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.

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 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.

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

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!

Traditional advertising and direct mail relies on interruption to get the message across to prospective customers. TV adverts interrupt interesting programmes, magazine adverts appear in the middle of articles and junk mail and unsolicited phone calls interrupt your day. Content marketing gets the message across in the content whilst providing something that’s useful, interesting or solves a problem for your audience.

The idea is to create relevant and interesting content for your visitors and build a relationship with them that hopefully at some point will result in them making a purchase or using your services. There are now more ways than ever of delivering content on the web including, blogging, video, podcasts, email and social networks. If you can get people to opt in for your mailing list or subscribe to your blog, or follow you on Twitter, you have lots of opportunities to offer them information and build a relationship.

Most people on the internet are looking for solutions to a problem, if they’re looking for a direct purchase, then your sales pages can offer that as well. If they’re not sure what they want to buy or not confident that your product or service is right, then the content that you produce can help reduce the resistance to making the decision and introduce the reasons why they should buy from you.

So maybe offering your visitors lots of useful content with the odd sales message thrown in is a good way of attracting new prospects and customers.

Image: Thanks to Ambro

Octavian Solutions is a new company formed when we identified a need for no nonsense web solutions for our clients. As a new company, we now have a new website and have begun the process of being indexed by Google and other search engines, a process that we’ve carried out for clients on numerous occasions.

The process starts with identifying your audience and putting yourself in their position. What types of phrases would you use if you were looking for the products or services you offer. When you’ve identified these words and phrases, it’s time to start “optimising” your pages and content to include them. The more focused your content is to meet the needs of your audience, the more relevant it will be to your products and services and the more Google will like it.

Unfortunately though, the content on your page is only a small percentage of the battle to get traffic to your site. What’s really important is that other sites are linking to you and the words and phrases they are using in those links. Googles aim is to provide a great search service to it’s users and one way of doing this is to rank pages that are popular and relevant more highly than others.

What people say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.

All our website solutions are optimised for search and we provide extra tools to help. We realise that not everyone can afford a dedicated SEO campaign and there’s an awful lot you can do yourself to promote yourself to search engines. We’re currently testing out a tool that helps to automate this process, if you’d like to know more, please get in touch.

Some helpful tips for keeping content alive are:

Have a schedule for publishing content. Even if you’re adding content about breaking news and fast changing stories, try and create an editorial calendar with, if possible a few weeks of articles built up in advance. Our content management solution (included with all our sites) will allow you to create drafts and set publishing dates into the future. This will mean that you can write a series of stories and be confident that you will have a bank of material ready to publish, even if your initial enthusiasm disappears.

Keep the same voice. If you have a brand identity for your business or organisation, try to carry it across to your web site content. It may be that you are publishing stories and material from a variety of sources on your site, but it should still fit with your overall brand message and identity.

Check and edit your posts. All our sites have a built in spell checker to help you avoid typos and spelling errors, but be sure to check everything before you publish.

At Octavian we have solutions to help with email marketing, social media, search engine optimisation and a host of other options. All of these work and will have varying degrees of return depending on your type of business and the amount of effort put in to make them effective. One of the most obvious methods though, and one that’s often overlooked, is the power of using printed media in the form of direct mail or printed entry forms.

Too many businesses (and printers are as guilty of this as anyone else) make the assumption that online and offline media don’t mix. This couldn’t be further from the truth in my experience. The printed word still caries a lot of weight with consumers and apart from making them aware of your site in the first place, also has a re-enforcing effect on the message you are trying to convey.

So how do you use printed materials to drive traffic?

Here are a few ideas:

• Make a compelling offer that gives people a reason to visit your site. This needs to be something that is of value to them such as discount coupons, special offers, a free trial or something similar. Once you have them on your site, you can invite them to join your mailing list in order to receive news of more offers.
• Make what you’re asking them to do very clear and then make it easy to find on your site. For example, go to www.mycompany.com and fill in our on line survey to receive a 10% discount voucher.
• Have a postcard printed that invites your customers to fill in their details to be added to a monthly prize draw. Use the opportunity for some market research at the same time by asking them for their comments on your products and services, this might also produce some good testimonials for you to use on your site.
• Make a quarterly printed newsletter with highlights from the content on your website and include a competition that can be either by post or on your site.

Ann integrated approach is often the best way to increase awareness of your brand and making the message consistent across printed and digital media is something we would advise all our clients to do.

We have applications that plug into all our Octavian sites that will help with the suggestions here including voucher codes from our e-commerce solution, email marketing and form building to help you create surveys and competitions etc.

If you would like more help with any of the above, please give Octavian a call on 01756 636106 or use our contact form.

Here are a few suggestions for business blogging to help you find some inspiration.

Latest Projects or Works in Progress

Writing about work that you are involved in helps prospective and existing clients have an insight into the way you work and also highlights the specific products and services that you offer that they may not be aware of. It also helps to show how you have solved problems for clients and acts as a form of testimonial.

Showing your expertise

Offering tips and advice about your industry can be very useful to clients and prospects in saving them some time or money and also demonstrating that you know what you are talking about. Giving away tricks of the trade is not always a bad thing, remember that customers who can afford to pay for your services, will do.

New Products and Services

Use you blog or news feed to highlight new products and services and emphasise how they help the client to solve a particular problem.

Product reviews

Write about how people use your products and services for a particular purpose, with testimonials from them if possible. It doesn’t do any harm to have an independent recommendation and it may be a mutually advantageous arrangement.
There’s always plenty to write about as it turns out, you just need the inspiration. All of our sites have the facility for you to blog easily from anywhere.