Coast Radar was faced with a problem that many other websites are also struggling with. The whole idea that visitors are using different sized devices and expect a tailored experience. At first we worked on a main website, mobile website and iphone application but this just became too expensive and complicated to keep in sync.

After listening to what the users were saying we decided on a completely new version of the website.

The beta is a mechanism where we can share our new vision and still have time to take on-board people’s comments.

At a high level the changes of the new website are:

• Clearer navigation outside of maps.
      We have provided a new text link navigation system where you start at a continent, then look at countries, then states, then actual listings.
• People who enter at a beach listing from the search engine said it is long winded to see other elements close by.
      We have added a breadcrumb at the top of a page labelled “You are at :: ” where the green parts are links to allow you to easily move backwards and forwards. This means you can easily move up from an entry to the region, from a region to the country, etc.
• People only want to be told about the area they are looking at rather than maps of the world with 1000′s of markers.
      We have changed the whole site to show information based on the context. For example, if you are looking at The United Kingdom you will see the regions/states, where as if you are looking at a state you will see the listings within it.
• People want a mechanism whereas they can ask businesses and other people for advice on a coastal area.
      We have expanded the community to provide a full social environment where people can freely ask questions and share experiences.
• People wanted a mechanism to plan plan and record a trip.
  We have allowed FREE travel Blogs within the community to plan, record and share a trip.
• People want a single website to map to the device they are using, a laptop, tablet or mobile phone and don’t want to have to swap between mobile, desktop and mobile application versions.
      This was a complete re-design to provide a responsive website that adapts to the screen size being used. We will discontinue our iphone and mobile website versions.
• Businesses wanted a mechanism to communicate with other businesses and people interested in the coast.
  The new community website allows people to discuss topics within what we calls groups. Groups can be PUBLIC – open to everyone, PRIVATE – people have to request membership of the group Admin or HIDDEN where people have top be invited. Anyone can start a group.
  
• People wanted a faster site.
  Although the beta does not use it, when the new website goes live it will use an international Content Delivery Network (CDN) to provide faster access to content.

Why not go and have a play at beta.coastradar.com

Technology wise, the main website is a custom HTML 5 fluid design and the community makes use of WordPress and Buddypress.

Any questions then just drop us an email or give us a call at +44 (0)20 8123 8159

This is especially the case within Travel and Tourism sectors as more and more people look to make up there own holiday packages by booking flights independently to accommodation. This means if you are an accommodation provider you need an engaging website, with detailed text and pictures. The visitor needs to totally understand what they will get, if they think something is missing they won’t ring or email you but just go back to the search engine results and try the next one on the list.  You also need to be ready for when they make a decision as you need them to book and pay a deposit whilst you have them interested. A lot of people that leave the site to fill in a form and post a cheque will have second thoughts and re-consider.

This all means travel and tourism operators need to:

• Have an informing and visually stimulating website. Photo and Videos help travel websites more so than other markets.
• Manage online reputations and be open by integrating them into your website. A piece of negative feedback does not have to be bad if handled appropriately.
• Make use of third party distributor sites such as Coast Radar, Last Minute, as they have bigger marketing budgets and rank well under highly competitive keywords.
• Give information on the surrounding area to give the visitor ideas on what they can do when they visit.

A lot of small travel and tourism websites don’t put the amount of effort they should into marketing. All too often a website is created and left to market itself, which of course it can’t do. This means those websites are missing out on all those people ready to buy.

Remember your website is operational 24 hours a day and will receive more visitors than you received phone calls, make sure it reflects your business, provides all the answers to visitors questions and allows them to book.

We would hazard a guess that most people would answer yes to the above. But, would also say they don’t actively back-up ALL business PC’s. Yes, you may have an external drive plugged into the back of a PC but how often do you remember to copy files to it, also if a power surge on your premises takes out your PC disk will your external hard drive be safe?

The cost of recovering data from a broken hard drive can be very expensive and may take days or possibly even weeks before you have all or some of the files recovered.

This is a major problem, but with Internet storage and automatic back-up software it should not be a problem. For less than £5 per month you can keep all your Window and Mac computers backed-up securely and automatically.

We strongly recommend that all businesses look at this, just think £50 a year for peace of mind.

You really have three categories of visitors.

• Contact – visitors coming to your website to get contact details or directions. These could well be existing customers looking to get in touch.
• Action – visitors that know what they want and are intent on purchasing. These could be people knowing they want to stay in your location and are looking for a specific property at a specific price.
• Information – visitors looking for information or researching. These could be people that have been told an area is nice to visit but are looking for ideas.

Once you understand the above three types of visitors to your website then you can plan your pages accordingly. Pages should not be combined but meet the specific needs of one of these types.

Once you know what pages you need then you can think about how the visitors will find these pages on the search engines. Here you need to look at your page and research the search engine keywords that visitors will enter and where you want to be in the returned search engine results.

When you have your site live then you need to constantly monitor using your analytics to understand where visitors come from, the search terms used and where they navigate to on your website. Based on this monitoring you need to fine tune, fine tune and fine tune.

This feature will be a great for marketing as it can tell you when people start to engage and when they start to drop off. For example, you want to offer some discounts for stays this weekend. You can tweet and facebook the offer along with a tracked URL, this will then allow you to see people coming in through the tracked link and when the traffic starts to drop off, you can send a follow-up message to re-engage the audience.

The feature will be launched to everyone in the next few weeks, for more information see:

Google Analytics Realtime

The Coast Radar mobile website version 1 has been launched today and can be seen at www.coastradar.mobi

The site works by discovering the current position and then displaying listings based on this location, listings currently cover the Beach Guide, Things to Do Guide, Shopping Guide and Places to Eat Guide from the main website. The site tries to adapt the various screen sizes from the 10 inch iPad to the much smaller mobile phones. With iPad/iPhones it supports the save to home page with icon and splash page.

If you want to search for locations rather than look from your current position you will have to use the main desktop website at www.coastradar.com, although we are looking to add this to version 2 later in the summer.

Give it a try, comments and improvement suggestions to the Coast Radar face book page (facebook/coastradar) or twitter (@coastradar).

Last year was over hyped on being the year for the mobile web but Praeparo strongly believes 2011 is the year.

The reasons for this is the adoption of smart phones and tablets like the iPad. When I look around my packed commuter train I see a large proportion using such devices. Yes, a proportion are playing games, watching movies or reading books but also a lot are on the Internet.

Not only do you have research and product purchases but also location based services. This is where someone is in a town center and searches for a shop selling product XX.

This year if you own a shop or an information site then you MUST be optimized for the mobile market or you WILL miss out as your competitors take these customers..

Praeparo has some excellent domain name price deals at the moment:

• .com from $12.74
• .info from $7.16
• .co.uk from $8.39
• .mobi from $10.87

Visit Praeparo domain name registrations to see these and many other offers.

All Praeparo Internet customers get 10% off web projects and search engine optimisation services. Also Free with Domain Registration:

Domain/URL Forwarding                                            Email Forwarding
Bulk Tools                                                                           Domain Control Panel
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Registrar Lock

It is not all about money but about targeting the available budget at the best areas to get a return on investment. We have worked with a number of smaller companies and managed to get quality traffic that make purchases. It is not about the number of unique visitors but about the number of visitors that actually purchase. I would prefer to have 10 visitors a day that purchase then 1000′s that don’t.

Some points to consider.

Don’t compete with generic keyword terms. Most small websites will not get to page one on Google for generic popular terms as budgets don’t allow the necessary spend to achieve this.

Instead select very focused or niche keyword terms. Look at the areas of your business you are a specialist in. Focus your keyword terms and search engine optimisation on these very focused terms, often called exploiting the long tail. For example, Praeparo are an internet marketing agency in the UK that specialize on helping local businesses. It is not worth us trying to compete for “UK internet marketing agency” as even if we did achieve this we don’t really want to take work from a business 500 miles away. Instead we need to focus on less competitive local terms “Berkhamsted internet marketing agency” and “Aylesbury internet marketing agency”.

Once you have identified your target keywords then focus your marketing budget based on your sales. Your marketing budget needs to be set to the return it achieves in increasing sales. All too often small businesses tell us we don’t have any spare money to use for marketing. You need to switch your thinking to how much of each sale can I dedicate to marketing. For example,

• first find what your average sale is, lets say average sale was £500 and after costs profit was £200.
• If our analytics say we have 1000 visitors a month and 1% of all website visitors purchase then this would tell us every 1000 visitors would create (10*200) £2,000 profit.
• If we were to allocate £20 of each sale to get new customers this would give us £200 per month.
• Don’t worry this reduces the profit from £2000 to £1800 as this marketing budget would only have to bring in one more sale a month to break even
• With a budget of £200 a month, every month you should be looking to double your visitors and thus your profit.

Thus, your marketing/SEO budget can bring you more profit, it does not have to be a cost!

Hopefully this has got you thinking so just give us a call on 020 8123 8159 and we can discuss over the phone or arrange to drop in and have a chat.

I know it is only October but people are starting to plan and get ready for Christmas.

You need to be putting the final elements to your Christmas internet marketing plan now in order to make the most of the high volume Xmas purchasing.

In a lot of cases this is:
- a small content change to focus on Christmas,
- a blog entry or article seeding present ideas,
- a new focused adwords campaign,
- or to just increase SEO work already being done.

Why not give us a call 020 8123 8159 to see if we can help. No obligation to purchase anything just a chat to bounce around some ideas.