Wednesday, 17 September 2008
New website for Living Streets’ Walking Works Campaign
This week sees the launch of a new website for Living Streets’ Walking Works Campaign. The site, www.walkingworks.org.uk, is dedicated to getting more UK employees walking to and from work, and to walk more during the working day.
The new website is targeted both at commuters wanting to increase their walking levels and to employers wanting to promote walking in the workplace. Visitors to the site can find out more information about the benefits of walking, can sign up to a bi-weekly e-Bulletin with tips on promoting walking in the workplace and can pledge to increase their walking and receive regular handy hints and tips to stay encouraged. The Walking Works campaign is run by Living Streets, the national charity working to bring our streets to life, with more walking in people-friendly public spaces.
Activate Media were responsible for the entire build, including the design, flexible content management system and integrated newsletter manager. Stacy Woodward, Walking Works Coordinator at Living Streets said: “We have been very pleased with the work Activate have done on our site. They have been responsive to our changing needs and helpful in their suggestions. Their flexible content management system allows us to keep our site current and fresh.”
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
Is the customer always right?
We have been in the web design and development business for more than 13 years and employ staff trained in computer science, user interface design, human computer interaction, visual design, marketing, web standards and accessibility. We are good at what we do.When a client comes to us it is our aim to use our expertise to come up with solutions that surpass the clients expectations. Input from our clients helps in creating a healthy working relationship; in fact without the clients’ knowledge of their own business we can never achieve the required result. Often the input from the client can be quite valid, but on occasions it is quite clear that the clients request is a bad idea and could be harmful to their business. So sometimes we need to go against the convention that 'the customer is always right' and may have to argue for certain design or functionality decisions to be made correctly. Of course this is handled in good humour and we support our argument by giving examples and explain in detail the reasoning behind our thought process and to date, there has never been an instance where this has not worked.
Put simply, we care passionately about the welfare of our clients and feel obliged to be truthful with them. The end result is a website or application that not only delivers on the original brief but uses innovative and forward thinking solutions that only experts can provide. Could the same be said if we had towed the line not questioned any client request no matter how little it made sense? We don't think so.
Monday, 15 September 2008
List of Best and Worst SEO practices for your website
webconfs.com has a great checklist of factors that can affect your web sites search engine rankings. The list contains positive, negative and neutral factors because all of them exist. Most of the factors in the checklist apply mainly to Google and partially to MSN, Yahoo! and all the other search engines.Check it out here.
Simplifying SEO - The Ethical Solution
One of the major challenges we face is getting clients to understand the work that we undertake to improve their search engine ranking. In an attempt to meet this challenge we recently revised our seo copy to try and give clients an insight into what many seem to think is a form of 'Black Magic' within the web world.In writing this revised text it became apparent that we were only prepared to offer what we consider ethical SEO or 'White Hat' solutions and not willing to resort to 'Black Hat' techniques such as using hidden or invisible text or cloaking. We think that the ethical approach is easier for clients to understand. This is because we employ a human approach to the search engine conundrum by creating well built web pages and using relevent keywords based around the clients product or service area. We then focus on creating relevent links to and from the site with a variety of understandable marketing techniques. In our view this will get the best long term results for the client and avoids the possible pit falls that could be detrimental to their business. The most infamous example of this being when BMW were removed from Google in February 2006 for the use of keyword heavy "doorway pages".
With the SEO techniques that we employ we aim to bring targeted search engine visitors to our clients sites. We are looking at not only improving the quantity of visitors to our clients sites but the quality too. Find out more about our SEO services.
A New Agenda Module for Event Registration Systems
Activate Media announces its unique multi-stream agenda module for its EventWare product line. The new agenda system allows Event Organisers to easily create multi-stream agendas for their web sites in an easy to use “drag and drop” interface. Once created, the agenda is displayed in an easy to read table which can be expanded or minimized at the touch of a button.
The system features the following:
- A simple to use and navigate multilingual site
- Features that would differentiate the ICI website from other web based NGO charitable websites
- Capture prospective donors and the ability to communicate with them
- Ability to play videos
- Multiple display tools
- Powerful and easy to use Administration system including content management
Andrew Dec of Dec Marketing commented “As a conference producer one of my biggest headaches is having to schedule breakout sessions which run concurrently. EventWare lets me quickly publicise the topics, speakers and timings online with the minimum effort. The system is flexible enough to cope with inevitable last minute changes. It integrates with the booking form and online registration database which allows my delegates to choose and book their sessions online.”
The new Eventware agenda system gives event organisers the ability to easily create complex agendas for their events without any custom programming. Up to now, creating a complex agenda might take days and making changes could only be done by a programming team. The new EventWare agenda allows Event Organisers to do everything, including changing the agenda at the last minute. The result is a well designed web based agenda and a saving of both time and cost.
Posts
