Wednesday, March 29, 2006

An interesting testimonial

Another couple of sites are live: Graham Thomas Hypnotherapy and Inspirational Singing Workshops.

Graham Thomas offers treatment for a wide range of symptoms and complaints including: stress, anxiety, stopping smoking, phobias, IBS etc.

Inspirational Singing offers Opera to Order, Workshops to Order, Musicals to Order and a number of other singing services.

We didn't design the Inspirational Singing website from scratch - the initial design (and, in fact the initial build) was done by a design company. We got a good testimonial for our work, however.

Google mysteries

We have been having fun recently with our portfolio pages ranking above the pages they describe for relevant search words (and even had people call us up looking for the services our clients offer). We obviously want our clients to come above our portfolio pages in the search engines for their search terms, but when they have new sites, this is sometimes tricky. One example is June Fettes, who we are still trying to get into Google for executive coach Perth, or I guess, even more ambitiously, executive coach Scotland.

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Thursday, March 16, 2006

Fashion accessories for dogs

Mitzy and Me has just gone live. Selling fashion accessories for dogs, Mitzy and Me are one of the less conventional businesses we have created a website for.

If your dog needs something to keep up with the latest fashion trends, this is the place for you.

During their launch, they managed to get themselves a small mention in Vogue (pretty good PR!). While it was only a few lines on one of the fashion pages, it was, at the time, the only way that anyone knew about the website (as it was too soon for the site to appear in the search engines). This has given us some interesting benchmarks for the effectiveness of small mentions in high-profile publications. Over the first few days, we have seen a few hundred page requests per day. It will be interesting to see how this compares to the numbers of visitors the sites gets once it appears for relevant search terms (like fashion accessories for dogs).

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Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Inspirational singing

Another site has just gone live: inspirational singing.

Run by female opera singer Judith Russell, they offer a number of services including some great wedding entertainment ideas.

The Inspirational Singing website was not designed by WandD, but we implemented it on content manager and host it.

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Server move

Our primary web server is moving house on Monday.

This coming Monday (13th March 2006) at around 9pm, our primary web server is moving from one Docklands data centre to another. This will result in a short downtime on that evening. All other services should be unaffected but websites will be unavailable during the move.

Please drop us a line : wandd@wandd.net if you need any more information.

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Thursday, March 02, 2006

A fun project from WandD - whiskyTAG

Anyone at all interested in whisky should head on over to our new whisky blog. We are working on a project called whiskyTAG that is going to enable people to tag and classify whiskies and then hopefully find new favourites.

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The Secret of Success

According to Michael Hyatt, the secret of success is responsiveness. He says that people judge you according to how long it takes you to respond (via email, returning phone calls etc.) - he likens business to a game of tag: "people 'tag' us in countless ways every day. They place calls. They send emails. They mention something to us in a meeting. Suddenly, we are 'it.' And, just like the game, if you stay 'it' too long, you lose. The only winning strategy is to respond quickly and make someone else 'it.'"

For the most part, this is our experience running a very small company as well. We make huge efforts to be very responsive to all of our business associates - personally, I feel stressed if I am away from email for more than half a day as I worry somebody is waiting for an urgent response (this is a downside of being generally highly available on email).

Where we disagree (and what causes us the most heartache) is that, especially in the small business world, at least half the time, I 'tag' someone but I am still 'it'. This applies to sales especially - I wouldn't dream of sending a letter to someone and expecting them to call me (even if they are interested).

So we have found that the key to success with our clients is responsiveness - and this would probably result in promotion if I wasn't already a director. Success for our business at this stage in our growth is a lot about bringing in new business and that is the area where we have to be 'it' all the time.

I would love to get to the stage where bringing in new business was all about being responsive to people knocking on the door and asking for our services. Until then, I'll stay responsive but I'm going to stay 'it' for a while yet.

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