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Matching Web Pages
advertising
Advertising We are currently running a small test project in which we're supplying adverts to various websites, in particular "Real West Dorset" and "Maiden Newton Village Website". We have a small number of ad slots available for use free of charge in exchange for helpful feedback from our advertisers that will be used to shape the project's development. The ad slots are available for use on a daily basis, with different each advertiser being able to s...
terms and conditions
Terms and Conditions for Website Usage Welcome to our website. If you continue to browse and use this website you are agreeing to comply with and be bound by the following terms and conditions of use, which together with our privacy policy govern Alacrify Ltd's relationship with you in relation to this website. The term 'Alacrify Ltd' or 'us' or 'we' refers to the owner of the website. The term 'you' refers to the user or viewer of our website. The use of this website is subject to the follow...
privacy
Privacy Policy This is a privacy policy for Alacrify Ltd. We respect your privacy. Here is an outline of the information that Alacrify gathers, how it is used, and how you can opt-out. If you have any questions about this privacy policy, please either write to us at: Alacrify Ltd 40 Elwell Street Upwey WEYMOUTH Dorset DT3 5QF ENGLAND or email jon@alacrify.co.uk Site Visits Whenever you request a page through your browser, information is stored in a log. This information incl...
website design
Website Design Website design used to be so simple; the options available were basic and straightforward - a little bit of text and some (small) images on a handful of pages to present the business or organisation to the world. Now the internet is a totally different animal. The transition of tv-style animation and video onto the web along with 'web 2' social networking interactivity have changed the options available beyond recognition. But more choice doesn't mean you make better decisions...
brochure websites
Brochure Websites The majority of websites on the internet are brochure websites. They present a company or organisation's products and services to the world over a series of themed pages. As with printed brochures these types of site can also have order forms, payment options, and contact details or information about special offers or company news. What's all the fuss about? We've been making brochure sites for people and businesses since 1999 and have found that the businesses can get man...
content management
Content Management Systems All websites need some means of keeping their content up to date. Whereas it used to be the province of people with an interest or expertise in web programming, nowadays there are many systems that are designed for the layperson to use. Read Meriel Thurstan's experience of using our Micro CMS here. These Content Management Systems come in all shapes and sizes. Many are fantastic some are flawed, some are expensive and others are free. They all try to do one thing ...
google adwords
Google AdWords Over the past several years we have been increasingly using both sides of Google's Pay Per Click advertising programmes -AdWords (for advertisers) and AdSense (for publishers). Their usefulness is matched only by their subtlety and endless configuration possibilities. As with many good ideas it takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. Advertising Your Site, Your Brand and Your Products / Services Google AdWords allows you to create and place adverts on...
branding
Branding and Re-Branding A lot of small (and medium sized) businesses tend to stick their heads in the sand when it comes to addressing the need for building a brand. Most tend not to notice that they're actually building a brand anyway, mostly without even realising it. Your brand is the collection of assumptions, impressions and expectations that you build in the minds of people who meet you. Everyone is a brand. Knowing how to build it to your advantage is a major part of bui...
accessibility
Accessibility on the Internet The need for accessibility on the internet is often taken to mean how much a site is accessible to people with disabilities. We look at accessibility as a much broader issue. Accessible sites aren't those that only perform well for people with disabilities, but those that perform well for everybody. Accessibility is closely linked to usability; the art of making things easy to use. It not only includes whether a site works well with a screen reader, but also whe...
home
Welcome to Alacrify Keeping cosy and warm this winter. why our clients choose alacrify we build websites that work - we understand Search Engine Optimisation and make sites that deliver traffic and business to our clients. we build websites that work - we know how to design sites that are useful, engaging and interesting to potential and returning customers. we try to be helpful and accessible - you will (almost) always be able to speak to one of our tea...
about us
About Us We are a design business based in Dorset, England. Normally if you contact us you'll get to speak to Jon Sloper. In August and September 2009 we appointed Peter Rickard and Stefan Warman. Major changes to the company meant that Pete left Alacrify in January 2010. His contributions to the company were much appreciated and he left Alacrify with our very best wishes for his future endeavours. Jon and his wife are sole Directors of Alacrify. Jon's area of expertise and ...
our clients
Our Clients We've worked with all sorts of clients over the years, from sole traders, new businesses, SMEs, international consultancies, membership associations, in all sorts of market sectors; retail, it, marketing, printing, leisure and so on. Our clients come from many different sectors of the market. We've created a set of pages to features those in each sector: hospitality and accommodation leisure and pastimes retail sector commercial secto...
our team
Many Hands Make Light Work At Alacrify we draw on the specialist support of several other people to make our work a success. We know that we can't be masters of everything and are keen to involve people with other expertise to help provide services to our clients. Regine Jong Regine is a professional marketing consultant with a diverse range of experience and expertise in understanding how to build brands, market a business and create effective advertising and marketing campai...
retail sector
Retail Sector Websites Our work for retail clients has included both print and web design. Flyers, advertisements and posters advertising goods for sale have been developed alongside new websites for direct online commerce. If you'd like us to come and work for you on your print or website design work or for a particular marketing or advertising project then please give us a ring on 01300 320076 or email jon@alacrify.co.uk and who knows your company may end up featured on thi...
commercial sector
Commercial Sector Websites We have found ourselves working with more and more commercial clients. In addition to the list below we have a number of current projects underway which will be added to this list in the coming weeks and months. If you'd like us to come and work for you on your print or website design work or for a particular marketing or advertising project then please give us a ring on 01300 320076 or email jon@alacrify.co.uk and who knows your company may end up featu...
networks and associations
Networks and Associations We've supplied many different services to the associations and networks that we work with. These have included creating and maintaining their websites; developing printed materials including adverts and flyers; publishing journals and reports, and a variety of other administrative support activities. If you'd like us to come and work for you on your print or website design work or for a particular marketing or advertising project then please give us a...
healthcare
Healthcare and Scientific Websites We've worked with clients in the healthcare sector since the mid 1990's and increasingly in the science and biotech sector too. This has included publishing a regular journal (for ACAT), designing and maintaining websites and an extranet (also for ACAT), as well as creating logos, adverts and marketing materials as they're needed. We've also developed websites for product support and news distribution. If you'd like us to come and...
homes and gardens
Homes and Gardens Our homes and gardens clients include people who make your house beautiful, make your garden beautiful or make beautiful things to put in your house or garden. If you'd like us to come and work for you on your print or website design work or for a particular marketing or advertising project then please give us a ring on 01300 320076 or email jon@alacrify.co.uk and who knows your company may end up featured on this page too! www.barton-cottage-pottery.co.uk Ba...
Matching Features
Hot Off The Press
We have been writing our company blog since 2006. It's a mixture of news about our business and the projects we're working on, along with more personal thoughts and comments on the experience of working in the print and web design business. Our blog is also a chance for us to flag up newly finished sites to the public and invite people to pay them a visit. This not only illustrates what we do, but also helps to promote our clients' businesses. You can a...
Matching Feature Entries
New Website for Fine Art Consultant
We've recently completed work on a website for Patrick-Lees Millais' fine art consultancy. It's only a couple of pages but gives a flavour of the type of work patrick deals in. Visit the site here. http://www.plmfineart.co.uk ...
We Are Recruiting - New Junior Web Developer Needed
2012 is going to be a big year for Alacrify. The growth in demand for our services increased again in 2011 and has already accelerated again this year. This means we need new developer(s) to join our team and will also be moving into new, larger offices in February/March. The job advert for a Junior Web Developer is now posted on Gumtree and GradSouthWest, but of course we're also making the most of our website to push out the message, as well as spreading the word around the Dorset d...
Show Dates and New Videos for Dorset County Show 2012
This week we published the new show dates for the 2012 Dorset County Show on the show website. The Dorset County Show will be taking place on the 1st and 2nd September 2012. There's also a load of excellent videos on the site that you can view to whet your appetite for this year's event. Traders/Exhibitors can view the latest video about the benefits of taking a stand at the show by clicking here, or clicking on the image below. ...
Adding a Blog to MagentoGo
Following on from our last post about Twitter and MagentoGo I thought it might be helpful to write about how to add a blog to MagentoGo, the SaaS e-commerce platform from Magento. Firstly I should say that there is no inbuilt blog in Magento Go. It just doesn't exist. So we have to find a workaround to simulate one. This is a bit fiddly as the key part of a blog (apart from being able to regularly publish content) is that it should be available as an RSS feed. Secondly y...
Adding Twitter and Twitterfeed to MagentoGo @MothPrevention
This week we have added in a system for creating a virtual news blog on MagentoGo. There is no built-in way to do this, so we have had to create a cunning workaround. This means utilising a bunch of formatting conventions for the page names on MagentoGo that we're using for the news stories (they are all prefixed with "stories/") and then using PHP to read the list and create an xml RSS feed from the published items. Once the RSS feed is in place (which needed to b...
Sector Publishing Sites Improved
As part of our ongoing involvement in Sector Publishing we've re-designed the the network's homepage to better represent all the available content on the site. http://www.technology-news-reports.com We've also been working on improving topic pages as well as making large improvements to overall site performance. http://www.technology-news-reports.com/topic/2407-video-games.html While still a work in progress, with these changes we hope to improve search engine o...
Review of 2011
This year has been one of growth and partnerships at Alacrify. We seem to have done more work than ever and now have our biggest client portfolio to date. More Sites Than Ever in More Sectors Than Ever In simple numbers we produced almost 50% more sites this year than last year, with over 50 new or rebuilt sites being launched in 2011. But that only tells a part of the story. We've diversified into new sectors like engineering, flooring, roofing, defence and catering. We'v...
Publishing News Online to Boost Traffic
We have been working for the Southampton Ice Rink to publish a series of news stories for them almost every day that they are open. With a new site like www.southamptonskating.co.uk which was only launched about 8 weeks ago, it's often difficult to achieve quick results for search engine listing. Many sites are barely listed in Google at all within this timeframe. To help them get their message out there more quickly we have been running daily stories on the site to build content ...
News from www.osedirectory.com on @OSEsafety and @OSEenvironment
We have just built a section for the OSEdirectory website to allow news stories to be added and published online. The stories are either written by or commissioned by OSEdirectory, or are created directly by their advertisers. The Health and Safety and Environmental directory is a multilanguage source of information about products, services and companies for health and safety and environmental monitoring. The news is automatically fed to Twitter and is followed by over 2,000 ...
SEO Testing and Visualising Changes to SEO
We've just created a new page on our site here to help us to explain to our clients how SEO works and show the effect on websites of altering different aspects of SEO. You can view the page here: SEO Tester You can use the tester to see how the different aspects of SEO can improve or harm your website's performance. We've built the tester from our experience of building and maintaining websites over the past 15 years; and drawn from a wide variety of types of website f...
Consistency in Website Design
As part of our work developing a number of 'microsites' for Honeywell Analytics this year, we were instructed to create a stand alone microsite for their subsiduary company, BW Technologies - for their new GasAlertMicroClip XT portable gas detector. We were able to quickly build a new website, based upon the design of an existing one - the GasAlertQuattro, working closely with Honeywell Analytics to ensure the preset content was suitably accommodated and easy to read. Attenti...
Quintessential Bed and Breakfast Tops The Good Web Guide for BandBs
The "Best Sites Digest" puts the site we built for Quintessential Bed and Breakfast in 1st Place on their B and B sites listing page. Check out http://www.thegoodwebguide.co.uk/news-info/best-sites-digest/best-sites-for-bed-breakfasts/13902 to read the full review. We're thrilled for our clients who have worked unbelievably hard on the site and really used all the functionality we built into their website; and the results are now speaking for themselves. ...
Microsite Marketing for Established Brands
During 2011, we have completed a number of small 'microsites' for Honeywell Analytics, international specialists in all forms of Gas Detection equipment. Microsites are designed to easily convey information about a product or service and are often used as a digital addition to more traditional printed marketing materials, such as brochures and leaflets. Our work for the newly launched H450EN Carbon Monoxide Alarm was centred around creating a website that strongly resembl...
Beta Test of xampe Going Well
@xampeNews. Our early adoption of xampe's online business administration app is proving really fruitful already. In just a couple of sessions we've already got over 25% of our data loaded and functioning on xampe's business administration system and already it's proving its value. xampe Report's Real Value We needed to run a spot check on our SEO terms on our clients websites to check they were all up to date, and through xampe we were able to run the report an...
Ice Skating in Southampton Opens in 10 Days
The new ice rink in Southampton City Centre opens on 17th November 2011. We've created a brand new website for the rink to allow you to book a Christmas holiday ice skating treat for you and your family. Just visit www.southamptonskating.co.uk and click on the bear at the top of the page. Pick your dates and times and pay online. You'll get a receipt that you can take to the rink with a QR barcode on it that will be scanned at the front desk. Then within just a few moments you...
Alacrify is a Beta Tester for xampe
@xampeNews. We're really excited to get our hands on xampe and to start using it to help us to run Alacrify. xampe is an online business administration and customer relationship management service. (It's not just for online businesses though!) It is designed to allow us to keep all our business records in one place, so we can access them wherever and whenever we need them. It won't replace Outlook or our website code storage, but it will allow us to manage our projects ...
Cheapest Websites Online
I spent a couple of hours looking at our competition on the web last weekend and one of the categories I looked into was the cheapest websites available on the internet to see what you get for your money. (And see if there's anything we can learn from them.) Cheap Websites from Under £30! The prices for a cheap website started at under £30 and then stretched up to a few hundreds. (One person's cheap is another person's expensive after all... it's...
What To Expect From A New Website
We build dozens of websites every year and try to make every one of them a real success for our clients. This means we need to understand what our client wants the site to do for them, and our clients need to understand what's achievable with a website on the internet. There's a number of questions about new websites that we find ourselves answering a lot. Here's our top 5. 1. How many visitors will come to our new site? How many visitors do other websites get? ...
Search Engine Optimisation That Works
We're lucky enough to have a large number of clients offering a broad spectrum of products and services through their businesses; from charities, to social care, through tourism and engineering, to the financial sector and art and design. This has allowed us to explore the full gamut of search engine optimisation over the years that we've been working with them. How To Get Top Listings On Google Well, regardless of what some marketing companies will try and tell...
Home-Start West Dorset Fundraising
Another charity supported by Alacrify, Home-Start West Dorset, is seeking supporters for their bid for NatWest Community Force funding. If you would like to know more about their bid to win £6,000 of community funding from NatWest please visit Home-Start West Dorset's website and click on the community force logo at the top of the page: www.homestartwestdorset.co.uk/page/home ...
New Site Designs and Rebrands
This month we've had a flurry of new website designs come our way, along with a number of sites that need to be redesigned to make a better impression on the web. The redesigns are for a variety of reasons. Some want a fresh look for a dated-looking site. Some want better SEO performance for their sites. Others want to utilise new web technology on their site. And some have changed the focus of their business and now need their site to be updated to reflect this. One of the aspect...
New Videos and Interactive Map on Dorset County Show Website
As the show prepares to open its gates to the public tomorrow, the show website www.dorsetcountyshow.co.uk now features a fantastic interactive Show Map and a lovely video to encourage visitors to come to the show. Over the weekend there will also be new videos published on the site showing this year's highlights as they happen. Check out the show video page: http://www.dorsetcountyshow.co.uk/page/dorset+county+show+videos ...
Positive Feedback from Relaunched Website
The comments have been really positive since the launch of the new website for ACAT (the Association for Cognitive Analytic Therapy), "Firstly I want to say how much I love the new website. The visual design is stunning, the new pages contain some great info and the site seems extremely user friendly." "Congratulations on a fabulous looking, well organised and easy to use website, it works really well!" "Fabulous! This is such an improvement...
Our Biggest Relaunch to Date
At midnight last night we opened the doors to our latest redeveloped website - ACAT online; a moment of excitement and trepidation! We have worked on the Association for Cognitive Analytic Therapy's (ACAT) website from day one, almost 15 years ago, when the pages were tiny, written in basic html and peppered with a few small, low resolution images. Over the years the site has evolved into a complete membership administration system, with masses of content and functionality ai...
Huge Improvements in Google Position Following Site Relaunch
Our recent changes and relaunch of the Whole Hog's website is now beginning to bear fruit with really improved search positions for the site. Following a complete, root and branch redesign and rethink of the site's marketing strategy we launched the site a couple of weeks ago. The launch process also involved us consolidating three domain names into one brand as Google's dislike of duplicate content was harming the overall business' performance on the web. We a...
Summer News from Alacrify
Once again we've got a wonderfully mixed orderbook of new sites and development on the go at the moment. From websites for therapy (4 of them no less!) to show jumping, engineering, financial services, leisure, retail and construction we seem to be working in almost every sector of the economy at the moment. This mix is something that is completely fascinating and brings enormous creativity to our working week. Although in some respects there are obviously going to be shared aspects t...
New Website for Weymouth and Portland
Following on the success of the website for Maiden Newton, we are currently working on a new website for Weymouth and Portland. Using our village website model we are working on a larger scale version that will hopefully offer the same quality and interest for people living in the area, and those coming to visit. The site is a work in progress as we source all the information that we need to make it as comprehensive as possible. In addition to information about things to d...
Having Fun and Being Creative - CSS3 and Google Fonts
Over the past couple of weeks we've been putting a bit of CSS3 sparkle into some of our new website designs. In particular we've been playing with shadows and rounded box corners to provide pages with some more texture and depth. Cute CSS3 Effects Some of the cutest effects in CSS3 would take hours to acheive through using conventional images and text. Glowing boxes, boxes that appear embossed, or float above the rest of the page content, or boxes that appear to be carved ...
Top Google Result for Relaunched Website
Our SEO approach has given Dorchester Photographer, Jonathan Gooding, the top spot on Google for searches for "Dorchester Photographer" in just a few weeks since the his site was launched. The mixture of useful content, properly structured pages, and optimised writing on each page has meant the site has rocketed up the search listings. Key Tips for SEO We don't use any "magic" to get to the top, just sound and honest approaches to making a site t...
Help with How To Start a New Business
Really useful advice and support with starting a new business is invaluable. It is rare that a new business startup will begin with all the answers in place, however much experience the new entrepreneur has accumulated in their previous work experience. Finding good sources of support and advice is really important in filling in the gaps in your knowledege and providing a "sounding board" for your new business ideas. Expert Advice and Commonsense Questions for New Busine...
7 Months of Growth for Bed and Breakfast Website
The site we created for Quintessential Bed and Breakfasts is now 7 months old and boasts 16 of the UK's most beautiful bed and breakfasts on its pages. The site's owner writes, "The Quintessential Bed and Breakfast website went live on 8 November 2010. Exactly seven months on and the site boasts 16 unique and luxurious bed and breakfast homes from the Scottish Borders to the very south of Devon. Visitor numbers are climbing by the day; thus far over 14,000 visitors h...
Websites for New Business Startups
We really enjoy creating websites for new businesses. There's something infectious about the energy that surrounds a new startup enterprise that gets our creativity flowing. We've been fortunate to work with lots of new businesses to establish their web presence and have found there are some important elements that really help everyone to set off on the right foot. Sharing a Vision Our starting point, as with all our work, is to get into the mind and worldview of the e...
Optimising Website Speeds
A key aspect of Search Engine Optimisation is improving page load times. This means that Google and other search engines can get to see more of your site more quickly whenever their spiders come and visit. It also means that visitors quickly get to see the contents of your site without waiting around for content to load. Testing The Site Load Times We measure the performance of our sites using Google's Page Speed tools. This can either be run from within Firefox or ca...
Twitterfeed and Facebook Integration
We are now serving our blog posts and diary events to Facebook using the magic of Twitterfeed. This simple tool takes the title and first few lines of text from our RSS feed and drops them into the news on our Facebook page. It's another aspect of the SEO we offer with our website Content Management Solutions and gives a big return on the investment of effort in writing new stories. The single story is then available on the site, via RSS, on Twitter and now also on Facebook. ...
Count Not Showing on Twitter Button
We use a Twitter button on lots of our clients' blog stories to allow people to quickly Tweet a story directly from the webpage. This is a useful and popular aspect of the blogging setup that we build and forms a package of optimisation features that includes Twitterfeed too. This past week I noticed that some of the Twitter buttons weren't showing the correct stats for the pages. I knew there were Tweets about the pages but they weren't showing on the button counter. Havi...
Bookmarks and Breadcrumbs on Websites
Continual improvements are the key to good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Standing still will mean you'll be inevitably overtaken by more active and ambitious competitors. We're constantly aware of this with the wide number of sites that we work on. This week we've spent some time looking at the Quintessential Bed and Breakfast website in particular. The website has now been online for several months and has been successfully indexed by Google and the other search e...
CSS3 and Website Statistics Charts
The best methods for presenting site stats depend completely on working out what the client needs. This month we've been working on a method for showing aggregated stats from a client's Clicky account and finding a simple way render a complex set of statistics as a coherent and easy to understand chart. Planning the Website Stats Reports The first stage was to get a clear idea of our client's needs. In this case it was for a monthly summary of visits, totalled by week,...
Capturing lifetime images of your special day
We've just launched a website for Wedding and Portrait Photographer, Katrina Sealey (LBIPP). Katrina had a specific set of requirements that she needed from a new website to help promote her photography business across the South of the UK, having just recently moved into the region. Having met and talked through some ideas, and given a demonstration of our Micro CMS 2 content management system, we were able to quickly arrive at a preferred design and start the build. ...
Dynamic Website for Local Photographer
We are pleased to have recently launched a re-designed website for local photographer, Jonathan Gooding. Jonathan, who is a qualified member of the British Institute of Professional Photography (BIPP) came to us to help him bring his existing website up-to-date. Working in collaboration with Graphic Detail, who created the design template, we built a CMS website allowing easy updating of both content and images. Particular importance was given for the navigation through th...
Promotional design for Village Stores's tasting events
We have just finalised the design of a poster for the upcoming "Sample Saturdays" due to be held in the Maiden Newton Stores throughout April. Each Saturday in the month from 10am - 1pm, there will be a different range of tasty treats on offer for anyone to sample in store. The products on offer have been selected from a number of local producers, listed below: 2nd April - Framptons Butchers (Bridport) Sausage tasting, sourced and made locally 9th April - Longmans C...
New Website for Enable Support Services in Dorset
This week we launched a new website for Weymouth-based social care providers "Enable Support Services". From the new www.essdorset.co.uk website: "Our goal is to support our clients in improving their skills and confidence in living independent and happy lives. We work in partnership with our clients and strive to consistently provide a sensitive, flexible and professional response. We have recently obtained registration with the Care Quality Commission (www.cqc.or...
Junior Web Developer Job at Alacrify
We are recruiting again; looking for a new person to join our team of web developers. Junior Web Developer We need someone with PHP/MySQL skills to work on a variety of projects for our clients. We've put the full spec on the recruitment page of the site. www.alacrify.co.uk/page/recruitment It is a great chance to work in a very creative industry and gain experience on many different types of project. The successful candidate will need to have a good set of existi...
Using .htaccess to Redirect Pages with $_GET Variables to Friendly URLs
As part of the recent changes to the OSE Directory website we changed the url structure that was used for the pages. The pages were set up with a number of $_GET variables that then were used to find records or search the site. They were in this kind of format: company.php?type=health&company_id=12 We needed to find a way to break this up and redirect it to our new friendly url version, which, in its simplest form is: /1-5-12/ [where health is denoted by 1 and company b...
Updated Design and Functionality for Multi-Language Website
OSE Directory is an online resource for people looking for health and safety service and product suppliers, and for sourcing environmental monitoring and analysis products and services. At the start of 2011 we were asked to update the design and functionality of the site to achieve two objectives. Firstly to improve the usability of the site for its visitors, and secondly to increase the site's presence in non-English-speaking markets. Website Design Updates for Increased&nbs...
Clicky - A Great Alternative to Google Analytics
We are addicted to website traffic stats. I guess it is a occupational hazard in our line of business where one of the key measures of online success is the number of website visits and visit duration. The undoubted and, at the moment, indisputable king of the stats trackers is Google's Analytics. It has set the bar for peoples' expectations of what stats can show them about their website's performance. And it's a great leader, integrating as it does with Google's...
First Choice Solar Website Under Development
We've recently been employed to provide First Choice Solar with a new website design and implementation and this week we should see the first few pages go live. First Choice Solar supplies and fits photovoltaic solar panels and is based in Poole, Dorset. Our task has been to provide them with a logo and a striking, bright and informative website to promote their business. The logo is now complete and our designs have been approved for the re-developed site...
Internet Explorer 7 and CK Editor Integration Problems
Have you ever been confused by IE7 randomly failing to load a CK Editor Instance without throwing any JavaScript errors? Perhaps it even works on some pages, but not others despite using the same template? If like me the answer to both these question is a loud and obscenely phrased "yes" I would invite you to delay your IE burning in effigy and hear a suggestion for a solution: Luckily the fix is extremely simple. As it turns out Internet Explorer 7 has problems loading CK E...
Great Response to Maiden Newton Website
Since we launched the new village website for Maiden Newton we have had a great response from villagers and visitors to the area. Several people have approached us with new leads for further content that will be added to the site, and many people have complimented us on the work done so far in bringing the site up to date again. Reindexing The Site After The Relaunch Google has fully indexed the new site, but still has lots of old page links in its database and so w...
Review of 2010 for Alacrify
This year has been full of good things for us at Alacrify. We have welcomed Mark into the team, built lots of lovely new websites and worked with lots of lovely clients. Here are some of our highlights. The year started with a flurry of activity on the BioPortfolio website. We were asked to provide a complete rebuild and redesign from the ground up. Building on the site's success over the previous 10 years, we have spent the year turning it into a highly sophisticated, quick, reliable...
Another Milestone for Quintessential Bed And Breakfasts
Fabulous accommodation across the UK on the recently launched Quintessential Bed and Breakfast website now includes properties from Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Devon, Somerset, Cumbria and Gwynedd. The site has simply the most outstanding bed and breakfasts imaginable in some of the UK's most glorious locations. Take a mo to visit and be tempted to stay in one of these exceptional bed and breakfasts. Along with the stunning properties there are now sev...
Clay-to-Game Shooting Services Website Grows
Shotgun tuition and shooting services company, Clay-to-Game, is growing fast, and to keep up with the company's expansion we have updated and expanded their website to include several new aspects of their business. Clay To Game Overseas Game Services Clay-to-Game are now offering special services to visitors from overseas who wish to visit the UK and experience clay and game shooting during their stay. We've added in a series of pages to present these services to the we...
Reflections on Using Google AdWords
I've just written a brief introduction and description of our experience of using Google Adwords and added it to our site. We've been using both Google AdWords and Google AdSense on several projects over the past few years and it seemed a good time to distill the insights and understanding we've gained through using them. AdWords is the bit where you pay Google to display your ads. AdSense is the bit where Google pays you to display their ads. As with all G...
New Design Brings Huge Performance Improvements for Bioportfolio
The ongoing work we are carrying out on BioPortfolio's Life Science website is bringing astonishing growth and traffic to the site. This week we have broken through the 1,000,000 listed pages threshold, and are increasing at the rate of between 10,000 and 20,000 new pages per day. This has brought about a major incease in visitor numbers. Alexa's figures for the site today show that it is rated at 117,193 in the world. That may not sound impressive until you consider the 232,839,9...
Online Donations Facility Added to Home-Start West Dorset Website
Today we've added an online donation facility to the Home-Start West Dorset website using the "JustGiving" service. This means that people can now make donations to Home-Start West Dorset directly and instantly over the internet. We also added new content elements to allow the charity to publish news stories on the site, and updated some of the design elements to make it easier to find key content on the page. In particular we've added a new "Annual Reports...
Long Tail Website Marketing - Practical Examples
One of the most helpful ideas in website marketing to have emerged over the past few years is the concept of the "Long Tail", as proposed by Chris Anderson in 2006. It says that in the world of the internet, the niche is King. Mainstream products and companies will always be battling it out for the centre ground and the vast majority of popular opinion or sales, and will be relying on mass media advertising and huge marketing campaigns to out-do one another. The Long Tail on...
Keeping It Fresh - RSS and Twitter Integration
Search engines like sites that are active and current, just like people do. They ascribe more importance to websites with new and regularly changing content than to sites on similar topics but with static or out of date content. In the race for the top spot in search engine results this can provide a key competitive edge. With our site we have always striven to provide easy ways to keep the site fresh and up to date, but for relatively little effort. A key part of the picture has been our...
Magazine Style Home Page for BioPortfolio
Our ongoing development of lifescience and biotech website, BioPortfolio.com has seen us launch a new home page design for the site this week. The new home page design has a more magazine-style format, featuring images from many of the news stories, reports and videos that are available on the site. Instead of just using text to show content listings the design now uses a mixture of images from the stories with artwork from BioPortfolio's extensive database of corporate images; p...
Design Updates for OSE Directory
We've just finished making a handful of new design changes to the OSE Directory website. Building on the successful and fast loading original design we've now added a new twist with rounding the corners of the central site background, and adding in a subtle gradient to make the overall design stand out from the page. www.osedirectory.com We've also reworked the major button navigation elements on the home page and added in one or two other subtle refinements. ...
New Brand Relaunch for Photography Studio
This month we have rebranded and relaunched the website for Seven Springs Studios' portraiture services. Having joined the successful, national Click and Fresh networks for portrait photography and makeover photography, photographer Andy Whale wanted his website to reflect his new involvement with these networks. We took his wonderful photos and created a new look for these pages, creating a strong, dynamic and fun feel to the sites. We split the site into two halves, one...
Real West Dorset
In the past fortnight we've helped to make a few improvements to the Wordpress news site "Real West Dorset" - www.realwestdorset.co.uk This has included setting up and configuring YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) and the Google News feed generator. They're now both working well, and YARPP in particular really enriches the content on each page. We got to know Jonathan Hudston, the editor for Real West Dorset and the company he works for (Water...
Seach Engine Performance Boost for BioPortfolio
Since launching the completely rebuilt BioPortfolio website we have been waiting with bated breath to see how well our SEO and design theories would stand the white hot heat of Google's reality. BioPortfolio is by far the biggest website we have worked on to date, with almost three quarters of a million pages (and growing), masses of live content, huge cross-referencing of information and a quarter of a million site visits per month. Tackling such a behemoth was a daunting process...
Relaunch of Bed and Breakfast Website
We've just launched a redesigned website for the fabulous "Old Post Office" bed and breakfast at Adlestrop in the heart of the Cotswolds. This exceptional accommodation is beautifully presented in an elegant, classy new design. The Old Post Office, Adlestrop. A beautiful place to stay. In addition to creating a lovely website to show off the B&B's wonderful accommodation, we have used every search engine optimisation technique possible to ensure that i...
Continuing Search Engine Optimisation [SEO] for Nightdress Website
We have continued to work with "If Only If" who sell traditional cotton and silk nightdresses to build their site's search engine performance. We've implemented a range of SEO methods within the scope of their site's custom CMS system. This is beginning to lead to better listings and more traffic. We've focused on the environmental and fairtrade credentials of the company, as well as on the luxury cotton and timeless styling of their nightdresses. In par...
River Cottage Handbook - Hedgerow - Additional Information
The new site that we created for River Cottage's foraging guru, John Wright, has now got some additional information on it about species that were not able to be included in the new Hedgerow handbook. Along with a series of new species there will also be pages added about how to make some of the essential foragers' equipment that John uses when he's out and about. Here's a screenshot of the Pennycress page on the site, showing the new information and the identificatio...
CKEditor Toolbar Config
We use the marvellous CKEditor and CKFinder on lots of our websites as a WYSIWYG textarea replacement in our Content Management Systems. Very often we customise the CKEditor Toolbar for each site. Here's a little crib sheet we use to remind us of the options available: config.toolbar = 'Complete; config.toolbar_Complete = [ ['Source','-','Save','NewPage','Preview','-','Templates'], &nbs...
Site Visitor Stats Rocket Following Redesign
The recent redesign of the Dorset County Show website has led to the site visitor stats rocketing by an amazing 500% since the site was launched three weeks ago. We've also seen an increase in visit duration and number of page views. This successful increase in traffic is due to a mixture of factors. In part it is the fruit of writing and developing of lots of new pages and page content. There's simply much, much more to see on the site. It's also helped by excellent search en...
Videos on the Dorset County Show Website
We have now added video to the Dorset County Show website. These were produced by SilverStream TV at last year's county show and feature a variety of aspects of the event; main ring attractions, horticultural and craft competitions, animals at the show, and trade stands and food vendors. Here you can see a screenshot from the main ring attractions video. You can view all the videos on the show website here: www.dorsetcountyshow.co.uk/page/dorset+county+show+videos There will&...
Breaking News about Dorset County Show
We have just added in a new "Breaking News" feature to the new Dorset County Show website. This allows the show organisers and PR company, WatershedPR, to upload news stories and for them to be shown on the home page in pride of place below the navigation. Titan the Robot's appearance on Big Brother was highlighted today. Check out the site here: www.dorsetcountyshow.co.uk...
New Team Member Joins Alacrify
Today sees Mark Diment join Alacrify as new member of our team. Mark brings a wealth of graphic design and printing skills as well as web development experience to the mix. You can read more about Mark here....
New Themed Information Pages on Health and Safety Website
We have recently built a new area on the market leading environmental and health and safety suppliers directory - www.osedirectory.com Drawing together information from their supplier listings, distributor details, product listings and from the articles published in their sister magazines www.hsimagazine.com, www.hsmemagazine.com, www.osamagazine.com and www.aweimagazine.com these pages offer an informative and useful digest on an extensive number of topics. Click on the links below ...
Rebrand for the New Year
We have just completed a series of re-brands for Artseeker today, updating their websites for the new year of arts exhibitions and shows. The suite of sites managed by Artseeker include: www.bridportopenstudios.co.uk www.ancientwessex.net www.artwey.co.uk www.artseeker.co.uk The layout has been turned into a 2 column design to allow more text and better display of image galleries. The colour schemes have been updated to reflect the corporate colours of the organisations where ...
Microsite Websites for Niche Marketing
I think most people have probably heard about the "long tail" in web marketing, and how good the internet is at putting niche customers in touch with niche suppliers. Well one way of achieving this is to develop "microsites" to promote a brand or particular aspect of a business. This week we did just that for Seven Springs Studios, a commercial photography studio in Dorchester, Dorset. They have had many years of experience in product or "packshot" photograph...
Useful CSS for Navigation Bars
We're working on lots of sites at the moment, and one theme that is regularly reappearing is the need to style up navigation bars with dividers between each hyperlink element. With CSS this is easy to do - simply set the left border of the A tag to #navigationBar a { border-left:1px solid #red; } However this means that the first link in the navigation bar will have a divider to its left usually next to the page margin. This looks weird. So to get around this we us...
3 out of 3 ain't bad! Google SEO
A third and final (for now) quick mention of another success on Google organic results, this time with Bay Publishing's 3 health and safety magazine websites. Today they appeared as the top 3 links returned for a search for "articles on working at height". While you may think this is a bit of a specialist search term, and indeed you may be right, this is a great example of the power of "long tail" website performance, where you get lots of small bits of traffic fro...
No April Fool - Another Google Success
Sometimes things seem to come along like London buses don't they. After my note about Alacrify's top listing on Google, we've just achieved our most remarkable success to date. The website that we launched only 7 days ago for Catching Rainbows Fertility Therapies has now rocketed up the Google charts and is sitting happily on page one of Google for almost all their targetted keywords; and sometimes gets 2 mentions on the page! "Dorset Fertility Th...
One in 653,000 - Getting to the Top of Google
Today we found ourselves at pole position for "Dorset Website Design" on Google, at the head of 653,000 results. For any of our sites to get to the top spot on Google is a cause for celebration here as it's usually the result of lots of hard work from us and our clients. How did we achieve the top Google search ranking? Well there's no secret really. We take care with all our sites to make sure that they are well optimised for search indexing. This means being sensi...
Happy Birthday Home-Start West Dorset
We are delighted to announce the launch of a brand new website for Home-Start West Dorset which coincides with the celebration of their first birthday. We wish them many happy returns of the day! The new site combines a host of functionality to give Home-Start West Dorset a really useful place to promote their services on the web. Using our "Simple CMS" the site incorporates page maintenance, diaries and a calendar, blog functionality and an area for press releases and vol...
High Tech Updates for High Technology Lighting
We've just re-launched a new updated website for High Technology Lighting. It incorporates a whole lot of new content and presentation elements to make the site look even more shiny and attractive. The use of carousels to display images, slidehows and tabbed content to increase the amount of content on the page, all add to this contemporary design. Take a look and let us know what you think... http://www.hightechnologylighting.com...
Sports and Fitness Feature on The Game Cloud
We've just added in some new articles to our new gamer project that I wrote about earlier. There's an introduction and review of the current crop of Wii games that are available to help you get and stay fit. You can check out our recommendations here: http://www.the-game-cloud.co.uk/site/page/ea-sports-active/Wii-Sports-and-Exercise-Games...
Is This Fastest Health and Safety Directory on the Web?
Today we ran some metrics on the updated OSE Directory website and were delighted to find that it out-performed all it's competitors on Google when comparing page loading times. Our recent work to optimise the site even further for quick presentation over the internet has led to the site loading almost 50% faster than the competition. The www.osedirectory.com home page now loads in a lighting fast 0.7 seconds. With industry wisdom and anecdotal reports indicating th...
Need for Speed - Making Websites Work Faster
The widespread availability of broadband internet connection means that there is a strong temptation to become less concerned about site load times; relying on the fact that with a 2Mb+ connection the site will still perform adequately almost regardless of how it's designed. This is a slippery path though and avoiding it not only makes for fast sites but also gives a degree of insurance against high-traffic loads and server weaknesses. We use a mixed approach to getting sites to ...
New Web Developer Job Advertised
[NB This job advert is now closed - 01.03.2010] Today we advertised for a new Junior Web Developer to join the team at Alacrify. You can read the full details here: http://www.alacrify.co.uk/page/recruitment but the highlights are... Junior Web Developer [Graduate or Equivalent Experience*] Alacrify is a well established Dorset-based web and graphic design agency which is seeking to appoint a Junior Web Developer in order to keep pace with increasing demands. We are therefore seek...
Multi-Language Websites and Domain Names
We've just added a bunch of new alternative domains to the OSEDirectory website to encourage the search engines to better index the website in the local search engine languages. Most international top level domains have the requirement for the domain owner (or business) to be resident or located in the country to which the domain refers. In order to get round the need to be resident we have opted for using these .cn/.de etc. domains as an alternative approach...
Bay Publishing On Facebook
{IMG} Our friends at Bay Publishing now have a Facebook page to promote their business and keep in touch with their friends, customers and colleagues. All their websites now have direct links to the page on them to allow people to visit and bookmark Facebook, enabling them to get the latest news and information about Bay Publishing as time goes by. The link to the Facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bay-Publishing/262550126013 You can read more about how to us...
Qianlong Vase on Sale at Dukes Auctions
We've just uploaded a new page on the Dukes Auctions website to promote the sale of a very beautiful vase at their next auction. The page was made to coincide with the publication of an advert in the press and features a slideshow of the various aspects of the vase, plus an enlarge and zoom function to allow potential buyers to inspect it in close up. You can view the page here and see the zoom-magnify options yourself... http://www.dukes-auctions.com/auction-highlights.php...
Making the Most of Social Networks
We've just been helping out Bay Publishing with setting up new social networking identities. Today we embedded links to these on their websites. In addition to the four magazines and company website we've also added them to the multi-language health and safety supplies directory that they also publish online. Together we agreed that the most suitable networks to engage in are LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. This gives Bay Publishing a simple way to get connected to people in the health and sa...
New News from Dry Island
We have just added a new news page to the website for Dry Island. It is maintained using our Micro CMS system and allows Jess and Ian to post information on the page whenever they've a new story to tell. There's still a chance to take a last minute Christmas holiday on Dry Island, and get away from all the hustle and bustle of the festive season. Check out their new news page when you get a minute. www.dryisland.co.uk/news.php...
Christmas Flowers at Seasons Florists
We created a special Christmas page for Seasons Florists to show off their wonderful selection of festive flowers and foliage. Incorporating a new slideshow feature and a whole bunch of new PayPal buttons means that they can take orders for Christmas and Advent wreaths, table decorations and stunning poinsettias straight from their website. Combined with their same day delivery for many customers their service is completely brilliant....
Our Plan ... It's Working!
Just a quick note about the progress of our multi-language website www.osedirectory.com. This week we're now getting traffic from Google listings in over half of the 17 translation languages. More are appearing every day. What is particularly pleasing is that these Google results aren't from listings that are buried on page 4 or more of the search results - the OSE Directory is appearing on page 1 of the listings for most of the search terms! Our plans for SEO success seem t...
International Language Sites
The sixteen different language-specific versions of the new OSE Directory website are now live. In addition to being able to change the language of the site when you are already on one of the pages, you can also visit the site in your own language straight away. We have created a series of alternatives or "aliases" of the site that show the chosen languages by default. You can still select a different one when you're on the site, but when you first visit it will already be in your chosen lang...
Submitting Websites to Search Engines
This week we have been making sure we're getting the most exposure for all our clients' websites and have started to resubmit their site information to four of the major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask Jeeves. To achieve this we have updated (and in some cases created) new XML sitemaps for the sites which Google, Bing and Ask Jeeves can then use to find all the pages in the site really easily. The format for these sitemaps is really simple; <urlset xmlns="http://w...
New Services from Alacrify - Domain Registration
In addition to the recruitment of new staff over the summer, we have been looking to expand Alacrify's portfolio of services too. Foremost among this has been considering whether or not to become Registrars for website domain names. Today we can announce that we are now registrars for Top Level Domains (TLDs) like .com and .net through Tucows. We are also in the process of applying to become registrars of .uk domains through Nominet too. Two things have prompted this decision. Firstly t...
Using our New Micro CMS - Client Recommendations
Meriel Thurstan is a botanical artist who works with the Eden Project and the Lost Gardens at Heligan as a teacher and author. This year we have developed two new websites for her, www.swsba.org.uk and www.merielthurstan.co.uk As part of the development we have provided our new Micro CMS (Content Management System) on several pages on these sites to allow Meriel to maintain the page content herself. This is her story... I came fairly late in life to the idea of a website, a...
Bridport Open Studios Website Live
Today the website we created for Bridport Open Studios had the final pieces of the jigsaw added to it before the big event this coming weekend! This is a major achievement for us and ArtSeeker who have collaborated together to create this website. Featuring over 120 artists from in and around Bridport, the open studios is an annual event over the August Bank Holiday in which artists open up their studios to the public for a brilliant exhibition of their work. The event and website is featu...
Introducing Charley and Our New Micro CMS
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that we've been working on a Micro CMS system which allows customers with brochure websites to maintain content on their own sites for themselves. This week saw the new system go live. The idea for this super lightweight maintenance option came from the fact that in almost every case, customers with brochure websites (which are by and large mostly full of static information), normally would like to have the means to update text and images on at least one ...
The Web Is A Wonderful Thing
For every question there really does seem to be (some sort) of answer on the web. Today I had a tiny problem with a website page that refused to load completely on Internet Explorer 7. It contained the fantastic "AddThis" widget that allows visitors to bookmark and share the page with their social networking services like FaceBook and Twitter. The page opened fine, and looked complete, but there was a persistent little message in the status bar saying it was waiting for one more item to lo...
Google Search Ranking Success
Following on from our recent successes with improving the search result rankings for Dry Island and The Gables we are now beginning to see a simliar improvement in search rankings for John Bullock Lighting Design too. Our recent conversion of John's website from a static brochure site to our own Simple CMS (content management system) has brought about some excellent results. He is now listed 4 times on the top 2 pages of Google for "Dorset Lighting Design" and the traffic to...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
New CMS In Full Flow
John Bullock Lighting Design, the second installation of our new CMS [content management system], is now beginning to prove the power of the system we have developed. Over the past few weeks since the new site has been launched, John has been putting his "back catalogue" of images and writing onto the site. And this week he has started to add new content to the site from scratch. His latest musings on the state of the Lighting Design Industry are to be found on one of his 3 blogs. www.jb-ld.co....
Glowing Praise from Dry Island
Today we received a lovely email from Jess Dodd at Dry Island, whose website we have recently updated. I'll let Jess take up the story ... "Ian has been doing self catering on Dry Island for 17 yrs. He started this to supplement his income due to the declining fishing industry in the area. Needing a website to move with the times, his partner, Jess contacted Jon Sloper after seeing an advert on the web about 5 years ago. "A very lucky find indeed. The original website was fantastic. Using ...
Promising Start for Re-launched Site
A week after the re-launch of the Dry Island website and the initial effects of the redesign are beginning to show; both in terms of increased traffic and aesthetic appreciation. Normally I wouldn't expect the results to be noticeable quite so quickly after a site is launched, but because the Dry Island website has been on the internet for many years, it already has listings on all the major search engines and is regularly "spidered" or re-indexed by them all. This means that the changes ha...
Dry Island Relaunch
Following on from yesterday's notice about the revisions to the two websites New Shoots and New Directions we are pleased to announce the relaunch of the first of the two websites --- www.dryisland.co.uk We've brought the design that we originally created about 7 years ago right up to date by subtle use of colour, text and photography. It features images taken by Jess and Ian at Dry Island, supplemented with images from iStockPhoto's photo library. This mixture gives a high quality ...
New Shoots and New Directions
As the search engines continually refine and adjust their formulae for working out which sites deserve to get which position in their listings, so we're also continually improving and responding with the code we're writing into our clients' websites. While this seems a bit like a circular process, in fact so long as we stay on the ball, the end results are almost always beneficial for our clients. The reason for this is that Google and its kin want to put the most relevant and genuine sites at ...
Cross Fertilisation and Brainstorming
Looking after a wide spectrum of clients' websites means there's always a new and different combination of issues to deal with. Some sites just need a small amount of content updating; like with Bay Publishing who needed a new banner advert placing on three of their sites today. Other work involves much more involved programming and development; we're still hard at work on two of our major projects at the moment, one in multiple languages and one using our new Simple CMS system. Pros and Cons o...
Alacrify's New Site
We're delighted to announce the arrival of our new website today. It is the culmination of many months of hard work and is entirely run off our own new Content Managment System - Alacrify Simple CMS. We've finally got our site up to the standard that we like to offer our clients and bucked the trend that usually means that a plumber's plumbing usually needs fixing! This CMS is so simple to use that we've been able to add much more content to our site and hopefully make it a lot more interesting...
Easter Eggs and Alacrification
Last month I wrote a little item in this blog about the Seasons Florists website and the special Mother`s Day flowers that they were selling. In addition to bringing in new business to Seasons Florists we also found that our website had a big increase in the number of visitors too. This made me think about the effect of including more "seasonal" phrases within our web content, and particularly in this blog. With Easter approaching we`re going hell for leather with our CMS project, trying to get...
Mother's Day Flowers
Last month we completed a website re-design for London-based "Seasons Florists." We helped to transform their existing site design into a beautiful, standards-compliant showcase for the fabulous floral arrangements and bouquets that they provide. They`re now all set for selling Mother`s Day flowers on their brand new website. The site was previously hosted with a do-it-yourself site design package and while the site looked OK, it wasn`t easy to maintain and wasn`t optimised very effectively for...
Getting to the Top
Our ongoing support and maintenance of the website for High Technology Lighting has lead to a phenomenal improvement in their search engine placement. The bespoke database-driven website allows the company to feature the wide spectrum of lights that they sell and the website architecture that we designed optimises the site for search engine listing. Each page of the site utilises all the recommended avenues for presenting information for listing in the major search engines. Adding this compreh...
Bed and Breakfast in West Dorset
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new website for Wooden Cabbage Bed and Breakfast in East Chelborough (a lovely village between Dorchester, Bridport and Yeovil). It`s our third West Dorset B&B website and has been developed in close collaboration with its owners, Martyn and Susie Lee. Using photography supplied by Martyn and Susie we created a number of designs which were whittled down to the one you can see below. We helped to prepare the text, researched the links to other local...
On the BBC
For the third time this year one of our clients has been featured on the BBC Dorset website. Robin Mills follows Michael Chappell and Bill Crumbleholme as a feature on the BBC Dorset home page . Robin`s current fine art photography exhibition entitled "Farmlife" is now on show and features images that capture the lives of people from the farming community near his home near Dorchester. Robin has spent his life as a farmer and more recently has taken up photography. He is now an Associate of the...
Under the Hammer
We have just produced a new website design for Duke`s Auctioneers` forthcoming sale at Buckland Newton Place. The brief was to create a site that is beautiful, high-class and elegant; and from our client`s feedback, we`ve done it! The basis of the design was the new corporate and gold palette that Duke`s have adopted in their recent auction catalogues and advertising. It incorportates some fabulous photography from the sale, both interior shots of the Queen Anne house, and closeups of som...
Ready for 2008
This week, one of our jobs has been to get the 2008 AGM Report for ACAT ready for publication. Combining reports from ACAT`s officers with annual accounts, proposals to be voted upon, nomination forms, and other important information, has been a mammoth task not only for us at the design end, but also for ACAT in assembling the documents. We are delighted to be just about ready to go to press with the 28 page document that will be printed and mailed out with the winter edition of ACAT`s newslet...
New B and B Site - The Different Purposes of Web Advertising
Our next Bed and Breakfast website is well underway. We`ve now received all the artwork to be used, and will be combining this with the copy our client has written. On this occasion we are helping to provide some contextual links to other local websites that may interest guests, including places to eat and drink, local places of interest and other leisure activities. Early results are looking promising. Making sites for Bed and Breakfasts reveals an and subtle difference in the purpos...
Finishing Touches to ACATonline - End of Round One?
We are currently working through the finishing touches to the new ACATonline website upgrade. As with many things this has been a deceptively extensive process. Our main task had been to rationalise a whole host of "bolted on" developments that we had made over the past 7 years or so, and then to roll out a set of site function enhancements that had been identified with our client. Most of the key changes are now made, and the new systems written, including enhanced document search and archivin...
LIttle Tips
I was developing a function on the ACAT website today to add Training Course Handbooks to the database using the fabulous Editize applet from Sitepoint. I realised after a short period of testing the the information was being truncated after a dozen or so pages of text. It took me a little while to track the cause down. In the end I realised [thanks to Simon Willson`s Weblog] that I was saving the record to a TEXT field on the mysql database which should have been changed to a LONGTEXT field to...
Wine Merchant Site Updates
We`re always happy to take on new clients who are looking for a little help with keeping their site up to date. When John Walmsley of John Gerard Wines got in touch to ask if we could make a small number of changes to his site to keep it fresh and current we were delighted to help. As a merchant for Western Australian wines John`s wine list changes through the year as new wines become available and as his stock sells. We`ve been engaged to put the new wine/price list on the site, to beef up t...
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What's New for Employers
6 Apr 2011 The new tax year brings changes to Personal Allowances, National Insurance rates, and statutory payment rates and processes. This presentation will explain all these changes including new Additional Statutory Paternity pay. Location: HM Revenue and Customs, Oxford Road, Bournemouth Further details: Visit this page on the Business Link website for further courses and details....
Becoming an Employer - What You Need to Know
4 April 2011 This workshop explains how to calculate tax and National Insurance. It also covers how to use P45/P46 forms for new employees and leavers, how to register for online services and where to get help when needed. Location: HM Revenue and Customs, Oxford Road, Bournemouth Further details: Visit this page on the Business Link website for further courses and details....
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing Friday, 25 March, 2011 - 09:30 - 12:30 Learn how to increase your companies’ website performance and find out why Search Engine Optimisation is important to your online strategy. This 3 hour seminar will raise awareness of SEO techniques to show companies that they can win more business with the same marketing spend. Location: Dorset Chamber of Commerce & Industry Chamber House Acorn Office Park Ling Road BH12 4NZ For further det...
Change Management | DCCI
Change Management Wednesday, 23 March, 2011 - 09:30 - 12:30 This half day workshop will examine some of the key economic and environmental factors which will force the pace of organisational change in the future. Providing a quick overview of some of the established models and frameworks which attempt to identify the elements which make for successful change initiatives and highlighting some of the essential ‘do’s and don’ts’ of this key aspect of running a suc...
Managing Business Relationships | DCCI
Managing Business Relationships Thursday, 17 March, 2011 - 09:30 - 16:30 Who is this course designed for? This course is designed for people who are struggling to find the best way to communicate with customers or colleagues, particularly when conflict situations arise or have the potential to do so. What’s in the course? • Understanding why we behave the way we do (Strength Deployment Inventory®) •...
Letter of Credit | DCCI
Letter of Credit Tuesday, 8 March, 2011 - 09:15 - 16:30 The ETS Letters of Credit course is not a "Starter" course but aims to take delegates with some exporting experience and develop their skills in the processing of this payment procedure. Exporters will learn how the UCP600/ISBP rules can assist in the process and receive general training on the documentation, banking procedure and "good practice" methods. Whilst this ...
Can Facebook predict the future? Business Link
Can Facebook predict the future? Crown Hotel, West Street, Blandford Forum, Dorset DT11 7AJ Through social media you can access immediate, real-time commentary, criticisms, and opinions from your customers, and potential customers, for free! For owners of small to medium sized business to consumer enterprises with a working knowledge of social media, this free seminar will help you to better understand your customers, identify new customers and spot emerging social and technology ...
Winning and retaining good clients | Business Link
This event is open to all Bournemouth-based businesses. To grow your business you need good sales processes and an ability to win as well as retain profitable clients What you will learn Drawing on his own experience of growing a company from £200k turnover in 2007 to a turnover of £4.5 m this year, Mark Pitcher of Concordia Business Improvement will take you through the ten top tips every business owner should know and understand. Attracting and retaining go...
Working successfully with the Public Sector | Business Link
Meet the buyer: competing effectively for public sector contracts. Join Borough of Poole and Business Link at this free event. 09:30 - 15:15 Lighthouse, 21 Kingland Road, Poole BH15 1UG Access Borough of Poole's Strategic Procurement Team, key service units and meet the people in charge of the money. Business Advice Sessions How To Work with the Council The Tender Process Other Ways In... What's the day about? Owner/managers of small to me...
Advanced Email Marketing | DCCI
Get smarter with your email marketing. Understand the factors of relevance and context together with egmentation; strategy, creative execution and testing have in effective success. Learn how to measure campaigns and benchmark your performance. Plan strategic event triggered lifecycle communications and increase your open rates and click through rates. Leverage segmentation and align campaigns with your communications strategy by utilising focused landing pages and hubs, resulting in b...
Closing Date for Job Applications
Junior Web Developer [Graduate or Equivalent Experience*] Alacrify is a well established Dorset-based web and graphic design agency which is seeking to appoint a Junior Web Developer in order to keep pace with increasing demands. We are therefore seeking a talented and ambitious full time Junior Web Developer to work on a wide portfolio of new client projects and sustain and support contracts. This role will offer the opportunity for professional development and career progression across ...
Alacrify Launches New TLD Domain Registration Service
Alacrify is now able to register Top Level Domains (.com and .net) as a registrar with Tucows. More details can be found here....
Matching Galleries
Web Design Portfolio
We have put a number of images of our work into this portfolio. It shows snapshots of some of the websites we've created since 1996. They cover a diverse range of styles and client requirements, from fully integrated office systems to one page brochure sites or domain parking pages. In every case we strive to provide a site that our clients are proud of, and that meets their specific needs....
Alacrify Ltd. 01300 320076. jon@alacrify.co.uk
