Codastar's Blog for The Best Web Solutions and Strategy

Posted May 19th, 2011 by Codastar & filed under Codastar News.

Linkedin has long been a valuable resource for any organisation’s business needs, whether that’s recruiting, networking or promoting services and products.

However, in many circles it’s still considered to be the boring cousin to the likes of Facebook and Twitter and we’ve spoken to many companies who are neglecting their Linkedin presence when really it should be at the top of their priority list, with 1 million new members signing up to the platform every single week!

Aside from setting up a company page and keeping all of the information regularly updated, there are a number of new features and services that will make Linkedin easier to use and even more valuable for you.

Posted February 23rd, 2011 by Codastar & filed under Codastar News.

There are thousands of brands and organisations currently using social media as part of their day-to-day communications or even customer service activity. Some are just testing the waters with a dedicated Facebook page, whereas others are successfully utilising all kinds of online tools.

However, there are still many that are a little apprehensive about integrating social media into their current activity and this is really no surprise.

Firstly, there’s a general misconception that far too much time needs to be invested in order to make it work. There certainly needs to be detailed thought, consideration and research put into any kind of online activity. However, it doesn’t have to be time consuming if it’s done right. You can use the tools that are right for you and don’t have to sign up for everything you see and read on Mashable.

Many also fear that they’ll slip up and industry publications and leaders will criticise their activity. Although there have been some cases of brands making big errors online, these kind of mistakes can be avoided through the creation of social media guidelines, internal education and increased knowledge of online etiquette.

Finally, brands feel if they open such honest and transparent communication channels, they will be more susceptible to criticism from their customers. However, the key thing to remember here is angry customers will write about your brand whether you are online or not. Therefore, it’s better in the long-run that they complain somewhere where you can see and monitor the criticism, you can show you’re responding to it and taking it seriously and finally you can show other people you’re acknowledging it and working to fix it.

Regardless of what concerns you may have, the advantages of building an online profile through social media channels really do outweigh the benefits:

1. You can build a strong and consistent voice for your brand across multiple channels

2. You can make a direct connection between your brand and your customers

3. You can build relationships with other people such as other businesses and potential employees

4. You can ensure your content is present in search results

There are countless other advantages to building an online presence through social media tools and channels. We’d be more than happy to talk you through them and explain how they can really benefit your business and more importantly, that there’s really nothing to be scared of or concerned about.

Image via birgerking’s Flickr.

Posted February 24th, 2011 by Codastar & filed under Codastar News.

Experienced in chimney maintenance and un-blocking, Ablewight are one of the foremost chimney sweeping firms in the Cambridge area. With over 50 years of experience, this Guild of Master Chimney Sweeps member is well equipped to deal with a wide range of situations.

Codastar have built Ablewight a clean website based around their existing branding that focuses on their excellent service and unique selling points. As Ablewight is a service industry, we recognised the importance of contact information and testimonials in their web presentation, and created a site with this in mind – complete with SEO-friendly keywords and Google’s favourite CMS.

Posted February 24th, 2011 by Codastar & filed under Codastar News.

This industry recognised provider of turnkey solutions operates on three basic principles: to provide solutions that are easy to use, work, and have that extra sparkle. With a creative an entrepreneurial work environment, RMH are expert problem solvers, delivering designs with added value.

Codastar took advantage of RMH’s design focus, enhancing their website with a selection of eye- catching illustrations alongside the usual tricks of a search-engine friendly website and easily digestible copy. We’re not finished with the RMH website just yet, so watch this space!

Posted February 25th, 2011 by Codastar & filed under Codastar News.

According to Google Adwords, remarketing is a feature of Internet-based advertising. Basically, it allows you as a brand, company or advertiser to display adverts across the Google display network to users who have previously visited your website.

For instance, if someone has viewed a section of your website that details and sells your top services, you can later show them the same services and offers they’ve been looking at if they didn’t make a purchase or get in touch the first time.

Let’s break it down into marketing and remarketing stages:

Marketing stage:

1. A user visits your site

2. They look at your services and products but don’t make a purchase or get in touch with your sales team

Remarketing stage:

3. Later on the same day the same user visits a site and is shown one of your ads

4. User clicks to revisit your site and this time makes a purchase or contacts you

There are many advantages to this kind of remarketing. Firstly, it gives you as a brand or advertiser the chance to target users who you know already have an interest in what you can offer. It also enables advertisers to take control and make choices about which services to remarket or upsell depending on a range of factors, such as which people currently have the most interest in.

On a technical level, this kind of remarketing involves the advertiser adding a key bit of code to the website pages they want to promote, which is called a remarketing tag.

This video from Google explains how remarketing works in a little more detail:

There are a lot of different views about remarketing, how it works and whether it does in fact drive more sales. Many people comment on social networks and in forums that they find the concept interesting, others are confused and others are worried about how much Google knows about their viewing and buying habits.

Regardless of the public’s views, several companies have found that remarketing really works for them. For instance, Google has compiled a case study about the popular home brand Yankee Candle, which used Google remarketing to tailor ads at users who had previously visited its sites:

“Yankee Candle’s Remarketing campaign has generated positive results, with nearly 10 percent of its abandoned shopping cart visitors returning to the site. The Remarketing campaign’s conversion rate was also 600 percent higher than the account average, and the cost-per-conversion was nearly half the account average.”

These results certainly speak for themselves and show that if brands take a tailored and responsive approach to remarketing, it can work to drive sales of both products and services.

To find out more about remarketing, visit the Google support site or contact us here at Codastar to discuss how we can integrate remarketing into your current online strategy.

Image via Yankee Candle case study.

Posted March 1st, 2011 by Codastar & filed under Codastar News.

Changes to the Advertising Standards Authority’s (ASA) remit means that advertising and marketing guidelines which perviously governed offline communications could change the way brands and organisations act and communicate online.

The Committee for Advertising Practice (CAP) lays down rules for many different brands and organisations to follow and they’re often referred to as the CAP Code Rules or CAP Codes.

The CAP Code Rules are a set of guidelines created to ensure that marketing communications activity isn’t misleading or offensive in any way and this has been the case for some time. The idea is that following these rules will make companies more reputable and communications to the public both valuable and honest.

However, this month the rules have been extended into the online space, meaning that the ASA is now able to police online materials for breach of any of the CAP Code rules. This means that all kinds of web content, from social media updates and to formal web copy, will be under scrutiny.

Many of the guidelines are focused on eradicating offensive and harmful content and we’re sure this is something that many companies won’t need to be worried about, as they wouldn’t allow that kind of communication regardless of platform. However, one area they do need to watch out for is anything that could be seen as misleading, which includes exaggerated claims when talking about products or promotions.

According to the BBC, in the last year the ASA has received more than 4,500 complaints about the copy used on websites and social networks. Until now nothing could be done about these complaints but they’ll certainly be taken further now the rules have been extended, either naming and shaming the companies that are at fault or even issuing penalties.

Even though we can’t help but think that it will be impossible for the ASA to police all online content, this is still a very serious matter and one that all brands and organisations need to be wary of.

We recommend that you have a good read of the CAP codes and see how they will apply to your organisation in the online space, visit The Committee of Advertising Practice – Codes.

Image via SteakPinball’s Flickr.

Posted March 2nd, 2011 by Codastar & filed under Codastar News.

Many organisations spend time setting up a website, adding content and expecting visitors to like what they find. Some receive great feedback and can promote their business and even sell products and services this way.

However, there’s only so much you can gauge from this kind of one-way interaction and it’d be much more beneficial for you to find out who looks at your site, how they get to your site and what they do once they’ve found it.

This is why it’s important to use analytics tools that will give you lots of information about your website, your content and your visitors that can ultimately help you to improve and work smarter.

There are many analytics tools on the market, but Google’s free tool, Google Analytics is often considered the best.

At first Google Analytics may seem a little daunting, but there are both simplistic and more detailed views of each function and everything can be controlled by the simple analytics sidebar on the left.

Here are some of the key functions:

The ability to see how many visits you get to your website:

Then you can drill deeper into who these people are, whereabouts in the world they live, what browser they’ve used and even what mobile device they’ve used:

You can see what your visitors view once they’re on your site and how long they spend on each page:

There’s also the ability for you to see how people get to your site and which other sites or social networks refer them to you:

Here at Codastar we use Google Analytics to help our clients understand more about their websites. However, although Google Analytics is very accessible, we understand that sometimes you may not have the time to trawl through information and make sense of what it means to you and how you can move forward.

This is why we use specialist software that we “plug into” analytics to help us generate in-depth reports that makes the progress of your website much easier to understand. These reports do not require you to navigate different pages of Google Analytics or spend time deciphering the data, they’re presented in an easy to understand PDF format for you to keep and share amongst your team.

Talk to us if you want to better understand your website and make sense of confusing analytics data.

All images via Google Analytics.

Posted March 9th, 2011 by Codastar & filed under Codastar News.

There are plenty of steps you can take to sign your company up to a range of social platforms. Maybe you think your customers would appreciate seeing regular blog posts, or a Twitter stream detailing everything your organisation is currently up to.

However, it’s important to see the bigger picture when it comes to online activity.

When your website, social media platforms and any other online activity is integrated then that’s when you’ll see the biggest benefit.

This may seem hard when you have so many different assets across the web. However, there are many simple steps you can take to include social media on your website, as a way of drawing everything together in one place and ultimately making the customer journey as easy and streamlined as possible:

Link to your other assets

The simplest step you can take is to add links and icons to your website in order to show where your organisation can be found online.

Many people like to find out information from a website, but others like to look at video content, or find out what you’re talking to people about on Twitter, so it’s important they can find these places easily.

There are literally thousands of icons you can chose from, but start from a list, like 33 Social media icon sets for designers and bloggers and pick those that fit best with the look and feel of your site and branding.

Make the most of Facebook

The Facebook ‘Like’ button has now taken over the functionality of the Facebook ‘Share’ button many people used in the past. So, if someone clicks ‘Like’ on one of your posts or pages, a full headline with a blurb and thumbnail will be posted to their wall.

This could mean that your content is seen by even more people and traffic to your site may increase, so it’s important you think about integrating Facebook into your site.

Visit the Facebook Developers page, Facebook for Websites to find out how it could work for you, or get in touch with the Codastar team if you’d like help understanding some of the technical jargon.

Think about widgets

Most blogging platforms and content management systems allow you to add “widgets” to your pages. This could be anything from a piece of text to an RSS feed.

Many companies choose to add a widget that displays recent tweets on their main page or blog – this is what we do here at Codastar, you can see our recent tweets feed over to the right. This not only adds a human element to an otherwise static websites, but it shows that your organisation is clued up when it comes to social media, which many customers now expect from everyone they come into contact with.

SEO benefits

It’s important to remember that it’s not just about adding lots and lots of social functionality. When you’re doing anything with your website, social media or simple web copy, you need to consider SEO.

Adding things to your website that will update regularly will ultimately help when it comes to making sure your website appears higher in search results, as Google likes pages that constantly refresh.

Images via AODDesign and Facebook.

Posted March 10th, 2011 by Codastar & filed under Codastar News.

There are lots of different options if you want to create a website for your business.

However, WordPress is the most popular web publishing software because it’s easy to use, it’s very SEO friendly and most importantly it looks professional.

Many people see WordPress as a blogging platform when really it’s often used to build very demanding websites that get a lot of traffic, need to look perfect and are integral to businesses.

From small businesses to global brands, WordPress is used to make slick websites, magazines and blogs.

Just look at these great examples:

The Open University and organic product company Pure Bubble use WordPress to power their websites:

5 Tips to make the most of LinkedIn

Ablewight

RMH Group

What is Google remarketing and why is it important?

Why you need to understand Google Analytics

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Meta