Strawberrysoup Blog

As you are no doubt aware, global warming, lowering carbon emissions and being carbon neutral is very important to ensure that our world is preserved for future years. We actively promote greener living and have just launched our latest client site, The Green Store.

The Green Store specialise in carbon neutral storage for businesses around Portsmouth. Their website is a simple brochure website that was designed by Paradigm Design, who asked us to work our coding magic and create a site that was accessible and search engine optimised. The result is a lovely looking website that follows the latest guides in terms of accessibility.

As you know, we love our food (Strawberry based recipes especially) and the brief for Kennel Cottage was simple - create a website that looked visually appealing and that would allow the owners to update it themselves.

We chose to use a wordpress blogging backend rather than our own CMS due to the out of the box potential that an OS blog has, and the whole site was built in a few days, from design to live.

The aim of the website is to upload and share recipes - starters, mains, desserts - you name it - the plan is to have many different types of recipe on the site over time. There is the functionality for end users to give feedback on certain recipes as well as bookmark pages via their social bookmarking tools. The owners also wanted to be able to sell cooking related books online, so we used Amazon and an XML widget to feed in their recommended literature! Very clever stuff…

What a way to start 2008! We have just launched our most recent website for Portland based wire guide manufacturer, Eurotubes UK Ltd. Eurotubes UK Ltd is the worlds leading provider of wire guide tubes and engineering solutions for the Coil Winding industry.

We were chosen by Eurotubes as they had seen some similar content managed websites that we had done for recent clients and found that the solution fitted in perfectly.

We designed and created a professional, yet approachable website that showed that Eurotubes is both an exciting and professional business to work with.

Our latest content managed website has just gone live - Rawleigh Property Group is a Chichester based business that specialises in both residential and commercial property development.

Established in 1994, Rawleigh Property Group is now made up of a group of companies specialising in many different sectors in the property industry.

Their new website is aimed at promoting the group and their relevant services to both businesses and individuals who are interested or already work in the property sector. The website is fully content managed allowing Rawleigh Property Group to update the site themselves from anywhere in the world!

We have just finished the rebrand and redesign of one of the UK’s leading musical instruments and music equipment websites, IGOTMUSIC.co.uk.

We were approached by the owners of the IGOTMUSIC.co.uk who wanted a complete overhaul of their current website. The backend system and website infrastructure was working well on the e-commerce website, but the owners felt that the brand of the business and frontend design of the website needed to be improved.

We designed and coded a series of frontend templates that we then handed to IGOTMUSIC.co.uk’s in house development team to bolt on the backend e-commerce system. The owners of the business wanted to utilise as much space as possible for product placement and advertising, which we chose the implement around the new website.

As you can see, we tried to make the new site as easy to navigate as possible with a professional, yet instantly recognisable design relating to music and brands.

When we began Strawberrysoup back in June 2005, we knew we were entering a very competitive market. Web design has reasonably low overheads coupled with the fact that you only need a PC/Mac to start with - so it was perfect for us.

We have spent the last 3 years increasing our exposure on the Internet for Strawberrysoup by using the latest proven search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) techniques and are now pleased to say that it has worked!

We are getting consistent high search engine rankings for a variety of web design related keywords on Google, Yahoo and MSN - something that we are really proud of due to the level of national and international competition online.

An few examples of our key phases and their results are below (correct at 6th December 2007):

GOOGLE
web design - 123,000,000 other sites - ranked 23rd (google.com)
web design - 10,300,000 other sites - ranked 21st (google.co.uk)
web designers - 7,840,000 other sites - ranked 12th (google.com)
web design bournemouth - 1,400,000 other sites - ranked 16th (google.com)
web design chichester - 272,000 other sites - ranked 1st (google.com)

YAHOO
web design bournemouth - 2,750,000 other sites - ranked 5th (yahoo.com)
web design chichester - 2,120,000 other sites - ranked 6th (yahoo.com)
website design bournemouth - 1,100,000 other sites - ranked 3rd (yahoo.com)
website design chichester - 637,000 other sites - ranked 6th (yahoo.com)

MSN
web design bournemouth - 1,460,000 other sites - ranked 3rd (msn.com)
website design bournemouth - 1,290,000 other sites - ranked 1st (msn.com)
web design chichester - 437,000 other sites - ranked 7th (msn.com)

As you can see from the above, Strawberrysoup seem to be well regarded in the eyes of the most popular search engines, and we hope that this continues to improve - and prove the our own search engine methodology works!

If you would like us to help your business get the search engine rankings that it deserves, why not contact us and we can help you formulate an online strategy?

Have you ever wanted to relax or meditate but didn’t know what to do? We are working with leading meditation website Download Meditations to help end users use their chakra and follow a range of downloadable meditations.

The website is used as an online resource by many people who are interested in meditation, but don’t know what to do or where to find more information. You can download professionally recorded, guided meditations for use as your personal pyschic school.

Winter is renowned for colds and flu and believe it or not, your website is no exception - we are now offering a FREE (yes free) website health check to all website owners who feel that they are being let down by their website.

The website health check aims to point out all the areas that a website is falling behind and is very detailed. It includes the following areas:

1. Accessibility Summary
2. Quality Summary
3. Search Summary
4. Overall Summary

The reports are written in plain English meaning that hopefully anyone can understand them and make changes to their sites in order to get the most out of them. For more information on our free website health check service, why not contact Strawberrysoup directly?

We have just finished creating a brand new blog for one of our most exciting clients, MIKE AND IKE®.

We work with them on an ongoing basis providing web consultancy for their sweets and brand and felt that whilst their website was receiving a wide range of visitors from all around the world, a blog would be an innovative method of publishing news, sampling information and fostering feedback from end users.

The blog is run from Wordpress and features a fully functioning backend CMS allowing both ourselves and MIKE AND IKE® to update the blog whenever and wherever they are. End users can also subscribe to an automatic RSS - allowing them to keep up with the brands latest news quickly and easily.

Check out the blog now at http://blog.mikeandike.co.uk

We were asked by Paradigm Design to help them redo their website. They had done the design work, but they wanted their site to be built solidly using the standards compliant XHTML code and CSS - and we were glad to step up to the job!

Now their new website uses StrawberrySystem for the content management system and more importantly, contains lots of juicy and important information that their end users will want to know - such as their services, video demonstrations, their portfolio and links to friends!