Vindicated

The Cyprus Holiday Villa market is pretty saturated. A Callisti client had challenged us with the task of building up quality web traffic for a young website to attract a share of the Cyprus holiday online booking market.

The challenge involved using only "white hat SEO" techniques, no Google Adwords or sponsored links, and work within a tight budget on a "shot to nothing" basis. The work is now paying off :)

After investing time in reducing pagerank leakage, making more friendly URLs, optimising meta tags, sourcing website and blog links from external and relevant websites, utilising a rich Flickr photostream, and tweeting when appropriate, etc., the bookings are now starting to come.

A strange feeling of satisfaction results.

Optimising wedding photos - a special thanks

Callisti had been provided with a script from the region's Bespoke Coder to run on some of the content managed sites in the portfolio.

Comlongon Castle had taken care to update all their image descriptions (normally ALT tags) throughout the website - no mean feat given the volume of wedding photos the castle venue generates!

The site and database were then backed up and the script was applied. This cycles through all the images in the content folder, copies back-ups for each image e.g. thumb, medium and full-size, into a temporary folder, then renames the image using the description stored in the database, or failing that the image file-name. The new file-names are put back in the original directory and the database updated to account for the change in image URL.

Why? In this case, the original content management system would rename any image file-name during the upload process to a string of digits. This update means all the images now have a keyword relevant title and URL.

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.

Wedding Fare

Callisti is off to enjoy spring equinox at the Comlongon Castle wedding fare, where many wedding service providers and romantic couples will be finding out all about each other.

Weather has been mild and bright so it could be a good opportunity to get some footage (still and motion) of the castle grounds.

 

Comlongon now has a customised twitter presence (in its infancy!)

Get your story straight

Work has started on The Dead Tree Press initiative to encourage a more balanced reporting of the events and goings-on in Dumfries and Galloway and beyond.

Writers are invited to submit content and articles, cartoons, illustrations, etc., that have a bearing on local, regional and national issues from a local perspective.

The web presence is still in it's formative stage and is open to flexible development to suit the needs of the readership and contributors alike.

Comments welcome!

Wedding balloons

The "wedding industry" has a diverse marketplace given the sophistication and customisation desired by modern lovers who want a perfect day that's just right for them.

Dumfries and Galloway is home to the famous UK wedding capital, Gretna Green - internationally renowned throughout history for being perched on the Scotland-England border. Callisti is now hosting the Balloons for All website which outlines the range of decorative services available to dress any wedding venue and we aim to help the website improve in the coming year.

Learning disabilities consultancy

As part of the foray into using Wordpress as CMS we are now setting up basic hosting services with the latest version of Wordpress installed so that clients can start from scratch and add all their own content, images and wordpress themes.

We also set up the .htaccess so that permalinks work from the off and encourage an xml sitemap generator to help with basic SEO.

The latest of these is BeaconLearningDisabilitiesConsultancy, a lengthy URL but descriptive all the same. This is currently being edited and transformed by the client.