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We’ve been working with Sports Leaders UK for many years, and I’ve written about some of the interesting projects we’ve undertaken with them.  Today I want to focus on how we enable Sports Leaders to raise thousands of pounds every month through selling merchandise using TeaCommerce and Umbraco. Using TeaCommerce for Sports Leaders UK  Sports Leaders UK were looking for an online shop tool that would enable them to advertise their clothing merchandise to existing schools and Learners.  In the shops original incarnation, the site simply showed pictures of available stock with a downloadable PDF to be printed and sent…

Last week we put a new site live for our customer Rediweld Mouldings who manufacture injection moulded parts for a number of different uses. They had an online ordering system in use which was based on Classic ASP, was unreliable, difficult to manage and required developer intervention when new inventory was added. The system forms an integral part of a Kanban ordering system for aircraft parts. Kanban ordering can be a very effective way to reduce waste within a productions system, but is reliant on effective systems. When Rediweld’s customer runs low on stock levels, they use the kanban ordering…

This week we put a site live for our new customer All Environmental Health Services. They had been using a self built site, but were unhappy with the performance of the site. They wanted a professional site which delivered leads to the business on a reasonable budget. Our package of responsive Umbraco Sites enable growing business drive more leads online. If you’d like help growing your business through digital marketing then get in contact with us. Read on... New Umbraco Site for All Environmental Health Services.…

For many clients the choice of which content management system to use on a project is a critical factor in the procurement of a new web project.  We have found that Umbraco is a perfect fit for Enterprise clients. Why is Umbraco a Good Fit for Larger Scale Websites? For many Enterprise clients the choice of Umbraco has been driven by a number of factors, including existing knowledge, skills and experience of the tools and technologies that form part of the Umbraco ecosystem. We have found that corporate clients presenting with an Umbraco requirement already have a significant investment in…

Year one in university psychology courses new undergraduates are taught about the importance of the primacy and recency effect (or Serial Position Effect) in memory recall tasks. For over a century studies have shown that when a subject memorises a list of items, the primacy effect means they are more likely to recall the first items in a list, and the recency effect means they are more likely to recall the last items in the list. Why am I bothering with this?  Well there’s a primacy and recency effect that is well know in menu design and information architecture.  Users…

We work on a retained basis for one of our clients who manufacture and sell furniture. We run an ongoing campaign of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as well as monitoring sales through their site and making ongoing improvements to the site - called Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). As part of this campaign, late last year we recognised that the site had a reasonably high number of abandoned shopping carts, that is people who were adding items to their shopping cart but leaving before purchasing. When one reads around the subject there is much evidence of being able to convert these…

One of our long standing Agency clients recently asked us to provide some training for the Umbraco Editors at a mortgage industry client of theirs.  The site had been in existence for a few years, and wasn’t one we had been involved in the development of. We started the engagement with a quick phone call to discuss what the editors knew and where they felt that training would be beneficial.  They were interested in: How to manage tables in Umbraco without having to learn HTML; Creating new panels and front end components on their site; Uploading images to the media…

A couple of years ago I wrote about the great Yahoo Style Guide which I still feel is a real go to reference for the written word on the web.  Sadly the guide is no longer online and only available as a book. Quite why a guide to online writing is now only available as a book is beyond me.   But instead of titling at that windmill I thought I’d have a hunt for some alternatives, so here goes: BBC News Style Guide Guardian Style Guide Economist Style Guide Telegraph Style Book Wikipedia Manual of Style reads like it was…

Back in 1946 George Orwell wrote six simple rules for for writing, which I think still hold true today especially in technology writing. Never use a Metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do (see Short words). If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out (see Unnecessary words). Never use the Passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a Jargon word if you can think of an everyday…

Clever people have already written about SEO in Umbraco before, but it’s been a while and we wanted to plug a commercial Umbraco package that we use all the time. Last year we were approached by our now client Vistaplan. They were unhappy with the performance of their existing website. They just weren’t getting the orders through their site that they really wanted. We built a brand new responsive Umbraco website that incorporates both Tea Commerce and also Richard Soetman’s SEO Checker package, in order to increase the profile of the site in Google. We’ve had a site license for…