Praeparo

New website, www.coastradar.com, is a complete resource for those visiting the UK coast. The comprehensive guide, launched by Praeparo Ltd., helps visitors find ideal coastal beaches and a full list of suitable activities when traveling to the coast. Whether travelers are looking for a beach holiday, a day at the coast, a coastal path walk, or energetic sports activities, Coast Radar has all the details.

Click here to read full press release!

The new website allows travelers to quickly and easily “Discover the Shoreline” with a very focused and relevant search based on visitor reviews. Coast Radar provides a full Beach Guide, a complete Weather Station, an Activity Guide, Kit Bag and full list of Services and Accommodations.

The Beach Guide features an online search locating beaches by region or by map. It also offers the top 10 beaches and allows users to suggest a beach. The Weather Station offers current weather conditions, the previous day’s highs and lows and the precipitation forecast. The Activity Guide helps travelers find things to do on the coast ranging from leisurely walks and hikes to surfing and sailing. The Kit Bag helps visitors locate shops for all their travel accessory needs. The Services Guide provides a list of schools, instructors and guides and the Accommodation Guide provides a list of friendly places to stay near the beach of choice.

There are several ways to search using the website. The “Quick Jump” takes users straight to a Google Map of a specific location. Users can also browse through maps based on categories of Beach, Activities, Kit Bag, Services and Accommodations; or users can browse through a region and narrow the search by selecting text links.

Coast Radar gathers its information based on visitor submissions. The site also offers business listings for local area businesses to advertise a service, shop or accommodation. While the site is currently focused on the UK, other coastal regions will soon be added to the site.

For further information, or to “Discover the Shoreline,” please visit www.coastradar.com

If you just go into creating a website without any business plan you will fail.

The first step is consider what type of online presence you want, these fall roughly into 5 categories although a number of websites do offer more than one.

1. e-commerce:
   provision of products available to purchase online.
2. information:
   typically help to generate offline sales of services by providing information.
3. brand:
   focus is to support your brand.
4. portal:
   provision of news and information around a range of topics.
5. social networks or community:
   enables community interactions between different consumers.

All these categories influence in slightly different ways when it comes to website design, development, website launch, operational ongoing costs and marketing. For example, a brand building site needs less monthly work than an e-commerce or portal site which depend on fresh updated information.

Google Analytics is an easy to use web analytics tool with minimal IT overhead to worry about. The web based user interface allows you to quickly get to the information you need to see to make informed decisions.

Getting Google Analytics working on your website is the first thing in any digital marketing strategy. To get started, simply open an account with Google and get your web design team to insert a few lines of JavaScript code on all your pages.

Once it is installed and gathering data it needs to be linked into your overall marketing strategy.

Features include:

• Detailed SEM reports
• Internal Site Search analysis
• Geo-location reporting
• AdWords Integration
• Event Tracking
• Path Analysis
• E-Commerce Tracking and Analysis
• Trend Reporting

Visit the Google Analytics site for more information

First of all what is the 3-Click Rule?

The thinking is that if any task takes more than 3 clicks to complete, a visitor will not complete the task. It is one of the oldest pillars of website usability design.

So is it over emphasised?

Although the 3-click rule can make you think about your page hierarchy we believe it is only one of the items you need to consider. Yes if you have a step of tasks then you should be limiting the number of clicks but the major rule is design to what the user wants and expects.

You must consider and provide:

• Detailed search to enable people to jump to what they are looking for.
• Common menu system on every page so that they always know how to get somewhere.
• Keep the pages simple. Visitors will not detail read they will first scan the page looking for key items like headings, links, bold text etc.  Only if it is interesting will they then go through back in more detail.
• Get a balance of pictures/images and text. Too many of one or the other will put people off. Images should be used to enhance content and not replace as now people too often associate images with banner advertising of which more and more people ignore.
• Search engine optimisation. You need to design for the visitor with search engines in mind and not the other way around. A high bounce rate in Google Analytics indicates the wrong balance in that people are finding you but the content is not relevant.

In Summary

Yes the 3-Click rule is relevant but not in isolation. You must consider all elements of website design and find the correct balance between them.