Welcome to the Escape Blog

We currently have three jobs up for grabs that are going to press today:

Three ‘Escapees’ required for our ambitious Design and Web Agency based in
Basingstoke. (attitude is everything)

1. Senior Account Manager - You need to be experienced and able to walk-the-walk. Web an advantage.
2. Online Marketing - Use MySpace? Blogs? Youtube? Fascinated by the web? This could be your ticket!
3. Office Assistant - First step on the ladder but one of the most important jobs here, so not just anyone will do!

For those of you interested in choosing effective keywords, you may be interested in this article called the five steps to effective keyword research

Many blogs in a corporate environment don’t work. Randfish explains the main reasons why. They are all valid points covering lack of transparency - points that we could learn from to make our blogs more effective, perhaps?

Everyclick.com is a search engine that helps charity. Simply by using their search engine, a charity of your choice could benefit. Each month Everyclick give 50% of gross revenue divided in proportion to the selected charities. ie. The more people use it, the more the charities will benefit.

E-Consultancy report that they have just been nominated for The Jaeger-LeCoultre Daily Telegraph Business Personality
of the Year Awards 2006.

Analysing web statistics on a regular basis is great for spotting trends. One I have noticed recently is the increased (not massive yet I admit) use of Google Maps for search referrals.

For instance, as an ongoing program of SEO for Truly Scrumptious, I added the shop to Google Local because it makes sense for them. They are a local business that rely on local customers. As a service business they have geographical restrictions so it makes sense that people will search for their terms and localise it, eg. beauty treatments in farnborough.

Visibility in every area of search is important for the business as users change their habits. The harder search gets for a user, the more ways they will try to find what it is they want and Google maps and Google local are finding their feet as a growing search tool.

Google is adding to it’s main page search all the time and Google Local is yet another way of finding companies (or people finding your company through search)  and services when locality is important. And, as much as we have the ‘world wide web’ some service industries still need to be near for us to use at a practical level.

So, if you have a business that caters locally, and that is pretty much any business, why not submit to Google Local? It’s free and adds yet another way for people to find you!

Last Friday some of us went to a client bash (see picture). You could be excused for thinking that this was a jolly, but… it was a think-tank of clients and Escapees at an annual International Amateur Boxing Event in Basingstoke.

As you can see, Simon is seriously getting across his point to Escape Clients Steve and Paul…. nope, I can’t fool you, there was an element of jolly involved.

To be fair, it was a Rotary Club event raising money for some great causes.  Oh, I almost didn’t see Ben there between the ladies…

Back at The Escape base it’s been a week of celebration. Both Jo and Lisa passed their CIM marketing exams after weeks of nail-biting. The rest of us knew they’d pass but well done to both of them!

On the work front we won a rather large web (and more) project that may mean us looking for some new Escapees if anyone is looking for a job at a cracking design agency in Hampshire. We need experienced Account Managers and Web Developers for starters and if you can impress, then you are in….

The second of our seminars (How to Plan and Manage A Website) was delivered yesterday to our largest audience yet. If it gets any bigger we will be looking at either running them in the car park, or at another venue. Kate from MPI enjoyed it:

I would like to say thank you very much for enlightening me on today’s subject. I am bombarded on a daily basis with web jargon and expected to understand! You have grouped together everything I had swimming around in my brain and allowed me to process it in a manageable and understandable way. Thank you. I will review your notes with pleasure!

There seems to be a few tools around that allow you to ‘preview’ the link that you are about to click on before you choose to click on it.

This latest one - iReader (released yesterday) uses semantic analysis of the target page to give you a summary of the content.

TechCrunch can explain it better but it’s one of those tools that will enable you to see the ’semantic analysis’ of any target page, even if it’s your own.

I can see massive value in utilising this with existing content analysis tools to further optimise the content of your web pages.

Randfish has an interesting and, in my opinion, very valid point of view on using Google Site Maps.

The crux is that if you submit your sitemap to Google, you may not naturally know which pages need more work - that’s my understanding of his point anyway.

If his notes don’t make sense to you, or you do not have that amount of control over your website structure, perhaps you should just submit anyway, it can only be more positive than not submitting it.

If you want to know how, watch our video on how to create and submit a sitemap to Google.

Ahhh, Valentines…. when love is in the air…

‘Love Me Tender’ was the song of the day as Jacqui was busy creating a nice tender for Dagenham and Barking - for design, print and distribution for a project. (feel free to groan at my jokes)… we’ll keep you posted.

We had nice big thank you this week (making us feel warm and cosy
inside) from Maverick, one of our newer clients, after delivering The Knowledge. They were pleased…

Lisa was kept busy with an on-site audit at Magna Housing. This is the first project for we have done so we hope our first date goes well. (I’m already onto tenuous links)…

Relate have asked us to do a web project for them so we have good relationship advice on hand in the future.

Meanwhile, back at our love shack in Basingstoke….

In the Studio, Andy has been busy ‘passing the dutchie ‘pon the left hand side’ - don’t you just hate it when people can wear silly hats and still look cool. I always end up looking like a fat American tourist…

Do You Love Us Enough?

We hope you love us enough to nominate our website for the Hants Web Awards… we’ve entered our site, but the more the merrier.

If you are used to sending direct mail the traditional way, by post, please note that stamp prices in the UK are going up again.

First class stamp prices will increase by 2p to 34p for the letter format, by 4p to 48p for the large letter format and by 9p to 109p for the packet format at the basic weight of 0 –100g

Second class stamp prices will increase by 1p to 24p for the letter format, bu 3p to 40p for the large letter format and by 8p to 92p for the packet format at the basic weigh of 0-100g

Time to get into marketing by e-mail?