Pay-as-you-go e-marketing

Finally, a sensible pay-as-you-go e-marketing service!

Callisti was in contact with Contact Multimedia's team in Glasgow and it was a breath of fresh air knowing that small organisations that need intermittent e-marketing services don't have to sign up to a monthly contract or get charged hefty set-up fees.

The user interface is very straightforward and any imported email lists are checked externally to ensure the email addresses are recent, not spammy, and that the end client has a proper opt-in/opt-out policy for subscribers.

The reporting system is easier to grasp and there is ready reckoner guide for what the average response is to e-marketing campaigns depending on the nature of your organisation.

Tickets now on sale

Tickets are now on sale for the 2010 Arts Festival in Dumfries and Galloway. The organisation uses a third party booking system called "The Booth" which allows visitors to book from an online allocation of seats at events.

Most of the ticket sales are still available using the ticket hotline number (01387 253383) which is handy for many of the events being run in partnership with other local organisations and venues.

Part of the event itinerary during the festival is the "Fringe" which lists some of the events on during the period of the festival - these are listed as part of a wider range of events being hosted in the region during the arts festival.

Planting potatoes - news

This won't win any design awards but is an informative website - some fooling about with Google news displays on seed potatoes (Note: always be very specific about the search terms you want the news for...)

The client has been providing content covering a range of methods for growing potatoes in space-restricted areas - the use of old tyres is a favourite.

html5

Ah. New standards. What do you think the worst browser will be?

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.