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
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
Monday, June 13th, 2011
We have just upgraded our Web Hosting and would like you to share in the celebration.
We are offering 1 Years FREE Web Hosting to one lucky winner, this will include WordPress automatically installed. All you have to do is “like” our Facebook page, thats it. Do it between now and Noon on Friday 17th June to be entered into a Draw to win FREE Hosting. We will then randomly draw a new Facebook friend from the virtual hat and post the winner a few minutes after Noon.
Godjira use Heart Internet for all our webhosting
1. Quality hosting
Purpose built web hosting infrastructure is unrivalled in the UK for stability and reliability.
2. Excellent customer service
Support database provides the answers to the majority of web hosting related questions and if you need to get in touch we are on hand to answer any questions you may have.
3. Value for money
All of our hosting technology has been developed by us in-house we don’t have any expensive licensing fees to pass on to our customers. That means we can offer you more for less!
4. Putting you in control
Believe in developing highly automated systems giving customers complete control of their web hosting. Web hosting control panel is one of the most advanced available today.
5. Grow with us
Web hosting that is ideal for a beginner starting their first website through to SME’s demanding their own powerful ecommerce solution.
6. Constant Monitoring and Security Upgrades
Take our customer’s security very seriously and all software is upgraded within 24 hours of new patches being released.
All of you with iPhones can also manage your websites and hosting accounts on the move with the exclusive iPhone control panel which has all the same functionality of the standard control panel.
Sunday, June 12th, 2011
New Chief Sitting Still here. Aka Lucie Dickens
You may have heard of me or even just seen my name in the recent newsletter. I have been working behind the scenes at Godjira for some time, well since the beginning and rarely step forward, but as business grows so here I are am pushed to the fore.
I rarely have the chance to write about the work we have been doing but would like to share with you my author. Well as you can appreciate he is not really “mine” but he was my first.
David Bracher came to me through a mutual friend. He had produced his book: The Way We Were. (Not to be confused with the 1973 film starring Barbra Streisand). This is a Photographic book of student life a Goldsmiths’ College in the late 1960′s.
He wanted a way to promote and sell the book. Unsure of where to start and knowing he needed a website and other marketing goodies he came to Godjira.
The Book, without even opening, had an immediate impact on me. Hair on the back of the neck stuff.
Simple black and white, or white and black depending on your perspective. A coffee table book if you will. Hard backed, white front cover with monochrome picture and black text. The back being black, as David said” It’s a coffee table book so you should not worry about putting your cup on it, so we made the back black to hide the rings.”
We sat down and had a chat. I knew the site had to be simple yet have the same impact on the viewer as the book itself had had on me. Its a photographic book, so we had to use the images with out giving too much away, as after all the purpose is to sell the book. There where lots of concerns about copyright and watermarking images, which we address. Also we made it easy to buy the book as they wanted to distribute it themselves.
Black and White, White and Black. The site had to be monochrome. Simple, well so I thought at the start, but have you had to design a monochrome website that has the same impact as a tangible object? Something classy and not overly simple. We took some time, looked at the requirement and Eureka! 10.30pm 3 days later, the design was born. We needed to showcase some key images and create a call to action. We also created a Facebook page which we would love you to become a fan of.
We like authors and we especially like David Bracher. If you are an author and if you can find us maybe you can hire the Godjira Team.
http://www.davidbracherbooks.co.uk/
Thursday, June 9th, 2011
Great Chalfield manor is an historic country house with a beautiful garden just outside of Melksham. It is owned by the National Trust and occupied and maintained by Robert and Patsy Floyd.
They have had a website for a while but wanted one that would help to promote the extra activities of the house such as corporate entertainment, the opportunity to stay in the house and the Friends of Great Chalfield Society. Richard Bill, a family friend had helped considerably with putting together some ideas but they needed some extra help putting it in to practice and asked Godjira.
We sat down with Robert, Patsy and Richard and put together a design and a plan that would give them a WordPress driven site to which they could add news and update information. Patsy is a professional photographer and she was able to provide lots of absolutely superb photos of the house, gardens and goings on at the house. We thought it was very important to showcase the photographs and set them up in clever galleries associated with the main marketing activities.
We’ve really enjoyed working with Robert, Patsy and Richard. They have provided excellent content and superb photography. We hope we’ve given them a website that they can really use to drive their online marketing and provide information to visitors to the house.
If you want to know more about how Godjira can build you a WordPress powered website. Contact Us.
http://www.greatchalfield.co.uk
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011
We have been working with Safewell for a number of years now. We ported their site to WordPress, took over the hosting and have been working quietly and effectively on their maintenance and keyword based SEO.
Safewell had a new innovative product to offer via their website; a Retained Health and Safety Service. Such was the power of the WordPress engine driving their website, their new page made it to number one on the Google search pretty much as soon as it had been indexed.
That wasn’t terribly useful however, as a review of the Google keyword search tool showed that in fact next to nobody was searching for “retained health and safety”. They may have been number one in Google but they were number one in a field of one with no-one looking for them!
So how do you get traffic to your website for a new product that doesn’t match any existing searches? Well the answer is of course Google AdWords. We sat down with Safewell and came up with a plan. We wanted to get traffic to their new product landing page based on searches people were already looking for like “health and safety” or “health and safety adviser” or “health and safety consultant” so we set up a ring fenced and targeted AdWords campaign with a fixed monthly budget that presented the advert for their retained health and safety service against those searches.
What we felt was important with this campaign, was to make sure the advert was discrete and targeted towards a particular landing page, so that the traffic could be clearly measured and evaluated to show a return on their investment.
The landing page makes sure that there is an “offer” and a method of capturing information for new potential customers. Safewell have a fixed monthly spend on their advertising that they can measure against business gained and aren’t just pumping money in to blanket advertising where no effect can be measured.
Safewell have gained several new key clients as the result of this campaign and are delighted with the results.
Find out more about Godjira’s maintenance and SEO packages here.
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011
Just a quick note to let you all know that we have scheduled more dates for our popular Build a WordPress site in a day and Twitter for Business courses.
The dates are as follows, click the link to book on our training provider site Findmeatrainer.co.uk :
Build a WordPress Site in a day
25 Feb 2011, Bristol
Twitter Classroom Training
16 Mar 2011, Chippenham
Build a WordPress Site in a day
25 Mar 2011, Bristol
Build a WordPress Site in a day
22 Apr 2011,Bristol
