1. Add your website address to everything that you use for business, printed materials, signs, vehicles, electronic documents like email and other websites and social profiles. It sounds obvious, but so many people don’t bother or forget to do this. Adding your web address to “real world” media such as printed materials, gives potential customers a simple way to contact you and find out more about what you do. Adding your web address to email footers and other electronic documents provides another easy source of traffic and in some cases can also increase your ranking with Google and other search engines, pushing your site higher up search results.

2. If you’re not already doing so, look into creating social profiles on Twitter, facebook, Linkedin, Google + and others. The type of business you’re in and the customers you’re aiming at attracting will determine which social networks are the most useful to you. For professional services, like law, finance and recruitment, Linkedin can be ideal. Twitter is great for retail and hospitality businesses. One word of warning though… if you haven’t got the time or enthusiasm to do it, either keep it simple with something like Twitter or think very carefully before jumping in.

3. Start blogging regularly. All our sites have the facility for you to write your own blog pages or articles. These are very useful, both in terms of increasing your site’s search ranking and authority and as a way of informing your customers about your products and services. For restaurants, adding recipes and tips can be useful for customers and also inspire visits to try the food. If you’re in the hospitality business, writing about local events or attractions can be a great way to pick up search visitors and get referrals from other sites. Most businesses can find a way to pass on useful tips to web users, and what better way to let potential customers know more about you.

4. Look for sites that can link back to your site. This is important for driving traffic and will also increase the authority of your site with Google and other search engines. Depending on the type of business you’re in, these might be local sites or more widespread. Web based directories are a great source of traffic and many are free to enter. Some of these are industry specific or general directories. You can also find local listing sites that will be more than happy to add a link for you, especially if you provide them with the right information and a photograph. Whenever you create a link in an external site, try to encourage the use of relevant keywords in the link phrase.

5. If you’re looking for local business, make sure you’re listed on Google places for business. 97% of consumers search for local businesses online. This is particularly useful if you have a business which relies on people visiting you, such as retail and hospitality business. Many people now use their mobile phone or other mobile device when visiting somewhere and looking for a particular shop or somewhere to eat etc. This works particularly well when combined with one of our mobile responsive web designs, so if you haven’t already, why not ask us about upgrading your site.

The post Ten things you can do to increase website traffic in 2013 – part one appeared first on Octavian Solutions.

We have found this is particularly true for retail and leisure clients such as hotels, restaurants and shops, where visitors may be going on line while travelling.

To better meet the needs of these visitors, we are converting many of our client’s sites to be mobile responsive.

What Is Mobile Responsive Design?

A responsive website will automatically adapt so that the content fits the device that your visitor is using.

There are four main device screen sizes that our mobile responsive design aims at… desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

As the screen on the device gets smaller the content display adapts and re-arranges to fit the screen size.

Why Change to a Mobile Responsive Design

In short… you want to give a visitor to your site (a potential customer), the best possible experience.

Visitors on mobile phones don’t have much space on the screen to view your site and many smart phones will zoom out to fit the whole content. This is fantastic as the visitor can see the whole of the site, but is not so good, if they’re looking round the screen to find a phone number or contact link.

If you’re in the restaurant or hotel business, potential customers on mobiles are probably looking to find out when you’re open or how to contact you, rather than to read any in depth reviews or recipe ideas.

Mobile responsive design can get the relevant content to mobile users quickly and still have the best layout for desktop viewers when required. All this is done without the need for multiple versions of your website or extra plugins.

To find out more about mobile responsive website design, call us on 0113 815 1089 or use our contact form.

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Production North are a well established music concert tour and event production company based in Leeds.

Co founder and director, Iain Whitehead, needed a way to upload and save documents on the internet that could be modified and updated easily. These documents would be accessed by clients using a username and password login. We helped by creating a simple intranet design.

Our solution allowed the company to manage this using the existing website and their own web based administration panel.

This means that Iain and his team can now edit and upload documents from wherever they are in the world and keep their clients up to date with details of the various productions.

Visit the Production North website

If you need help with a simple intranet design to help you manage communication with clients and staff, give us a call on 0113 815 1089 or use our contact form.

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Following a meeting with the management team, we were able to come up with some proposals to help the business make better use of the internet, both in terms of the farm shop website design and in using email marketing and social media.

We are now working closely with Blacker Hall to integrate the website into other aspects of the farm shop business and to optimise the site for relevant search terms.

We successfully introduced an e-commerce solution to allow the farm shop to take orders for Christmas which included payment of a deposit and choice of a collection day. This moved away from standard e-commerce in that no full payment was taken and arrangements were made for collection, rather than delivery. We were able to make these changes to our standard shopping cart solution, with all transactions being by credit card and Paypal.

The team at Blacker Hall were surprised at both the uptake and the conversion rate of visitors into orders. The volume of orders far exceeded expectation.

If we can help you with your farm shop website design or any other project, please give us a call on 0113 815 1089 or fill in our contact form.

The post Farm Shop Website Design appeared first on Octavian Solutions.

Does your website comply with the Directive?

The Commissionaire’s Office (ICO) allowed website owners 12 months to comply with the new Directive. There is the threat of a fine of up to £500,000 for not complying.

If your site is using Google Analytics or other scripts, then it will be using cookies in the browser of the visitor. Under the new law, any cookie deemed as “non-essential” will require consent from the user of the site before it can be used.

If you have an Octavian website, we have a simple solution that will allow the user to accept cookies on their first visit to your site. This can be implemented quickly and for a very low cost. If you would like to use this solution please click here.

What is the EU cookie directive?

The reason for the law is to protect privacy of the user.

The directive compels websites to be transparent about the fact that they are using cookies and requires visitors to give consent before cookies are used.

It’s no longer enough to just include the use of cookies in a privacy policy.

Who needs to comply with it?

The law applies to all websites in EU Member states, but also applies to those outside the EU if they are targeting EU visitors.

Why do I need to comply with it?

It has become law. There is a maximum fine of £500,000, with lower penanlties, such as a letter asking you to comply or an enforcement notice.

What does this mean for my website?

In most cases, this is fairly simple to implement and we have a solution available at a very low cost.

The UK government agree that Google Analytics is an essential part of a website.

You will be allowed to use cookies without permission if they are for a function requested by the visitor or for processes that wouldn’t work without a cookie, such as ecommerce shopping baskets etc.

When do I need to comply with it?

As of 28th May 2012, your site needs to comply with the directive.

How do I comply with it?

To comply with the directive your website will need to warn users that cookies are being used and ask for their consent.

The post E U Cookie Directive appeared first on Octavian Solutions.

The company had commissioned a site in August of last year which had recently gone live and they didn’t feel that it represented what Landguard was about and had a number of technical failings.

As usual we started the process by meeting with the company and learning as much as we could about their business and what they wanted to achieve by having a website.

The outcome was the site at landguardlogs.com.

The site is built on the Genesis Framework as are most of our sites and as such is very search engine friendly “out of the box”. The company has three main areas of business firewood logs, firewood processing and forestry services. These are represented on the front page and easily found from anywhere within the site.

A simple e-commerce solutions allows visitors to order on line for delivery either locally (within 20 miles) for free or nationally for a charge.

The site includes the following features:

• Ecommerce solution using PayPal for payments and credit  card transactions.
• Email marketing solution connected to the ecommerce and the enquiry forms, segmented into various customer types.
• Social sharing for products.
• Search Engine Optimisation and XML sitemap.
• Google Analytics for monitoring performance.

We completed the initial build of the site including the ecommerce solution within two weeks of the first meeting and are now continuing to help with email marketing and search engine optimisation alongside a general web marketing campaign.

The post On line Firewood Sales in Northallerton appeared first on Octavian Solutions.

As with many of our new clients Chris was introduced by one of our existing clients, Lee Mitchell of Air Cooled. We love it when this happens as it shows that we must be doing something right! Thanks Lee.

The George Hotel has been fully re-furbished by Chris and Jo and is the showcase for the Old Spot Brewery, another company that Chris is involved in. The pub is putting an emphasis on quality, locally sourced food and real ale from it’s own brewery. Chris was concerned that this should be reflected in the website and wanted a solution that had everything he needed in one place.

After a short visit to talk through the website and understand a bit more about the business, we recommended one of our hospitality site packages, tailored to match the George brand. As the food is so important we also provided specialist food photography to make sure that the site reflected the experience that customers have when visiting the George.

The final website includes everything that Chris and Jo need to run their business on the internet and is supported by our basic web marketing package. The George site includes:

• Our hospitality essentials website package
• Food menu plugin for building the specials board and the guest beers board – this can be updated quickly by the Chris and Jo.
• Social sharing – to allow visitors to share pages on Twitter, facebook, by email or printing etc.
• Analytics – to measure traffic and the effect of web marketing.
• Search Engine Optimisation – to help with being found in Google and other search engines.
• Google maps for directions
• Interactive forms for contacting The George and enquiring about tables for dining.
• Email marketing – to collect email addresses and provide monthly newsletters etc.
• News and Events section for Chris and Jo to update easily.

The post Real Ale and Local Food at The George appeared first on Octavian Solutions.

The first version of this is now available and we are testing it on our own theme for restaurants. When we are satisfied with the results the plugin will be available to all our clients and will also be a available to restaurants in North Yorkshire as part of the Yorkshire Dales Food Network.

Once logged in to the admin area of the website the chef can create courses and assign them to menus… so, for example, you could have a starter course and add it to your A La Carte menu. The next step is creating dishes and adding them to each course. Each dish can be tagged with a list of ingredients and the site visitor can search for dishes by ingredient.

As time goes by we will add more features to make the plugin more useful and as always we’d value any suggestions you might have for improvements and features.

The restaurant theme can be adapted to fit any branding or layout and is available to use immediately.

Take a look at our test site here.

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Steph, we discovered, is first and foremost a talented chef who is passionate about using locally sourced produce and even forages for her ingredients herself. The other less well known role for Steph is that of chef consultant to some of North Yorkshire’s finest food businesses and restaurants.

Steph wanted an affordable website solution that would show both sides of her profession and also convey something of her personality and her love for food in general and local food in particular. It was important to Steph to credit her clients as examples of her work and also to attract new clients through search.

Our solution… to provide Steph with a cost effective website that she could easily update herself if required, with a simple to use content management system. The finished website has a simple structure of pages for the various elements and a blogging section to add news, recipes and other elements.

We optimised the site for her chosen key phrases and are delighted that stephaniemoon.co.uk already appears on page one of Google for the search phrase “consultant chef”.

The next stage for Steph is to use our email marketing package to build a useful database and continue to build her Twitter following.

An added bonus working with Steph was to be invited to sample her “Great British Menu” in the luxurious surroundings of Rudding Park near Harrogate which included the fantastically creative and well named, Yorkshire Mess, which we thoroughly enjoyed!

View Stephanie Moon – Chef Consultant Website

Follow Stephanie Moon on Twitter @stephaniejmoon

The post Chef Steph Makes a Mess of Yorkshire Produce appeared first on Octavian Solutions.

According to most web marketers, quality content is something that provides value to the reader. By value we don’t just mean a cheap price or a discount voucher, although that’s always useful. The content should be one or all of the following:

• Useful
• Entertaining
• Relevant
• Appeal to the emotions

One of the things that many of our clients struggle with is coming up with content to add to their on line campaigns, but it doesn’t have to be that difficult.

If you’re looking for content for your website or email newsletter, have a look back through some of the things that you’ve done in the past that could maybe be revisited.

Think about your customers and some of the experiences they’ve had, good or bad. What problems did they have that you were able to solve for them? Do you have any useful tips or recipes etc that they might find useful?

Try and create some content that others might like to share, maybe you’ve got an interesting or funny experience that you’ve had at work. We’ve heard some great stories from some of our Bed and Breakfast and Hotel clients from around the Yorkshire Dales about the eccentricities of their guests. These things are great to re-tell, just don’t forget to change the names!

If all else fails you can always ask us about our monthly copywriting service or our email marketing and we’ll try and help you out!

The post Writing content doesn’t have to be difficult appeared first on Octavian Solutions.