Why optimise?

Your corporate or business website is your 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, non-stop marketing and information machine. It can reach a massive audience and relay your products, services and relevant information about your company.

Nobody wants to be misrepresented so it is important to maintain this window into your business. How do you manage your website?

Are you reaching as much of the right audience as you'd expect? All your website development efforts may not be fully realised if your website is hard to find.

We believe that a website isn't just an add-on to your marketing strategy. It can be integrated efficiently into the way you traditionally share information and distribute changing information about products, services and events.

We also know that time spent clarifying your target keywords, updating the web-copy where appropriate and building relevant links, in short 'search engine optimisation' (SEO), can help you get a lot more out of your website and, in some cases, restore your faith in how effective a website can be for your organisation.

Callisti can also help you with sponsored listings, such as Adwords, which is an efficient way to drive traffic to your site especially once your target keywords and SEO has been completed. In cases like this it is good to think about your online marketing budget and the targets you would aim to meet to demonstrate value for money.

So much information is available on the internet, all it costs is your time. You also need some experience and judgement to make sure that you're getting the best information.

Contact Callisti if you are starting to think about SEO and online marketing. We can guide you by principles of good practice and help clarify what you can expect when you have a well managed website.

Making Music

G came visiting today and offered some inspiration for making music again. What I need to do, though, is set up a capture mechanism for recording acoustic sounds to digital tracks in my PC pod. Although this could be an avoidance technique for actually doing the work of writing new music.

I've been thinking about the transience of music making since hearing about the death of Steven Edgar of My Electric Love Affair although I don't know whether I know him from Leith by association with Cestlavie and his Rodney Relax connection.

An American World

We live in an american world. Every day I have to miss spell words like colour (color) to correctly code css style sheets.

Excerpts from Skype #1

when i left on tuesday i got a wave of weirdness

i thought i'd been a pest with asking for your help on some stuff

but generally i'm curious and interested in what's going on with you re change of direction in your life and if you're just being mental for a bit or if you have a new found purpose and appreciation for things within you that have been quiet up to now

A whole host of problems

We don't market ourselves as a hosting service but we are finding that a lot of new customers feel it's time for a more reliable service and are asking if we can provide.

There is much more administration involved in keeping a website and email service ticking over nicely with so many factors affecting how well your current hosts can deliver on their promises. Even the process of switching to a new provider is seldom hassle free.

However our strength is that we keep our client base small; if it's too big how could a small team look after everyone properly? It seems obvious but different companies have different business plans and philosophies.

If the market was truly free...

When the site hits the fan

Woke up this morning, checked in on a client site, nothing there. No database access, content management access or website front-end visible.

Not good.

After some frustrating phone calls, another freelancer working on the site (unit A), started playing the 'blunderbuss blame game' to defer any responsibility for the problem.

Unit A was put in place to ensure the site project would have failsafes for when a server went down, mirrors and database snapshots with smart load balancing, clustered server setup, 3 different geographical locations, etc.

Previously the site had 99.7 % uptime on a Fasthosts dedicated server but Unit A was keen to force through 'scaling up' tactics rather than wait for the worst to happen. Sensible chat indeed. However Unit A is a chatter and not a doer it seems and is now squirming while all the teams working on the project add yet another black mark to the Unit A gripe-sheet.

This is the culmination of a month of Unit A speaking with forked-tongue about a new, more safe and efficient system that was being put in place for developers to test and deploy code to the live site. Which hasn't been delivered.

What we now have is a system whereby Unit B (a friend of Unit A) outsources development work to Unit C and all work must go through Unit C's team server environment.

Once we check files in and out we now have to merge those files on the team server, run a script or batch file to update THE WHOLE SITE from the team server to the development server, test on the development server, then snapshot that instance of the site and submit to the Live-Candidate stage using a multi step, error-prone system, then wait for Unit A to hear from Unit B, (which in practise is me phoning Unit A every day at least once asking that he sends an email confirmation which he is very resistant to doing) then carry out UAT (user acceptance testing), then feedback to Unit A, who passes this back to Unit B, who charges the work to Unit C to revise the develoment server version, resubmit to live-candidate version, ETC.

In the meantime we have work queued up on the system which can't be deployed until Unit C fix their errors.

It's the perfect bureaucracy: impossible to understand, unduly complicated, far too many agencies involved and people who want to get on with their work can't. Oh, and the CEO is under the illusion that we need Unit A and that everything will be better soon.

Add to that, the most creative developer is so demoralised by the situation that he is now leaving the team. This follows all the existing team repeatedly expressing justified reservations to the CEO about the involvement of Unit A and subsequent issues.

Some other key failings of Unit A: not making any allowance for the fact that the whole team use Macs which aren't compatible with team server, not being open with basic permissions and access details for team, not communicating clearly, etc.

Sometimes I feel like laughing.

SEO is not alchemy

SEO services that professional companies should offer you:

• Online Market research - Competitor and industry research, research into the psychology of the targeted audience, keyword research etc.
• On-site optimisation - On-site changes that are made in order to improve search engine rankings. On-page optimisation can include improving keyword density, writing headings and meta tags, cleaning source code, setting up links etc.
• Copywriting - Writing content for your website is an important part of any search engine optimisation campaign. It doesn't matter if your website ranks #1 if the words don't communicate your message and make the sale.
• Off-site optimisation and marketing - Includes setting up external links, partnerships, manual submission to search engines, directories, setting up ads etc.
• Tracking and ROI Analysis - Tracking traffic changes and patterns as well as accurate ROI analysis is what makes a SEO campaign successful or not.

You should expect to pay for all of the above services, they are all part of search engine optimisation and they all require time, knowledge and other resources in order to be successfully carried out. Some other aspects of SEO consultancy that are likely to incur costs are:

• Email and phone consultations
• Client training and education
• Preparation of reports and other documents and materials related to services to be provided