01225 436109
01225 436109Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
Stephen O’ Dwyer Builders are a business that produces high quality building work based in Calne. Stephen was doing some work for Marcel Floyd of Floyd’s Climbers and liked what we had done for their website.
They needed a website that they could use to show of their portfolio of building work and to act as an online contact point with a clean design that would separate them from their competitors.
We came up with a unique design built on the WordPress framework that used the news posts and categories to show their building work as a series of case studies with an image gallery.
Case studies are a great way of showing what you do. Often, when you try to write a more formal description of what you do, it can be hard work and the result ends up making you sound like a combination of Miss World and Mary Poppins; in that you *can* do everything and you *like* to be say you are the best.
When you write a case study, you are writing about a real world example in way that is comfortable and easy to do. In effect, you are writing a story about something you have done, which is the sort of thing you talk about anyway, so writing it becomes easy because you are talking about what you know best.
Anyway, Stephen O’Dwyer, who is one of the nicest builders in the world to boot, now has a website that displays his work and what he can do and separates him from his competition.
Thursday, January 5th, 2012
Amanda Richards from Young at Heart was one of Godjira’s very first customers when we built a very cool website for her beauty salon in Trowbridge. When she helped set up Young at Heart, we were one of the first people she called to help them with a website.
Young at Heart are an artery scanning and wellness business and they needed a website to be able to help with online marketing and promotion of their clinics, workshops and products.
Amanda is familiar with WordPress and we all felt this was the best way to get an engine under the hood of the website that could feed out to multiple other media, including a Facebook page, Twitter stream, RSS feed and a MailChimp mailing list.
We asked Mark McGuiness from Covert Digital to help with the design on this one and he produced a very clean and classy design that fits in well with the business. We then created a unique custom WordPress template.
The site has features like an Events Calendar and an Online Shop that have both been added as WordPress plugins and integrate seamlessly with the site..
Young at Heart now have an extremely powerful marketing tool for their business as well as clean and professional site.
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
We have been working with the Dive Zone in Melksham for some time now. We originally stepped in when their previous web company evaporated, leaving them with no website no email and a bit of a mess. We managed to sort them out and get them all back and running and from that took on the maintenance of their website.
When Mark Alexander at the Dive Zone managed to get a contract to sell the premium Kowalski diving torches, we were therefore the first people they called.
They needed a website to sell the torches, which they could update and maintain themselves and yet would be clear and easy to use with a strong design not too far away from their existing corporate image and also using Kowalski branding. Mark supplied the main photograph for the background, which is actually him under the sea using a Kowalski torch.
We asked Gareth Coxon of Dot Design to do the graphic design for this project and he absolutely nailed it! The design is striking clear and easy to use. With this sort of shop the navigation needs to be very clear as with only a few dozen products you need to direct the customer directly to the good stuff.
We used ZenCart as the engine for this one. ZenCart is free and Open Source and also under constant development with lots and lots of useful add-ons which made it a good fit. For instance we can supply a list of products to Google Base, Google’s shop like thingy. The shop is also fed out to Dive Zone’s Facebook page. DiveZone already had a contract with WorldPay, so it was easy to add on the payment module
The result is that DiveZone can now present a unique branded presence for Kowalski in the UK as well as sell products and maintain the shop. We like it a lot.
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
Safewell are one of our best and most valued customers. Nick Evans from Safewell has the highest integrity of any business owner we have ever met. We have worked with Safewell converting their old website to WordPress (without leaving a join) and on their search engine performance, Google AdWords, Facebook Page, Mailing List and more.
So when the time came to update their site we were their first point of call and were absolutely delighted to be able to help.
With this being a revamp/upgrade, we had to be very careful not to break the existing site. So we took a backup and worked on a new WordPress theme on a mirror site. The theme needed to have a few things . It needed to be wider to take advantage of larger screen resolutions, it needed to be bolder, it needed to replace the Flash bits and pieces with lighter and more portable JavaScript widgets and it needed to help the viewer identify strong calls to action.
So within the design we built a home page that identified the main calls to action and presented them firstly as a cool JavaScript slider and then other areas of interest as “lozenges” below. Safewell have a clearly defined and strong corporate image and we were able to use the associated imagery throughout the site.
When it was all ready, we got the sign-off from Nick and then switched the themes and hey presto! A new design was online. There was obviously a bit more to the go live than that. There was a new sitemap to submit and Google and Bing websmaster tools to update, but we are good at all that!
We hope the result is a very striking and modern looking site that has clear entry paths and defined calls to action within the WordPress framework that allows Safwell to edit and update their own site as well as publish news to multiple media.
Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
After a few experiments* with things like Joomla, Drupal and a couple of other Content Management systems, we have pretty much standardised all our managed content websites on the WordPress platform.
* we call this the Dark Ages, about 5 years ago!
The question is why? Why is WordPress so good?Well there are a number of great reasons to use WordPress.
Firstly it’s FREE and Open Source and in constant development. This is really important. The World Wide Web is still a bit like the Wild Wild West out there and you need to make sure whatever software you are using is being properly maintained and protected.
Secondly it is immensely powerful. You can do pretty much anything with it from a simple blog site to a classified advert site with all points in-between. We’ve built shops, directories, and all sorts using WordPress plug-ins. WordPress scales up really well too, sites like Mashable are built on WordPress and we’ve used Amazon Cloudfront to speed sites up by delivering static content from the cloud.
WordPress lends itself to modern designs really well too, some of the premium themes are actually really good indeed too. If you take a look at some of the best design sites out there then about 40% of them are actually being built on WordPress. We can design sites for WordPress and be completely relaxed about being able to do the technical build of the website. (It helps that we are really good at it too).
WordPress can be a cost effective way of getting your own site built. Our £50 blog hosting package gives you a choice of the hundreds of standard themes that come with WordPress. For a few dollars more, you can choose a premium theme and get lots more functionality built in to your site. In fact if you pay us for a few hours of your time, we can help you set it all up and you can have a WordPress site with a premium theme that will look great, you can edit yourself and add unlimited pages, images and news/blog articles. We can also build you a custom design or fit your existing site design if you don’t want a change, but want the extra power.
One of the greatest things about WordPress is that Google loves it and WordPress loves Google back. WordPress is built from the ground up to work really well with Google; plus you can add Search Engine Optimisation plug-ins and things like the Google +1 plug-in to make sure your site plays the game in exactly the way that Google wants it played. Simply, WordPress sites perform well in Google and by adding regular news or blog articles you are doing exactly what Google wants you to do to keep your site fresh and important.
So we love WordPress. We are WordPress experts; we could write you a plug-in, build you a site and scale your site from an iddy biddy one to a great big one running on it’s own server with cloud delivered content. We can even teach you how to use WordPress yourself in our scheduled classroom training.
To find out more about our scheduled classroom training, our £50 blog hosting offer or to get us to help you build a WordPress site……drop us a line
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
CJS Services is a redesign and a re-work of a previous website we had built for John Francis and his extraordinary valve amplifiers and cleverly constructed speaker cabinets.
John had finally decided to take the plunge and give up his day job, being something very clever for Motorola, to concentrate 100% on his real passion, clever electronics for amps, speakers and guitar pedals. As a result, he needed the ability to sell on-line as well as use the website to power his on-line marketing. We didn’t want to go too far from the existing design, but wanted to freshen it up a bit and make the structure something more flexible.
We chose WordPress as the engine to build the site on; adding on the WordPress e-commerce plug-in to give John the ability to sell his upcoming range of pedals on-line. We chose WordPress in line with our published marketing method, to give John the ability to use news to power his on-line marketing and his Facebook business page. We also added on a couple of cute things like the Facebook “like button” that lets anyone with a Facebook account to quickly and simply add a link to John’s website.
We like John and we like his products. We think we’ve given him a website that is professional looking site, full of functionality to sell products and provide a base from which to power his on-line marketing. What we would really love however, is to give one of his Soul Destroyer valve pedals a long term test drive!
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
The Orbit research website came about because of one of John’s past lives as a Project Manager for a medical imaging company. Orbit were part of the team that were responsible for getting medical images from the mobile MRI and CT trucks around Birmingham via satellite to Budapest and then back to Birmingham and Cardiff. Orbit provided the mobile satellite equipment and the satellite infrastructure. John did stuff like crawl around on the back of unfinished MRI trucks with network cables and set up 12 servers in a week as well train Radiologists in Budapest and Birmingham.
Anyway. Orbit wanted a new website and were referred to Godjira from John’s old employer Pukka-j. Gavin at Orbit wanted more than just a website that sat there and was interested in the marketing methodology that goes with a news driven site.
We have provided Orbit with a WordPress driven site that lets them edit and add as much content as they want. We also split their main product offerings down to three target areas presented on the front splash screen with a bit of funky JavaScript driven image swapping.
Being WordPress, the site is Google focussed and does clever stuff like feed an RSS feed out to populate a Facebook fanpage. We also included the LiveZilla live support software, so now if you want to know anything about Satellite Internet solutions, you can chat live with a genuine bona fide expert in Gavin Foster. We also set up a mailing list based on the RSS feed using FeedBurner.
We really liked working with Orbit. Gavin has some great expressions for common computer issues. Such as user error being “Finger Trouble” and VOIP phones being “scramblers”. We hope to continue the relationship and look forward to helping Orbit with their online marketing for years to come.
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010
Making your site Visible to GoogleAs part of the initial setup service Godjira will create and edit your main page keywords and description. These are important hidden fields that help search engines find and index your site
Godjira will register and verify your site with Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live search engines. This involves adding your site to the webmaster tools section at Google and including a verification code in the page.
Godjira create an XML sitemap for your site. This is a coded map of all the pages in your site that the major search engines use to help them index the site. Google encourages you to use a sitemap to help them.
Godjira will create a Google analytics account and include the counter code on each page of your website.
You can link the analytics to your own Google account (if you have one) or get the report emailed to you on a monthly basis.
Sites hosted on Godjira’s servers at Heart Internet come with their own Control panel login at http://www.control.godjira.co.uk
There you can manage as many of the details of your site as you like including your email settings.
Godjira charge an annual fee for hosting your website. That fee includes the renewal of one .co.uk domain name. Domain names registered on your behalf by Godjira automatically renew, so you don’t need to worry about losing them.
Godjira always make sure the domain name is registered to you. That way you can have control about what you do with your domain name and if you want to move it, it is easy for you to do so.
Keywords should be used throughout each web page on your site. They should be repeated in the title, the meta description, the meta keywords, the main heading of the page and in the main text of the page. Keywords should reflect the words that people search for on a search engine. Each page should have a different title, description and keyword selection.
Including lots of keywords and repeating keywords in hidden text is considered bad practice.
Godjira offer additional services to help you market and maintain your website.
We can provide a regular monthly maintenance and on/off site search engine improvement to a fully fledged on line marketing campaign using exciting new social media methods such as Twitter and Facebook as well as mailing lists, news and Blogging campaigns.
Friday, December 18th, 2009
Every website design agency has a portfolio page. We want to make ours a little different by telling you a little story about each customer in terms of what we are asked to do, what we actually did and how we added value and over-performed for each customer.
Of course we are going to include some screenshots, but it’s people and stories that are interesting so we want to tell you about those.
Watch this space as we add more and more of our customer portfolio.
