the little green blog

Ongoing working relationship

fuzzylime has been working with Fife Council again. We're always banging on about how we like to maintain a close relationship with all our clients but realised we don't really tell anyone about it!

The team at Invest in Fife approached us to be involved in two very different projects.

The first was to custom-code a property search for their land and property team. They had been subscribing to a commercial service but found that it did not meet their requirements and provide the service they required. We were able to provide an add-on to the content management system to meet their precise needs.

The second project was a filming project to provide a series of videos for the Invest in Fife website. fuzzylime was asked to manage the project – approaching potential companies, briefing the interviewees, conducting interviews and overseeing the filming days and travel arrangements.

We worked with cameraman Alan Dickinson to produce and edit the footage. The resulting films are on the Invest in Fife website. The films covered topics such as the quality of life in Fife, education and the skilled local workforce.

SEO - the ethical way

We are often asked for advice on search engine optimisation - it being the buzz phrase of the moment. When we set up our sites we always work hard to ensure that the site is as optimised as possible without employing 'black hat' methods of cheating Google and other search engines.

We always advise against this method as it only provides a quick fix and a site will be penalised if Google finds out.

Too often sites are written for search engines and not for people and at the end of the day the SEO may get you the visitors but they are going to be completely turned off once they get there and that's not good for any business.

Try to keep the copy on your site interesting and relevant, keep your site updated regularly and make sure the important words are in the right place. If people enjoy visiting your site and it is user friendly they are more likely to come back and recommend it to friends.

This is a point which is well made (strong language warning for our more sensitive visitors) by Matt Gemmell on his blog - definitely worth a read before you decide which SEO hat to wear.

Cheers

We were delighted to be approached by Philippe Larue of L'Art du Vin to completely revamp their website. After all, we love wine - it was a match made in heaven!

L'Art du Vin had an existing website but it was outdated, had an over-complex menu, was difficult to update and use and had a very clunky e-commerce system that didn't make it easy to buy the lovely wines on offer.

We completely redesigned the site to make it vibrant and uncluttered and installed our own e-commerce software to make the buying experience a simple and enjoyable one for visitors to the site.

There is a lot of fascinating information on the new website and it is now easy to find.

Why not have a look? fuzzylime accepts absolutely no responsibility if you spend all your money on lots of wine. You would absolutely not catch us doing this - hiccup.

Solar shift

Those of you who have been paying attention may remember we launched a website for Thermal Coatings earlier this year. As always, we like to keep in touch with our clients and when the company was looking to expand into a new sector they picked up the phone to fuzzylime.

The new venture is called Thermal Solar Energy and the brief was to retain some of the branding from Thermal Coatings while ensuring the new company identity reflected the new business. The website also needed to be set up quickly as the company was keen to get started.

The Thermal Solar Energy site retains the parent company's colour scheme and logo but the website itself is much brighter and more suited to the subject matter.

The site had to provide a lot of information to prospective clients but also remain easy to use and navigate.

Have a look and see what you think.

Time for a holiday

We were approached by voiceover artist Derek Smith who was looking for some help to make the words on his website more appealing.

As well as working as a successful voiceover artist, Derek's background is in travel and it was the content on the travel page that he was particularly concerned about.

We met Derek and talked to him about his fascinating career and travel history before sitting down to write about his experiences to help promote the travel expert side of his business.

It was lovely to take a virtual holiday around the world but we are more than inspired to take off on a real holiday soon!

If you need some travel inspiration, take a look.