Inaugural blues festival in Thornhill

The end of April heralds the first Blues Festival in Thornhill, Dumfries and Galloway. Organised by local enthusiasts from its inception last year, the blues band itinerary is now online and you can get tickets using paypal.

If you live in the Thornhill area there are a few outlets selling tickets for the main event in Thornhill Community Centre on the night of Saturday 30th April.

The initial website was a simple wordpress install, slightly customised, to get the Thornhill Blues online. It uses google documents as the source of the embedded spreadsheets. After the festival Callisti would like to improve the website usability and functionality.

Google Listings

Just tried a speculative search in UK results for 'usability and seo' and callisti comes up in postition 8. Remove the 'and' and it shifts to 3rd or 4th page. Encouraging though all the same. I must update the sitemap now that some content for user testing and seo consultancy has been added in a subdirectory for the website.

User testing or website usability

I'm not even sure if usability is actually a word beyond the realms of websites and graphical user interfaces. Anyhow, user testing is a research component of the website usability consultancy service offered by Callisti.

A client's website is examined in several ways: what does the unassuming user discover unprompted when visiting the website; how does the user navigate through the site and what is her experience of this; how does the client intend the website to work; etc.

By compiling the findings we can report back on a convergence strategy that aims to improve ROI and goal conversion from the client's point of view while simultaneously improving user feedback.