April 2006 Newsletter

A "tactical" website for the Barley Mow

The Capital Pub Company recently acquired and refurbished The Barley Mow pub in Chiswick, west London.

The previous incarnation of the pub had a bad reputation, so the challenge for the new owners is to get the good people of Chiswick to give it a try. A series of PR activities was planned, and it soon became clear that a "target website" would be required. And it was required urgently.

Last Friday (21st April) was a busy day at BRAINBOX:

• 9:00 - website address (barleymowchiswick.co.uk) acquired
• 12:00 - initial version of the website goes live
• 4:30 - upgraded version of the website goes live

It doesn't look great, and it won't rank well in search engines. But it does the job for which is was built. Take a look.

Records Management Society (RMS) Annual Conference

Wanted to say a public "thank you" to the Executive Committee of the RMS for inviting me to their Annual Conference in Manchester earlier this week.

BRAINBOX rebuilt the RMS website about a year ago (we continue to host and maintain it), but was the first opportunity I'd had to talk to real users of the website. I came away from the event with a long list of suggestions to radically improve the website.

Getting back to Google - Part 3

Our New Year's Resolution is holding: the BRAINBOX website is being updated regularly.

Google rewarded us a couple of weeks ago: many of the pages on the website now have a PageRank. PageRank - a scale from 0 to 10 - is Google's indication of the importance of a web page. The higher the PageRank, the more likely it is that the page will feature in search engine results.

So far we've only achieved a PageRank of 2... but it's early days.

Are you making the most of your email?

Once you have your website address - let's call it www.greataddress.co.uk - you're going to want to be able to send and receive my.name@greataddress.co.uk emails.

Although this sounds simple enough, our experience is that it can often be confusing - not least because of the number of possible options.

Rather than get into the nitty-gritty here, we've posted a detailed article on the website.

Read the full article on email configuration here.

An earthquake on a map?

In the last edition, we covered some of the practical uses of Postcode data, and the plan was to cover the practical uses of maps in this edition. But I didn't get around to it.

As a consolation prize, here's a link (below) to a rather impractical use of a map.

Check out the San Francisco earthquake website

Pay Per Click

Most website operators will want to benefit from visitor traffic that originates from search engines. Getting that traffic means getting the website to appear in search results. There are two ways to achieve this:

1. by earning the right to be there (i.e., by achieving a good search engine ranking).
2. by paying to be there.

Search results that come from a good search engine ranking are known as organic search results. Search results that come from paid adverts are known as Pay Per Click (PPC) search results.

One of the key advantages of PPC is its immediacy: search engine optimisation is essentially a continuous process, one that can take months to produce results. A PPC campaign can be prepared and activated inside an hour, and keywords and ad copy can be changed as often as required.

Read our introduction to Pay Per Click