.

What Can You Do?

Translate that philosophy onto your business model and wonder what opportunities you could create for yourself.

What will make people buy into your sales offering with your message? If you have a news section, make sure it is up-to-date and something that someone (your potential client) would be interested in.

I don’t care that Maureen in Accounts has just got engaged. You probably don’t care too much about any new clients we have had. You are looking for articles and pages that may teach you something to make your life better in some way - an enhancing experience!

What We Do

We have this blog. We write articles and we create tools, to attract traffic and engage our audience.

• Our SEO Analyzer tool was uploaded in August 2006. That page has a Page Rank of 4/10 and gets approx 700 page views a month.
• An article and video tutorial created in November on how to create a google sitemap has only 105 pages views in that time but has managed to get a page rank already (the only page in a section that was created in August 2006).
• For tsbautyshop.co.uk we created a Jessica Nail Colour Chart. Supplementary to the actual sales pages for the products, but it has got a page rank on this new site within three months.

Summary

We all want traffic. If we concentrated on what would attract it, our profile raises, which in turn gets traffic. If the content is relevant (including geographically) we get relevant traffic.

Make it relevant to what you do and make sure it has value and you will start to see the difference. Then, you have created the opportunity to turn strangers into friends with a view to turning them into customers. Ref. Permission Marketing

This could make things tricky for you if you use e-mail marketing with compliant layout of your HTML e-shots.

Dave Greiner at Campaign Monitor explains how Outlook 2007 is one massive step backwards for e-mail marketing.

Aaron Wall suggests that it’s more than you think:

• content creators
• customers
• suppliers
• site members
• bloggers
• mainstream media
• topical experts
• other high authority link sources or publicity sources
• search engines

Another thought provoking article on website build from SEO Book

Jakob Nieson on his 2007 list of common website mistakes (via 456 Berea Street):

1. Bad Search
2. PDF Files for Online Reading
3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links
4. Non-Scannable Text
5. Fixed Font Size
6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility
7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement
8. Violating Design Conventions
9. Opening New Browser Windows
10. Not Answering Users’ Questions

For more details, visit his article - Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

The BBC today reports on the Governments plan to scrap up to 551 (58%) of it’s 951 current websites.

The Cabinet Office called it a natural step as people shifted their interest to use what it called “supersites” such as Directgov and the BBC website.

It is reported that this will save them £9 million per year. Yes, £9 million. 551 websites at £176,471 each in my book. I would have done it for that and some!!

So, Apple have finally gone and released a phone product, the iPhone.

What’s more, I can tell you about it as it happens, thanks to live updates by some serious "on-the-ball" bloggers who are posting the Steve Jobs Keynote Speech Live.

I am sure (it’s not there just yet) that full details will be on the Apple website soon enough.

As innovation goes, you gotta love ‘em.

Check out the new iPod as well, how small is that?

If you are creating a new website, or moving an existing website to a new domain, I recommend this article from SEOMOZ:Expectations and Best Practices for Moving to or Launching a New Domain

I love using a third party reference to the fact that:

1. It’s not straightforward or easy
2. It takes time and effort

Apparently, One in three UK companies flout spam laws, reports E-Consultancy, based on a study by CDMS claiming that 31% of the UK’s top companies are failing to comply with EU directives on Privacy and Electronic Communications.

Under the terms of the directive, companies must only send emails to non-customers if they have actively opted in to receive them.

This amounts to an increase of only 3% additional companies complying compared to the same study in 2005.

That said, if you are doing it all Permission-based, E-Mail seems to be a great way to market, as this article on Retail Bulletin testifies: E-mail marketing delivers the goods for leading organisations in December.

News from the BBC that there is a security issue with older versions of the web plug-in for Acrobat.

Upgrading to version 8 of the Adobe Reader software removes the risk of falling victim to the flaw.