The car park provides 24 hour access to its secure premises in the Q-Park complex on Kent Street, and customers receive a dedicated Named space and personal transponder. There are even a few extras thrown in with the parking contracts, such as meals at the nearby York Pavilion Hotel and Langton’s Brasserie.

In other news, the new e-commerce site for Andrew’s Golf is now live – you can read more about this golf accessories shop in my earlier post. Another recent development is the Shandy Hall online gift shop, which is now fully operational on the website for the Laurence Sterne Trust.

Glamping site Jollydays Luxury Camping have just commissioned a major project for their online booking and payment system, and the gifted education publishers Royal Fireworks Press have asked us to use Issuu to provide sample pages for the books available on their site.

On the SEO side of things, organic children’s clothing retailers Twigs4Kids have commissioned some additional work. Having obtained a no. 1 position on google.co.uk for the search “organic children’s clothes”, their next target is to improve their positions for the named brands that they stock. The first two that we’ll be working on are Frugi and Little Shrimp.

The next sites in line for us to build are a new site for York estate agents Nigel Naish, and an online outlet for York curtain shop L & G Adams.

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Shandy Hall in Coxwold, North Yorkshire, was the home of 18th Century vicar, novelist and celebrity Laurence Sterne. It is now a public museum, housing a collection of his work. It also incorporates a gift shop, garden, and the beginnings of Asterisk*, which, when fully-fledged, will be a workshop space for artists, writers and technologists.

The website developed by Semlyen IT for the Laurence Sterne Trust features an online shopping cart enabling site visitors to purchase items from the Shandy Hall shop. As well as physical items, they can also buy Shandy Hall membership packages from the website. The site also features alongside the shopping cart, a bespoke events and exhibitions management system.

This site was designed by Bivouac.

EMDR Extra

This is a brochure site for EMDR Extra, an organisation offering training workshops to mental health practitioners working with psychological trauma. EMDR is a technique used to treat conditions resulting from trauma, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The site features an online application and booking form, which includes payment processing by PayPal.

This site was designed by Jamie at Semlyen IT.

McCartney Lettings

York letting agents McCartney Lettings commissioned this new property management site, which integrates a bespoke property details administration system. McCartney Lettings are a new agent and their new website will help attract the attention of more landlords.

Designed by Andy at Semlyen IT.

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In building websites which are, in effect, an online business card or flyer, we can apply some of the same design criteria as we would to an equivalent paper document – prominent contact details and a brief description of what’s on offer so that site visitors get an instant overview.

But simply making an online flyer isn’t the end of it – there are other considerations when marketing on the web, and probably the most important is SEO. If a website isn’t properly optimised for search engine visibility, it almost certainly won’t be bringing in many new customers – and in some cases, may as well not exist at all.

Fortunately, optimising a website for search engines has many parallels with providing information to site visitors. As well as contact details and a quick overview, providing a more detailed description of the services a business offers is beneficial to both human readers and search engines. The more the readers know about what a business does and how it operates, the more likely they are to pick up the phone and get in touch. The more written content on a website, particularly with relevant key phrases, the more valuable it will appear to Google.

A very useful tool for one page sites is a Google map. Google makes it possible to create a marker for any location, and embed the map in a website. The embedded map is more than simply an image of a map – it is interactive, and allows the user to zoom in and out, as well as use navigation controls to display different areas. York car valeting company KleenKar have this tool put to good use on their site:

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We have previously used Mal’s cart with several other clients, which is a great solution for small e-commerce websites. In this case, though, we needed some more advanced features. Therefore we have built an entirely bespoke system with the following features that are missing from third party carts like Mal’s.

Customer management Customers can create an account, subscribe to one or more mailing lists and get their purchases associated with their accounts. They may view their order history and print confirmations after logging in, simply by typing in their email address and password.

The customer management system was crucial for York Food Festival as they wished to provide discounted tickets to the supporters, ‘friends’ of the Festival, and at the same time they wanted to enable their customers to become a ‘friend’ by buying a special ticket.

Stock management As with all booking systems we had to make sure that if a customer puts a ticket in their virtual shopping basket they will actually be able to buy it on check out without having to fear that someone might have been quicker. This feature is essential for tickets, however, you might want to take control of your stock even if you are not selling tickets.

As a customer adds an item to their basket the system puts it in ‘hold’ for 30 minutes. For that time no one else can buy it. So effectively the customer has half an hour to complete the payment.

We have also made the system able to handle event limits to make sure we don’t oversell tickets. This can certainly be useful with other kinds of products as well, where you may have a limited amount in stock – as you do in most cases. We have also added the facility to set up a cut-off limit. Over that limit tickets are not available online; they can only be purchased through the Ticket Line.

User experience A rock solid back-end is inevitable for building a reliable shopping cart, however, we have also put a great amount of work in user experience. A fully customized shopping cart can easily win customers’ confidence. Your customers are not transferred to third party carts, they will stay on your website while they are shopping.

Our system allows customers to put the desired item straight into the cart after clicking on ‘Add to basket’ without even having to load a new page. This technology is called AJAX. Your customer can continue shopping without having to click to an “add to cart page”, but can still view their cart at any time with a single click.

Someone who is using an older browser needn’t worry either: it will work in older browsers as well. Technically speaking: it degrades gracefully.

Administration area We have developed an administration system which allows manually entry of orders by the client. This means orders by customers who don’t have an internet connection or prefer to order via telephone, can still be inserted into the system and managed in the same way. The administrator takes orders and payments through telephone and enters the details in the administration system. Their purchases will appear alongside all other orders in one single system.

Further features of the system include the ability to add new, or search existing clients and view their order histories. Administrators are also able to resend email confirmations in case the customer has accidently deleted theirs.

Finally, the best way to measure the success of this website is by its sales, and we are proud that after just a few days from the launch, the website is producing a high volume of sales.

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Cycling related websites are proving to be an excellent area of business for us. There are several in our portfolio already, and some more in the pipeline.

Last year we built a website for the York Festival of Cycling, and this was followed by a new site for Get Cycling, one of several projects run by the Company of Cyclists. Get Cycling is a community interest company which organises and promotes cycling events, bike try-out roadshows and cycling festivals all over the UK.

One offshoot of Get Cycling is now having its own website developed. Bikeboost is a scheme set up to promote and support cycling to and from work in urban areas. The first city to participate in the programme is Sheffield (one of the UK’s hilliest cities!) where 800 people will take up cycling to work. The scheme provides bike loans and support over a two year period, and will offer free cycle training in association with Sheffield cycling organisation Pedal Ready.

Our contribution to the project was a sophisticated bespoke (no pun intended) online system to manage the various BikeBoosts. Participants can register their interest and fill in an online questionnaire about their current commuting habits. People are selected to take part based on this information and the number of places available, and they are then given an account within the BikeBoost site.

Once admitted, participants can log into their account on the BikeBoost website and record their experiences and progress throughout the challenge, keeping track of the distances logged by themselves and their colleagues.

The online system makes it a whole lot easier to sign people up, loan them bikes, and find out how they’re doing. Reports on the facts and figures of the challenge are available at the click of a button.

Another project run by Company of Cyclists is Cyclorama, an enormous, multilingual online cycling resource which is still being developed. Cyclorama incorporates the online cycling magazine Bike Culture, which features a vast array of cycling articles and essays on practically every aspect of cycling imaginable. The site also serves as an exhibition space for specialist cycle designers, manufacturers and retailers. Each exhibitor has their own profile page, which contains a portfolio of their products and a blog.

Last month saw the launch of a website for the Big Bad Bike Ride, a sponsored charity bike ride which has been raising money to fund research into Friedreich’s ataxia since 1991. This site was set up to provide up-to-date news and information to participants, and to take online registrations and payments. Participants can also collect their sponsorship money online through Just Giving.

The next cycling-related website that we will be developing is Cycling City York, a project for the City of York Council which will promote York’s status as a Cycling City.

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This new e-commerce site sells a variety of golfing products – instructional golf books, golf accessories and golf gifts. It also features additional online golf resources such as advice, videos and a readers’ forum.

The site was designed in partnership with Mode, and coded by Semlyen IT. The shopping cart is powered by Mal’s e-commerce. The site will be launched very soon.

Mobile Shredding Company

The Mobile Shredding Company specialises in shredding confidential waste using environmentally friendly methods. The shredded paper is taken to a nearby recycling centre once the documents have been destroyed, and this is always included as part of their paper shredding service.

They also shred various other materials as well as paper: their shredding portfolio includes interview audio tapes, floppy disks, computer back up tapes, CDs and DVDs, magnetic media, USB Memory sticks, uniforms, security passes, credit and loyalty cards.

This brochure site was designed by Bivouac Design Solutions and coded at Semlyen IT. Its SEO treatment included keyword and keyphrase research into the many different variants of ‘paper shredding services’ that people might search for – it could be ‘paper shredders’ or ‘paper shredding’, to start with – and then there’s ‘confidential waste shredders‘ or ‘shredding’ or even ‘confidential waste disposal‘ or ‘confidential waste destruction‘.

With a small site it’s hard to cover every possible variation. The site has therefore been optimised for phrases that receive reasonably high search volumes, but not necessarily those that receive the highest, as these are usually more both competitive and more generic.

For example, a search for ‘paper shredders’ on Google will produce pages selling paper shredding devices in addition to people offering paper shredding services. Even though ‘paper shredders’ is a more common search term than ‘paper shredding services’, it’s better to be more specific and optimise for the latter. This increases the likelihood of a page one Google position as there is less competition. It also means that people who find the site are likely to be searching for paper shredding services rather than a shredding device, and therefore should generate a higher percentage of actual customers from the search traffic that reaches the site.

Brassed On!

A new site sponsored, designed and coded by Semlyen IT, featuring a logo created by Caroline from Royal Fireworks Press (whose site we also manage). The site is powered by WordPress.

Brassed On! is York’s Brass Band Festival, inspired by the film Brassed Off. It will feature all five of York’s brass bands, plus a young people’s masterclass led by members of the Grimethorpe Colliery Band. The festival takes place on 2nd – 3rd May.

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Here you can see York Health Group’s intranet document management system:

The system also has a calendar feature:

The sites were designed by Doug James of Mode. Doug was initially approached by the clients for logos, branding and website redesign. After a successful collaboration developing York Photographer Greg McGee’s website in early 2009 Mode and Semlyen IT have worked in partnership on several projects including these websites for Medical Practices.

Haxby Group Hull’s new website went live last year, and since the beginning of this year we’ve also launched redesigned sites for York Medical Group and York Health Group, plus a brand new site for Tadcaster Medical Centre which previously did not have a website at all. The next to be launched is the Haxby Group‘s main website (separate from its Hull division).

York Medical Group has practices in Acomb, Monkgate, Woodthorpe and at St. John’s University. The new site has a separate students’ section for patients at the University. This site also includes a Travel Health Questionnaire.

York Health Group is a commissioning consortia made up of 24 GP practices. Working in partnership with the hospital, social services, primary care trust and patient groups, they make decisions about the way patients receive health care.

Tadcaster Medical Centre is situated in Tadcaster bus terminus, next door to the Health Centre. It is a training practice for post-graduate medical students – fully qualified doctors learning to specialise in General Practice.

The Haxby Group runs GP surgeries in Both Hull and York. In addition they provide or support a range of community-based services including surgery, such as vasectomy, and dermatology. This website acts as the gateway to their Hull and York websites.

The Hull website for the Haxby Group. The group opened three new GP practices in Hull last year, beginning with no patients registered at all. Their aim is to grow to roughly 5000 patients at each of their Hull surgeries over the next 5 years.

All of the surgeries’ sites link to EMIS, which is an online booking system for appointments.

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Instant Interiors is Tricia’s furniture package service, aimed at landlords, letting agents and show homes. Tricia provides interior design packs for people who need to furnish properties attractively, quickly and to a limited budget, such as landlords who want to let their properties to tenants rather than leave them standing empty. Equipping the property with good value, co-ordinated and robust furniture has proven more conducive to successfully letting a property than filling it with old, mismatched hand-me-downs. Tricia’s experience both as a landlord and an interior designer has led her to develop this fast-track furnishing service.

Tricia’s online shop, Lifestyle Store, is her newest venture, and was launched a few weeks ago. The shop stocks designer furniture, gifts and accessories, and in particular it features three collections of furniture and home accessories – Islington, Notting Hill and Knightsbridge.

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