Monthly Archives: May 2012

05/30/2012

Social media practical workshops a resounding success

By urbanelementblog

The two  free social media work shops that Urban Element held last Thursday and Tuesday night  to support the launch of the small business package were a definite success.

LinkedIn Improvements

Delegates who attended the LinkedIn session were taken through their profiles to identify its strengths and weaknesses and everyone left with a clear idea of not only how they could improve their profiles but also how to use LinkedIn more effectively, ideas included:

  1. Use your Professional Headline not to say what you do, but who you can help or want to connect to.
  2. When you are describing your business verbally you will naturally talk about its USP’s and why you are passionate about it and this should be reflected in your summary.
  3. Join groups to start and contribute to conversations  so you can then offer your advice and expertise. You will  not only be making connections but engaging with other users.

Lessons  in Twitter 

For new users to Twitter, make sure you have a picture of you rather than a product, have a think about the clients you are looking to connect with and start following them. Initially you will gain followers by retweeting interesting and relevant info and blogs you come across.

Launching the Small Business Package

Why?

Small businesses need what bigger business can afford,  a quality website with the knowledge and training to understand, manage, maintain and utilise it.  They also need to develop their understanding of online marketing, and utilising social media, but again don’t know where to start or how to be strategic with it.

What?

The small business package is Urban Elements solution. Delivered in ‘clusters’ of 5 businesses working alongside each other for peer support, we will hand-hold you through the process of design, functionality, content, search engine optimisation, strategy, social media and e-commerce if necessary.

How?

By the end of the process you will have a highly optimised website, with a content management system that means you can make changes, branded relevant social media accounts you’ll know how to use, plus access to exclusive ongoing support and training as part of our small business community. The cost is spread out across a 12 month period to make it accessible, £975 +VAT deposit and then 12 monthly payments of £233.33.+VAT (which includes hosting)

For more information on the Small Business Package please email lucy@urbanelement.com

1 comment | posted in Urban Element

05/08/2012

Free social media practical workshops for small business

By lucylavers

Urban Element are offering 2 free practical sessions on optimising Twitter  and LinkedIn for business to launch its new web design offering for small business.

Optimising LinkedIn Thursday 24th May 6-8pm, Urban Element, Network Point. Witney

LinkedIn is becoming one of the fastest growing business networking tools out there.  Whether you are a complete LinkedIn novice or just want to hone your skills Jon Ellard Urban Element’s Managing Director will be giving practical advice on;

  • First impressions with images and headlines
  • Summaries that sell
  • Raising your profile with recommendations
  • Linking with Twitter
  • Targeting the right people in the right way
  • Creating and joining professional groups

email lucy@urbanelement.com to register your interest now, as places are limited

Twitter Workshop  Tuesday 29th May 6-8pm, Urban Element, Network Point. Witney

Find out all you need to know about Twitter for business, how it helps increase your search engine rankings, can be used for customer support, can build product / service anticipation and its effective use for interacting with your customers.

email lucy@urbanelement.com to register your interest now, as places are limited

Web Design for Small Business

Urban Element is developing a package created in response to demand from small business with a close eye on ROI, for high quality web design, with flexible payments, that encompasses SEO, CMS and online marketing.

The package consists of all the essential elements needed to create, launch and support a website, delivered in small professional groups with ongoing support and training. As part of the small business initiative you will have exclusive access to peer and expert support whilst learning and shaping the future of your business online.

Improve your skills on Twitter and LinkedIn and learn more about Urban Element and its small business offering by emailing lucy@urbanelement.com

Leave a comment | posted in Urban Element

05/08/2012

Why Do I Not Always See the Most Up To Date Version of my Website?

By ferguswj

When we update a website for our clients, we are often asked why one person can’t see the updated version of the site, while their friend can. I find it hard to answer this question without getting too technical so I am going to try hard to explain it without you glazing over!

Ok, so bear with me. Every domain has a domain name server (or DNS). When you type in a web address (e.g. www.urbanelement.com), your computer associates this with an IP address which it then looks up (kind of like a name and phone number stored in your address book).

This is obviously on a much larger scale, and so in order to find the IP address of the site, each website domain has its own authoritative, primary server. In order to find the server that the website is hosted on, one server will ask another until it finds the right one (there is an amount of logic to it, e.g. by a site being a .co.uk domain, a server will be sent down a certain route).

However, each server can cache data from other servers higher up the chain, meaning that if it has recently found the server that you are looking for, it will already have the data stored. It stores a copy of the site files for an amount of time (this is set by the servers A Record and could be an hour or days) and serves this to you. Depending on when this copy was taken, this may be minutes old or hours old, and so if changes have been made to the site in this time, you may not be viewing the most up to date version of the site. Therefore, depending on which server you reach first, you may be viewing a different version of the website than your friend next door.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , | posted in Web Design, Web Development

05/02/2012

New Cookie Law implications

By lucylavers

What Are Cookies?

Cookies are the messages that web pages use to store information about visits to web pages. We use them on the UE website and they are used at some level on all our client sites because we use cookies to track visitors through google analytics.

How does this effect us?

New Privacy & Electronic Communication Regulations (PECR)  require all websites  with a UK website presence to clearly identify that they are using cookies. This is to protect users privacy, and at the moment ‘implied consent’ which would be the ideal and least intrusive solution is not considered sufficient. So other solutions that still comply but do not interfere too much with the web design are needed.

You can read the full government implementation guide by following the link http://alphagov.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/gds-cookies-implementer-guide.pdf

What’s the solution?

Urban Element are currently in the process of identifying the cookies they use on the UE website and we will be adding a cookie law solution to the UE website soon as an example of best practice.  We will share this with all our followers and will  be in touch with all our clients to help them implement effective and tailored solutions.

We would love to hear your comments and if you have seen any good solutions on other websites please let us know.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , | posted in Online Marketing, Web Design

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