Web Development Articles from York web designers Semlyen IT

For any business, staying in touch with potential and existing customers regularly is very important, and the most cost-effective way to do this is via email.

However, it’s important to have an efficient system through which to sent the emails. Email marketing campaigns, if just done manually, can be extremely time-consuming. Managing a list of email addresses, deleting those who choose to unsubscribe and those addresses which are no longer functional, on top of creating the newsletter itself, can all add up to hours, or even days.

Many small business start their mailing lists in this way, but as their lists grow they find them increasingly difficult to manage. Many people imagine that upgrading to an automated system that produces professional emails – perhaps even personalised to match their website – might be complicated, expensive, or both. However, this is not the case!

We work with a email marketing system called Campaign Monitor, which is cost effective and extremely flexible, even for relatively small mailing lists. We can design email newsletters to match your site, which you can either take as a template for creating your own newsletters, or just leave it all to us.

As well as boosting your image with a professionally designed email newsletter, Campaign Monitor takes all the fuss out of managing an email list. Every email sent through the system includes a small ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of the page, so if anyone no longer wants to hear from you, all it takes is one click. If an email address bounces, Campaign Monitor can remove it from the list automatically. You can add an automatic subscription form to your website for people to join the list. In short, Campaign Monitor will manage your subscribers for you – there’s no more time-consuming address book management.

What’s more, once your email is sent, you have access to statistics such as who opens the email, who clicks on the links to your website – information which is difficult trace when emails are sent manually.

On top of this, there are dozens of other features: newsletter designs can be tested to ensure that they will display properly in all the major email clients, and you can make separate lists for customers who may have slightly different interests within your service. If you wish, you can even track whether recipients of the email have forwarded it on to a friend.

Here are some examples of Campaign Monitor newsletters we have designed and sent for clients in the past:

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Wordpress is a powerful, yet simple, blog management system which runs online. Installation and customization is simple, it can be skinned to look like almost anything and if you don’t have a design in mind there are hundreds of themes available. The license allows us to modify the templates as much as we like and does not even require we credit Wordpress… oh and its completely free!

This allows us to use Wordpress almost like a Content Management System with any custom arrangement of pages, categories, sub-categories and even our own custom static pages. In some cases we have stripped out what we don’t need and used it as a simple and effective feedback or latest news system.

But Wordpress is just as useful ‘out of the box’ it contains everything you need to set up and manage a successful blog and can be a great asset to your website, giving it an up-to-date feeling, while increasing repeat visits and improving SEO. There are thousands of plug-ins available for Wordpress which do a range of things from running automatic backups and basic security, to automatically updating your Twitter account and turning your blog into a photo gallery.

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Recently we’ve had quite a surge in the number of clients who have come to us for SEO services.  One of the sites that underwent some SEO treatment in October was that belonging to Cloudfree IT, who are a team of IT consultants in Keighley, Shipley and Bingley in West Yorkshire.

This site was an interesting one to work on, as much of its existing navigation relies on Javascript. If a page is only linked to the rest of the site via a Javascript link, Google is unable to find it, and the page is not indexed. This meant that there were quite a few pages on the site which, even if they received heavy onsite SEO, would never appear in any Google search because Google simply couldn’t see them. Ideally we would recode the site, which is still a possibility for the future but since the budget to do this was not immediately available and SEO was seen as more of a priority, we needed a work-around.

Our solution was simple: we created a site map, and made sure that every page was linked from that via a static text link. Within a few weeks Google had not only indexed the pages for the first time, but they were also beginning to climb to higher positions for various searches such as ‘IT support in Shipley‘, ‘computer repairs in Bingley‘ and ‘Keighley computer services‘.

Another interesting point that arose when optimising this site was the fact that when a Google search is performed which contains ‘IT’, Google will often ignore this, as it sees it as the word ‘it’ which is disregarded by the search engine due to being a very commonly used word. Google does have an option at the bottom of pages of such results inviting the user to view results which do contain the word ‘it’, but this is hard to spot, especially when quickly flicking through different sites, and I imagine many users will miss it.

This means that it takes considerably more effort to obtain a high position for searches containing ‘IT’. When optimising a site for ‘Keighley IT consultants‘, if Google is only paying attention to the words ‘Keighley’ and ‘consultants’, many other consultants within various other professions in Keighley are unwittingly competitors for the Google top position. Despite this, after our SEO treatment Cloudfree IT has gained a number 1 position in Google for ‘IT consultants in Keighley‘ without having to click the ‘display results that contain the word “it”‘ button. It’s interesting to note, however, that position number 2 is currently occupied by a firm of recruitment consultants, position 3 by business consultants, and 4 by transport consultants – none of whom offer any IT services at all!

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Can justified text be justified for the web? The answer, in case you were wondering, is no! As you continue to read this article I will explain  the disadvantages of justified text, and when it should be used. To begin, I would like to explain my reasons for writing this blog post.

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The whole world is going online. Literally. It started with Multimap and Streetmap, and it got a heck of a kick with Google Maps and then Google Earth. Right now as you read, the whole planet is being digitised in ever greater detail by cars, planes and satellites.

The grandiose term for these are Geographical Information Systems – GIS. And they are incredibly useful. (more…)

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