Newsletter February 2006

Can you help?

We're currently marketing to membership based organisations.

We'd be very interested to hear from you if you have contacts in a member-based organisation, especially if it's one of those list at the end of this email.

Many thanks!

New Year's Resolution

Worst Day of the Year

Did you read that Monday 24th January was officially the worst day of the year? Or that Monday the 6th February was the day we were most likely to call in sick?

The stories made me think about New Year's Resolutions: it's no wonder we break resolutions if the worst-day-of-the-year turns up just three weeks after we make them... just before we come down with a mystery (phantom?) illness.

It also made me think that we were in serious danger of breaking the only New Year's resolution we'd made...

A New Year's Resolution for BRAINBOX

Do you have trouble writing your own CV, but would have no trouble writing one for a friend or colleague? It seems to be the same way with website content: we do a great job for other people, but never seem to get around to updating our own.

So our resolution for 2005 is simply this:

Sounds simple enough, but I bet it will be the most difficult challenge we face this year.

Making a Start

We neglected our website during 2005. The content changed hardly at all, and visitors (and search engines) lost interest. When we changed our name - and website address - in September, traffic to the website dropped to virtually nothing.

A nice clean sheet, then.

We've taken the first steps: The website has a brand new look, and the content has been tidied to a certain extent. But content development is a marathon rather than a sprint: it's going to several months to achieve the results we're looking for.

A question for you

Is your organisation making the most of its website? Does its content change regularly, and does it attract a good level of traffic?

It's not to late for your website related New Year's Resolution. And Let us know if there's anything we can do to help you stick to it.

Look no hands! An introduction to RSS

While on the subject of updating website content: what if you could get other people to update your website for you? Even better, what if you could get the BBC to update your website for you ?

A nice technology called RSS makes this possible. On this page on the BRAINBOX website, I have used RSS to "subscribe" the BBC news headlines.

It provides a really nice win-win situation:

• When the BBC changes its news, the details on the page change automatically. I'm happy.
• When someone clicks a link on the page, they go to the BBC website. The BBC are happy.

Useful for your website?

Is this something that would make sense for your website? Please get in touch if we can help you get started with RSS.

The Big List

(continued from "Can you help?")

If you have contacts in any of the following organisations we'd like to hear from you: