Blogging - Customer Workshop in Brighton, 23rd May

Written by Adam Stafford | Filed under Client Events | No Comments

Fresh Egg held a customer workshop last Friday at the Brighton Metropole on The Power of Blogging.

Can I firstly thank everyone for a great turn out; we had people arrive from all over the country including Dale who came all the way from the Visit Wales office in Cardiff.

Lee, Tony, Ammon and John gave great presentations on all aspects of blogging. Topics included some of the following: the benefits of blogging, promoting your blog, blog applications, open Q&A session, finishing with a demonstration of the WordPress admin area by John (copy of invite: invitation_blogging_workshop).

Thanks to those who handed in the customer feedback form, we had some generous comments and some great ideas for our next workshop (most likely usability and conversion)

Below are a couple of photos of the blogging event in Brighton:

We finished off the day enjoying a couple of drinks on the Metropole terrace soaking up the sunshine. It was great to catch up with those clients who were able to stay around and enjoy a few quiet drinks into the early evening…!

Workshop attendees included: Visit Wales, Wales in Style, Liberty Plc, Grove Lodge, Norwich Union, Mankind, Beauty Expert, Wineware, Nexus, Aerco, Aneela Rose PR, Artyfect, Classic Wine Direct, Independent Schools Council, Local Web Solutions, McIndoe Surgical Centre (BMI Healthcare), Lifestyle Shutters, Pest Free Homes, Richard John, Simply Extras, H20 Fun, RED Anywhere, and TLH.

A download of the presentation notes can be downloaded here: blogging-handout

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Further information relating to the day that may be of use:

Recommended Reading:

The Cluetrain Manifesto is a book that everyone involved in using the Internet for Marketing should at least have read once. It is based around 95 Theses and the book’s full text is available online http://www.cluetrain.com/book/index.html or to buy Amazon

Purple Cow by Seth Godin is another true ‘landmark’ book of modern marketing, and one that deals with the greatest problem of the most competitive marketing environment ever created – the internet, where every competitor in the entire world is just one click away.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Purple-Cow-Transform-Business-Remarkable/dp/014101640X/

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is a highly recommended read for anyone engaging in social media marketing. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0349113467/

Also consider:

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson explores the value of diversity and ‘niche’ marketing to increase demand.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Long-Tail-Endless-Creating-Unlimited/dp/1844138518/

Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble – one of the most famous bloggers, Microsoft employee Robert Scoble, discusses how blogs are changing the way that businesses talk with customers.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Naked-Conversations-Changing-Businesses-Customers/dp/047174719X/

Blogging Policies:

Dell offers a relatively simple Online Communication Policy.

Cisco have their Internet Postings Policy.

IBM Social Computing Guidelines covers the use of blogs, wikis and social media.

The BBC’s blogging policy applies to all personal blogging of its employees. http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/advice/personalweb/blogging.shtml but has a much fuller and wider set of guidelines as befits its business as a media company. There’s a full section on policies for Interacting with the Audience - http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/edguide/interacting/interactivityed.shtml and more on User Generated Content.

The Word Of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) provides some guidelines on a ‘code of ethics’ for business use of social media of all forms.

Other Resources:

SEO Plugins for Wordpress – Michael Gray shares a compiled list of various plugins for WordPress that offer value from an SEO perspective. Please Note that Fresh Egg customers using blogs setup by Fresh Egg have all the major useful plugins installed by us and monitored for updates and additions. http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/seo-plugins-for-wordpress-part-ii/

Why Your Company Blog Is Failing – Jennifer Slegg examines the most common pitfalls of corporate and company blogging. http://www.jenniferslegg.com/2008/04/22/why-company-corporate-blog-fails/

Times Online 50 Best Business Blogs (June 07): http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article1923706.ece

Google Blogsearch: http://blogsearch.google.com/

NMA Website of the Week - The Sanctuary

Written by Adam Stafford | Filed under Web Design | 2 Comments

Fresh Egg recently launched the new Sanctuary website and we are pleased to announce that it received an impressive 87/100 score - receiving the status of NMA site of the week.

We have won this award several times over past years but were especially proud of this recognition as it was a significantly large project; complete redesign including development, new admin area, upgrade of ASP to ASP.NET, CSS, integration into office application and transfer of existing SEO.

Thanks to all staff who worked on the site! The new launch was seamless with absolutely no problems with the fantastic early success of new generic search positions :)

The site has been developed using ASP.NET and CSS producing a clean and accessible site; this element has significantly contributed to some great new search engine listings.

The genius of YouTube design

Written by Lee | Filed under Web Design | No Comments

John was showing me how YouTube use a single background image on their site to present most of their images.

Revolutionary? No- However, with this approach the days of slicing could be well and truly numbered.

Genius? Yes - The saving alone with cached information is great.

Will it take off? Yes. If this technique is good enough for You Tube/Google, then it is good enough for the rest of us. I had a chat with Ollie in the Fresh Egg design team. He has used similar techniques, but not to the level how the dev team at You Tube have attacked it

So for all of those who are still using Fireworks or Photoshop to hack and slash to carefully cut out their images to the pixel, forget it and stick your images onto one nice background sheet as seen below:

I am not as pro-active with the design elements as I used to be, but something like this even floats my SEO boat, especially where load times and download times can be improved and of course bandwidth reduced.