Crockett & Jones – Makers of the Finest English Shoes

Crockett & Jones specialise in the manufacture of high quality Goodyear-welted footwear. Founded in 1879 in Northampton, Crockett & Jones have produced three ranges for men (Hand Grade Collection, Main Collection and Shell Cordovan Collection) and for women there is a small range of low-heeled shoes and boots.

As a 5th generation family managed business, Crockett & Jones is committed to maintaining the highest standards of traditional craftsmanship, quality and service and this has been appreciated by their customers for over 130 years.

The new Crockett & Jones website aims to provide customers with a comprehensive insight into the heritage, manufacturing process, collections and retail shops of the company and after 6 months in the making, it is now live.

Built with a fresh design and our own bespoke content management system, the Crockett & Jones website shows customers the different collections and where to buy in an interactive way. One of the main features on the website is the way in which the product range is showcased. With 300 different styles available in the retail shops, the user can see each one from all different angles using 360° photography.

At present there are 11 Crockett & Jones retail shops and concessions and details of their locations with information can be found on the website. There are stores across London, Birmingham, Paris, New York and Brussels and users of the website can see each one in great detail. As well as opening hours, contact details and photographs of the store, users can find it with ease thanks to the integration of Google Maps.

Video has also been incorporated into the site giving customers the opportunity to see the manufacturing process behind of a pair of Crockett & Jones shoes. This is coupled with a shoe care video demonstrating how to care for a pair of Crockett & Jones shoes.

Crockett & Jones attract over 40,000 visitors a month to their website and this has increased by 20% since the site went live last week. Since going live, the bounce rate has also decreased which Newedge are delighted about.

We all know that links, content and user experience are all major factors on how we rank organically but here are 5 of the factors you may not know much about and some info on what that means for your websites SEO.

Here are my 5 factors that people often don’t realise effects their SEO campaign significantly.

• Page change frequency
• Content/Code ratio
• Host location
• Link positioning
• Social media reputation

Page change frequency – Now this depends on the type of website you are operating, a blog for example or a news source has to have fresh content and that gives out all the right signals to Google and other search engines but a business website shouldn’t be changing a large proportion of its content regularly, this is un-trustworthy. Though there is a fine line between what can help and what can hinder my advice would be to have your main body content as a static section and all the necessary blog feeds, news etc around the pages.

Content/code ratio – There are many theories about what the correct ratio should be but the basic principle is that the more code you have the longer the page download speed of your pages, this is a signal that Google is almost certainly using now and will become more prominent in the not too distant future.

Host location – In Google’s quest to give the searcher the most relevant website for their search one of the factors that definitely affects the results is the host location of the website. For example it makes sense for Google to give benefit to those websites that are hosted in the UK for a UK based search as one would assume that these websites would be more relevant, much like having a .co.uk domain would give off similar signals. In basic terms a UK based business should have a .co.uk domain and a UK based host.

Link positioning – Again Google has been working strenuously to give the best result to a searcher, in doing so they have identified many signals that indicate whether a site is trying to manipulate its index, one of these signals relates to link quality. It is very plausible to assume that a link on a websites sidebar or footer is not as important as a link within the body content of the website.

For many reasons this makes sense but broadly speaking a link within the body would indicate a reference or a link to an authority on the subject much like Wikipedia. A link on a sidebar can equally be downgraded, especially if it is site-wide, because if it was worthwhile to the user it would make sense for it to be involved in the content and not listed on every page, this also has relevancy issues as not all pages on a website would be relevant to any outbound link source.

Social media reputation – For many years SEO’s have speculated that social media does and should impact on search engine rankings though this was largely rejected by Google and others but more recently Google and Bing have both confirmed that they use Social Media data in their algorithms. This was only backed up by the release of Google +1, demonstrating that Google wanted to use a social media justification in the way it evaluates a website.

Here is what Matt Cutts says about Google using social media data in its algorithm:

It is becoming obvious that Google and others are using many more factors as part of their judgement on your website and a healthy balance between all the on-site factors and social media is a great sign of a naturally progressing website, be sure to get involved in social media and use it as an extension of SEO rather than an additional resource.

After a few modifications, mainly to change the tick speed and the speed of the animation when shuffling articles, we slotted vTicker into the site and began to test.

Everything seemed to be going well and vTicker looked perfect. Unfortunately, when we passed the site over to a non-technical member of staff to look over we discovered a problem. The person we had asked to test the site had been looking through it and switched tabs in his browser and left our new site in the background for a few minutes. On returning to the first tab, we found all of our animations on the page playing catch up and the vTicker repeating the same article over and over again, at very high speed.

During our investigation, we found 2 separate issues coming from the same source. jQuery animations. More specifically jQuery animations and Firefox/Chrome.

When jQuery handles an animation, it adds the animation to a queue and runs it as soon as the previous animation has finished. This works great, until you add in Firefox and Chrome trying to help by not rendering any animations if the window or tab containing the animations is not focused. Here was the source of our animations racing to catch up with where they thought they should be in the queue.

To solve this, we need to use jQuery’s .stop() function before we run the next animation. The .stop() function will stop the current animation being run on selected page elements and takes 2 optional arguments. The first being ‘clearQueue’ which will clear the rest of the current queue and the second being ‘jumpToEnd’ which will jump to the end of the current animation.

For our issue, we only needed to clear the animation queue with .stop(true):

current.stop(true).animate({opacity: 0.0}, 1000);

As you can see, we stop the animation on the selected element and then instruct jQuery to animate it again. This means that regardless of the number of animations that have been queued up, we will ignore them and move straight onto the next animation that the browser is expecting, which prevents our animations from playing catch up.

Our second problem, that if the vTicker repeating articles, was a little more interesting. To make it easier to understand, we need to delve a little bit into how vTicker shows the news articles and rotates them.

When we create a vTicker object on a page, we create a div for each article that we want to cycle through. So if you have 16 articles to show, but only want 3 to be visible at any time, you still create 16 divs, but tell vTicker to only show 3 at a time. What vTicker will then do, is to replicate the top most div, place this clone at the bottom of the collection of divs, and then delete the top most div to make room for the next article. Before deleting the div, vTicker will add a rather nice fading up animation to the top div so that we don’t just have divs blinking in and out of existence.  What we found was that, because we queuing the .animate() on the div that we wanted to delete, we were also queuing the command to delete the old div. This meant that we were cloning the top most div over and over again, while the window is unfocused but not deleting the original. The end result was that when returning to the page we were clearing the animation queue with .stop(true), which also contained the command to remove the original div.

The solution that we finally settled upon was to tell jQuery to switch off animations when the window is unfocused and switch them back on when the window becomes focused again using jQuery.fx.off:

$(window).focus(function(){jQuery.fx.off = false;}); $(window).blur(function(){jQuery.fx.off = true;});

This means that the page will still clone the top most div but, importantly, it will still delete the div after it clones it, before it tries to clone again. This works because we don’t have any animations to queue, so we don’t queue the delete commands.

After months of a gradual rollout, Facebook Timeline is now available to all users, just in time for Christmas!

Timeline is a complete redesign of Facebook’s profile pages, first announced in September at Facebook’s F8 conference. The feature replaces traditional profiles with a vertical scrolling timeline of your entire life on Facebook from present day right back to your birth.

Timeline is automatically filled with status updates, wall posts, photos, videos and other items you’ve shared throughout your life on Facebook and you can manually fill in information that it has missed. It also has a new, private feature called Activity Log, which allows you to review all your posts and activity. Here, you can adjust your privacy settings via a drop-down menu that lets you decide if an item should be included in Timeline.

To accompany the Timeline, the redesigned pages have a more magazine-like feel, with a large ‘cover photo’ at the top of the page.  The purpose of this is to be creative and add a little bit of personality to your page. To the right of this is a timeline that filters posts by entire years or by individual months. The whole point of Facebook’s Timeline is that it instantly becomes an online electronic diary – a place where you can walk down memory lane, see your memories, things you’ve done and photos you’ve shared.

So why has Facebook made this change? At F8, Facebook’s annual developers conference in San Francisco, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said: ‘Millions of people curate stories of their lives on Facebook every day and have no way to share them once they fall off your profile page…we have been working on ‘timeline’ all year…it’s the story of your life and completely new way to express yourself.’

As with all major Facebook changes, the Timeline has undergone much criticism but here at Newedge, we think it’s awesome!

Here’s what the new profile page looks like:

You can enable your own Timeline by visiting this page and clicking on ‘Get Timeline’. Let us know what you think!

1. Experiment – PPC is all about understanding your market and the potential client base available from this channel, how will you ever know how many clicks and customers are available unless you play around with budgets, times of the day and location unless you try? In the early days of the campaign test as much as possible, refine and create a robust campaign that works for you.

2. Learn – If something isn’t working, change and learn how to recognise what will and wont work in AdWords before you action it. For example targeting certain markets on mobile platforms or on content networks may or may not work but learning and experimenting from yourself and others is the best way to succeed saving you time and money.

3. Focus on conversions –Possibly the most common mistake I see when looking at a new account is people focusing on clicks and not conversions or even worse than that not having a conversion tracker installed on the account. I have seen accounts of people who have been running Ad Words for years and spent hundreds of thousands on it without knowing how many conversions it gets them, for me that’s the most important thing about internet marketing as a whole, being able to analyse in real time.

• Install a conversion tracker on a ‘thankyou’ page or equivalent yardstick that is your target for the campaign.
• Pause and delete those keywords, ad groups and campaigns that do not convert!
• Don’t be drawn into judging the success of the campaign on clicks or any other metric that isn’t telling you how many customers you’re getting, your there for customers
• If a keyword is costing a % of your daily budget but isn’t converting over a decent period of time (judge that for yourself) then drop it, no matter if it’s your main service or product. You need to get customers; once you have a firm bed of keywords that are converting regularly you can add in the ‘prize’ and ‘luxury’ keywords.  Remember that wasted £ on keywords that don’t convert is sapping budget away from keywords that do convert.

4. Be pro-active – Don’t just sit on your laurels, there are always more keywords, placements and experiments you can run. Small tweaks to keywords can have a massive difference to a whole campaign so keep playing around in silos and continue to get better return on investment out of your campaign.

5. Use all that is available to you – There is probably a way to summarise this better but essentially I mean utilise all the services, tricks and ways you can improve your campaign that are available to you. Things like:

• Utilise the display URL to include a keyword or two
• Build separate landing pages for all ad groups
• Use the ‘experiment’ function on Google PPC to mine data
• Create multiple ads with a different approach
• Start with as many keywords as your budget allows, trim, refine and focus on conversions not clicks.

Having fresh content isn’t always easy if your products and services don’t change that often, so you need to work out a way of keeping other content worth items into your website, this could be in the form of a news feed, blog, forum, gallery, social media feeds, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds or even new customer testimonials.

Looking busy and active on your website also excites potential customers, giving them a feeling that your company is up-to-date, on trend and trust worthy. Keeping content fresh is a time resource investment, it doesn’t have to be costly to implement the before mentioned features onto your website, in face with a content managed website these “plug in” modules can quickly be added at relatively low cost.

Here are some easy topics you could be writing about on your blog today:

• New product launches
• Service updates and changes
• New project wins
• Career opportunities
• Industry specific hot topics

So there you go, an easy one for you this Monday, but a really essential one to keeping your website up to date and keep the Google love that is the gold mining of today!

Africa Exclusive is one of the world’s premier specialist safari companies. Established in 1990, they have focused entirely upon high quality uniquely designed safaris and vacations throughout Africa including Kenya, Botswana, Tanzania and South Africa.

Owned and personally ran by owners John Burdett and Warwick Hoffman, Africa Exclusive is based in Northampton and has a worldwide clientele with the majority living in the UK and United States. Drawing on their 21 years experience, every vacation is tailored around the interests and preferences of each client whether it’s for a honeymoon or a last family holiday.

Africa Exclusive have been a client of ours since 2007 with their UK based safari website www.safari.co.uk where we continue to assist in design, development and SEO.

After the success of their existing website they came to us looking for a brand new website and campaign aiming to break into the US market. With a new bespoke design and a 12 month SEO strategy in place, we are delighted to announce that www.africaexclusivesafaris.com is now live. The new SEO campaign will focus on ranking highly on the larger .com market for all the safari related keywords to target those customers in the United States.

Africa Exclusive Safaris are  also embracing social media – you can find them here on Facebook and Twitter.

The idea behind my 5 simple ways to build links in your niche is based where applicable on targeting those top sites in your niche, the sites that everyone goes to as information sources and is well thought of by search engines.

So here goes, my 5 simple ways to build links to your website are:

• Guest posting
• Commenting
• Link baiting
• Quality content baiting
• Mini sites

Guest posting

Guest posting is essentially providing an article, blog post, review or like to a blog within your niche who in turn will let you link out to your website in exchange for you helping keep their blog fresh. If your lucky enough you will find a few, ideally your looking for those websites that let you put a link to your site within the body of the article, but a bio link is well worth it too.

Some guest posting sites will ask you to pay, just do some research as generally the best blog sites are those that value quality content and so the owners are more than keen to accept new authors as long as your content is up to scratch. Generally speaking those sites that ask you to pay will not be as valuable to your SEO campaign as those who have a thriving community of bloggers.

The easiest way to find a guest post opportunity is to browse top lists of blogs within your niche, start with the top ones and aim high, alternatively try searching this in Google:

Site:.co.uk “guest post” your niche keyword(s)

This will give you a list of websites within your niche that contain mentions of guest posts, if they have mentions they almost certainly have opportunities.

Commenting

Commenting is essentially contributing to threads on websites within your niche that allow a link from either your name or in the content. I’m not talking about automating 100,000 template comments, I’m talking about targeting authoritative sites relevant to you and actively contributing usefully on threads naturally. If you can do these on authoritative TLD’s like .edu, .ac.uk or .gov then even better.

Have a look through the sites you use regularly, most sites have some form of commenting area but be sure to not waste time looking at those that don’t allow links in comments or on your name.

Link baiting

Link baiting is the strategy and practice of producing something that organically collects links from third party websites who want to link to it because it’s a great source. To be successful at link baiting you first need to understand what websites in your niche want, what they would link to and what they would actively promote to the users of their websites.

Things that do work are competitions, give-aways and widgets but you need to adapt your approach dependant on what niche you operate in. For example in the SEO market there are hundreds of tips, widgets and software you can give away and the target market are those people who have daily access to websites, blogs and forums so are very receptive and happy to spread any good word. But if you are in a local gardening market then you may struggle to gain links from gardeners, as many wont have a blog or actively use forums so you will need to tailor your approach to target those who do, perhaps hosting a competition for all the local gardening websites and the prize goes to those who get the most tweets or shares back to your blog.

Quality content baiting

I am sure there is a more technical or mainstream word for this but I call it quality content baiting because essentially it’s the process of finding a place where you want to get a link, it may be a manually edited directory, Wikipedia or another authoritative source in your niche and developing content that answers a question, gives them something that helps there users or is a unique information based article and telling them about it.

This works really well when couple with the 5^th addition to this list, create a website that houses lots of quality information about a small niche in your market and then add a link or two on Wikipedia to it. Obviously the host site will not be sales or driven at anything but the information, that way it will always be accepted.

Mini sites

Mini sites are just that, small websites targeted at tight subjects within your niche, usually targeted at specific keywords and on keyword rich domains. These websites can be created quickly and can become great link partners to your main website, though there are a few things that you should do in order to maximise the potential benefit you get from them, namely:

• Host the websites on different IP addresses
• Only use unique content
• Don’t interlink all of the websites
• Make them dynamic with feeds and update them as often as possible
• Don’t make them “salesy”
• Don’t over optimise them, keep it simple
• Only link out to your website within the content

Another quick tip on this if you’re looking to target Wikipedia links to your mini-sites is to use the Wikipedia template on Word Press. Find a host that allows quick CMS installations to streamline your time.

Where should you start with RWD?

I am not going to recurgatate what’s already out there, so here are some awesome guides to get you on your way to designing a really slick new RWD’ed website

-          http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design

-          http://thinkvitamin.com/design/beginners-guide-to-responsive-web-design/

-          http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/how-to-design-a-mobile-responsive-website/

-          http://mypixelbox.net/coding/beginners-guide-to-responsive-web-design-with-wordpress/

Examples of RWD

Here are some great examples of websites with RWD – try them out on your desktop then on your mobile device.

-          http://colly.com/

-          http://www.anderssonwise.com/

-          http://foodsense.is/

-          http://us.illyissimo.com/

-          http://clearairchallenge.com/

-          http://3200tigres.wwf.fr/

Why not to use RWD

There are of course some people who think RWD is not the way to go, indeed in all these situations it’s good to hear from both sides of the fence:

-          http://www.netmagazine.com/opinions/responsive-web-design-boring

-          http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/its-not-responsive-web-building-its-responsive-web-design/

-          http://www.lukaswhite.com/blog/post/2010/responsive-web-design-and-media-queries-not-silver-bullet

Summary

Making sure your website looks great on mobile devices is a must and whatever the buzz word used. Using the latest coding standards such as HTML5 and CSS3 will ensure your website is optimised for mobile browsing on iphones and the like.

If you would like to know more about RWD or mobile applications, get in touch with Newedge.

The Label People supply the biggest range of safety labels, warning tags, safety signs and tapes on the web to help businesses comply with laws and regulations on site, in the office or trade.

On the site you will find pat labels, cutom labels and signs for any industry whether it is building, electrical, construction, engineering, plumbing or IT. With a fast, reliable and  professional service, these products attract the worlds biggest and best brands from Siemens and AVG to the NHS and BT.

With their existing ecommerce site, The Label People came to us looking for a fresher design and better application suitable for their marketplace. We were able to help them with our very own NEMcart.

NEMcart is Newedge Media’s very own online shopping system. It allows The Label People to have complete content control and provide their customers with a secure shopping cart system. NEMcart allows the customer to manage their purchases, view and choose the shipping options and sign up for a customer account.

The new website has been live with us for a couple of weeks now and with NEMcart, The Label People can now offer their customers a safe and secure online ordering system along with flexible payment options.