SEO? Forget about the tricks. Try working on your content

Whenever we design and build a web site, the question of web traffic comes up.

‘What do you think about SEO? How are we going to get better results in search engines?’

Now, there are some things you should absolutely do to try and improve the likelihood of your site being found, but they aren’t complex and good clean code, clearly labelled, will help.

Beyond that, it seems, there’s widespread belief in something like a Harry Potter solution to the problem. Sadly, on the web as in life, wizardry isn’t the answer. Instead, try hard work and perseverance.

View your website like a magazine, competing for readership, rather than an annual report or a corporate brochure and you’ll be getting on the right track. If people want the content you provide, you’ll get more traffic, more comments on your blog, more engagement with the market, and that’s what you built your web site for, isn’t it?

Three important steps:

- measure traffic all the time. Only when you know what’s happening, can you do something to improve things
- add a blog, and use it to provide advice, help and encouragement, based on your expertise
- keep updating content in the site. Add current testimonials that illustrate how your products or services add value to your clients

Doing these three things continuously will do more than any amount of ‘wizardry’.

Source in Your Office?

Anyone who has been to one of the Source food outlets – there’s one in Chiswick Park, another just outside the railway station in Richmond – will know about their great range of food for lunch. Source not only provide salads, sandwiches, paninis and wraps, but also have a range of hot food at very reasonable prices.

Source in Chiswick Park, now delivering food for office meetings and lunches

Source in Chiswick Park, now delivering food for office meetings and lunches

What people don’t know about Source is that they also provide a wide range of in-office catering options – from food for a breakfast or lunch meeting right up to (if your company is of a sufficient size!) having a tailor-made Source outlet of your own, serving your office staff exclusively.

Source have been working with Wild West Design for some months now, concentrating on improving signage and display, and beginning to publicise the in-office catering options that the company provides.

Now, Wild West is beginning to build a new commerce-enabled website, that will help its many office customers to order food for meetings and lunches direct from their office desks. We’re hoping that the site will be live in a few weeks from now, but until then, you can order by phone or popping in to one of the Source outlets in person!

Phone Source in Richmond on 020 8439 9866

Phone Source in Chiswick Park on 020 8994 1590

IT sales leads? You need INCo

The new INCo website

The new INCo website

INCo are a sales lead generation company, pure and simple. They work – through telemarketing – for all kinds of IT and Consulting organisations. As they point out, there’s no magic to what they do – they apply a straightforward method in a totally methodical way. And that produces results, for big, household name companies and products, and for newer, emerging ones too.

Now, with a smart new website (designed and implemented by WildWest Design), and an active blog that addresses some of the very current sales issues that they confront on behalf of IT and consulting companies, they are ready to take the next steps in their development.

Already, they have taken the INCo method right to the top of organisations in the Times top 250, and working to address C-level exectutives, have proved that they can develop strategic opportunities at very high levels within the largest companies.

INCo's business is sales lead generation for IT and Consulting companies

INCo's business is sales lead generation for IT and Consulting companies

INCo work to provide forecasting data too, and many different types of company (software, services and hardware among them) are finding real benefits from getting real, intelligence-based knowledge of market potential, in both the short- and medium-term.

For more on what INCo offer, visit their new site at www.inco-online.com

BTG Pactual wins Best Global Macro Fund

Capa2We’re sending our best congratulations to our clients at BTG Pactual.

BTG Pactual last night won the EuroHedge award for Best Global Macro Fund in 2010. They were awarded their prize at the prestigious EuroHedge Dinner.

BTG Pactual a Brazilian-based investment bank, the largest in South America. Wild West has been working with BTG Pactual for some time, helping them with stakeholder communications and other issues where our design skills have real value.

Altassets says Stock Spirits for sale – at £1bn

Orzel vodka - becoming popular in the USA

Orzel vodka – becoming popular in the USA

According to a report in Altassets magazine, our client Stock Spirits is up for sale, with an asking price of around £1bn. Stock manufactures branded spirits from sites in central Europe, including its best-selling Czysta de Luxe and Orzel vodkas.

Stock is owned by investment company Oaktree Capital, who are apparently keen to cash in on the progress that Stock has been able to make over the past few years.

Stock was just beginning its remarkable transformation when we helped the company revitalise and define its logo and logo useage. We also designed and built ten websites for the various operating companies around Europe, all with a common look and feel, but allowing for regional differences, one of the most important of which was language. Several of the sites allow viewing in two languages, some in three, but everything has that consistent and high-quality look that Stock were aiming for.

We’d like to think that at least some of that £1billion is down to the classy websites we provided for each of the group companies.

Go to www.stockspirits.com for more.

Website maintenance – a different view

Web maintenance and updating is one of those subjects that splits clients down the middle. Some of them just say, “You do it,” and we do. Others say, “No. We’d like to have the opportunity to update some or all of our site.”

Our 'Dynamics in the Cloud' website for Tectura was built using WordPress.

Our 'Dynamics in the Cloud' website for Tectura was built using WordPress.

Those in the latter group, sometimes have a different option (if we know that is what they’re going to need from the outset!); we can build their site (or microsite) using the wonderful toolset provided by WordPress.

This blog is (of course) built in WordPress, but there are plenty of customised WordPress sites all over the world that you would be hard-pressed to spot, and because WordPress was built for bloggers, it is amazingly easy to update – even for non-specialist users like me!

WordPress gives those who want to have it, complete control over the pages that make up their site. They can add graphics, sound or video. They can provide links to other pages and other sites. Best of all, they can provide the complete information on a page that will help it to be found by search engines very easily.

Sites built in this way are ideal for a topical occasion (a product launch perhaps or a sales conference) and because they are so easy to add to or amend, marketing and PR people really like them. Especially when the new site can be shown to really add to traffic – and, yes, you get an inbuilt traffic monitor too!

If you would like to find out more about this option, please get in touch.

Just heard…

The Barclays Premier League debit card, designed by WildWest

The Barclays Premier League debit card, designed by WildWest

….that our design for a Barclays football Visa Card is being introduced throughout Africa. This is the latest in a number of promotional resources we’ve designed for Africa, where Barclays has a big presence and football is very popular.

Barclays Footy Goes YouTube

Barclays Football TV

You can follow the official sponsor of the English Premier League now on Twitter (search for Barclays Footy) and you can see all the great things that Barclays are doing for the game on YouTube too.

The Barclays Premier League has to be one of the most popular national leagues in the world and Barclays is helping to bring it closer to more and more international audiences.

At Wild West, we’re incredibly proud that our design work (in electronic and print media) is now being seen by huge numbers of people around the world, and helping to underline too our status as a great source of design in the world of football, sport and sponsorship.

Barclays football is also on the web (of course!) at www.barclaysfootball.com

Promoting Money Skills to Students

This brochure was part of a pack introducing Barclays Money Skills weeks to collegesPromoting financial awareness to students may not be the easiest task in the world, but now more than ever, it’s essential that students stand on their own two feet financially, and understand the implications of their financial decisions. Adding expensive overdrafts to a debt mountain of loans may feel like something to be worried about later, but debt can add up to a big burden for later life, or worse, if spending and debt get out of control.

Full marks then, to Barclays for extending its already huge and wide-reaching Money Skills programme - a programme designed to educate the underpriviledged and the needy about financial management – into colleges, to help their students.

Student life can be stressful enough without money worries, and out of control debt can have a marked impact on health, on the ability to study effectively, and most important of all on college drop-out rates. Barclays Money Skills weeks provide important lessons, for student life and for the life of work that follows.

Wild West are helping Barclays promote their Money Skills programme and in particular their Money Skills weeks, through promotional work like that illustrated here.

Rumours of a celebration?

Stock's international sales are growing fast, thanks in part to our website

Stock's international sales are growing fast, thanks in part to our website

According to press reports, our clients at Stock Spirits are planning to launch an IPO sometime next year. Of course, we can’t comment on rumours, but if you do feel like a celebration, you will find some excellent cocktails on the Stock Spirits website!

We’ve designed and built websites for Stock in its corporate guise, as well as dual- and sometimes tri-language sites for the Stock operating companies around Europe (Italy, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia) and in the US, as well as a site dedicated to their growing international sales portfolio.

Stock came to us via their corporate PR agency, and we’re looking forward to providing great value and great presentation as they extend their global reach still further into new countries.

The Stock Appletini. Find the recipe on the website

The Stock Appletini. Find the recipe on the website

And of course, if you feel like a celebration, you could hardly do better than the Stock Appletini. You’ll find the recipe (with some others that use the great Stock range of branded drinks) on the Stock Spirits website.

Stock Spirits continues to win major international awards for its spirits brands, which combine traditional methods and high-technology in terms of production and quality control to achieve remarkable results. No wonder that Stock is rapidly becoming central Europe’s leading producer of branded spirits.