It seems like a long time ago that we were sat sat on Weymouth beach enjoying the sun, sipping pina coladas and getting through gallons and gallons of sun cream . . . about six years ago!
Even though the summer was a whitewash we managed to keep busy and have some fun whilst we were at it. We launched the Allsave mobile app on three platforms inclding IOS and Android, launched several mobile versions of websites and got the first user (Flying Flowers) live on the Hephalump api.
The new Big Tall Order website went live, a long time in the making. Although it is a great looking website its really stands above the crowd in its search engine freindliness, gaining page one listings for most search terms, and its user friendliness through the use of filter searches. It has a very comprehensive backend including stock control, automatic courier notification and full order management.
Bathroom Supastore is seeing doubling of its monthly orders and we won lots of new clients including Firework Nation, F1 Bathrooms, The Organic Hamper Co and Zuma foods.
We’ve also booked Jamie Oliver’s Italian for our Christmas shindig.
We have won new business for Ellenborough Park Hotel, Zuma Foods, Merlin Cinemas, Steve Blake, Signworld, Atkins and the Flags & Heraldry Committee. We have also been kept very busy by our existing clients including an API integration for Hephalump.com and a mobile app for Allsave. Oh and Wired turned 11 last month (so Happy Birthday to us).
With all of these lovely clients keeping us busy we have had to recruit more staff, so welcome to the team Steve and Andrew, you are going to be busy. We are always on the lookout for great talent so if you’ve got what it takes get in touch.
As a result of the recent Google changes one of our online retailers saw their conversion rate drop from 4% to 2%. We have spent a lot of time rewriting content and getting good quality inbound links as well as AB testing some key elements of the purchase path. It was very scary there for a while (for both us and the client) but we are pleased to report that the conversion rate has been steadily increasing as a result of our work and the average conversion rate over the past week has been a whopping 8% . . . now that IS impressive!
Hephalump, the online personalised greetings card service, were featured on Groupon (again) with their Father’s Day promotion. The server enhancements that created a more flexible and immediately scalable solution as a result of the Mother’s Day traffic proved invaluable as traffic and transaction levels rocketed. . . and we didn’t have to do an ‘over nighter’.
The new website for Ellenborough Park went live in May and they immediately saw a doubling in their conversion rate for online room bookings. They were mighty pleased. We are now looking at improving this further but cannot say much here as it is all a bit hush hush. Look out for the Q3 or Q4 update.
Finally WiredCMS 2012 version is nearly ready to roll. With improvements to the look and feel, speed, image/file storage, SEO/social, and better analytics integration we are sure this will keep us ahead of the game.
No repeat of the successful jolly to Cheltenham in March I’m afraid, but we do have an exciting outing planned for September and I think the team are taking me out for some drinks this coming Thursday . . . or is that me taking them out . . .
It has been a busy start to 2011 at Wired Media with several new contracts won, a customer fulfilling more orders in a day than they had in the previous two months, lunch at the Lords and a trip to the races!
Where to start. We came back from the Christmas break (seems like so long ago) having to hit the ground running in order to deliver the Gifted of London website and make a start on the web design for Big Tall Order.
We have since won business for Ortho100, Bathroom Super Store, Broad Street Properties, Byron Bay Cookie Company, Team Pixie, 2000 Television and Artscrum. We’ve also had mountains of work from our current customers.
Hephalump, the online card personalisation service, were put onto Groupon (again) in the run up to Mothers Day and cleared an unprecedented number units over a weekend. As they had only expected to sell only 10% of this number (which was actually triple their normal daily average anyway) it meant we had to equip the web servers to handle an unprecedented amount of traffic with literally a days (and nights!) notice. We replaced the existing one server with five servers; a load balancer, 3 web servers and a database server. We are happy to say that all orders were fulfilled via the website in time for Mothers Day. More on this in a future post specifically talking about load balancing on the Cloud, the problems we encountered and how we overcame them.
Skin Nutrition were featured in the national press and sold 4,000 units of ‘Pure Potion Skin Salvation’ in one week. The servers handled the traffic with ease and there were no issues to report (other than a modification to their cms allowing them to bulk print orders – as they had so many).
Our Founder and Director, Tom, was invited to the House of Lords by Charles Ashburner of mrflag.com to celebrate the marking of the permanent flying of the Union Flag above the Place of Westminster and met some very interesting people as you’d expect. We are hoping to work closely with several government committees to develop their web and communications strategies in the near future. Watch this space!
A new website for ourselves – number 5 in 11 years. As a digital agency our work always seems to take a back seat to that of our clients so this took somewhat longer than expected, but we got there in the end. We are really pleased with the results and have had some great feedback and most importantly it has improved our search position and increased the number of enquiries, which with the current workload means we will be recruiting again very soon! Any decent web developers, with a couple of years agency experience, want a job? You’ll get free cookies from the Byron Bay Cookie Company, a Mac (or a PC if you really have to) and we’ll fuel you with free Guinness from time to time (see below).
Finally Cheltenham for St Patricks Day, which is becoming a bit of a tradition! A full day of fun in the sun and then back to Bristol for a bite to eat. Any ideas for our next away day? We were thinking of shooting clays . . .
