Strawberrysoup Blog

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!

We would like to give a warm welcome to our 2 newest team members - Jaime and Gavin.

Jaime is based in our Chichester office and will be focusing on backend website development and integrating new modules into our CMS. He has great project experience and has worked on a wide range of large web projects.

Gavin is based in Bournemouth and joins us like Jaime as one of our experienced PHP developers. He has worked with large agencies before including agency.com and will be a great asset to our team.

We look forward to working with them both!

We are really pleased with this new webite - its a very large site with some great functionality allowing Ambasun International to control it in-house. This project was given to us by Paradigm Design who wanted to offer their client leading design paired with a reliable content management system.

The website is split into 4 core areas - information about the business, spanish living, brazilian living, bulgarian living and finally living abroad in other countries such as Goa. Each and every page is updateable via the CMS and Ambasun International also have the ability to upload new properties as and when the become available.

The website has been built using fully valid XHTML and CSS and adheres to the latest web standards in terms of accessibility and cross-browser interoperability.

Chichester Park Hotel is one of our existing search engine marketing clients who came to us and wanted to get effective search engine rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN. We optimised their old website and began to market their site online and within a few months had achieved them page 1 rankings for all of their keywords on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

After discussing the campaign effectiveness, we decided that it would be a good idea to create a new website for Chichester Park Hotel due to the old site using legacy technology, poor code and the fact that they wanted to update the site themselves.

The new website you can see below uses our StrawberrySystem content management system to drive all content to the site and allows Chichester Park Hotel to update the site, add new PDF downloads and generally maintain the site themselves - thus reducing the total cost of ownership.

You may have noticed that we have not added anything to our blog recently… this is mainly due to the fact that we are really busy (both creating websites and pitching for new ones) - but we are pleased to announce the launch of a new website for K Lacey Cables, a cable wholesaler and supplier based in West Sussex.

Their new website features our StrawberrySystem CMS allowing them to update their website and upload new product datasheets whenever they wish, without having to ask us to do so! Paradigm Design approached us to build the website as they have worked with us on numerous projects previously and felt that our CMS fitted in perfectly with what K Lacey Cables needed online.

Local marketing specialists Coconut Creatives and ourselves have recently teamed up to launch a pilot project to offer local businesses an integrated solution to managing online and offline marketing. The project which has now been running for several months has been hugely successful with a range of local and regional businesses realising the benefits of approaching their small business marketing needs in this holistic way.

We both decided to launch www.fruitandnutmarketing.co.uk after having worked together on a number of hugely successful joint campaigns. One such project was with FitKid.co.uk which had complex requirements to meet the demands of their UK Training qualifications, National Franchising Operation and FitKid Dorset Clubs.

Nicky Kay, Development Director for FitKid has seen the benefits in working in this way; “We have ongoing assistance with our on and offline campaigns, regularly achieving newsworthy national PR coverage. Our new website and online shop was specified, created and designed beautifully and our customers have provided fabulous feedback. Coconut Creatives and Strawberrysoup work seamlessly together and we have seen significant company growth during the time we have been working together”.

“We’ve found that there is a certain mix of on and offline activities which bring our clients success. It just seemed logical to package this up and offer it to businesses throughout the region” adds Sarah Dyer, founder of Coconut Creatives.

You may have noticed that our website has changed slightly - the design is pretty similar, but the site itself, the code it uses and its ease of navigation has improved dramatically.

The site also features new areas including some website testimonials, web design articles and pages specifically for each of our offices. We have now added more recent sites to our portfolio too (which has also been redesigned.) - keep your eyes peeled for new sites that are still to be added as we have been quite busy!

We would like to say very well done to Sarah, Ruth, Lianne and Stef who ran the Race for Life in aid of cancer research on Sunday. The weather couldn’t have been much worse, but this didn’t dampen their spirits for the run which measures at just over 5km.

The girls did fantastically and ran the distance in about 28 minutes and raised over £400 for cancer research - a charity close to our hearts. Over 3000 women attended the run (or walk) for life and the atmosphere was great - well done to everyone that got stuck in!