We first worked with Bramble.cc several years ago, building them a website in partership with content from Next Communications. But with Bramble.cc becoming a supplier on the Buying Solutions ICT Consultancy & Delivery framework agreement, they needed their site to be able to do more and grow along with their success.

We migrated the entire Bramble.cc website to the WordPress content management and blogging system. This included reconfiguring some of the commonly updated content, such as news articles, to be easier to maintain. We also integrated a membership system and logged in area, which will contain exclusive content accessible only to website members.

Russell Publishing’s European Railway Review magazine, one of their many industry-leading publications, was due a fresh new website design, with a focus on selling both subscriptions to the magazine and delegate places on railway industry events all over Europe.

Working closely with Russell Publishing’s Digital Manager, we designed a new look and feel for the site, and developed a new information hierarchy for the large number of articles and event listings required on the site. The ability for site visitors to subscribe at various levels was crucial, so we used the WordPress content management system and WisList Member premium plugin to create the necessary functions.

Integrating and restyling the SagePay payment system was also required to create a seamless user journey through payment to subscription and creation of member logins.

European Railway Review is one of the largest and most ambitious websites we’ve built, and relies on the powerful WordPress system to drive complex categorisation of articles, multiple membership levels, and conditional content depending on if a visitor is logged in or not, and at what level.

We’re due to start work on the next Russell Publishing website very soon!

Blackcode Advertising, a leading below-the-line direct marketing specialist, needed a website to showcase their services and bring new people to their team.

With a clear design steer from Blackcode, we built a simple website to reflect the company’s slick and professional values. Features included a custom contact form, interactive Google map and slideshow-style promotional area.

Lucy Premium offers unique and beautiful hair jewels for weddings, parties and dancers, with a patented easy to use applicator and Swarovski crystals.

Their UK website needed a new look and feel to make the shopping experience as professional and slick as the product. We redesigned the site and integrated our new design with the existing e-commerce solution, EKM Powershop.

We also reviewed the entire site for search engine optimisation, writing keyword-rich copy, page titles and descriptions. We finished by creating and submitting a Google sitemap and integrating Google Analytics with the site to track its success.

Some highlights of our brand new website include:

• packages – describing our three website packages
• our portfolio – showcasing our most recent website projects
• services – describing some of the expertise we can offer our clients

And why not follow us on Twitter?

A really good website also needs to be:

• user-friendly – so visitors find the site easy to use rather than a chore
• logical - so it’s easy to find information and navigate from one page to another
• accessible – so users with different browsers, screen sizes, connection speeds and disabilities can still access it
• reliable - so all the functionality works when visitors want to become customers
• engaging – so visitors want to come back time and time again
• optimised – so search engines rank it highly for the keywords your future customers are searching

All our websites are custom designed to meet the needs of the individual client, with no standard templates or recycling of past creative. From small sites with just a few pages to large e-commerce or content-managed web presences, every website we build is unique.

If you want to be able to update your site yourself, we can integrate WordPress, a powerful content management system (CMS)and blog platform, with your site, enabling you to post news, events and articles through a web-based interface. Alternatively, if you only need to make minor changes, we’ll implement PageLime to make small changes to your site content easy.

Strictly stars Brian Fortuna and Kristina Rihanoff are taking time off from their busy TV schedule to headline our second dance event at Ditton Community Centre, near Maidstone, on Sunday 25 October. They’ll be performing a fabulous American-style dance cabaret and meeting everyone for photos and autographs.

We sold out all 300 tickets for our first event in three weeks, and early indications suggest we’re on course to do the same with this one! As before, we’ve done all the marketing and promotion in house – from creating a high-impact micro-site with integrated PayPal for ticket sales to designing the flyers and posters (and working with our print partner to get the very best deal!), writing the associated press release and promoting the event across Twitter, Facebook and many other online channels, including our website www.strictlydancers.com. An integrated Google map will help our guests find the venue, and we’ve rounded off the marketing push with a Google AdWords campaign.

Tickets are on sale now at www.strictlykent.com (or you can call us on 01622 717977 for more details)!

Well-written, engaging and concise content is the key to converting users into customers, but web users don’t read webpages in the same way that they do brochures and offline material.

The typical objective of a web user is to find information, and to do so they’ll tend to scan, not read, pages, looking for links that will get them closer to their goal. It’s crucial to write web copy that caters for that seek-and-find behaviour while also motivating your users to complete YOUR objectives – whether that’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter or just making an enquiry.

In parallel, it’s vital that a website is designed for search engines to find, read and index, too. Search engines like Google and Yahoo drive a huge percentage of web traffic, and making your site appealling to them is equally as important as making it engaging for humans.

We work with our clients to list keywords and phrases that their customers (and future customers) are likely to be searching for, then optimise the copy, page titles and descriptions and many other elements for those words and phrases. We also develop strategies for inbound links – links from other relevant websites, which increase your site’s ranking in Google.

We use Google Analytics, a free but extremely powerful web analytics tool, to track visitors, and use the information to measure return on investment and make improvements to our websites.

It integrates closely with Google AdWords, and gives us the information we need to write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites. Google Analytics helps you find out what keywords attract your most desirable prospects, what advertising copy pulled the most responses, and what landing pages and content make the most money for you.

Google Analytics is:

• free – so you can spend your marketing budget on marketing, not analysis
• sophisticated – with an almost unmatched set of features and complex reporting tools
• easy to use – you can look at a summary of site traffic or run very specific reports

Of course email marketing is impossible if you don’t have any contacts, so we’ll help you gather email addresses from existing and prospective customers. Then we’ll produce great looking email designs, ensure that your email is delivered, and maximise the open-rate and clickthroughs to your website.

Our powerful email marketing platform enables us to offer:

• customised signup forms
• design and broadcast of great-looking emails, with no ugly logos or links
• personalisation of emails to individual customer names
• management of lists and subscribers
• single and double opt-in subscription
• unsubscription and suppression list management
• forward to a friend functionality
• segmentation and A-B testing
• data import and export from/to Excel
• detailed reporting on delivery, bounce, open and clickthrough rates

Tickets for the event went on sale back in April and sold out in just 3 weeks thanks to promotion on StrictlyDancers.com, a dedicated event website StrictlyKent.com, and promotion via email, flyers, mail and online social media such as Facebook, Twitter and online forums.

The success of the event has encouraged us to host another Strictly Come Dancing themed night featuring Brian Fortuna and Kristina Rihanoff – and we can’t wait!

We can integrate online sales into your website in one of three ways.

PayPal ‘Buy It Now’ buttons

If you have a small number of products we can set you up with a PayPal business account and create PayPal buttons for each product. These enable:

• secure payment via PayPal account, debit/credit card or bank account
• purchase of individual products
• stock and inventory management

PayPal shopping cart

If you want your visitors to buy several products at once, we’ll set up a PayPal business account and create ‘Add to cart’ and ‘View cart’ buttons for your site. These enable:

• secure payment via PayPal account, debit/credit card or bank account
• purchase of multiple products
• PayPal shopping cart viewing and management
• stock and inventory management

Integrated e-commerce

If you have a large number of products, and/or want to include a sophisticated shopping experience as part of your web offering, we can set up and integrate a full e-commerce solution into a website based on WordPress, including:

• secure payment via a number of payment gateways, including PayPal
• purchase of multiple products
• shopping cart viewing and management without leaving your site
• seamless integration into your website’s look and feel
• stock and inventory management

We can assist in areas including:

• search engine optimisation of your site
• pay-per-click (Google AdWords) strategy
• landscape and competitor analysis
• usability and accessibility review
• web project scoping
• social networking strategy

If you’d like us to consult for your organisation, please get in touch.

The Starlite School of Dance needed a new website to replace their old one, which had been constructed using a generic WYSIWYG site builder. The design of the old site didn’t adequately reflect the status of Starlite as a nationally renowned ballroom and Latin dance school, while also being awkward and inflexible to update.

We started by creating a completely new look and feel for the website, including the design of a new logo for Starlite, and rewrote the content for search engine optimisation (SEO).

Starlite were keen to be able to communicate news to the hundreds of kids and adults attending their classes, so we made full use of the WordPress blogging platform to make news and event updates easy, and added an email news signup. A user-friendly gallery was also a key requirement, with Starlite attending regular dances and competitions, so we integrated a Flickr gallery with WordPress to streamline the process of uploading photos to the site.

The result is a website that looks great and has some very powerful functions under the bonnet, courtesy of WordPress and Flickr, but is very easy for a non-technical person to update.

Find out more about the Starlite website >>