Activate Health have entered the health market offering premium products and supplements that until now have not been readily available to the public.

They are also marketing their products towards spas, health clinics and gyms.

For more details about Activate Health and the range of quality products I would encourage you to take a look at their new website at www.activatedhealth.co.uk.

That’s quite a lot of traffic, and with the number of visits per hour often exceeding 4,000, often getting well over 1,000 concurrent visitors using the website, it is a real success story and it is expected that this will be exceeded December, probably just in the first three weeks!

Clearly this is testimony to the commitment and drive The Watch Hut team have towards their customers and their business, and it is also an endorsement of the system they have that can manage and support this amount of traffic 24/7. So it may come as no surprise that their website is running on e64′s very own eSPOSURE system.

eSPOSURE is our own platform, fully developed and supported by e64, and is a powerful, easy to use eCommerce system designed to run websites for anything from 1  to over 1 million visitors a month. For more information checkout our eSPOSURE page on the website.

I don’t usually get too emotional about on-line deliveries these days, but I liked their website, communications, speed of delivery and all the stuff that came in packaging (oh, and their prices too).

And just to be clear we didn’t build their website, do any SEO for them or anything like that. We’re just happy customers and I wanted to share the love.

Simon

Here at e64 we have always believed that quality SEO in fact is a benefit to Google and their searchers as it helps new websites with decent content and services get found.

And it appears now that Google agrees! Matt Cutts, a senior engineer from Google’s Web Spam team has posted this video discussing this very point, so if ever there was a good time to think about your SEO, now would be it so feel free to get in touch and discuss this with us.

Matt Cutts Video on if SEO is Spam

This is slowing up our responses to email, and also affecting the speed in which we can upload changes from support requests and project work. We are told this is being looked into as a matter of urgency however we have not been given any timescales for a resolution yet.

We apologise for any delay in responding to your email or publishing changes to your website this may cause.

Initially I was surprised that I’d missed this in amongst the Rugby World Cup stuff, painting my lounge and track news from Formula 1 and the tragic death of the IndyCar driver, Dan Wheldon.

It will be interesting to see how they will integrate this into their existing range of products. Undoubtedly I would expect to see  integration with their Instant Messaging products, Windows Live, come quite quickly, there could also be the possibility of built-in support with their Windows Mobile operating system bringing VoIP to the mobile market. Ok, Skype have had their own offerings for a while now, but that was a separate app and its not been fully integrated into an OS before – and let’s face it, being integrated into an operating system didn’t do Internet Explorer any harm did it?

Only just over 22 days left before the big event and bookings on the website for breakfast are filling up.  If you want to make breakfast then you need  to book now so you don’t  miss out on what is going to be a very interesting start to the day, with a great guest speaker in Andrew Cave thrown in.

The event is shaping up to be a very successful day, and all the details you need are here:

http://www.svbg.co.uk/blog/index.php/svbg-expo/

So, in order for the person visiting your site to find that piece of information they need; the design to target specific areas of key information in a way that is succinct. However, how can you have a minimalistic design with a few sentences of text and expect to be found in a search engine? Big problem.

Overcoming this problem and getting a nice balance between design and SEO can be a huge task for any designer out there, but there are solutions. Search engines require your content, but your designs don’t want to display huge blocks of text which will inevitably distract the reader away from your site. Therefore way’s around this problem can be through so called “hiding” of text. An excellent example of this can be found on e64′s new website design. Instead of cluttering the home page with chunks of text we have decided to highlight the key areas using bullet points, behind a drop down tab. Please refer to the example below:

An example of hidden text

Not only has this reduced the amount of text being displayed in large paragraphs, but it has also strayed away from impacting the design elements, and if anything freed up more space for other text. Other ways in which you can prevent your site from becoming too dependent on textual information is by using pop-outs and various other useful tools that not only add great functionality to your site, but ultimately keeps to the minimalistic look that you are hoping to achieve, without impacting search engines.

I have noticed recently, through my research, that the trend for minimalistic website design is rapidly increasing, more than ever! New approaches are being taken to displaying what the client want’s in a clear and understanding way, without impacting them all important search engine statistics. Keeping up with new approaches to website design can be a difficult task, however a task that can be extremely beneficial to aesthetically pleasing web design and, more importantly, the overall success of your website; from getting found on Google to keeping your visitors on your site.

Below are some tasters into some of my recent design projects. I have aimed to achieve an aesthetically pleasing website, whilst maintaining understanding of the importance of SEO.

RedFern

Preview for RedFern Design and Build

IJM Media

Preview for IJM Media

To conclude; when pulling together ideas for your new website design remember to focus on the smaller things that will have a bigger impact on the overall usability and aesthetics.

Remember – Less is More.

We also have two seminar sessions that are FREE to attend on a first come first served basis with bookings for both open from the commencement of the Business Expo at 10:00 am and we have some great content lined up for you.

1st Seminar 11:00 am – 12:00 am

Gary Townley – The Intellectual Property Office

The IPO are the official government body responsible for Intellectual Property (IP) rights in the United Kingdom. These rights include:

• Patents
• Designs
• Trade marks
• Copyright

They promote innovation by providing a clear, accessible and widely understood IP system, which enables the economy and society to benefit from knowledge and ideas. Having listened to their presenters before, this is a very interesting subject and one which touches more businesses than we realise.

2nd Seminar 12:30 pm – 1:30pm

Warren Cass – Social Media – Resistance is Futile

Most of you reading this will have profiles on many of the main sites (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).You are there because you feel you ought to be, after all everyone else is, but you probably still don’t understand the opportunity, aren’t achieving a return on investment and we doubt you have a strategy in place.
Warren Cass will help you put this right. He will give you a framework for implementing a strategy having already demystified the opportunity for you. Looking at loads of examples of how other businesses large and small have used social media…. The good, the bad and the ugly! The promise from Warren is that we will have a bit of fun in the process!

Breakfast is only available by prior booking and our breakfast speaker is worth the investment alone. If you wish to join us between 8:00 am and 10:00 am for a fantastic buffet breakfast you will need to book early and this year the breakfast charge remains the same as last year at £12.50 per person. For early booking visit the SVBG website.

If you can’t make it don’t just ignore this post, please tell any other businesses in the West Midlands area who could benefit from being there.

This is what can happen at the moment moment using a new Beta feature Google has recently released called Google Alerts, here’s what Google says about it:

What are Google Alerts?

Google Alerts are emails sent to you when Google finds new results — such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs — that match your search term. You can use Google Alerts to monitor anything on the Web.:

However – and here’s the big thing – you can set up an alert for anyone’s email address. Okay it’s not quite that simple as the alert needs to be confirmed by clicking on a link a confirmation email, however it’s Google asking for the confirmation and many people have Google accounts who would easily think an email about Google Alerts was a new service for their existing account.

Now all you need to do is find some search term that isn’t very competitive, sign up your mailing list for email alerts on that search term, then publish an optimised web page targeting that same term.

As soon as your web page starts to get listed on the search results everyone will be told about it by Google – and because we all trust Google we’ll read it too.

I know this all sounds quite involved but it really isn’t that difficult to do.

The question is – is this a great way to set up some marketing using a trusted independent source, or has Google just opened up a new way for our in-boxes to be filled with yet more spam?

I know which one I think, however if you want to try this out, go to www.google.com/alerts, just don’t use my email address!