Itsh a compromizhe

This has been on the back-burner for a while. Initially the site was transferred into Callisti's website hosting service toward the end of last year. The vision was to develop a Dr Martens focussed ecommerce site as these products seemed to perform well online, while reducing the in-shop administrative burden of monitoring and updating hundreds or thousands of products.

The site was developed for Christmas 2009 but hit a snag with Dr Martens (who advised against the particular design and domain name we'd settled on.) So what we have done is used a Zen Cart ecommerce engine to replace the previous incarnation of CubeCart and merged the first new build structure into the existing Outdoor Spirit design.

The outdoor-spirit.co.uk has a domain history which can be used and is also familiar to existing customers. More subsidiary work is being done to build around the Outdoor Spirit brand using content channels such as Youtube, a Blog presence, and other linked entities to help promote and review products and provide relevant outdoor activity feedback to help inform website visitors.

Other initiatives such as the Gap Year travel kit have helped package outdoor equipment into one stop shop kits that offer savings to customers and ease of in-shop administration.

Web analytics vs people

Callisti loves this blog.

If you want good insight in to web analytics, return on investment (ROI), organisational challenges facing clients and how to manage data, this is yer man.

A Scottish Perspective

We've been playing around with a newspaper style blog for the Dumfries SNP (Scottish National Party) website. The site is aimed at providing a platform for highlighting local issues in the town and region to engage the residents of the area.

It can also act as an advocate for the wishes of the community by allowing contributions from interested readers.

Still some work to be done on the blog design to incorporate video footage, clips and more information...

Change your face today

Your website is your company's face. What sort of expression is on that face?

Are you communicating effectively? Remember your face is being read by friends, strangers and robots continuously.

Wanna talk about it? Contact our SEO and website management service

(Just testing the email to blog service offered by Blogger)

Arts Festival publicity

Homecoming year for Scotland based on Robert Burns and the number 250 means that publicity for events in Dumfries and Galloway region will be tied into this initiative to some extent.

I guess the pound is weak so Scotland is as attractive a place as any for non-UK visitors, especially ex-pat Scots looking for a reason to return to the homeland.

That aside, the site has had some updates and now validates properly. The big Christmas pagerank bonus also saw the dgartsfestival blog site get a cheeky 2.

Using blogs for SEO

All the basic entries are now added to the Arts Festival diary on the wordpress blog and this has now been 'pinged' using PingMyBlog. Loosely, this is the blog equivalent of search engine submissions.

Running concurrently

Ah, the long winter nights.

Recently Callisti has been updating the experimental Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival wordpress blog site with the provisional festival diary.

Some of the events are tentatively booked so dates and venues may still need to be firmed up.

Updating wordpress blogs can take an age - I hope it's not as slow as that when you have a local server installation.

Anyhow, good to see the search results for "dumfries and galloway arts festival".

Now what was that about PageRank?

MyWishWand on Wordpress

There is now a dedicated Wordpress blog keeping abreast of updates to the MyWishWand wishlist and gift ideas for the family website.