the little green blog

Inspiring and brave

fuzzylime was delighted to nominate The Emma Cameron Foundation as Scottish Women in Business's charity of the year.

The foundation was set up earlier this year after Emma died of cancer aged 11. It was established to make a difference to the lives of children and their families after a child has been diagnosed with cancer.

Emma was a bright bubbly and brave child who lived life to the full and even attended school (including an outdoor education camp) until just 10 days before she died.

Her father and sister want to help other families as they have seen at first hand what can bring a smile to an ill child, what can make going to school easier and what can make life easier for the whole family.

The Foundation is actively working with care providers and has identified vital services that are not available for paediatric patients that would be available for adults - it is hoped it will be able to help fund these as well as many other projects.

It was announced at last night's SWIB event that the charity had been chosen as the charity of the year. The charity will benefit from raised awareness and donations from every SWIB event and the proceeds of two raffles.

Julie Gemmell, the voluntary fundraiser, gave an inspiring and emotional talk about Emma and what the foundation hopes to achieve.

Please have a look at their website and like them on their Facebook page.

An engaging site

We've been working with Engage Renfrewshire on upgrading their site to add new features and the updated version is now up and running.

The organisation contacted us with a number of features to be added to a small site that was set up when Engage Renfrewshire launched in April 2011. The site's design was to stay intact but the body required a news section, resources system and a database of volunteering opportunities.

Staff were also keen to get the upgraded site launched as quickly as possible and we were able to deliver all the features that were required in a short timeframe.

We also showed members of the organisation how to manage the site going forward through our CMS. Much of the content already on the site at launch time was loaded on by Engage Renfrewshire staff as they picked up how to use the system.

Why not take a look? You can also find out more about the project in our portfolio.

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.