Artisan Images

Artisan Images are a Leicestershire based company specialising in classic and traditional wedding photography. All of the services and packages that Artisan Images offer can be tailored around individual requirements.

Each wedding photo package includes full coverage of your day from the bridal preparations until the first dance. No two weddings are the same, therefore Artisan do not specify time limits, which is a limitation of other photographers.

Artisan are based near Kirkby Mallory in Leicester, allowing them to offer wedding photography in Leicestershire, midlands wedding photography and they will also travel nationwide if required.


On their website they offer tips for successful and beautiful wedding photography. I have picked out my favourite ones:

• Make a shot list even if you would only like two photographs taken, it will ensure those two photographs are not forgotten in the excitement.


• Have fun, you could have employed the top wedding photographer in the country but if you are worrying about who great uncle Bob is offending, your images will reflect this (apologies to all inoffensive great uncle Bob’s)


• Feed your wedding photographers, they will in most cases have been with you from early morning so if you are hungry they will be too.

For more information about the services on offer, you can contact Atrisan through their website.

Leicester Business Event 2009

Anicca Solutions are proud to be exhibiting at this year’s Leicester Business Event, on 1st October 2009: Walkers Stadium, Filbert Way, Leicester, LE2 7FL.



We will be running an advice zone, where we will be able to advise on any technical or marketing issues you may currently be facing with your website. The 1-2-1 sessions with members of our team will be available in 30 minute slots. It will be a great opportunity to discuss items such as:

• How to drive more traffic to your website
• Engage visitors through great web design
• Improve conversions and save money in the process
• Writing interesting and keyword rich content
• Manage and maintain a successful blog
• Increase sales through email marketing

If you would like to make an appointment, give me a call on 01162 242 096 or if it's easier, drop me an email

Fitness Options - New Online Store

Creative Heights, web designers in Chesterfield have recently redesigned and launched a new ecommerce website for Fitness Options; the first dedicated fitness equipment specialist store in England. The company have been operating for around 20 years, having moved into Europe’s largest fitness equipment showroom in 1999.



The design of the new website was heavily influenced by the branding styles used in the Fitness Options print material. The site uses a simple grid style structure to display the many fitness products on sale.

The fully editable, custom e-commerce site features over 800 product lines. The site design ensures that it is easy for customers to find products & place orders online, plus efficient for Fitness Options staff to add, delete and amend the product database.

To attract more visitors to the site, the pages are to be optimised for many of the leading brands and products including Nautilus fitness equipment, Life Fitness treadmills, multigyms, elliptical crosstrainers, home gym fitness equipment & commercial gym equipment.

Summer may be coming to an end, but thats no excuse to start kicking back on the fitness plans!

Free Google Analytics Installation

Are you aware of how many people visit your website each day, week or month? Monitoring the visitor traffic is now an essential task for webmasters and marketeers.

Google offer a free web statistics package called Google Analytics. The service has been around for several years, yet surprisingly there are still a lot of webmasters and marketeers who are not using it - despite a recent study of 400,000 websites by Berkeley students which suggested that the adoption rate for Google Analytics was around 88%!

The system is very user friendly, it presents a wide range of statistics in a very user friendly dashboard which is pictured here:



In order to track the visitor stats for your website, a few lines of java script code must be added to each page on your website.

So what are you waiting for? Until the end of July I will be offering to install the Google Analytics tracking code to your website free of charge. If you would like more information or have any questions, please get in touch.

Email Marketing Fail: Gocompare

I have just received this email from Gocompare.

I'm not sure why, but it frustrated me that much I wanted to put it on here.

I have used their website in the past, and I'm pretty sure that I filled in all of my details correctly.



If you are trying to make an email more personal by inserting names into it, surely you should take the data from the right place?!

How many people are likely to click through to the site when they get something like this wrong?

MediaCampNottingham - 9th & 10th May

Get ready for MediaCampNottingham which takes place this weekend.

MediaCamp is a FREE one day event for digital media professionals wanting to share and expand their knowledge, and businesses or social enterprises who are curious about the digital phenomenon wanting to learn more. This event is to share, explore, challenge and build understanding in digital media. Veterans and new comers alike can learn about audio and video podcasting, blogging, web marketing, graphics, email campaigns, Second Life, Twitter and other social media tools.

If you would like to attend, you can register and browse through the list of other attendees on here on the MediaCamp wiki: http://mediacampnottingham.pbworks.com/register

Information about the different sessions can be found on the sessions page. There are still some slots available for anyone who would like to run a session.

The event takes place at:

Lace Market House
54 - 56 High Pavement
Nottingham
NG1 1HW

For more information about travel and directions please see this link:
http://mediacampnottingham.pbworks.com/where

Strange Google Result!

I just searched in Google to see where my blog was ranking and this is a screenshot of the results!



There's clearly more that 2 results per domain appearing! Must have been some kind of temporary glitch, searching for the same keyword a moment ago the results were back to normal.

Uploading Images to Google Local

In the past I have found it really frustrating when adding pictures to Google Local listings.



This morning I was uploading pictures for one of our Metafocus clients, Pemberton, caterers in Nottingham. Often, uploading pictures is a really slow and painful experience! Sometimes the images don’t upload properly, and on many occasions fail.

I have found that hosting the pictures online and then using the “Add a photo from the web” option works much more effectively. Rather than sitting through minutes watching the upload icon wondering what is happening, you just copy and paste the links into the box and click “Add Photo”. When uploading the pictures stored locally on my computer, I sometimes loose track of which images have been uploaded. The thumbnail images are not always displayed, which makes it easy to upload the same image twice without realising.

Using this method has also helped me to keep track of which photos have been used for the Google Local listing. Having the images hosted in a file on the server means they are easy to find and locate. This can save time in the future if any of the pictures need to be reused for other directory sites, blog posts or on the clients website.

Differences between google.co.uk and google.com

Recently while working on some of our clients sites I have been noticing some really big differences between the rankings for some sites in google.co.uk and google.com

I first noticed the problem with a new website we created for Kim’s Chilled Couriers, a local haulage firm who offer refrigerated transport and frozen transport. Monitoring the keywords in google.co.uk was providing some very disappointing rankings. One day, using the search box in firefox I searched for “chilled couriers” and the site was ranked in the first result. I wasn’t signed in to my google account so the listing hadn’t been voted up using the search wiki, but the search box in firefox searches in google.com, not google.co.uk. It was clear, that despite our efforts, Google was not associating the site to the UK.

I thought this was quite surprising. Admittedly the site does have a .com url, but it is hosted on our server in the UK, the geo target had been set to UK in the Google Webmaster Tools and the site was listed in Google Local.

I asked on various forums to get help with the problem. Some of the suggestions that I received:

- Build more UK links
- Add UK to the title tags
- Add UK to the address on the page footer
- Add United Kingdom to the address on the Contact page
- Submitting the site to local directories

It was also suggested to change the html < html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> tag to this:
< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-gb" lang="en-gb">

Over the last few months a combination of these factors have helped the site to rank much higher in google.co.uk. Here are the screen shots from google.co.uk & .com

co.uk:



.com:



As you can see the site is still ranking slightly higher in .com, but the rankings in co.uk have really improved recently – at one point they were about 80 positions out!.

This example clearly demonstrates that, given a choice, it is a much more sensible option to choose the local domain associated with the main target users. We were asked to use the .com address in this case as they had already used it in the past.

The Kim’s Chilled Couriers site is solely focused to people who are based and searching in the UK, I firmly believe that if we had been able to use the .co.uk address, it would have taken far less effort to improve the google.co.uk rankings.

New Website: Let’s Fish Spain

It’s been a while since I posted anything on here! I seem to have a collection of old, half started and incomplete blog posts.. It seems a bit late for a post on new years resolutions, so that one might get saved till next year!

I have recently built and designed a website for one of my friends who has moved to Spain and set up a business taking holiday makers on organised fishing trips around Southern Spain.

The site has been live for about a month and is begining to rank well for some keywords such as costa blanca fishing, and fishing on the costa blanca.

Here's a selection of pictures taken from the gallery page: