Diary for June 2009
14th Maiden Newton Open Gardens
The annual open gardens takes place on the 13th June. This year the allotments will also be open to the public. Jon's allotment will be on view (near the community shed) and he may well be around and about at the allotments during the day....
13th Maiden Newton Open Gardens
The annual open gardens takes place on the 13th June. This year the allotments will also be open to the public. Jon's allotment will be on view (near the community shed) and he may well be around and about at the allotments during the day....
8th Portland Legal Services - Website Re-Launch
Today saw the relaunch of the website for Portland Legal Services. The site, built using our Simple CMS, is now fully optimised for search engine indexing. We also used the opportunity to give the whole site a clearer and more contemporary look. This is our first legal and professional services website, and hopefully will mark the beginning of a series of sites developed for this sector....
29th How We Get More Website Traffic
The past 2 weeks have started to show the effect of the search engine optimisation, Google Maps and other promotional work that we've done for The Gables holiday cottage in Crail (in Fife, near St Andrews golf course). About a month ago now we set The Gables up on Google Maps using the Local Business Center services that Google offers. This allowed us to show The Gables on any geographical search for holiday accommodation in the area in and around Crail. We also refined the site conte...
26th New Issue of Reformulation Published
Today saw the arrival of the the Summer issue of Reformulation (the journal for the Assocation of Cognitive Analytic Therapy - ACAT) arrive on the doormat. It looks and feels particularly smart with an unusual "ticket" motif on the cover which advertises the forthcoming international conference that is being hosted by ACAT. We've been designing and publishing the journal for ACAT for about 10 years now, starting with a desktop-published version using MS Publisher, printed by a very small prin...
24th Job Vacancy - Junior Web Developer
We are now recruiting for a Graduate Junior Web Developer to start work in September 2009. The starting salary will be £15,000 plus bonuses working in or near to Dorchester (location to be confirmed). The closing date for applications is 21st July 2009. Full information about the job is below. Graduate Junior Web Developer Alacrify is a well established Dorset-based web and graphic design agency which is seeking to appoint its first employee in order to keep pace with increasing demand...
22nd Creating Good Administration Systems
I will be spending this week going flat out on finishing the online administration systems for the two big projects we're working on currently. Running both in tandem has been a useful experience as there's been a good deal of cross-fertilisation between both projects that has improved the design and operation of both. This symbiotic evolution is quite normal for us as we multitask across a variety of projects at any one time. Both these projects have a sophisticated data architecture underne...
19th Local Networking - MeetDraw and DorsetDigital
Last night I went along to the second MeetDraw gathering which happened at Key West, at the end of Bournemouth Pier. Having missed the first event I had no real idea about what to expect, other than it would be attended by lots of people in the local digital / new media community. Although networking events are not my prefered habitat, I do enjoy the occasional foray into this environment, and last night was a good experience. While there was a little bit of "points-scoring" - my co...
17th Indicating Language Choice with Flags or Text
As part of one of the major projects we're working on currently the issue of how to represent language choices to the viewer has arisen. In this particular case we're dealing with 15 major languages which are spoken all over the world. My initial instinct was to see if it would be at all possible to use flags as an indicator of language, but immediately ran into the issue that while it may be almost legitimate to use the French Tricolor as an indicator of French, the Union Fl...
12th Improving Search Engine Ranking
The recent re-launch of John Bullock's lighting design website is now beginning to bear fruit with increased search engine performance. Visitor numbers up by 54%, page views up 214%, pages per visit up 105% and bounce rate down by 16.5%. These stats show the positive impact of investing in a larger site which has been thoughtfully optimised for search engine performance. Increased visitor numbers speak for themselves, but the reduction in bounce rate also indicates a better quality vi...
11th Going Cuckoo: Achieving Work-Life Balance
At the moment we are very fortunate to be facing the challenge of managing many different projects simultaneously. Juggling priorities to make sure they are all moving ahead, while not working 24/7 is a perpetual challenge and occasional source of stress. This past week I've taken advantage of these long summer evenings to do my bit towards the community allotments in the village by putting up a rabbit-proof fence at the front of the community plots. Creating a sturdy and reasonably smart pie...
9th Legal Website Re-branding - Portland Legal Services
Yesterday we launched our fourth website created using our Simple CMS [content management system]; the first we've created for the legal and professional services sector. Portland Legal Services approached us to find out why their previous website wasn't performing as well as it should on the search engines. The site was well written and doing well at converting visitors into clients, but most of the traffic to the site was being generated through Google Adwords campaigns rather tha...
5th New Issue of Reformulation Sent to Print
Today has been a busy mixture of meetings and deadlines. The morning was a project meeting for one of the big pieces of work we're doing at the moment; a chance to catch up and plan the next steps. This afternoon has been spent with a fine-toothed comb, putting the finishing touches to the new issue of 'Reformulation' which [the journal for ACAT: www.acat.me.uk.] Its now flying through the ether to the printer and should be ready for delivery in 2 weeks time. The mixture of the social an...
2nd Getting Your Business On The Map
I have just completed the registration process to get The Gables Holiday Cottage, Crail onto Google Maps. This is almost the final piece of the jigsaw in promoting this lovely holiday home on the web. We launched the site about a month ago now and are now happy that it has found its way across most of the search engines, and in particular to Google. The next task has been to set it up as "location" on Google Maps. To do this we used Google's "Local Business Center" and registe...
1st Commenting on Blog Posts
Today we have added the facility for visitors to post comments about the blog stories that we publish using our Simple CMS system. This is in response to our clients' requests. The system uses a simple feedback form with a small CAPTCHA facility to try and stop automated form submissions from spambots. Comments can be controlled at various points in the system, allowing individual feature entries to accept or deny further comments, as well as having global controls for the whole blo...
Alacrify Ltd. 01300 320076. jon@alacrify.co.uk
