V4 Technical are delighted to announce the launch of a new Ecommerce website for the Stones Throw Food Co, which brings a real, local alternative to online supermarket shopping. Owned by Elveden Farms Ltd, the retailer provides a wide choice of fresh items including bakery, vegetables, meat and dairy all of which can be purchased online and delivered to the customer’s door on a pre-booked timeslot, initially within the Norwich area.

Shoppers can also check how many food miles their weekly shop has travelled. If products cannot be sourced locally, the Stones throw Food Co will find the best alternative so that these can also be included in deliveries.  The new site offers information about the producers of the food it sells and recipes for making the most of both seasonal ingredients and family mealtimes.

Richard Walters,MD of Stones Throw said

“We are really impressed with the resource that V4 Technical Ltd put behind this project. They worked closely with our in-house team every step of the way and delivered the website on time and within budget. Even better, the site was generating orders for us within hours of going live.”

 V4 Technical MD Andy Merrill said

“StonesThrow Food Co wanted to offer a real, local alternative to online supermarket shopping and chose us to be their partners because of our experience in the food sector.  This is just the start, we expect the range of products being sold on the site to expand over the next few months.  We’re very proud to be working on such an exciting project.” 

Link to http://www.stonesthrowfood.co.uk/

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Want to create a mailing list that automatically updates when a customer takes or more importantly doesn’t take an action?
 

As part of a recent e-commerce website we have created a new application module that automatically modifies a Mailchimp mailing list moving a subscriber from recent customer to lapsed if a customer hasn’t purchased from the site in the last 30 days.

The smart segmented mailing list can then be used to encourage the customer back to the site. Of course, if the customer does come back and by again they automatically move back to the active customer’s mailing list. No admin required!

As part of your new e-commerce site  or application the smart segment code  talks directly to Mailchimp via their API.

Once a day, but it could be as often as you like, it looks at the registered  customers of the site and, depending on their activity level, it moves them around within a Mailchimp list. When it comes to contacting these customers Mailchimp always has updated and accurate marketing lists to use.

The triggers for actions can be custom designed by us, so could be driven by something like the products purchased, the coupons used, their location and that’s just E-commerce.

We’re sure you can think of ways you’d like segment a list automatically and improve the conversion levels for your email campaigns.

Whilst this development was part of a Trifle E-commerce website, using Mailchimp’s API, we can do something like this and more for most web applications and sites developed by us.

All you need is a website that uses PHP and MySQL and we’ll be happy to discuss how we can include a smart segment module in your new project with us.

So if  you like the idea of doing less work and getting more from your new e-commerce and Mailchimp email marketing then get in touch today!

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But this could change for a few reasons. First, the Apple juggernaut is slowing in growth (but with plenty of headway against the competition) and Blackberry has seen a lot of excitement about its new Blackberry 10. 

As part of this new launch, the Blackberry app store has been renamed ‘Blackberry World’ opening up the platform for access from the desktop. The heightened interest in Blackberry, and more open access to the App store could help bring Blackberry app development back in to focus. 

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These answers will aim to be more relevant to the user which wil in turn drive better traffic and higher conversions. Through the use of Social Signals like Google +1′s and Facebook Likes, the engines will take an independent score of a sites value or popularity which will be added to their algorithms. Sites with social ‘woven in’ to the site and ones that offer good content will have the potential to fare better than sites still missing that social ingredient. 

The continued rise in mobile usage and mobile searching will also impact the results. Through a mobile’s GPS the search engines will be able to identify location, thus offering a more localised result without the user needing to type in their location. 

Additionally, the Rich Snippets Google has been using for the past year will come into greater effect, offering more signposts for Google indexing.

This year will also see the release of the Facebook search engine. Using elements of Open Graph, Facebook will deliver contextualised search results that will also feed into Bing. 

The evolution of search indexing and the move to answers not results will impact how a website is built. Sites that succeed will be the ones that include social signals and the latest search techniques ‘baked’ into the site, not added on later. 

You can read more on the evolution of search in our latest article, published in the East Anglian Daily Times. 

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The search engine allows you to discover new people, places or things based on the correlation of different elements of the social graph.

 ”Show me restaurants in Edinburgh that my friends have checked into.”

“Show me the most popular band my friends like.”

The search results will be based upon the data Facebook has, from Fan Pages to Places checkins and website likes. At the most basic level, the wider your Facebook audience and the more engaging your content, the better chance you will have of appearing in these searches. 

For  your brand this will mean  you need to boost your Facebook presence seeking, a wider relevant audience and more content, in the same way you would have dedicated content for different search results in Google. On your website this means ensuring Facebook knows about your search engine and Facebook users can add it to their social graph.

Open search won’t be coming to the UK in the very short term so you still have time to get your site ready. From the most basic inclusion of a Facebook LIke button to deeper integration with Facebook Connect and Fan Page Integration your site needs to be ready for Facebook.

Like submitting a site to Google, these Facebook connections will be the crucial first step to obtaining visibility within the graph search. 

We can help improve your existing site to be ready for Facebook and for Google+ or we can talk to you about bespoke integrations to harness the Open Graph today.

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Affecting IE6, IE7, and IE8 the latest vulnerability is bad news for those still running Windows XP users as they cannot upgrade to more recent versions of Microsoft’s browser.

If you can we strongly recommend upgrading to IE9 or IE10, which are not affected, or even better go with Google’s Chrome free to download from here https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/ 

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Google loves fresh unique content. 

One of the key considerations for any SEO strategy must be content. Both the quality of content and frequency of updating. The frequency is important. When Google visits your site it will check for fresh content. If your site has not been updated for some time, then Google will come back less frequently which will impact your traffic potential from natural search.

With major websites, updating hourly, we can expect to Google to index hourly or less. This is broadly how you see ‘live’ results within Google search results. 

If you don’t have access to Google Webmasters, or want to see this for another site. Try the following tups to see how often Google visits your site.

Create a Google Alert for your site or business name. Set the alert fo ‘as it happens’ and you can time the gap between publishing and alert. Over time you should start to see the gap decrease.

Working with our clients, we  can see that Google was indexing our site about a week after we updated the site. We could see this was due to a lack of fresh content. Within one week of updating the site daily, with fresh content, we decreased the indexing time to 48 hours. With continued posting of quality content we expect that time to drop.

On this site we haven’t been as active for a while which saw our indexing frequency drop substantially from a near instant update to over a week later. Again, with a simple content strategy we are seeing greater activity from Google.

Logging into Google Webmasters will also tell you the last time of crawl and more details on the results Google took from the site.  

Find this graph in Webmasters>Health>Index Status

Including more content in your site will also boost your social and link potential. 

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However, a new report from website monitoring company Pingdom points to a continued Microsoft dominance of desktop web browsing. 

With so much buzz around mobile devices, in particular the iPad and iPhone, it is refreshing to see a comparison of importance vs desktop systems. 

When designing a site or web enabled product, it is vital to remember such statistics. It may look cool to design for iOs but that can’t be to the detriment of the largest potential audience. 

Before considering if or how your site can work with mobile devices, do check your site analytics. Most major providers including Google Analytics and Clicky break down the visitors by platform and device. Shout if we can help.

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Amazon, for example is keen to own .kindle , .movie and .app whilst Mircosoft would love to own .docs and .windows. The last major expansion of name extensions was the .xxx extension, available to verified adult content providers. Additional domains could benefit businesses looking to create brand or product differentiation through domain ‘addresses’.

However, for most brands the core domains including .com should be the initial focus of investment and management. The new domain extensions won’t pose a threat for business reputation. Deloitte is building a trademark clearing house that will help ‘police’ the increasingly complex brand domain relationships.

You can see the full list of requested domain extensions here.

V4 can help suggest and manage your domain choices to ensure maximum relevance and opportunity as a core part of any development strategy or program. Get in touch to see how we can help you. 

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