The Blog - Archive for blog

Link Goodness – August 11th

by Julia Filed under: Knowledge

Looting celebrities, pink sombreros and social chimps are just some of the things we’ve been checking out!

Here are this week’s top links.

Lootalikes

Celebs caught looting in the UK riots? Surely not..

Make your own video game system with Arduino and a Wii Nunchuck

This post teaches you how to connect the Arduino, highjack your Nunchuck controller and build the light cycle races from Tron.

If you’re feeling adventurous learn how to create Tetris with the Video Game Shield add on.

Get Social with Mailchimp

Mailchimp introduce a new social plugin for WordPress that seamlessly integrates your blog with social apps. 

LESS.js

This “dynamic stylesheet language” lets you extend CSS with behaviour such as variables, mixins, operations and functions.

Cowboy Coding and the Pink Sombrero

Find out why these guys have to wear a pink sombrero when changing code directly on production servers.

Good Trial Conversion Rates: The ticket to success?

Is your company driven by free trials? Make sure you read these 5 top tips for converting your free trial users into paying customers.

Website features you don’t want!

Conversion rates seem to be a popular topic in blog posts this week.

Here are 10 website features which Dave Cain thinks will lower your conversion rates as well as annoy your users.

New Blog for Brabantia

by Mark P. Filed under: Case studies

Recently the Brabantia Life blog went live. We were asked by Lawson Clarke to create a stylish SEO friendly blog for the “solid household products company”.

The site is intended to be part of an online campaign to encourage community and stimulate content creation around the Brabantia brand. Various aspects of the companies social media activities needed to be incorporated on a tight budget and timeline.

Using WordPress as the blogging platform of choice we created a design based on the Brabantia brand. We wanted to use lots of white space with obvious calls to action and focus on the content.

The sidebar actions are to ensure that should a visitor have got to the blog by mistake and are looking for support or specific product information they can move on quickly.

Points of interest:

  • Twitter Feed
  • Social Media sharing of all pages
  • Feedburner for easy RSS subscription
  • Large obvious social media buttons for Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.
  • Google analytics with extended event tracking
  • retractable header for frequent visitors
  • An easy to update header for seasonal features

We’re very pleased with the final site. Lawson Clarke and the most excellent Sally Hems are doing a great job of engaging the visitors.

3 years old and just starting…

by Mark P. Filed under: Company

The last six months have been crazy for us at Simpleweb. It’s like we’ve finally arrived at the beginning…

Tom and I set up Simpleweb three years ago to make process driven websites for small businesses. We developed some cool technology and put into place some solid processes so that we could design and build websites at an attractive price and at great quality.

Three years on and we’re developing geo based social networks, CRM systems for the government and massively successful marketing campaigns for high street retail chains. Our model has changed a bit, but our ethos of honesty, integrity and passion for results has not.

We’re about to move our office into a fantastic warehouse in the lovely Bristol marina, next door to the SS Great Britain, where we will be twelve people. The perfect number.

On top of that we’ve got Media Genius, our new product which we’re bursting to tell everyone about. Basically a “social media toolbox” that most people will actually be able to use and see an ROI from. More of that to come later though!

To celebrate the influx of change that “seems to have just appeared” we thought that it was about time that we got a decent site of our own and started to share all of the wonderful knowledge that we’ve learnt over the years and communicate some of the great projects that we’re involved in..

So here we are with a new “blog” and a lot to say…

Thanks for all of your support.