We would like to invite you to our FREE Twitter seminar, taking place on Friday 24th of May. Pogo Digital are providing this seminar to the attendees of the Sterling Integrity Swansea Business Show along side exhibiting at the show. Our stand offers something a bit special as we will be providing a LIVE Social Media Surgery throughout the entire day. If you would like to discuss the Social Media Strategy of your business or gain some ideas on how to drive traffic to your website through platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, visit our stand! We offer the complete Web Solutions Package, from Bespoke Website Design to Online Marketing

This seminar will explain how through Twitter, you can:

• Build brand awareness.

• Find leads.

• Gain valuable customer feedback.

• Announce new products.

• Promote a special offer.

• Use Social Media Listening.

About The Sterling Integrity Business Show: 

The Sterling Integrity Business Show is a fantastic opportunity for business decision makers to grow their business by a combination of marketing, networking & exhibiting with positive and dynamic delegates and fellow exhibitors.

The environment and ambiance is busy, fun, and friendly, whilst maintaining high levels of professionalism focused on bringing people together making a perfect platform for growing your business.

Being non-industry specific, businesses from all backgrounds, find new and productive ways to help their business grow. Grow new contacts or develop existing relationships, discover new suppliers, reduce costs and gain valuable industry knowledge from our expert exhibitors & workshops.

What Business Who Attend Think:

Our previous seminars have received some fantastic feedback and appraisal. This time we combine the chance to see our seminar with the opportunity to attend the Sterling Integrity Business Show – where you can meet over 200+ businesses with free entry / parking and free lunch. You can learn something new at one of the three possible seminars and participate in speed and open networking.

Here is what just a few of our previous attendees have had to say about our Twitter seminar:

Pogo Digital would like to invite you to attend our FREE Twitter Seminar and see our exhibition at the UK'S BIGGEST Business Show - The Business Show - London ExCel.

The event is being held at the London ExCel on the 6th and 7th of June. 25,000+ Businesses will attend the event with a vast range of keynote speakers, workshops, seminars and exhibitions - and best of all, it's FREE to attend.

This FREE Twitter Seminar will demonstrate how Twitter can be a powerful tool for Businesses.

• Build brand awareness.
• Find leads.
• Gain valuable customer feedback.
• Announce new products.
• Promote a special offer.
• Social Media Listening

WE ARE ALSO EXHIBITING AT THE LONDON BUSINESS SHOW

Throughout June 6th-7th, Pogo Digital will be exhibiting at the The Business Show. Visit our stand to see our LIVE Social Media Surgery!

This is your opportunity for FREE advice on your social media strategy, and to obtain ideas on how to drive more traffic to your website through platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google +.

On April 26th, Pogo Digital took its Twitter seminar entitled “How Did We DOUBLE Our Revenue In LESS Than 30 Days Using Twitter” to the Regus building in Bristol Temple Quay.

We had previously taken the seminar to Cardiff and Gloucester in conjunction with Regus and #Bizitalk, receiving some fantastic feedback and appraisal. This time around in Bristol, we were once again delighted at the response from our attendees!

Our FREE seminar aims to help our attendees understand how Twitter can be a powerful tool for business. Many of our guests arrive at the seminar with a basic understanding of Twitter and limited knowledge of how social media can be extremely beneficial to their business. Once they leave the seminar, they inform us they feel they are better equipped with some very useful techniques and tips that are visually demonstrated on screen. 

The event took place in Bristol at the Regus building. Regus offer state of the art offices, virtual offices and serviced offices to rent.

We had 45+ businesses attend this FREE seminar. Guests had the chance to participate in open networking before the event started.

The seminar lasted around an hour and we had a lot of great questions throughout – something that we encourage. We also gave our attendees the opportunity to hear from the Chairman of #Bizitalk – Adrian Llewellyn-Jones. Many say that #Bizitalk is the fastest growing business hashtag on Twitter. 

Pens and paper are always put into good use during the seminar. Taking notes helps our attendees to take away our advice and implement it into their social media stratagies.

Take a look at the video highlights of our Bristol seminar below:

We’d like to thank everybody that attended the event. Here are a few pictures of those who attended!

Our next seminar takes place in Swansea. For more details and information about how you can register, click the link below:

Swansea Twitter Seminar

It’s been a busy month here at Pogo Digital. We would like to share some of our exciting developments with you.

Pogo Digital sponsor Miss Socialite Award 2013 and have been selected to build a new Miss Wales Website

Pogo Digital was selected to sponsor the prestigious Miss Wales event 2013. Pogo sponsored the award for ‘Miss Socialite’, which was a unique award to be given to one of the lady contenders who has shown the greatest social media presence and displayed the Miss Wales values throughout her online activities.

We monitored all the 50 contender’s social media accounts and the Pogo team attended the Gala Dinner Awards Ceremony where our Head of Online Marketing – Prab Chadha – presented the award to Liz Thomas.

Liz Thomas showed excellent social media presence as well as representing herself and the great work Miss Wales does for charities and the public to an excellent standard. Congratulations Liz!

Work begins on the new Miss Wales Website.

We are proud to announce that work now begins on designing and producing the new Miss Wales Website. Our team was selected from a large list of companies to take this project on, and we are extremely grateful as 2013 looks to be a strong year for Pogo Digital.

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Pogo Digital at The London Business Show 

Pogo Digital will be exhibiting AND speaking at The London Business Show 2013 in ExCel. This is the largest business show in the UK

On the Thursday 6th June 2013 at 11:00 AM, Prab Chadha will be a Keynote Speaker at The London Business Show with the Pogo Digital seminar - "How did we DOUBLE our revenue in LESS than 30 days using Twitter?"

The London Business Show has over 25,000 visitors and is free to attend. If you’d like to attend the event, click the banner below.

In addition to this we are exhibiting on the 6th and 7th of June. There will be an opportunity to see the new live Social Media Surgery at the show.

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Personal Trainer Worldwide launches with Joe Calzaghe as Brand Ambassador

Personal Trainer Worldwide launched two new websites simultaneously in the UK and USA. Personal Trainer Worldwide is a directory for personal trainers to promote themselves to get more clients! Pogo Digital built both websites and are managing the SEO and Social Media Management.

Personal Trainer Worldwide unveiled their new UK and USA websites last Friday. Joe Calzaghe was announced as the official Brand Ambassador for Personal Trainer Worldwide UK and USA.

Here is what the Co-Founder and Director of Personal Trainer Worldwide, Hashim Salmman, has to say about the Pogo Digital team.

“Pogo-Digital did not simply meet every deadline; fulfil every promise; excel in client care. Pogo-Digital forced the Company to re imagine what it can demand of itself. Pogo-Digital created from scratch our brand identity. The coding development, brand design, SEO and digital marketing/social media management services provided ensured our Company now has a platform to achieve real world status in our field. 

Pogo-Digital is a talented and exciting company. Our Company has been provided with a patient and 5* service from beginning to end” - Hashim Salmman Co-Founder and Director of Personal Trainer Worldwide

Watch the promo video for Personal Trainer Worldwide UK below!

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Pogo Digital wins new Social Media Contract - Hampton by Hilton

Hampton By Hilton Newport has selected Pogo Digital to set up, manage and maintain their social media accounts.

Pogo Digital’s Social Media Management services help businesses see real results from social media. Work will begin with new social media page designs for Facebook and Twitter. We then focus on brand awareness, researching into a target audience and building a following, creating engaging postings, and using our specialist techniques to promote the hotel and find customers.  

We are proud to be associated with such a great brand.

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Pogo Digital Twitter Seminars Receiving OUTSTANDING Feedback

We have been going from strength to strength with our Twitter Seminar - "How did we DOUBLE our revenue in LESS than 30 days using Twitter?"

We have presented a series of seminars across three cities: Cardiff, Gloucester and Bristol.

The aim of the seminar is to show you how Twitter is a powerful tool for generating business leads, creating brand awareness and promoting offers and promotions.

We have received outstanding feedback from our attendees, and luckily we’ve captured all of our seminars with photography and video. Head to our YouTube channel to see some of the video testimonials and great highlights from our seminars.

Soon we will be announcing more locations, watch this space...

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Pogo Digital exhibit and speak at Sterling Integrity Business Shows

It’s been an absolute pleasure working alongside Sterling Integrity this year; we had the opportunity to launch our new live Social Media Surgery for the first time at their Business Show in Gloucester on Friday 19th April.

We gave businesses the opportunity to have one on one appointment with Social Media experts! 

We will be running this surgery again with our Twitter Seminar at the upcoming Sterling Integrity's Business Shows in Swansea and Cardiff:

Our three Social Media Surgical Experts at the Gloucester Sterling Integrity Business Show!

24th May 2013

Village Hotel - Swansea

Prab Chadha will be a keynote speaker at 10:15 AM with our seminar titled "How did we DOUBLE our revenue in LESS than 30 days using Twitter?"

Pogo Digital will also be exhibiting with our Social Media Surgery.

21st June 2013

Cardiff International Legacy Hotel

Pogo Digital will be exhibiting and presenting a workshop at this event. Times and subject Tbc.

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Pogo Digital enjoy Business AND Breakfast at BforB

Pogo Digital are now members of the Business For Breakfast networking organisation.  

As well as providing support to their marketing efforts in South Wales through email marketing and social media, we also attend the breakfasts in Cardiff at the Legacy Hotel.

Business For Breakfast is a UK-wide referral networking organisation, where every week members bring in £10,000s of business for each other.

1971 –  Ray Tomlinson sent the first email…to himself.  

"The test messages were entirely forgettable. . . . Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar," says Tomlinson.

He is also credited for using the “@” sign to distinguish between username and domain name.

1971 – ‘Creeper’ was the first virus, created by Bob Thomas it simply displayed a message: “I’m Creeper: Catch me if you can.” In response to this the first ever anti-virus was created – ‘Reaper’.

The first malicious virus is regarded to be ‘Elk Cloner’, created by Richard Skrenta, it was spread via floppy disks.

Early 1980s – The First ASCII based Emoticon :-) was invented by Scott Fahlman.

1985 – Symbolics.com was the first domain name ever registered on March 15^th. It now serves as a historic site.

1991 – The first website was dedicated to information about the World Wide Web, going live on August 6^th, 1991 - http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

1990 – Archie was the first search engine before Google joined the game, it was created by 3 students from McGill University in Montreal; the name Archie comes from the word “Archive” with the “v” being dropped.

1992 – The first picture uploaded to the web. Posted by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) the picture uploaded to the web was edited in version one of Photoshop on a colour mac, it’s of a comedy band called Les Horrible Cernettes.

1994 – The first ever banner ad went live in October on HotWired.com, created by Joe McCambley it promoted 7 art museums, sponsored by AT&T.

1995 – Ebay went live in September, initially called Auctionweb. The first item to exchange hands was a broken laser pointer put up for auction by Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar. The buyer claimed to collect broken laser pointers after seeing it was advertised as faulty… so the sale went ahead.

2003 – The first sentence uttered on Skype was in Estonian by a member of the development team - 'Tere, kas sa kuuled mind?' or "Hello, can you hear me?" in English.

2005 - The first Youtube video posted by co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo consists of an 18 second report from the elephant enclosure including a flashing message that reads “Can you hear the goat. Meeeeeeh!!”

This video has been viewed over 10 million times.

2006  -  Twitter was developed by Jack Dorsey, he posted the first tweet on March 21, 2006 at 9:50 PM – “just setting up my twttr.”

Following our last Twitter seminar in Cardiff, we hit the road taking the event to Gloucester on the 12th April and held it at the Regus Gloucester Docks North Warehouse. 

This time we had 45 businesses attend who, alongside the seminar, enjoyed networking opportunities, refreshments and even one of Britain's top caricaturists Picasso Griffiths.

Not only are these seminars free to attend, but the tips and techniques to help your business use Twitter as a tool to find leads, build profits and create brand awareness are very beneficial. Our attendees say they have been inspired to start using social media successfully for their businesses.

We have created a short video of highlights from the day. See the video below to see how the event unfolded:

Once again the feedback was fantastic, with some businesses putting themselves forward for video testimonials.

Our Twitter seminar has gained great feedback from our attendes. This aim of the seminar?

• Build brand awareness.

• Find leads.

• Gain valuable customer feedback.

• Announce new products.

• Promote a special offer.

• Social Media Listening

Want to attend a future seminar?

Our next seminar is in Bristol! To attend the event, just follow the link below:

It’s very easy to fall into bad habits. Social Media habits are no exception – and here’s what you should avoid.

Social Media can take some time to implement – you have to create a strategy that works for your business through trialling, testing and measuring. The rewards for this system can be great in building your brand, gaining customer interaction, generating leads and advertising your services/products, but what about when it gets very busy in the office, in the shop, or at home? What about when you don’t have time to work on your strategy and slip back into the generic social media habits? 

Slipping into bad social media habits can be damaging for your business. How you represent your business through social media can have a direct effect on a potential customer’s image of you. Below are a few of the most common habits that can put users off your social media pages for good.

‘Share and Retweets’

Having your content shared and retweeted is fantastic. It means your content is reaching a bigger audience and even has the potential to go ‘viral’, but knowing WHEN to ask for shares and retweets is the difference between keeping your audience and losing them.

If you have produced content that you know has the ability to engage people, or you’re promoting an offer that you know your audience and beyond will want to take part in then asking people to share or retweet it is acceptable. If you are noticeably asking users to share and retweet every piece of content that you post, users may get the impression that you are desperate, that your business needs more engagement or views, and you generally look smaller or ‘needy’.  As a user, having your timeline bombarded by a company asking for your help can simply put you off that company. Users will ignore your requests, get aggravated with how often you are asking for engagement, and disconnect away from your page.

Untidy or Bad Images On Social Media Channels

Businesses now have the opportunity to add a far greater range of visuals to their social media channels. Social media has become a very visual industry – having a nice appearance throughout your channels can make you stand out from the crowd, where as using out of shape, unclear or badly designed images can affect your brand appearance. If you aren’t up to date with how to correctly size Facebook, Google+ or Twitter header photos, it’s important you research into this before uploading images. If you don’t look as professional or visually appealing as your competitors, users may not engage with your page. Try to keep a visual brand theme throughout all channels and use high quality images.

Overcompensating For Inactivity

Small to medium sized businesses may not have the man power or funds to be able to employ social media managers. When it gets too busy in the office, shop or at home and you don’t have enough time in the day to keep up with your online presence, businesses fall into the trap of overcompensating.

If you haven’t posted in your social media channels for a few days due to other commitments or a pile up of work, it is a bad idea to post numerous updates in quick succession to compensate. Being inactive on your channel isn’t a good thing but not as many users as you think will unfollow you or disconnect from your pages. If you suddenly appear and clog up their feed with tweets, updates and pictures, it is far more noticeable that you are trying to make up for lost time, it can annoy users, and will essentially mean that people do not want all of your content on their feed. Users will unfollow and disconnect.

Don’t Ignore Requests

If you are asked for help or somebody has a query related to your business, try and respond to it as soon as you can. Users appreciate your engagement just as you appreciate theirs. It’s true that you cannot be on top of everything at all times, but the longer you leave messages and queries, the less likely you are to respond.

Overuse of Hashtags on Twitter

Hashtags are a vital and fantastic way of providing context to your updates, getting your business on the timeline for keywords and topics and reaching specific audiences. The best way to use this feature is to be specific to your target audience. Many businesses will try to appear on every timeline and hashtag page through hashtagging as possible, producing tweets that are primarily just hashtags. This can confuse users, as well as making your business look desperate to appear all over Twitter with no general purpose. Think about what you want to achieve from your Tweet, and use hashtags to reach specific audiences, such as targeting locations (#Cardiff #London).

Syncing Posts on All Channels

Yes, using software to make sure your update or post appears on all your social media channels saves time, but it stands out like a sore thumb. Not only will it give users the impression that you are being quite lazy, but often the software will post unattractive images to all your channels. Taking more time to take advantage of all your social media channels will hugely improve your posts effect. Each social media channel has different features that can enhance what you wish to post, whether it be visually by posting related images, hashtagging or tagging names. You are far more likely to achieve greater engagement if you look like you have taken the time to use your social media channels correctly.

If you’d like help with managing your social media channels, see what we can offer you here:

http://www.pogo-digital.co.uk/Social-Media-Management

Small Business owners understand that they should implement a Social Media strategy, but often aren’t completely sure how to find the time to do so. 

Here are 10 tips to help small business owners use social media effectively.

1. Start with a plan. 

Search through social media websites to find out where your potential customers and target audiences are having conversations in which you can add value. Google Alerts is a helpful tool to do this.

2. You don’t have to be perfect.

To begin with, listen and learn from others. You’ll find that throughout social media humility is always on display. Don’t worry about being the ‘new’ person as many are willing to help.

3. Use one tool at a time.

There are many social media websites that a business can display itself on, but using one tool effectively is far greater than trying to manage a wide range of accounts. By delegating your time to one tool and learning how to use it correctly for your business, you are more likely to get what you want from social media. Choose the tool in which most of your customers or prospects are based.

4. Appear consistently.

You may not have enough time to constantly appear on your social media channels. The way to battle around this is to choose a certain time period in your business week, even if it’s for one hour during a particular day, and make sure that you appear during that time and post consistently. This strategy is better than using social media for 4 hours one day, but only 10 minutes the next.

5. Use your own voice. 

The way in which you interact through social media should be personal and human. Use your voice and your personality to professionally reflect your company brand. Consumers now value a human voice.

6. Create a time limit.

All marketing strategies need a time limit. It’s very easy to get distracted within social media, and you may find yourself drifting away from your main properties. Get on the social media tool, do what you need to do, and then get off the tool according to your time limit.

7. Turn notifications off.

Notifications are distracting and will consume time. They simply decrease overall productivity when you aren’t working on your social media. Turn notifications off and work on your plan.

8. Create new content and schedule it.

Creating new content is the best way to drive new traffic to your business online and keep your users engaged with what you post. Start to schedule new posts on a weekly basis to begin with.

9. Use analytics.

Results are the aim of the game, and every marketing strategy needs to be measured and reviewed. Social media is no different and a great tool to review analytics is Google Analytics.

10. Set out an expected return on investment.

Understand what your business hopes to gain from using social media, and over what period of time.

We here at Pogo Digital can help you with your Social Media accounts. To see how we can help click the link below:

Pogo Digital Social Media Services

Search Engine Optimisation can increase the visibility and ranking of your website. If you’re just beginning to experiment with SEO, you may have some trouble understanding the large amount of jargon involved with the industry. Below is a quick guide to explain some of this jargon and help you get to grips with search engine optimisation.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation – Taking the HTML code and content of your website, optimising it and building incoming links so major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo can find your website. This helps those search engines understand your website and what it’s about, and if managed correctly, rank it on its engines for your desired keywords.

Keywords

Keywords are a specific set of words or ‘search queries’ that a website is optimised for.  These keywords are enabled within your website to improve your search engine rankings. The content you create for your website/the pages on your site should have these keywords strategically placed so that your pages or articles still make sense, and help search engines rank your website.

SERPs

 “Search Engine Results Pages” You may be asked where you are in the SERP’s. This means they want to know if you are ranked highly on page one, or deep down into the later pages of search results.

Anchor Text

This is text that people use when they link to your website. Anchor text is used to let search engines build a profile of relevance. You may be running a link building campaign, which means you use your keywords as anchor text – then search engines know your site is relevant to the keywords because there is proven links. Building links through keywords is a common and proven way to improve your website rankings.

301 Redirect

This is a status code that you can use to let search engines know that a page within your website has moved. This technique ensures that you avoid problems with broken links, and that outdated links or old data still pass Page Rank to your website. 

Organic Results

When you run an SEO campaign, your main goal should be to rank high for your chosen keywords  and generate a lot of traffic through organic searches. Organic results are unpaid or non-sponsored results that appear on search engine results pages.

Bounce Rate

This indicates how many people visit your website and leave after viewing only one page. This is a great way to indentify if your website is engaging enough for visitors and offers what they need from you. Google uses bounce ratings as an indicator of your page quality.

If you need help with implementing SEO strategies, view our services here:

Pogo Digital SEO Services

Let’s take a quick look into some of the most historic facts about Twitter that you may not have known. Who has the most followers, what is the most re-tweeted tweet of all time, and who made the biggest cock-up ever? It’s been seven extraordinary years...

1) The Most Retweeted ‘Tweet’ Ever!

After winning his second Presidential election, Barack Obama wrote ‘Four more years’ and posted a picture of himself hugging first lady Michelle Obama. This tweet is currently the most retweeted of all time, racking up over 810,000 retweets!

2) Twitter is worth how much?!

The site was set up by Jack Dorsey in March 2006 and was initially called Twittr. Seven years on, the micro-blogging site predicts an ad revenue of $540 million by 2014!

3) Who is the most ‘followed’ person on Twitter?

In second place we have pop superstar Lady Gaga with 35,261,238 followers, but taking the first place honour goes to... *drum roll* - Justin Beiber. His loyal and passionate fans that call themselves ‘Beliebers’ have earnt him top spot with a staggering 36,305,545 followers.

4) It just keeps growing... 

One million accounts are opened every day, and 11 Twitter accounts are created every single second!

5) The Deepest Tweet

In an amazing dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, director James Cameron ventured in his self designed submarine and tweeted from 35,775 feet under the sea. He tweeted “Just arrived at the ocean’s deepest pt. Hitting bottom never felt so good. Can’t wait to share what I’m seeing w/you”.

6) The Biggest Trending Topic Ever

Beyonce helped Super Bowl XLVII become the biggest trending event of Twitters history. A record total of 24.1 million tweets were sent that night on February 3rd, 2013.

7) The Biggest Hashtag Cock Up!

Susan Boyle was trying to promote her latest album through Twitter. The record label sent out a tweet to get her fans trending #susanalbumparty. It trended, but for all the wrong reasons!

Need help with Social Media? We are holding FREE Twitter seminars in Bristol and Gloucester!

• Build brand awareness.

• Find leads.

• Gain valuable customer feedback!

• Announce new products.

• Promote a special offer.

• Social Media Listening.

Click the button below for more information and how to register!

The three big hitters of social media are Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, but Pinterest has been gaining momentum and traffic quite rapidly in the background. Now it’s implementing the tools to challenge those big hitters by offering businesses much more of a reason to actively use the site.

The stats are positive for Pinterest. Research shows that for fashion-based brands, Pinterest gains more sales than Facebook. This week the website has boosted its revenue potential through introducing its new analytics tool. This tool allows businesses to measure and track the ‘pins’ they realise, and essentially understand how Pinterest users engage with the visuals uploaded.

This is just the latest offering from the social media site. Pinterest has already begun to successfully attract businesses to use the site due to its widgets, secret boards, tools and business accounts. 

A new design has enhanced usability. The idea with the new look is bigger pictures and far more discovery tools. It offers users better linkable content that focuses on engaging more users with your content.

The new design allows users to explore pins on boards without leaving the page they are visiting, as well as providing more inspiration and links related to what you are viewing on the same page – an idea that has worked wonders for YouTube, keeping users on the website and travelling through different content with ease.

Users will now be given recommendations based on what others are pinning similar to what you are engaging with on your own board. 

So Pinterest is working hard to make sure your content can be seen and engaged with. It’s offering you as a business, measurement tools, better linkable content, and a chance to engage with your customers and inspire them. 

How To Use Pinterest For Your Business 

Set Up Your Account Correctly

If you already use Pinterest and own a personal account, you can quickly change this to a business account. Log into your personal account and then visit pinterest.com/business/convert. Simply fill out the form and you’ll be given the option to create a custom URL for your page – make sure this URL is what you’d expect your customers to ‘search’ for to find your business.

If you don’t own an account, click ‘Sign Up’ on the top right hand side of the page.

Verify Your Account

You’ll need to verify your website. Go to the ‘settings’ page and click the ‘verify website’ button. Once you’ve completed this task, a tick will appear next to your domain, building credibility for your Pinterest website.

Use Widgets And Buttons

Social media is all about engagement and generating traffic to your business. You can create widgets and buttons to use within your Pinterest page to encourage users to click to discover more from your business. To embed widgets and buttons, click the ‘Button and Widgets’ section on business.pinterest.com

Create Boards

Before you start ‘pinning’ you should create boards. These boards are where you will post all of your content. It means you are organising your content which makes it easier for potential customers/anybody interested in your business to find what they need from your Pinterest page. Click the ‘add’ button on the top right hand side of the page and begin to label boards suitably.

Begin Pinning!

You can now head to your website and find images that you’d like to ‘pin’ to your Pinterest web page. Click the ‘Pin It’ button and the site will show all of the images on your webpage that can be transferred to your Pinterest boards. 

Choose and select which images you’d like to pin and a pop-up window will appear. A tip for businesses – write a description on this image (in the box asking for a description when pinning). It makes it easier for users to understand your visuals and makes them easier to find.

Interact

The best way to use Pinterest is through interaction. Find businesses and companies that you can relate to – find influential people who are ‘big’ on Pinterest and follow pages or people that you know will also be interested in what you have to offer. Begin to target your audience on Pinterest and use its analytics tools to test and measure what you post. Once you begin to see what gains the best interaction from users, you can build on this which in turn builds your brand and your online Pinterest presence. 

Pinterest is now becoming a great tool for businesses to use online. Its new features encourage more interaction, better ways to discover pages and easier possibilities to get your business out there in the Pinterest community. 

If you’d like help with Social Media for your business, click here: http://www.pogo-digital.co.uk/Social-Media-Management

Our last Twitter seminar "How Did We DOUBLE Our Revenue In LESS Than 30 Days Using Twitter" was a great success. We had over 40 businesses attend the seminar and received brilliant video testimonials and feedback.

So many people registered for the seminar that we had to create a waiting list. We can now confirm that we will be bringing our seminar to Gloucester and Bristol! 

We'll be explaining how through Twitter, you can:

• Build brand awareness.

• Find leads.

• Gain valuable customer feedback

• Announce new products.

• Promote a special offer.

• Social Media Listening

Twitter is an invaluable tool for Business if used correctly. We'll explain exactly how businesses small and large can use Twitter effectively, and we will demonstrate LIVE on the Internet to show you how to target potential customers.

Bristol Seminar

Our Bristol seminar will take place on the 26th April 2013. It will be held at the Regus building and will be co sponsored by Regus and Bizitalk.

To register for the event, click the button below:

Gloucester Seminar

Our Gloucester seminar will take place on the 12th April 2013. It will be held at the Regus building and will be co sponsored by Regus and Bizitalk.

To register for the event, click the button below:

We created a short video to display our last seminar in Cardiff. You can take a look to see how it happened below.

Why should you attend? 

Here a few video testimonials from the businesses that attended!

Social media has and will continue to change the role of Chief Marketing Officers (CMO’s). These CMO’s have to now realise how social media can provide customer interaction and customer retention - because if they don’t their businesses will be left behind.

Twitter, Facebook and Instagram all play a key part in your brand. Through using these social media sites your brand is being talked about, discussed and debated, your activity is shared and commented upon, your brand awareness is increasing and your audience is growing. Due to this new age, your customers are now in control of driving your company and brand messaging – not you.

Customers, potential leads and consumers are now empowered. They are interacting with you across a variety of platforms and they expect you to give them what they desire.

CMO’s who have a social media strategy are doing so much more than having a Twitter account and a few LinkedIn groups. They aren’t just using email marketing and basic data capture either. The role of a Chief Marketing Officer now demands that instead of acquiring databases of contacts, they are now focused on building relationships and intimacy with customers. 

So why are most businesses missing these opportunities within social media, to engage, interact and learn about their customers? Across traditional marketing and social networks, companies are missing out on 80% of customer engagement.

It’s simple - Your business and everybody involved with it has to become customer obsessed. It may sound daunting but through implementing this you will be keeping up with all those other businesses that operate this way in our new era. Your processes and systems should be flexible and worked around the customer, information should flow freely through all hierarchies of your business and employees should be enabled to use data to build professional relationships with their customers.

Social media is the key channel for customer interaction. Here are a few techniques that your business should implement for customer engagement.

Empower your Employees!

Customer interaction is a shared responsibility. Your sales, customer service or marketing teams are no longer the only people in the position to focus on customers. All employees need to be able and empowered to see a customer engagement opportunity and be equipped to take it on. 

You should invest in technology, but people and processes too. Select tools that your employees use at home and choose a ‘social media champion’, a real ambassador of your company who has technological skills. The ratio of people and processes over technology should be 2:1, as people drive relationships, not technology, even though both are incredibly important.

It’s Time To Get Personal With Customers

You should treat each customer and prospect as an individual to really maximise on customer engagement. Each customer has their own story and through social media you can build human relationships with your customers. For instance, 58% of people who have tweeted about a bad customer experience will not receive a reply from the business that they have an issue with. Not interacting and engaging with people who have a problem with your business damages your brand even further because they are not receiving advice or a resolution. You are left to look as though you do not care or look after customers.

Building relationships and getting personal with customers encourages brand loyalty. There is a large array of businesses that your customers could turn to if they desire more choice or their expectations aren’t met, but if somebody feels you have met their expectations and comes back for more you build profit, customers referrals, loyalty, and they take to social media to become an influential brand advocate. 

Making Company Advocates

Engaging your customers to a point where they choose you as their default buying choice means that they are loyal, and possibly without knowing themselves, they become company advocates. Through social media engagement your customers can and will endorse your company to all of their friends, followers and connections.

If your company has a history of good service, more than 70% of customers will spend more money. If you listen to all your social media channels, respond and engage with customers, you can quite easily turn a negative customer into a very happy customer – and through the power of social media this will be seen by tens of thousands of people. With ‘good service’ becoming a key factory in spending more money, it’s easy to see why engagement is over taking productivity as the driver of profits and growth.

Make your customers feel known – this is when they are truly engaged, and social media is the best tool to deliver this.

For help with social media management, have a look at this page:

http://www.pogo-digital.co.uk/Social-Media-Management

Traffic on your website or blog is vital. It’s simple – traffic makes sure that people are viewing your website and what you are offering, whether it is services, products or advice, which in turn generates leads and profit.

Are you finding that your website isn’t getting enough views? Tired of posting blogs and articles through social media and nobody paying attention? Content Marketing is here to help. 

Content Marketing is “any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers “– Wikipedia. 

It is vital to our online activities. It’s what drives our online presence and enables us to reach out to customers. More importantly, it’s how customers find YOU.

So how can you use Content Marketing on your website? Take a look at the techniques below:

1) Have A Strong Foundation

Firstly you should have OR be setting up a good website/blog that consistently posts as many meaningful articles, images, testimonials, videos and useful information as possible.

It’s proven that a great looking website which appears up to date and maintained will ensure that users stick around on your website for longer. 

2) Know Your Audience

You need to learn and understand exactly what your audience will interact with. If you’re website, social media or blog posts look like jargon, uninteresting or bland, nobody will click through. Research into the demographics of your audience; understand their lifestyles, interests and how THEY use social media and blogs. Try and test techniques and see what gets the best feedback, then work on this. The better interactivity you can have with your audience, the more they will share, like and recommend, which means more traffic!

3) Build A Content Marketing Plan

A content plan should be implemented around your businesses marketing events for the year. Note down important events including public holidays/events – you can use these events to prepare content well in advance and make sure that you are ahead of the competition. 

Use your businesses annual events to again plan content in advance, but also at these events make sure the people you network with have a reason to go to your website. You can offer rewards or promotional offers after events to make sure they do go away and view your website, providing more traffic and again helping share your product or services.

4) Optimise Reach And Impact Of Your Content

Successful content will make sure that audiences associate it with your brand and business. Factors such as colours, text presentation, visual representation and sound should promote that it’s your brand that has posted this content. As content gets shared, your brand also gets shared.

When posting content you should make it easy to read. Nobody likes to look at pages of text and many of us ‘scan’ through content quickly without taking in everything that it has to offer. Ensure that your paragraphs are small, use bold type to make key areas of the content stand out, and use attractive images to draw audiences to read further. 

Promote it! Promoting content is what drives the traffic to your website or posts/blogs. This is where social media platforms are vital. If you aren’t using social media right now then you are getting left behind. There are so many platforms that your business should be signed up to, enabling you to share and promote content intelligently. Through joining groups on social media that coincide with your industry, following influencers and building fan bases, you can promote content successfully.

For help with social media, click here:

5) Don’t Under Estimate Resources, Time and Man Power

To really drive traffic through content marketing you will need human and financial resources. Becoming successful with content marketing does not happen overnight, and eventually your content will reach a high standard in which you know gets results. Look into these resources:

Creative: Including Design, Photography and Formatting

Editorial: Ensuring that your content meets your brand and ideas, as well as being grammatically correct.

Marketing: Getting content distributed.

Technology: Measure results and uploads.

6) Be Yourself

You are much more likely to gain interaction with your customers if you be yourself. We all use technology and social media platforms and we all know when somebody posting personally or as a business. The more friendly you are, the better connected you can be. 

Ask for customer reviews, offer special promotions, give them recognition on your website and social media platforms, apologise if you’ve caused dismay to somebody and never be angry. 

By following these steps, you will not only gain more traffic to your website, social media and blogs, but you’ll begin to build professional relationships, build on your brand and generate leads.

If you’d like help with your Online Marketing, just ask us! www.pogo-digital.co.uk

On March 1st St David's Day, we held a seminar entitled "How Did We DOUBLE Our Revenue In LESS Than 30 Days Using Twitter" at Regus House, Cardiff Gate.

The event was fully booked within 36 hours of launch. With 45 businesses attending there was great opportunities for networking alongside our seminar.

To see what you might have missed from this seminar, you can watch our highlights video below:

We had great feedback from our attendees! Businesses put themselves forward for video testimonials and we also took some great photos.

Here's some pictures of a few businesses that attended!

Ashley And Darren from Solutions Hypnosis

Neil & Tracey Davis - Sterling Integrity

              Kal from SimTek World                                                    Steven Walker from WKprint          

Seren Evans (The Stoke Association)               Rachel Thomas (Llamau)

John Crook & Dan Jarman from Henry Howard Finance 

Nicola Osgood from Play Duvet            

The number of people accessing websites through smartphones and tablets has dramatically increased over the past year. A recently published report on Telecrunch states that 58% of the UK population now own a smartphone and 19% own a tablet device (such as Apple Ipad, Samsung Tab, Google Nexus). Only 11% use their smartphones and tablets for shopping, but the number using devices for research and entertainment are in the millions.

Does your website work on a tablet or smartphone?

If your website isn’t displaying properly and is difficult to use, you’re losing out on traffic and customers. 

Tablets with larger screens are less of an issue than the smaller sized screens. Even if you don’t own a device, it’s a good idea to ask a friend to borrow their device so that you can personally take a look at your website. This gives you firsthand experience of using your site as well as witnessing the look of your site on these devices.

The next best option is to use an online emulator:

Below is a list of emulators. Click each emulator (or navigate on the page you click on to view different devices) to see how your website looks on a mobile devices, and to see if your site is tablet or smartphone friendly.

• iPad

• iPhone

• Android

• Blackberry

• Tablet

What To Do If Your Site Is NOT Tablet Or Smartphone Friendly?

Begin by checking your analytics; how much traffic is coming to your site via a mobile device? Are they browsing or do they give you income?

Google Analytics lets you view reports which show how many people use mobile devices to access your site. It’s detailed as it shows the exact devices they used including brand, model number, and a picture of the device. To view the report in Google Analytics, go to Audience > Mobile >Devices.

When looking at the figures, you may notice that the number of people viewing your site through mobile devices isn’t enough to warrant a design upgrade. What you have to consider is the growth you expect from your business over the next 12 months and the rapid increase in smartphone and tablet useage. It’s now mandatory that big businesses optimise their websites for device use, and if you don’t follow the trend your business can be left behind.

An Easy Way To Get a Mobile Optimised Website

Wordpress can be an easy tool to create a website. If you already use Wordpress to power your website you should consider installing a new mobile responsive theme or a plugin like WPtouch which is free. 

Wordpress sites are easy and cheap to make mobile friendly. They can be a great starting point for businesses to get onto the Internet and have a well designed website. You choose from a wide range of themes and can add all your own images and text. 

These themes work off the width/resolution of the browser or screen that the user is using. The theme always keeps the same design aspects and graphics but arranges and fits them to different screens to suit different devices.

If you aren't using a Wordpress site, you need to speek to the experts. 

Why Should I Optimise My Website For Device Use?

In late 2012, Google conducted an independent survey titled “What Users Want Most From Mobile Sites Today.” Of the 1,088 smartphone users that were surveyed, about 67 percent indicated they would be more likely to purchase a product or service from a business that built a mobile-friendly website. Couple that with the fact that 61 percent of users also said they’d leave a site that’s not optimized for mobile and it’s clear that having a mobile-friendly site is more important than ever. 

For more information about how to make the most of your website, visit www.pogo-digital.co.uk

Pay per click – you advertise a website or link, somebody clicks it and is directed to that site or link, and you pay an advertisement fee. This can be a great tool to advance your marketing efforts, with marketers still seeing results from solid pay per click adverts. So where you should you begin to implement PPC?

Where To Advertise 

It’s easy to get off to a bad start and advertise in the wrong places. There’s a huge range of websites that offer you the chance to use PPC but in this blog, we’ll tell you the sites you should use to get started.

Remember to understand and keep in mind your strategy; is it for brand awareness or possible lead generation? Each website will serve your business differently and using the correct outlet for your strategy can help keep costs down.

Google AdWords:

Google AdWords is one of the biggest places on the internet to utilise pay per click advertising. It excels in promoting brand awareness which can be especially useful to businesses that have yet to show up on search engine results, enabling you to get your business name seen quicker.

Adwords promotes the opportunity to reach individuals. You can target people by creating adverts to be placed on certain websites with a specific topic, making it easier to reach your ideal customer. ‘Keywords’ are vital for PPC campaigns - These are specific words that users search for and in response Adwords shows your advert. You input these keywords into every campaign and advert you create so that you can reach your desired audience and Adwords can direct audiences to your advert. 

Google AdWords is a great place to start using PPC but because of its huge range of tools and abilities, it can take some time to understand. The best way to make sure your campaign is successful is to know your strategy and read up on what has worked for others through sites such as PPC Hero.

TIPS:

Try to use your target keyword in the title of the advert, rather than using a snazzy title or brand name. Through doing this you increase your conversion rate, and by utilising keywords into your advert text as well as landing page, you can maximise your click through rate. Also, never leave keywords at their default!  Select and experiment with different match-types rather than keeping the keywords broad.

Facebook:

With 193 million active users, Facebook can be a great way to advertise depending on your needs. Facebook’s PPC system is far simpler than Google AdWords – You can create adverts to get more page likes, promote certain posts to get more engagement with your page and awareness, or set up a regular PPC campaign that targets individuals based on location, gender, interests, age, connection and page likes. There ‘Cost Per Click’ system is also generally lower than some other PPC campaigns.

TIPS:

This method is best for business to customer because of the unique targeting capabilities. If your main strategy is to increase leads and ROI, it would be better to link the advert page to an external landing page rather than to your Facebook page.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is possibility the best way out of these three websites, in terms of usability and target reach for business to business connectivity. You can target audiences by job title, location and business size. It’s a very easy system to set up, however without increasing your budget well above the minimum it can difficult to get results. 

One of the best features of LinkedIn is that you can set up advertisements that collect users profiles if they click on your ad, enabling you to connect with them and send them inMail.

PPC isn’t an easy process and won’t always be high converting. You have to treat it like a business – Run 10 different ads, and find the best one or two that are profitable. Make tweaks and scale up.

For more information about PPC, visit our website!

What will the FREE seminar cover?

• Build brand awareness.
• Find leads.
• Gain valuable customer feedback.
• Announce new products.
• Promote a special offer.
• Social Media Listening

The presentation will last around 60 minutes. There will be an opportunity for networking afterwards. The event will be attended by 30+ businesses from around Cardiff.

To register visit www.pogodigital.eventbrite.co.uk

We hope to see you there!

You can quickly personalise campaigns to reach specific audiences with email marketing. If you intend on reaching different demographics it’s easy to style and design your email to fit different needs. This means you can target niche markets and make instant changes, making campaigns more successful.

There are a wide range of tools that offer in-depth analysis about your email campaigns. Now you have the ability to see who has opened your emails, where they’ve clicked, what they’ve ignored and what part of the world they are from, just to a name a few tools. With this wealth of information you are able to see what works and what doesn’t work and even calculate who your ideal customer/user is and what they expect from your emails. The ‘unsubscribe’ button means that users who don’t want to receive your emails can choose not to, meaning you don’t get marked as spam.

 Even with the new age trends of social media and various ways that companies communicate online to provide customer service, email is still the best medium to build business relationships. Email suggests a more serious conversation, as business professionals generally do not go to social media websites for private and business related conversations.

Did you know that email has nearly three times the amount of users than Facebook and Twitter combined? That’s nearly 2.9 billion users!

Facebook and Twitter make up just 0.2% of the number of emails sent every day (not including spam). Email marketing should be an integral component in your marketing and sales approach – many modern marketers will claim they’ve “tried it and it didn’t work”, but getting it right has huge benefits for your business. For instance, if you target an older audience, a lot of your prospects will not have Facebook or Twitter, so the closer you come to a written letter the better!

Many users now expect to receive offers via email and are more likely to be in a buying frame of mind when they view your message. If you compare this to other forms of marketing such as social media marketing, messages get a lot less attention as customers/users are in a non-business state of mind. People are predominantly on social media to engage and chat with friends – far from looking for anything to purchase.

Testing means that you can quickly indentify sections of your mailing list that aren’t engaging or responding to your emails. You can tweak and revise your messages to better communicate with your ideal customers. You can choose many ways to test your email marketing, and it will allow you to tailor emails to address each customer’s interests and needs.

Designing, printing and posting expenses all add to your costs when direct marketing. Telemarketing involves a lengthy process of prospecting for customers, qualifying them and closing the sale, meaning you put pressure on sales teams and absorb a lot of their time. Email marketing is likely to cost less than 10% of a direct marketing campaign and will reach a considerably larger audience.

It can cost as much or as little as you want – spending less never means compromise. Email marketing allows you to create campaigns quickly and efficiently without driving up expenses

We’ve all at some stage been disturbed by a cold call or have skipped through television ads to get back to our programmes. When a customer/user opens your email, they are actively opening and engaging with your message, where as a cold call or advert normally interrupts a prior activity with messages that are often unsolicited.

If you make a good job of designing your email, customers will look forward to seeing what you have to say.

The past year has brought social media to the forefront of business strategies, but to get the best ROI (return on investment) it’s important to make sure you use social media correctly.

There are more devices connected to the Internet than there are people on Earth, so your online presence and brand is vital. By grasping some of the tips stated below you can ensure that your business is making the most out of social media channels and getting a return on investment. 

To achieve success you have to humanise your brand and website. Whether its brands wanting to engage customers, marketers who create social media campaigns or websites that want to gain traction through social media – they are all in agreement that users connect on a personal level.

If you simply just post links to websites and blogs you aren’t going to gain much. By providing a name, a persona and a human touch, users are more likely to respond to your media. Be accessible and friendly, don’t just be a ‘website’ or ‘brand’, be a person!

It’s easy really – just do what a person naturally does on social media. Share links, post videos and photos, interact with communities and comment on others statuses. People will more readily interact with profiles that feature people on them rather than strictly branding, as well as building trust.

It’s important to personalise your entire approach to social media marketing, but you also have to make sure you engage. Do not leave your audience out of the equation otherwise you are nullifying the effect of your social media campaign.

 Purely posting links does not engage interaction. You need to engage users, customers and curious visitors so that you can change them into potential customers.

How to engage with users:

• Reach out to them by commenting on relevant activities.

• Provide valuable input in discussions on Twitter, Google+, Facebook etc.

• Give more: share links from websites other than your own.

• Have answers for people’s queries, even when they are not addressed to you.

• Ask for feedback and act on it.

Amongst all the online noise, people value honesty and transparency. Brands can make mistakes and will continue to do so, but a brand that is transparent, apologises and moves on is the one people will remember positively. Building trust is a huge factor when marketing your brand/website/blog. 

Social media is littered with fake profiles and bad information. People expect your brand to be honest and through honesty, you will stand out from the crowd.

Mobile internet grew substantially last year and this year it’ll just get bigger. Users now spend more time on their mobiles and tablets logged into social media accounts than they do on their PC’s. Supporting your media for mobile use is no longer just an option, its mandatory.

If you want to use the power of social media completely and profitably, you should;

• Optimise landing pages for mobile screens.

• Place adverts that will appear on mobile apps.

• Invest time in observing the user patterns in mobile advertising in your industry.

• Understand user dynamics of the mobile user: what drives them to click your ad?

• Optimise all social media profiles so they look great on mobile platforms.

When we look through information, we normally have to sift through tons of garbage to get to the real deal. Search engines aren’t fantastic in this respect, which is one of the main reasons social media is becoming incredibly important.

You need to provide useful content to your target audience, so make sure you apply value, quality and context. By using these three factors in what you write, what you post and what you comment on, you will have the best shot of achieving balance between being active and generating valuable material for your prospects.

Success comes down to the quality of your content. Content is the pillar of all marketing efforts and there are clear indications that content is going to be even more important for social media. Links, posts, videos, images, comment, retweets, mentions... all provide you the opportunity to produce quality content.

You have to combine quality content with superb social media positioning. This means you must:

• Publish on multiple channels, several times for reach.

• Provide unique material.

• Offer vital information directly on social media: people are less likely to click a link through to a website if the information isn’t useful.

• Employ a variety of media to circulate content.

There’s huge competition in social media for marketers. It’s the ‘hottest’ place, brimming with people from all walks of life, so naturally there’s big competition. 

Here are a few final tips on how make your presence felt and become a social media superstar:

• Engage in many social media channels consistently!

• Be very active, but not at the cost of being noisy.

• Be interactive, much more than being active (comment, reply and mention more than just posting)

• Be insanely useful before trying to market anything.

• Become a leader, a trouble-shooter, a help, and a friend!

If you need help to structure a social media strategy, we can help. Just visit our website www.pogo-digital.co.uk for more information, videos and tips.

Web Developers are vital to your business if you want to make the most out of the Internet. Whether you’re yet to create a website OR you have a site up and running, web developers can always help you expand and build for the ever changing World Wide Web.

A web developer is a person or company engaged in developing and implementing applications for the World Wide Web. Tasks include scripting, programming, creating software applications, designing, graphics and hosting/managing websites.

With so many tasks, typically more than one person is required to develop a website or web related applications. For successful web development, specialised knowledge and expertise are needed.

Developers with different expertise have different names to help you find what you need, for instance:

Webmaster – Somebody who maintains the site once it’s running.

Software Developer – Somebody who writes code or scripts to create software programs.

Web Designer – Somebody who designs and generates the graphics/handles HTML and semantics.

Now, how do you select the right web developer for you?

You need to look for overall value and the ability to be a long-term partner when selecting a web developer for your business. Here is some important criteria when deciding:

Reputation – Ask business associates, past colleagues and companies for referrals. 

Overall Experience – Experience brings knowledge of handling problems.

Industry Experience – Establish which industries the Web developer has worked for and look for your own industry in the list. 

Work Samples and References – Request reliable and unbiased references as well as checking websites that the developer has completed.

Definition of Success – Determine if the developer considers a good looking site or satisfaction survey as success. More important than that are SEO ranking and return on investment.

Process For All Projects – Ask whether there is a systematic process that the developer follows with all their projects, and ask them to walk you through it.

Communication – Ensure that there will be adequate interaction between you and the developer, such as weekly status reports.

Code Ownership – Ensure you know who owns the rights to the code, and make sure the project has open coding that can be modified independently when needed.

Specific Skill Sets – Ask about specific details of the developer’s skills, programming languages and the other services offered such as marketing and SEO.

Resources – Know what materials you will have to provide and what the developer will offer. 

Support – Find out if you can get a deal that includes support and maintenance – the more help the better.

Interoperability – Its best to make sure the coding can be used and supported by different browsers.

It’s a lot to consider but there are huge benefits of using web developers. 

Higher Traffic To Your Website – You can improve your search engine ranking by having a well planned and organised site. An experienced web development team can structure and place content and graphics in such a way that search engines can find relevant terms quickly. 

Improved Customer Experience – Through using simple and well formed coding, the user gets a far better experience as pages will load faster and require less bandwidth. A slick website can also help attract customers and encourage them to use your services.

Readiness For The Future – To keep up with the fast pace of the Internet, your business will need to update and upgrade constantly. A well-developed site will allow you to take advantage of new developments at a potentially lower cost.

 Compatibility With Different Platforms – A well executed website will operate easily on, and be supported by various browsers. No information or functionality will be lost, giving your site wider usability.

Cost Savings And Efficiency – It can be very costly to operate and maintain a website. Employing a well qualified web developer can help control costs. 

For a quick quote on web development, just click here.

Are you embarrassed by your website? Has your business moved on to bigger and better things yet your website still looks the way it did the day you set it up? Your website is an integral part of your company – 70% of internet users are more likely to use a local business if it has a website and social media, so let’s stop your website from letting you down today.

Firstly, when we search for businesses on search engines, we all quickly scan through the results pages and settle on what looks professional and credible. If your website looks clunky or out of date then say goodbye to your visitors, you’re instantly losing customers and enquiries because they will simply move on.

Your website should be a lead generator; it should build instant trust with the consumer and quickly establish recognition of your brand and what you are about. It’s a key way to make sure your business is available 24/7 and easily accessible to potential customers.

A bad website instantly makes your business lose credibility. You could in fact offer superb services or products, excel in customer service and compete with the very best, but if your website makes visitors click away due to its design or unprofessional appearance, how will they ever know?  It’s your chance to reach out to a wider audience, to show through visuals and easy navigation that you mean business!

Let’s take a quick look at an example of a "pants" website. This website looks out of date, has very little content and forces the visitor to inspect the page fully to understand exactly what the site offers.

This is a website that we’ve designed and created for our clients ‘Lush’. Which one would you spend more time looking at? This design is sleek, professional, and immediately builds credibility and branding.

That’s the power of your website. It’s absolutely vital to stay up to date and make sure your website stands out from the competition.

Now, if your site is in need of an update, do not worry! We can help bring you up to the present. We offer a wide range of web solutions and web design, but we’re not just any old web design company, we’re Pogo Digital - We pride ourselves on offering brilliant web solutions and superb customer interaction and service. 

We’re currently running a scheme that lets you trade in your old website AND get money off a brand new one designed by us. We value the worth of your site and you get 10% of that value discount off a new site. So if your website is valued at £1000 you will receive £100 cashback, if it’s worth £50,000 you will receive £5000 cashback. 

If you just want a fresh design then we have a talented team and a big client list that have proven results. If you then want to take advantage of your brand new website, we can show you how to make sure your website hits the top of search engines, how to reach customers through tactical social media management and PPC, and how to start turning website visitors into profit.

Get in touch with us, have a talk, and let us know if you need any help. We can give you quick quotes and are more than happy to answer all your questions.

Visit www.MyWebsiteIsPants.co.uk for a quick contact form!

The power of social media is having a big impact on the Australian Open, especially with Tennis Australia’s digital push into China.

The Australian Financial Review has revealed that China is now contributing the third highest number of visitors to the Australian Open website, displacing the UK. China provided 9.3% of traffic, behind the US with 16.4% and of course Australia with 23%.

Tennis Australia made a decision this year to use Chinese social media sites such as Sina Weibo (the equivalent of Twitter) and created a new onlinepartnership with sports.qq.com – one of the big four portals in China. In just the first few days of the tournament, downloads of the Mandarin scoreboard from the site were over 1 million. 

The stats of the big hitting social media sites show that the Australian Open is having large interaction from users. The Open now has 850,000 friends on Facebook, up 38.9% since the end of the 2012 tournament, while Twitter followers is up to 134,934, a large 67.6% rise over the past year. About a quarter of those on Facebook are “talking” about the Open on a daily basis.

Kim Trengove, the Tennis Australia manager of digital and publishing said that “It means they are actively engaged, sharing our content, making comments and liking it”.

The most “liked” item was a piece following Roger Federer’s victory over Bernard Tomic. The most retweeted was about Maria Sharapova who is said to be very popular in Japan.

The website page views are up 20% on 2012, but the biggest and most notable growth has been in mobile. There have been 360,000 downloads of the iPhone app and page views on the device are up 95% to 31 million page views. Android has also witnessed a gigantic increase in page views, up 296% to 18.9 million views.

IBM is analysing Twitter comments and feeding them into this year’s popular Social Media Leader board. Serena Williams, then Novak Djokovic followed by Venus Williams are the most tweeted-about players overall. Jelena Jankovic, Alexandr Dolgopolov and Caroline Wozniacki are all tied on 94% with the highest positive sentiment scores. Twitter was down between 7pm on Saturday and 4am on Sunday which may explain why Roger Federer isn’t higher up the list (he was playing at the time).

With this large interaction through social media, aside from encouraging people to play tennis, the next step is to monetise the wealth of data streaming information.

It’s vital that you’re overall online presence is at a high standard as customers are going to read through your entire website before deciding to pick up the phone. Through building credibility websites can maximise on inbound lead generation.

Customers will scan quietly through your site and leave without you knowing, meaning that the content and design of your site can be the difference between converting website visits to sales.

Here are some tips to ensure your website sends the right message and builds trust with visitors.

Website Design Needs To Be Up To Date and Easy To Navigate

If your website design is out of date, hard to navigate or just generally clunky, visitors will simply move on from your website. Your website should feature a clean and simple design and have the ability for visitors to quickly scan through. Avoid flashy designs and “in your face” visuals and make sure that key messages are clickable/invite further contact. 

Create A Blog And Update It!

Companies now need to take advantage of blogging; it’s very important to have a company blog.

Having a blog is one of the biggest ways to drive regular and recurring traffic to your site. When visitors look at your site they need to see that you’re still in business, you’re up to date and regularly commenting on your industry’s latest issues and trends. Another key advantage of blogging is that every blog article creates a “long tail” of keywords and content that prospective customers can locate, even if its months or years after you first published the article.

 Feature Real Life Success Stores From Customers

When visiting your site, customers will ask the question “Will I get a good result from hiring them?” By offering real life success stories you can show your website visitors exactly what your company does and how you achieve success, often meaning that those casual visitors will want to hear more about your company.

Feature Client Testimonials With REAL Names 

This is one of the most powerful ways to build credibility – but you need to use the real names of your clients and their companies. By using non-existent or generic company names you can undermine your credibility because your visitors will be asking themselves “What are they trying to hide? Why can’t they use real company names?”

It’d be a great advantage if prospective customers are able to contact your clients who have given testimonials on your website. If a prospect is serious about doing business with you, they may take the time out to ask about clients experiences with you.

Remember, you don’t have to close the deal with your website. If you can win the trust of your visitors you’ll be more likely to be asked for more information or follow up calls. 

The biggest question a customer will ask is “Can I Trust This Company” – so your website must answer that thoroughly.

Did you know that when searching online, 75% of users never scroll past the first results page? That's just one statistic that proves how important it is to make sure your website is optimised correctly.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is vital for all businesses. According to 'Search Engine Land' “you can't compete for ranking on specific key-phrases unless your web page provides a good match for the user query”. By optimizing all of your content and tags, you provide a base from which all search engines call pull for indexing and ranking.

Here's some fantastic tips on how to make sure your on-page SEO strategy is effective.

1. Keyword Research:

Knowing which keywords and phrases are searched for more than others makes a big different in results. Research and utilize words/phrases that your target audience is likely to search and take note of industry-specific terms and trends.

2. Page Titles:

Equip relevant keywords into page titles. This will help search engines understand what your page is about and therefore make your page easier to find and far more relevant to users.

3. Descriptions:

You should include keywords in page descriptions, as well as providing helpful and compelling language to attract potential visitors. This is the opportunity to let everybody know exactly what you have to offer.

4. Content:

You must provide quality content. The content should include relevant keywords that attract search engines and site visitors. Did you know that companies that blog have 434% more indexed pages, which gains far more leads.

5. Headline Tags: 

You should add relevant keywords to headline tags. Think of it as an introduction to the page for readers and search engines. Apply a creative strategy to capture attention and consider rank. 

6. Architecture:

URL structures need to be logical and in accordance with your business. Navigators should be text based and with the use of site maps, you can make crawling as simple as possible.

For more information about SEO, click here.

Every New Year starts with new predictions. As social media becomes an even bigger integral part of brands, ensuring they connect and interactive with audiences, it's important for businesses to look past what's trending right now and instead look forward to what’s upcoming, ensuring they stay ahead of the game.

Here's a list of social media predications for 2013. 

1) Brands will need to measure ROI (Return On Investment)

Social media tactics need to provide Return On Investment. A study in London of 600 CEO's claims that 72% are tired of budget requests that do not have proven results. In 2013, social media managers will be tasked to show and prove their worth through social media channels and outreach campaigns.  

Harvard Business Review points out that by empowering community influencers in your social media channels to work with for online marketing, you can gain greater visibility and reach out to a wider audience, whilst influencers revel in the attention of a major brand.

2) A big role for visuals. 

Visuals are to play a vital role in 2013. According to Forbes, in July 2011 'Pinterest' had one million active users, yet one year later that figure sky rocketed to a community of 20 million. Instagram is another company that rose to fame last year due to visual content. Business Insider reported that when Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook, bought the company in 2012 there were 860,000 daily active users. In September 2012, that number soared to 11 million.

Huge growth like this has prompted social media to use more visuals. In 2013, this trend will grow with brand managers producing visually pleasing content to drive success.

3) Mobile Platforms mean brands have to optimize content 

Mobile use is growing at a huge pace. The term “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device) shows the trend of allowing employees to bring personal laptops and mobiles to offices. Content consumption through smart-phones and tablets are at an all time high and in 2013, this consumption will continue to expand. This means that business' need to make content accessible by optimizing to fit such devices. Quick links and visuals are easier to consume, where as text heavy content will be a thing of the past.

4) In House Brand Journalism

Over the last year its hard to ignore the growth of brand journalism. By creating their own journalistic content brands are seeing huge success. The likes of Boeing, Cisco and HSBC are all taking advantage of this opportunity to connect with new audiences in a different way. In 2013, even more brands will begin to self-publish, especially now that traditional media outlets and their manpower begin to shrink.

5) Advertising through social media will continue to gro

Brands understand the power of social media outlets and in 2013 the advertising market will drastically follow this. A recent report by BIA/Kelsey stated that social media ad revenue reached $4.6 billion in 2012 and is projected to hit $9.2 billion in 2016. Budgets will shift from banner ads to social media ads in 2013 as they see bigger return of investments from these efforts.

Email strategies are now crucial for retailers – but when launching an email campaign it's easy to bombard and confuse users with large volumes of content and text, leaving users disappointed in a company’s lack of attention.

In a recent report by Media Post it was highlighted how the industry will focus on content and data quality. Campaigns need to offer value and accessibility on a large range of devices, which is why firms are developing strategies to enable advertising campaigns consisting of different media types.

Video is expected to make a comeback to the email landscape in the mobile era. Anna Bager, an executive at The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) said “Digital video marketing has sky-rocketed over the past year and is primed to deliver even greater return on a variety of screens – particularly on mobile devices”.

Not only is video quick and easy to produce, it will almost certainly provide greater interactivity, enhance SEO efforts and email marketing,as well as boosting social media engagement. 

POGO Digital has been selected as a finalist for the Digital Entrepreneur Awards 2012 in the Web Development Entrepreneur Category.

The Awards have been running since 2006, and you can find out more about then here.

Since May 2011, the UK government has set out stricter rules regarding the use of cookies. Due to technical issues for various UK online businesses, this law was delayed to May 2012 to give time for UK businesses to adapt to the new law.

Cookies form an important function for websites. There are "strictly necessary" cookies which are used for user logins and remembering very specific data on a user, such as language selection, currency, and current shopping cart inventory. By UK law, these cookies are permitted as they perform a very specific task to the functionality of the website, and are also actioned by the user.

The cookies which form a problem in the eyes of the law are those which are used for tracking purposes. A lot of websites do use tracking cookies, both for targeted advertising, and for usage statistics. Note that such statistic tracking is not for tracking a particular user, but to collect an overall picture of how a website is used.

Regardless, in aid of privacy the UK government has seen fit to restrict such cookies to require the user to grant permission to allow these cookies. To comply with the law, we have implemented these permission requests in to our framework which will be rolled out to any websites we develop whose business is served within the UK (and EU).

The difference as far as a visitor to the website will see, is a popup box asking for permission to allow the cookies. This will typically follow the style of a web-browser's permission bar seen at the top of the web page when certain content is requested (such as a user's position when looking at a map). It can of course be customised both in visible functionality and design to match that of the specific website.

In a nutshell, the only differences will be:

1. Visitors do not see adverts specifically targetted to them
2. Statistic tracking such as Google Analytics will not be as accurate as some users will have opted not to allow these cookies.

If the law changes again, we will adapt the framework to accomodate. If you have any questions regarding this matter, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

We just launched Item Directory Component (IDC) in our default framework. This would help us with planning and developing a lot of different types of websites.

IDC can be treated as an additional attachment of an online user. It can be profile information, business information or/and others.

With in a IDC, you can set up / define other related attributes or objects to attach to it. ie: for a business directory website, business profile can be treated as an IDC and its document for downloading or company videos records can be treated as additional objects attached to the IDC.

On loading an IDC, the system will automatically loads all related objects/attributes in one go and put them into the memory ready to use. With a given user ID, the system can load up all IDCs of this user (the system allows multiple IDC attached to one user). The database structure is designed in a way that suits the IDC system so any search will be performed quite quickly even the data of the site is not cached.

The first attempt of putting IDC system into practice has been successful. The website will be in our portfolio in a few weeks time.

Now the system will be improved and implemented into other website development.

Good R&D always increase the work efficiency!

XML gateway integration

As a part of our services, we support XML gateway integration. We developed system for a company formation company to do all communication with the Company House and system for communicating with Twitter.

How XML gateway works?

Normally there will be authentication checks before we can get any services / data from the gateway. To combine Public Key and Private Key plus the SSL connection can make sure the connection between the sender and the gateway is supper secure. 

The second stage is schema checking. The gateway will check the information posted by the sender and verify it to see if it is in the right format that is required by the gateway. By doing so, the gateway will take a lot of pressure from the service providing server(s). The gateway will throw out errors to the sender if there is any.

Once the schema checking is passed, the gateway will decide which server it will send the request to depending on what service is required in the sender's request. In this instance, the gateway will be acting like a balance server. It will redirect requests to different server. By doing so, the responding time to an individual request will be very short and the sender will get data from the gateway much quicker.

After receiving the data from the gateway, the sender will need to parse the response into the understandable format to the existing system and execute actions on the parsed data to update the current database. A full list of response actions functionalities is needed as there will be different scenarios sent from the gateway to update the database accordingly. 

What do we need to develop XML gateway interface?

A correct and comprehensive understanding of what the chosen XML gateway is capable of would be a start. A list of supporting document and example data would be necessary. Developing XML gateway interface can be tricky as normally the supporting document is very long and it would take a fair amount of time to understand the structure of the gateway. There will also be a large chunk of time spent on testing the gateway and normally the support team behind the gateway isn't that supportive.

So how to make the development go smooth without so many surprises? To hire experienced developers is essential as they can make sure the service / product will be strong and be delivered on time.

On most major Pay Per Click platforms, there is a little known feature called “Dynamic Keyword Insertion”. Dynamic Keyword Insertion is one of those “dirty little secrets” used by PPC marketing agencies and is the cornerstone of the millions of Internet marketing eBooks written by self proclaimed “gurus”. Dynamic Keyword Insertion needs to be fully understood before it can become marginally effective and when it is, it can increase your ads click through rate (And subsequently quality score) massively.

This guide will show you how to correctly implement the Dynamic Keyword Insertion feature into your ads on the three major PPC advertising networks (Google, Yahoo and MSN). As always, test and understand before fully committing to any permanent changes.

SO WHAT EXACTLY IS DYNAMIC KEYWORD INSERTION?

As you may or may not know, all the major PPC search engines reward the relevancy of your PPC advertisement by showing keywords in bold in your ad. For example, below you can see an AdWords ad for RedFly Marketing. The keyword we are targeting is “PPC Management”.

As you can see the keywords we targeted and that triggered our ad were in BOLD in the ad. You can see that not only is the keyphrase “PPC Management” in the title of the ad bold, but the keyword in the ad copy and the display URL is also bold. This has been proven time and time again to increase your ads CTR. It makes your ad stand out more and “pull” a searchers eyes to it. We also know from my previous article on Adwords Quality Score that an increase in CTR will increase your quality score, bid rank and lower your minimum bid.

When your ads contain your keywords bolded, you are also showing an ad that a searcher explicitly wants to see. It appears super relevant and exactly what they are looking for.

So where does Dynamic Keyword Insertion come into play? What happens if you have a LOT of keywords? You COULD write individual ads for each one. Spending hours, days even weeks writing a different ad for each keyword. Or you could have Google/Yahoo/MSN insert the keywords that you want bolded dynamically.

Let me show you an example. Let’s take the following keyword list in a single ad group: (we’ll keep it small for the purpose of this demonstration)

Chocolate Bars

Stinger Bars

Lollypops

Brown Bread

As you can see, the above list of keywords are all somewhat related. Rather than splitting up all the keywords into smaller adgroups, you can write a SINGLE AD for them all and have the search engine place your keywords into your ad! Here is how the ad should be created:

Once you set this ad live, the search engine will automatically replace {KeyWord:Online Newsagents} in the ad with whatever keyword from your list that was searched for. Using the above list of search terms, The ads will look like this:

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SOMEONE SEARCHES FOR A VARIATION OF MY KEYWORD THAT DOES NOT MATCH EXACTLY?

If you broad matched your keywords and someone searched for “Stinger Bars and Lollypops”, your ad would still show, however it would show the DEFAULT ad as shown below.

The default text is the text after the “{KeyWord:” part. In this example, it was “Online Newsagents”. Your default text should still fit the maximum characters limit.

      TIP: The ad title can expand past the 25 character limit and AdWords will accept it as long as the default text remains at 25 characters or less

You will notice that keywords can be dynamically inserted into ANY section of your ad, including your destination URL. This shows your keyword more times in your ad and is eye catching in so far as the keywords are bolded multiple times and appears more relevant to the user/searcher increasing your CTR and ultimately (hopefully) your conversions.

WHAT ABOUT QUALITY SCORE?

We have already gone over how having keywords in your ad title and ad text can improve AdWords quality score, unfortunately, Dynamic Keyword Insertion does not improve your quality score directly, however it can indirectly help your quality score by increasing your keywords CTR.

VARIATIONS AND CAPITALIZATION.

The standard format for dynamically inserting your keyword is this: {keyword:yourdefaulttext}

There are also variations you can use to capitalize your dynamically inserted keyword as follows:

• keyword – No capitalization, all word(s) are in lower case
  
• Keyword – The first word is capitalized
  
• KeyWord – Every word is capitalized
  
• KEYword – Every letter in first word is capitalized
  
• KEYWord -Every letter in the first word AND the first letter of the second
  
• KEYWORD – Every letter is capitalized
  

YAHOO AND ADCENTER.

Yahoo and MSN both allow Dynamic Keyword Insertion however unlike with AdWords, with them it is a “known feature”. There are options to dynamically insert keywords at the ad creation level. Yahoo even go so far as to say the Dynamic Keyword Insertion will increase the ads quality index (YSM quality score).

 

 

BE CAREFUL!

Dynamic Keyword Insertion is only valuable when closely managed and monitored. Ebay are notorious for running MASSIVE PPC campaigns with AdWords using Dynamic Keyword Insertion and making themselves look incredibly stupid. The bid on literally millions of dictionary words and combinations and end up with ridiculously structured irrelevant ads. Below you will find a small example.

 

 

IN CONCLUSION.

So there you have it. Although AdWords has very little documentation on this feature and some in the industry regard it as a close kept secret, you are now armed with a very powerful tool. We have seen CTR increases from 1% to 20% using this method alone. Be careful, use it wisely and where possible, insert the words manually into your ads. This is a time saver, not a substitute for human common sense.

 

See full discussion on http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/dynamic-keyword-insertion-the-ultimate-guide/

How much do you spend on marketing your website? Has your website got the most of the market for you. Do you know that you can save a lot on the marketing budget especially on PPC if you optimize the on-site elements of your website well enough?

Let's take Google Adwords for example, the better Quality Score (QS) your site has the less you have to pay to CPC in order to maintain your position in PPC listing.

How to improve your landing page quality by optimising your website? Our guidelines is:

• Relevant and Original Content
• Transparency into the nature of your business, how your site interacts with a visitor's computer
• Navigability, i.e. providing a short and easy path for a user to purchase or receive the product or offer in your ad 
• Well structured web coding
• Page responding time and caching

Relevant and Original Content

If you would like to put selling CDs in your ad, you don't want the landing page to be talking about car customization. You need to pick up the most relevant page of your ad content and tell Google that what Google sees is what you describe in your ad. Put a good number of relevant keywords onto your landing page is important as by doing this you will emphasise your ad. But bear in mind that just dumping keywords onto the page could make Google think that you are doing keyword spamming. So well-designed content is needed.

Transparency into the nature of your business

Use simple English to describe your business. Making content complicated to be read by Google will not help your QS.

Navigability (sound user experience)

Can your site be easily navigated? The landing page needs to have links to the main sections of the site. Your audience needs to be able to find those links without any problem. And the most of all, those links have to be relevant to your business as well as to your ad.

Well structured web coding

So how Google read your content? Of course, from the top to the bottom of your page. So we think the sooner Search Engines start reading your content the better they understand your business. Unlike other web developers, we code the site in such a way that enable Google to read the main content a lot quicker and therefore our clients are getting higher QS on this feature.

Page responding time and caching

Website responding time is considered by Google. At the some occasion, slow website is not because of the low responding time on the server but the way of coding. Since CMS was introduced, a lot of websites are database driven. To get database structure and script right is the key to the performance of a website. We did a project of selling number plates, it normally takes no more than 0.05 second to finish a search among 39 million records (the same volumn of data of DVLA). Google likes it very much so as our client.

There are a few other bits that can improve your responding time are caching, Etags, gzip, minify scripts, CSS stripe and etc. With right skills implemented into development, your website can bring more opportunities or business than your competitors'.

Would like to find out more? Click here to contact us.

What is Marketing Based Web Design and Development? Marketing Based Web Design and Development is to implement established marketing strategy into the web design/development in order to maximize the performance of the marketing campaign within a limit budget. Get a better results in marketing will benefit the sales process. Therefore bring more opportunities into the business.

Now why Marketing Based Web Design and Development is important? Let me ask you a simple question. What is the next step after setting up a website? Of course it is marketing. To get to top of Google is goal for every site owner. As we all know that we have to have some marketing budget in order to complete that goal in a short time period. But how to use the budget to make sure every penny is worth spent is one of the key things to a successful operation or busienss.

First of all, think of marketing strategy before getting a website set up. Why? Let's take Google for example. If you are running a PPC campaign, Google will charge you every time a visitor clicks your advert. The cost of that click will be based on the Quality Score (QS) of the keyword you are bidding. The higher QS you get, the less money you will spend per click. If you and your competitor are bidding the same keyword, you will spend less on per click than your competitor to get the similar position if you have a higher QS on the keyword. How to save the cost on this type of marketing? Get better QS! Now, how to get a higher QS? The answer is simple: make your home page / landing page as relevant as possible to the keyword(s) that you will be using in your marketing campaign.

Now what is the next after we have a marketing direction? Yes, to implement it into the web as this will help your marketing operation in the future. Why? Because this will help increasing your Page Rank quicker in doing SEO. A lot of people are talking about SEO and we know that there are on-site SEO and off-site SEO. And SEO is the ultimate method to get to the top of Google. Back links will help the Page Rank and that is a fact. So everybody is using off-site SEO to get as many back links as possible to the website. But not many people know that getting a better on-site SEO will double the benefit from those off-site SEO in terms of the Page Rank and keywords relevancy. Better Page Rank will push your position higher in Google and better keywords relevancy will save the cost in your online marketing. How to get a better on-site SEO? There are a lot of elements can be designed in the first place and developed after in a right way to please Search Engines.

Almost all business owners have to spend extra money which is unnecessary to optimize their websites while they are or about doing markeing campaign and off-site SEO. With the right web design and development in the first place, it could save them up to 40% of the cost of what they spend in online marketing.

We, POGO Digital Ltd, are the first company provide Marketing Based Web Design and Development in the UK aiming to cut down the online marketing cost for our clients. We will be able to provide suggestion that values to your online marketing strategy and design and develop your website to fit in your online marketing strategy. We can make a solid fundation for your online enterprise and you will see the high ROI yourself.

Would like to know more? Get in touch with us then.

On the new POGO Digital website, we use SiFR to get some nice font shown across all browsers.

We know that for some browsers CSS3 can bring a nice font to the front end user and make the whole page more fun (Look at this page to see how fantastic those fonts can be. Be aware that IE 6,7,8 are not supported). But the realitiy is that over 40% of internet users still using IE 6,7,8 and none of the current live IE versions supports font functionality in CSS3. So how do we overcome this problem if we want to show our users some interesting fonts? SiFR is the right choice!

SiFR package is a combination of SWF files and JavaScript. SWF files control the displaying font. As long as you know how to program flash, you know how to make a font file. The page needs to include libraries of flash and SiFR before calls the SiFR function to enable the none-web-secure font to be shown on your desired places of the web page.

With a large amount of market shares of IE 6,7,8, HTML5 and CSS3 will be hard to take over the internet. In my opinion, HTML5 and CSS3 will give the front end users a better surfing experience but bring more trouble to the web designers and web developers as they need to again make a few more configuration for adapt browsers on top of current multi configuration for multi browsers. I feel that a framework for HTML5 and CSS3 that auto detects browsers and auto loads configurations will be born in a short time period as it will free  developers' mind to focus on logic rather than fundamental settings just like why JQuery and YUI were born.

When the amount of records in the database is tiny or small, it is easy to get a complicated search under 0.01 sec. The database will copy the relevant records into the server's memory and then do the sorting and grouping and then return the results back to the application layer. Even the SQL script is badly written and/or complicated, all server needs to deal with is a couple of thousands records. It won't be any problem for any of the moden PC to handle. The worst scenario is to optimize the SQL script to get a fast speed.

Thinking of the time cost of the same logic SQL script performing on millions and millions of records, it will require not only the optimized SQL scripts but also the database structure. At some point, a well-planned database design can bring the whole system up to another upper level.

Different data requires different ways to be deal with. Get to know the data fist is always a good start.
We all know that computer only recongize 0 and 1. To get a faster searching speed among large data, in my opinion, the data that is searched the most frequently needs to be converted into ASCII code before storing into database. Searching digits is always faster than searching characters as the database will save some processing on translating characters into digits.

Caching the results is always a good practice as it enhances the performance of a system. Everyone knows that Google only returns a limited number of results on the page. Why? It would take ages for Google to get all document from every corner of its database. Once those results are found, Google caches it. The next time someone search the same thing, it just shows the cache which can be done under 1 sec.

In conclusion, first of all you need to know what data you will be dealing with and in what format those data will be presented. Then analyse it and try to categorise it. With a good caching support, your searching speed can be a blink of an eye.

Opencart is an open source shopping cart written in PHP that is rapidly growing in popularity. This is down to its strong logical MVC framework.

MVC explained:

Model: The database layer. All calls to the database are done here, referenced from the controller.
View: Template display for front and admin center. This is where the HTML/CSS/JAVASCRIPT show their magics.
Controller: Main controlling code base. This is where the functional logic code is processed.

What this all means is that Opencart's code is streamlined and easier to follow than some other bloated opensource ecommerce solutions such as OsCommerce and Zencart. Because it is so well orginazed in terms of class structure, you can complete data process in Controller, build logic control in View and etc. As long as you grab the essense of this system, you can get anything from anywhere you want.

Opencart also appeals to designers and shop owners alike because it is fast, secure, well supported and expandable. It caches images and data, the two most time and CPU comsuming objects in web contents processing. Talking about expandable, Opencart is strong enough to be worked as a framework. Look at the current software solutions in the market, we can easily find out that all CMS systems have got management features of pages, users, reviews, page categories and a WYSIWYG or similar Editor. All those features are included in Opencart. With further development, Opencart as a framework can handle almost all requirements in SME market.