www.snowleopardvodka.co.uk

The new website was built upon Teampoint's favourite content management software, the Umbraco CMS platform.

The project was headed by Acme Studios, with Gareth Edwards creating the site's visual look and feel, and Sam Grady providing project management and functional specification.

Teampoint were brought it to provide the Umbraco CMS build, website frontend coding and ASP.NET development.

The final CMS configuration includes many custom provisions for managing specialised content. For example, a private area for members (in this case called Ambassadors) is provided where access to exclusive event invitations are made available to registered users. Additionally, registered users are encouraged to submit creative works promoting the brand, within a prominent online gallery. Submissions to the gallery can be moderated with only authorised submissions being made live within the online gallery.

We're very proud of the work produced and look forward to working with Acme Studios and Snow Leopard Vodka on various future planned updates.

We were delighted to help them re-develop their website, making it easier for both their audience to read and use, and their internal teams to manage their ongoing updates.

Built upon the Umbraco CMS web content management framework, we were able to design and develop the system around the principal maintenance tasks. Mostly these tended to be updates on various development projects taking place around the town, but also the inclusion of important documents for download.

The site uses validated X-HTML and includes an accessible text version of the site for use by screen readers and other accessibility software.

Social media functions are made available, where users can share specific pages with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Where further integration with Twitter provides a micro-blogging format, where announcements are displayed on the site's homepage and provides the means for users to follow these updates directly from Twitter.

The site is tracked by Google Analytics, and we hope to see an increased readership over the next few months due to these improvements.

*Update*

Unfortunately Renaissance Southend was wound up in December 2010 as part of the Government's spending review.

However, we have been given permission to maintain a preview of the website at the following URL. (Please bear in mind this is obviously not a live version of the website and is not maintained by Renaissance Southend):

rs.teampoint.co.uk

When they invited Teampoint to assist them they already had a website based on Shopify. This web-based e-commerce infrastructure provides useful blogging features and focuses it's efforts on being and remaining as Google-friendly as possible. In the interest of  an early result, we made only limited changes to the existing website, mostly to improve it's structural search engine optimisation (SEO).

Our primary focus was on acquiring more traffic (views). To check our work we installed and configured Google Analytics so that we could adequately monitor the changes in traffic and the responses to various keywords and phrases. Our initial SEO work was successful and the site began to climb up Google's natural listings, but not yet onto the first page. We researched suitable universal keywords and their linked market interests, assisting Hoboken in making appropriate modest investments in Pay-per-Click (PPC) through Google Adwords.

The conversion of views into orders was our natural secondary objective, and we concentrated on creating coherent custom-designed "landing pages" for the various key-words based traffic arriving at the site. These avoided any inadvertent off-putting for visitors, allowing them to move almost straight to the products we assumed they might be looking for, with subtle side references to other product areas served by the website.

Because of the relevance of social networks in e-marketing, work was also begun on setting up accounts with Facebook and Twitter to take advantage of these additional ways of spreading the word of news and promotions.

The Shopify application also collects opted-in email addresses from customers, and we plan that these can be exploited in the future by using our Wildfire247.com application.

We have demonstrated to our client the huge benefits of using paid-for traffic generation and that, used intelligently, Google Adwords is a vital, and extremely controllable and sensitive resource. After setting up the website and the proposition in a coherent fashion then only a small daily budget spent on this resource can bring almost immediate results.

We also demonstrated that although out-sourcing the specialist work has it's place, there is absolutely no alternative to thorough, and committed, daily grind to keep the website relevant, up-to-date, interesting and fully populated with product.

Umbraco includes the standard features we've all come to expect. For example, you can expect to be able to create and edit page content, update navigational menus, and upload images and documents. However it also includes more powerful functions like multiple user management and workflow notifications for site editors.

Supported by a growing community of developers, Umbraco is an ideal choice when considering ongoing and future support for your website. Community developed "packages" offer extensions to Umbraco and include functions such as including your Twitter updates on your site or integrating Google Analytics within your admin tools.

The system is also support by a core team, based in Denmark, who continue to refine the core code and release upgrades almost annually.

By embracing open-standards, flexibility and integration, Umbraco ensures websites are user friendly, search engine friendly and platform independent. Umbraco sites employing web standards will work successful on all modern browsers (that support web standards, for example Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome).

Additionally, Umbraco websites are incredibly search engine friendly and lend themselves naturally to SEO (search engine optimisation). Extension-less URLs (read search engine friendly URLs), Google XML sitemaps and access to all page content in addition to Meta page titles and descriptions make for a powerful SEO platform.

Our clients find Umbraco very intuitive to work with. From managing small brochure-based websites, through to managing large information portals, we've found Umbraco to be the ideal solution in a whole range of scenarios.

If you are interested in further information or would like to see Umbraco in action please contact us where we would be delighted to discuss your requirements.

The key objectives were to:

1. Provide information and advice to young people (13-19 year age range) in Southend-on-Sea
2. Extend a network of social media marketing touch points
3. Provide a central website to act as a portal to further information and third party websites

Excited as we were at the thought of producing a website to target this particular user base, we were aware that they were possibly an unforgiving audience. We needed to ensure the overall tone of the site was neither condescending nor patronising. However, we were buoyed by the fact that we could safely assume this audience were very comfortable with communicating and conversing over the web.

A number of other factors, however, presented challenges. Firstly, this was a new website on a new immature domain name. We needed to work quickly to establish the domain and ensure that it could be easily found on search engines and maximise inbound traffic numbers from search queries. For this reason, levels of traffic to the new website would be one of the key indicators of success.

Secondly, it was crucial that Connexions were able to manage the website content for themselves and make those all important regular updates to the site's content. Where Connexions themselves were producing marketing materials in-house, they did not have technical HTML skills. Any solution presented would need to provide the ability to administer their site through a suite of non-technical content management tools.

We decided to build the website using Umbraco CMS, since it provides a very user-friendly suite of web content management tools. Umbraco also provides an excellent platform for SEO (search engine optimisation) work and is happy working with web standards compliant, validated XHTML mark-up.

Crucially, Umbraco additionally provides the opportunity to easily integrate feeds from third party social networking sites. As part of Connexion's web strategy, using an extended network of social media websites provided the benefits of firstly, incorporating the technical know-how of such content partners, but also cast an extended net across the Internet providing additional opportunities to reach their audience.

For example, the photo sharing web service called Flickr was used to upload and store photos taken of Southend Connexion's events. Through the aggregation of Flickr's RSS feed, we were able to include their photos directly within the Connexion's website. Further, Connexions were able to benefit from the social facilities provided by Flickr, namely community feedback and that Flickr photos could also be shared on other bookmarking sites, thus providing a route back to the Connexion's website.

To further complete this loop of interaction, the new website includes the facility to share site content externally with social networking sites. If a user finds any information of interest, they can share it with sites such as Facebook and Twitter simply by clicking a "share this" button positioned on every page of the website.

To ensure successful indexing of the site and its content with Google (and other search engines) we created an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap details the site's entire page structure in machine readable code that search engines prefer to process when indexing a website within their pages. The sitemap was then registered directly with Google and was quickly downloaded and processed. This has allowed us to rapidly establish the site within Google's SERPs (search engine results pages) under key search phrases, in this case principally "Southend Connexions".

Surprisingly there was already a number of natural listing, i.e. free listings, sites competing for this search term. We are now positioned second in the results lists, with this being achieved within only a couple of weeks of going live. This ensures that we are highly visible to our searching audience.

Google Analytics has been installed to allow us to track how the site is being used, how often this is and where users are coming from. The website has quickly seen traffic levels grow in excess of 1000 monthly unique visits within just a short period. The origins of the overall traffic is a combination of search engine referrals, unique hits generated from pamphlets and materials, and further referrals from the extended network of social media touch points.

Southend Connexions continue to develop the website, with refined focus being on events for their audience to participate in, and specialist job listings for young people. With the site's architecture being provided by Umbraco and the ASP.NET framework, it remains flexible to accommodate further developments and rapidly extending services to incorporate any new marketing campaigns.