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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Buttonbag

This site was coded by Semlyen IT, and the SEO – both onsite and offsite – was provided as part of the original site development. The site, which sells craft kits for children, has done well for various search phrases. As a follow up, the site’s owners have commissioned an SEO boost in the form of some additional work for those phrases which are lagging behind. We keep track of how well each phrase is doing by logging the position of each in Google results every few weeks.

Buttonbag is currently at position #1 for searches on google.co.uk for “sewing kits for children” and “children’s sewing kits”, but “children’s craft kits” is lagging behind a little at position #3, and “craft kits for children” at #2.

We will be adding some new offsite SEO links. Combined with the site’s existing onsite SEO, these should lift its position.

Shepherd’s Huts

Furniture For Life is a company specialising in high quality handmade furniture. As an offshoot of this business, they build shepherd’s huts – reproductions of miniature homes on wheels traditionally used by shepherds in the nineteenth century as they moved their flocks to new grazing. Today these are becoming popular as garden offices, hideaways, garden retreats and summerhouses.

The Shepherd’s Huts site was originally created by the business owner using free website software. Before we started work, it was at position #70 in Google results for “shepherd’s hut“.

When we added some SEO content, we ran into a software-related obstacle. It became apparent that the software used by the client was not compatible with updating files that had been changed remotely. This was going to make it impossible for the site’s owner to make updates without overwriting the onsite SEO.

It also became apparent that the software used to create the site generated the navigation using Javascript. As a result, Google was unaware of all but the home page. The site needed to be recoded.

Since the recode, the site has risen dramatically and is now at the top of page two for a google.co.uk search for ‘shepherd’s huts‘. As more links take effect, we should see it on page one.

David Bellis

David Bellis specialises in wedding photography in York, as well as portraiture and various other photographic forms. He created his website using software that produces sites in Flash. Flash is generally unreadable by search engines, as the text is embedded in the Flash file and, from an SEO point of view, may as well not be there at all. Before we worked on the site, it did not appear anywhere on the first 25 pages of Google search results for “York photographer“, “wedding photographer in York” or any other similar phrases.

The software used to create this site does provide some basic SEO opportunities: it allows the user to insert page titles, and meta tags containing keywords and a description. However, it duplicates these on every page of the site, which is not good SEO practice, as search engines favour sites in which each page has unique titles, keywords and descriptions.

There was also an existing static splash page on the site. This was written entirely in html, so had more potential for including SEO content. We added title and meta tags, and a few paragraphs of written content, so that there was something for search engines to read. This onsite SEO was combined with offsite SEO links.

Since we added the optimised splash page and offsite SEO links, the site jumped to a position on page 4 for ‘york photographer‘ even before Google had properly re-indexed the recoded site.

Google has now re-indexed the recoded site, and it is currently towards the top of page two for ‘york photographer‘. It should rise further as Google indexes the offsite links.

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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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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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Since 1991 the Big Bad Bike Ride has raised almost £600,000 for Ataxia UK, a charity which supports medical research into the causes and possible treatments of Friedreich’s Ataxia. The name ‘ataxia’ means ‘absence of order’, and people with the condition have problems with co-ordination which usually become progressively worse over time.

Graham started his fundraising campaign after his two children were diagnosed with the condition in 1990. His aim is to raise one million pounds for the charity, and, one ambition, he says, “to close York with a massive bike ride, similar to what happens in Cape Town every March when 36,000 take part.”

This year the Big Bad Bike Ride will take place near Pitlochry in the Scottish Highlands, on an undulating circuit of 75 miles. If previous years’ turn-outs are anything to go by, it should see over one hundred riders taking up the challenge.

Graham says the award is “a tribute to all the people who have helped me. Over the years, a lot of people, mainly from the York area, have been involved in the bike rides.”

The Big Bad Bike Ride website will be launched on 15th January 2010.

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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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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.

Some examples:

Breaks night in York
Blog to promote a monthly DJ night, a simple yet funky design complete with Soundcloud snippets, Flickr Gallery Feeds and Twitter Syndication.

Thrifty Living website
Highly customized blog with different templates for each category, although no plug-ins have been used a large amount of custom coding was required, the blog sits alongside static pages including an online book shop.

Tui Na UK
A simple, cheap feedback system was required that would let users post feedback on particular pages, Wordpress was chosen to do the job and integrated on a number of pages, all other ‘blog like’ features have been taken out of the front end so all we see is the feedback form and the comments. A gallery was then required, so we installed a gallery plug-in and again, stripped out all but the standard blog stuff.

Web Analytics Consultancy
Features: Twitter Syndication, RSS feeds by Feedburner, email subscription to feeds and comments, social bookmark links, print this post, all in one SEO and vipers video quick-tags.

This one!
You may have noticed you are reading a Wordpress blog, this one is fairly ‘out of the box’ but uses the following plug ins: all in one SEO pack, Add lightbox, Google Analytics for Wordpress, Lightbox 2, Limit login attempts, WP-Syntax and WPBook.

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After a fully booked summer, Jollydays are planning to expand deeper into the woodland, with potential for thirty additional tents equipped with even more luxurious features such as a four poster bed, vintage roll-top baths and flushing toilets.

Another York Press award, the Science and Technology Business of the Year award, saw another of our clients, Applied Web Analytics, as one of two runners up. Applied Web Analytics was launched in March this year by Dan Croxen-John, and the company’s website was given SEO treatment by Semlyen IT.

In yet another award category, Michael Hjort  – whose various websites are hosted by Semlyen IT – was a finalist in the Business Personality of the Year.  Michael owns Melton’s restaurant and Melton’s Too café bar, and is also director of York Food Festival.

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