Joined by our Senior Developer Mike, this year's festive elves have all joined Silkmoth in 2011. Simon, Gary, Matt and Sam have all helped Silkmoth turn in a great year in difficult times.
Silkmoth will be closed over the Christmas period from 12:30 23rd December to 09:00 3rd January.
From everybody at Silkmoth have a very merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year.
It's been quite a while since I last got round to blogging so thought it was high time I gave you an update on what's been going on at Silkmoth.
Our development team has been strengthened by the addition of Samantha Bradbury. Sam is Silkmoth's third new employee this year and adds to our Microsoft .Net, ASP and SQLServer skills base.
Sam has spent most of her time working on the Construction Health Action Toolkit with Gary and myself. This major project for Constructing Better Health is due to go live in the next couple of weeks. It's been Silkmoth's biggest project to date and will support the health management of over 2.5 million construction workers in the UK.
As usual we've been cranking out websites at a frantic rate.
On the eCommerce front we've launched fashion brand Curvy and Stylish and cameras and accessories store 1st Cameras.
We've continued our work for TJL Solicitors with complete re-designs of their personal injury and cosmetic surgery negligence websites.
Customers also receiving a complete makeover are manufacturing companies DRB Engineering and Holloway Tool.
New Silkmoth customers include Starkey for whom we've launched the Just Hear website and Origin Easifold Doors for whom we've built a product showcase site.
Working with our partners at Axon Garside we've launched a new website for payroll solutions provider Midland HR and a new site for Harris International Marketing.
We're pleased to announce the appointment of Simon Cooper to the Silkmoth team.
Simon joins us as a support engineer specialising in ASP.NET, C# and SQLServer. He has already been put to good use working on updates and new functionality for some of our customer's websites.
On his appointment Simon says "I'm thrilled to have joined Silkmoth. I'm very much looking forward to working on the huge number and vast variety of projects that Silkmoth have delivered."
For those who are signed-up to the Silkmoth newsletter you'll have heard about or Easter Egg Hunt competition over the Easter weekend. All you had to do was find the Easter Egg hidden somewhere on our site (here it is in case you couldn't find it) and then you would be entered into a draw for a wonderfully tasty Hotel Chocolat chocogram.
Of all the entries drawn out of the hat the winner was Paul Startup, an assistant product manager at CreditSafe down in Cardiff.
Now as generous as we are, the purpose of the competition wasn't to give away chocolate. The real purpose was to get as many people as possible over to the Silkmoth website trawling through as many pages as possible.
You can see from the Google Analytics graph above that there was a significant increase in the number of pageviews on the site following broadcast of the email. Most people started at the sitemap looking for a simple answer to where's the egg? We're really disappointed that you folks out there think we'd be so stupid as to make it that easy!!
A recent and very useful addition to our mail broadcast solution is the ability to view on a world map where people are reading our newsletters. You can see on the map here that our readers are primarily hugging the M6/M1 corridor from Manchester to London.
The green pushpins represent people opening the emails while the blue pushpins represent people clicking on a link within the email.
You can see, just outside Cardiff, the blue pushpin that represents our winner Paul.
If you'd like to learn more about our cost-effective email broadcast solution, or just want to have a chat about how emails can boost your business please give us a call.
Google rolled out its Panda update in the U.S. in March to improve the quality of their search engine results. Panda has now been allied for all English searches across the globe.
"Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does." (Google)
Google aims to improve the quality of search results by lowering the rankings of sites with:
This has had a serious impact on some UK websites with Pricedash.com and DiscountShoppingUK.co.uk reporting a drop in traffic in excess of 99% (Searchmetrics).
On the flip-side eBay.co.uk and TechCrunch.Com both report a 40% boost in traffic.
Firstly it's worth doing a link check (3WC Link Checker) to see if you've got any broken links. These may have come about if you've removed a page from your website and it's still linked to from some other content.
Not many of our customers have ads on their site or list their own voucher codes but it's worth making sure everything is up to date.
The "lack of original content" needs a bit more work especially on eCommerce websites. It's easy to drop in a manufacturer product description rather than write your own. However, it's becoming increasingly important that you add some value to that content. Perhaps you carry out your own product review or maybe you capture some customer comments that can be added to the description.
Find out more about Silkmoth's latest developments.