Champion Timber were an existing client of Urban Element. We had built them a bespoke e-commerce website to complement their 9 timber merchants in the South East of England.

Making a good site great

Although the site was taking significant sales, in 2012 it was decided to update the website’s look and functionality, and move all existing pages and products onto Adobe’s Business Catalyst (BC) platform. This would make the management of the site easier for Champion Timber, enable Urban Element to support them cost-effectively and improve the site’s navigation and buying experience for customers.

Crucial elements involved

From the start we knew that there were three crucial elements of the existing site that we could not let slip:

1. Sales and functionality. With the site taking significant revenues Champion Timber could not lose any sales or customers.

2. Ranking. With top ranking positions for key search phrases such as ‘Timber Flooring’, Urban Element had to ensure that these weren’t lost in the switch.

3. Customer satisfaction. Champion Timber pride itself on delivery of quality, choice and service and couldn’t let any of these elements suffer in its online offering.

Improved Functionality

Urban Element looked at the design of the current website and the 1000′s of products available online from Champion Timber. Navigation had become an issue.

Mega menus with direct links to product groups and promotions meant that customers could go straight to the products they needed, and couldn’t miss relevant offers and promotions.

Business Catalyst’s customer relationship management (CRM) tool allows Champion Timber to provide an improved service, storing and using data effectively for future marketing and sales campaigns.

Maintaining Rankings

The most vital element for maintaining the high search engine rankings we had obtained for Champion Timber was to ensure that each individual product page was redirected to a page on the new site. With £1000′s of sales at risk,  this process had to be painstakingly completed and then tested by our SEO expert Paul Wood.

Customer Satisfaction

As with all new things, especially large and complex projects, things can, and do, go wrong sometimes. All the testing in the world can not match the rigours consumers will put a site through in its first few weeks. We therefore added a customer feedback button, to ensure  that every user of the site has an opportunity to comment on their experience.

With a news article on the new website and Champion Timber informing their customers about the  new site, existing customers won’t be shocked to find that the new website is a great improvement, and if it isn’t Champion Timber certainly want to know about it.

A Champion Team

At Urban Element we are proud of the team that brought this complex project through to completion.

Leadership and strategy from Jon, our MD. Sasha for his customer friendly design, navigation and build of the site. Technical expertise from Witold and Malcolm in transferring all the old site’s product information; finding and fixing any bugs. Paul for completing the painstaking redirects and other vital SEO tasks and of course the client Mike Bird from Champion Timber; for his dedication to the project and understanding of the intricacies and difficulties that the project faced on its, at times bumpy, road to launch.

The Champion Timber website will sit proudly next to our other portfolio websites, a testament to the dedication and expertise of the Urban Element team.

Can you tell if your website is working hard enough?

Whether you understand what SEO (search engine optimisation) is or not, everyone wants a website that appears on the front page, or better still, at the top of Google’s search results.

But what are the elements that get your site there? Well Google looks at over 200 elements and changes its algorithms all the time, so how do you keep up?

There are a few essential factors to SEO that will make your site SEO frienly, helping Google to read your site and hopefully rank it, but does your current site have them?

This was the basis of my presentation to the Oxfordshire Project‘s Ardington group last Wednesday night.

Your website pages are books

Firstly think of your website as a collection of pages, each page dedicated to answering a question someone will ask of Google

Google is the librarian

Secondly think of Google as a librarian for these pages. They are going to send visitors to the best pages, with the most relevant and up to date content, that they have been able to find easily, and they can see is liked and recommended by others.

Five quick ways to an  SEO friendly website

You don’t have to be an IT whiz or understand the technical side of things to look at some quick elements of what your site does or doesn’t have.

1. Keywords. Included in a page’s URL, page tabs and headline – let the librarian know what this page is specifically about

2. Broken internal links. That limit Google’s ability to find and crawl your pages so they can be indexed

3. Analytics. So you can see what is working or not on your site, and Google can see what pages you have.

4. Social Proof. Sending messages to visitors and Google that you are liked and trusted with social media and testimonials.

Urban Element often speak at networking events around Witney and are pleased to do so. We offer regular free social media seminars for business who want to make the most of the web that explain these and similar issues in a little more detail.

For more information or a chat about your website please call Jon or Lucy on 01993 776999

I am going to take you through 5 essentials for blog layouts, to make your blog more appealing to readers.

1. Include in your title exactly what is in the blog.

2. Write a quick intro to let readers know what they will get if they spend the time to read on.

Points 1&2 were good, 3 is better

3. Use subheadings, it breaks up text and makes scanning your blog easier

4. Include an image that is big enough and clear enough to make an impact

OMG, this blog is awesome!

5. Use bullet points, lists and illustrations where you can, to make it more visually interesting.

A bonus point, as you got this far..

6. Leave with a question, or call to action, to invite comment.

Do you think I have missed anything? If it was 10 points what would you add?

Free Twitter, LinkedIn and Blog seminars

Urban Element run regular free seminars to help small business increase their social media effectiveness with Twitter, LinkedIn and Blogs.

It must be rocket science!

Everyone has changed their profile to have a big image and you haven’t!

They must be those computer geniuses that can code, click and surf in their sleep!

No, it’s easy peasy. And I will show you how and what to think about when choosing your image.

New profile layout

The new profile page set up means you can now create a more exciting and image rich welcome page. Continue reading

Urban Element is pleased to announce the launch of our latest website build project; Ashley Latter. The project is an extensive website plan, design and build combining multi-media features with an e-commerce and event booking module all combined in a content management system that allows Ashley to run his online business with ease. Continue reading

Predatory Thinking by Dave Trott

“90% of advertising goes un-noticed”. This was the opening thought from advertising expert Dave Trott at Brighton SEO. Despite being from an advertising background and apparently being un-aware of what ‘SEO’ stands for, Trott delivered one of the inspirational highlights of the day. The aim of his talk was to make the audience realise that in order to be successful in whatever creative project we undertake we must aim to beat the competition in order to be amongst the 10% that is noticed. Continue reading