Wonder if Lotus do a bike rack?

http://tinyurl.com/5txgrg3

Quality service...

...not

accepting that we had shocking weather, Christmas and New Year and it only had a second class frank, I have to say that 4 days short of a month is taking the whotsit to deliver.

A letter posted in Manchester on the 14/12/10 (c. 30 miles away as the pigeon flies) it landed here at Pigs & Bees towers on 10/1/11 - shocking

Re-MOO-ving stress in the workplace

Picture the scene - farm yard (Longley Farm), snapper (aka Owen Phillips) and willing client (Yorkshire Therapies' Marsha Dawson) - the brief was simple - shoot the client with the cows (not literally), hence demonstrating the intrinsic benefics of massage and complementary therapies to employees in the workplace. Oh no, not a simple thing. Cue relunctant Jersey, nervous yet brave client and intrepid snapper. Needless to say we decamped to a safer enclosure of cute calves. Job done.

The Longley Farm produces some of the nation’s favourite dairy products and the agreed to take an unconventional approach to maximising productivity - enlisting the help of Huddersfield based complementary therapy practice Yorkshire Therapies.

Whether a calm workforce is the secret ingredient in Longely Farm’s delicious products they wouldn’t say, but the massages received an overwhelming thumbs up from Longley’s staff (the cows however now have a deep distrust of anyone with a camera or smelling of tea tree).

Anyone interested in finding out more about how a corporate stress reduction day could benefit their organisation should call Marsha Allen Dawson at Yorkshire Therapies on 01484 664 774 or visit www.yorkshiretherapies.com to find out more about the range of treatments available both off and on site.

Harder-to-read fonts boost student learning

Comic Sans improves learning? Sweet mother of all that is holy tell me it's a mistake...


Harder-to-read fonts boost student learning

Doodletastic

The snow brings out the Auteur in me

Mr Bounce and the SEO experts

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is I don’t know which half.”
John Wanamaker


We were privy to an interesting discussion on SEO and CPC advertising recently. A business owner had a bounce rate of around 50% on their paid for clicks and was quite happy with such a rate. Their previous agency had told them that 50% was the best they could hope for. Now anyone telling their clients that they should be hoping for success must walk with bowed legs when they present their invoices (bolas grandes). Anything that has a 50% chance of happening is not good odds - it's pure chance. Let’s put that 50% success rate into perspective:

Whatever you are bidding for each search term, you are actually paying double for each visitor who explores your site.

People are no more likely to visit a second page of your website than if they were using a coin toss to decide whether they stay or go. How many purchasing decisions do you base on a coin toss?

Finding out why people bounce from your home page is not straightforward. It could be that they find all the information they need there on one page. It might be that they simply hate the look of your site or that your site shares a similar name to another business (the one they were actually looking for) or any other number of reasons. What struck us about the cases in question is that they had been advised to ‘cover all bases’ by sponsoring searches for terms that were distant cousins to their what their business actually offers. The problem with this strategy is that the first thing many visitors to your website will experience is disappointment. Imagine if half the items you bought in the supermarket contained something other than what was promised on the box. I’m looking for X and you offer Y. Yes, someone might discover that they prefer the taste of Y compared to the X they were looking for but does that sound like an effective way to attract new customers?

People no longer search for generic terms. Type ‘used cars’ into Google and you get nearly 250 billion results. Type ‘used cars uk’ and you reduce this to 78 billion. Change it to ‘used cars west yorkshire’ and you’re down to 435,000. Most of us know this yet there are still ‘SEO consultants’ out there advising people to part money for search terms that haven’t got a hope in hell of winning them any new business.

Unlike John Wanamaker, anyone using Google Adwords can quite easily discover which part of their (online) advertising budget isn’t working and make it work. If you’d like to find out how, give us a call on 01484 689 400 and we'll be happy to demonstrate what can be achieved online.