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Website NI & Crossroads Caring for Carers (NI) get ‘Active In The Community’

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Win conference tickets valued at £180 with WebsiteNI

Award winning, Tyrone based creative web design company WebsiteNI are joining one of their community sector clients, Crossroads Caring for Carers (NI), at Northern Ireland’s premier voluntary and community event, Active in the Community at the Ramada Hotel, Shaw’s Bridge from 9th-10th October 2012.

Active in the Community is a stimulating, information-packed, two-day event for everyone who works in the community or voluntary sector in Northern Ireland.  There is practical help and encouragement through two days of seminars, plus more than 80 exhibitors providing relevant support and advice for this sector.

Managing Director of WebsiteNI Daithi Conlon said,

‘We are delighted to be exhibiting at Active in the Community this year and happy to see so many of our clients using this great resource to help develop their organisations.

‘One of the most effective ways to promote and drive support to a community organisation is through a professionally designed website that is easy for the organisation to use and easy for the audience to find.’

WebsiteNI offers professional and creative websites, working with clients every step of the way to launch sites that are specifically designed and developed with the target audience in mind.

Crossroads Caring for Carers (NI) Director of Projects Richard Best said,

‘Having a professional and helpful website is integral to Crossroads’ services, to support both adults and young carers. WebsiteNI helped us create our Crossroads websites to provide easy access to information for carers and to develop our volunteer base.

‘The experience of creating websites and the guidance that WebsiteNI brought to our website has really helped us get our message across. Working with them has been very easy and we look forward to working with them again in the future.’

‘We are looking forward to attending the seminars at Active in the Community as any support and learning opportunities for organisations such as ourselves is very welcome.’

WIN TICKETS VALUED AT £90 EACH!

WebsiteNI who will be in the exhibition hall throughout the event, has teamed up with Active in the Community to give away two 2-Day conference passes valued at £90 each.  Community and Voluntary organisations can enter at www.websiteni.com A winner will be picked at random and notified on Thursday 4th October 2012.

The conference programme will be headlined by Yorkshireman Steve McDermott who will present an inspirational Key Note address, ‘When The Going Gets Tough!’. Steve is probably the best motivational speaker in the world, having been voted UK Motivational Speaker of the Year in 2006, 2007 and 2009.

Steve’s presentations not only make people think but also laugh. In over twenty years as a professional speaker he has talked to thousands of people about how they can be more successful in life and business. It’s his unique style – half business guru, half stand-up comedian – which has made him one of Europe’s busiest and most sought after speakers.

Download your free exhibition hall only passes or explore full details of the event at www.activeinthecommunity.com

Active in the Community Conference Itinerary

Tuesday 9th October

Key Note Address

10.00 - When The Going Gets Tough!

Twelve O’clock Presentations

12.00 - The Legal Issues – When Organisations Work Collaboratively

12.00 - Responding to Sexual Health, Drugs and Alcohol Issues

12.00 - Make It Pay To Work!

Vision Seminar 1

2.00 - Positive Partnerships for Practical Change

Two O’Clock Presentations

2.00 – Marketing On A Shoestring – For Community Sector Groups

2.00 – Family Mediation in Your Community

2.00 - An Intergenerational Approach

Vision Seminar 2

3.30 – The Opportunities of Social Enterprise

Three-Thirty Presentations

3.30 - Accounts and Good Governance Under the New Charities Act

3.30 - The Diversity Of Learning

3.30 - What Is Sport For Development?

Wednesday 10th October

Vision Seminar 3

10.00 - Bringing Sport and Physical Activity to Your Community

Ten O’clock Presentations

10.00 - Making the Most of Gift Aid

10.00 – Partnering With Age NI in Your Community

10.00 – Moving Your IT System to The Cloud: All You Need To Know

Twelve O’clock Presentations

12.00 – Setting Up A Computer Suite with Internet Safety

12.00 – Healthy Brains: BrainFit Resources For The Over 55’s

12.00 – Managing Your Organisation – Measuring Social Impact

Vision Seminar 4

2.00 - Timebanking – Harnessing Talent from Within Your Community

Two O’clock Presentations

2.00 - Get Away! How To Organise A Great Holiday For Your Group

2.00 - Health & Safety – Protecting You

2.00 - Focus On Fraud

The Last Word …

3.30 - The Next 5 Years For The Third Sector

Enter here to win tickets

Creating Content for your Website

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By entrusting WebsiteNI to design and develop you website, you can rest in confidence that the site will be designed with a fresh and modern look and feel and the code will be developed using search engine friendly coding techniques to help maximize the chances of your website ranking well in the search engines.

But we can’t do it without your help. We need you to provide us with the winning content that will deliver two results:

  • Content that will get your website ranked when people search for your product
  • Content that will encourage your prospective customer to “raise their hand”

By providing us with content that delivers on these two results, we can deliver a website that will act as a 24*7 lead generation tool helping you to win more business. While the appearance of a site needs to be professional and attractive, if the information you provide is dull and uninteresting your site will never attract very many visitors and it will be unlikely to help grow your business.

So here is our quick guide to creating winning website content:

- Think about Search Engines First



Traditional marketing will always tell you to put the customer first, but when it comes to websites, we would advice putting the search engines first; it doesn’t matter how customer focussed your content is if no-one can find it. Create a list of key phrases that you want people to find you for and try to work these phrases into your content as much as possible.

5+ Work in your ‘long tail’ key phrases

There is no point in trying to be No1 for extremely competitive ‘generic’ key phrases (e.g. ‘restaurant’). By focusing on longer key phrases (e.g. ‘Italian Restaurant Lisburn’) you are more likely to success and the user who uses this phrase is more likely to be interested in your particular services. For example, on our own website we added a section at the bottom of the homepage ‘Website Northern Ireland is based in Benburb just outside Dungannon, Co Tyrone. Within easy reach of Armagh (6 miles), Portadown (15 miles) and Belfast (45 miles), we will happily travel to anywhere in Northern Ireland to meet our clients.’

The casual browser might think this content was written for the user, but its main purpose is actually to tell the search engines that we are interested in people using phrases such as ‘Website Design Dungannon’, ‘Website Design Tyrone’

- Create Useful, Detailed Information



Think about it – when you visit a website you are looking for useful and detailed information and that is exactly what you should provide for your visitors. Don’t disappoint them by giving them one measly paragraph on your about page. Instead, inspire them with the history or your company, information about company management, your mission and your values. It’s always better to over deliver rather than under deliver. If you are describing your services, don’t just create a boring bulleted list. Instead, go into detail about each service and how it can benefit your customers.

- Make It Easy to Understand



The last thing your visitors want to do is whip out a dictionary to look up every other word. Make sure you are using easy to understand language and don’t just assume that your visitors know everything there is to know about your industry and products. Spell things out in plain English so someone who knows absolutely nothing about what you are talking about can “get it” quickly.

- Use Keywords



One of the ways that people will find your website is through search engines such as Google and Bing. One thing you can do in order to help your site to show up in search engine results is to use keywords in your web copy. A keyword is a word or phrase that someone might type into a search engine to find your business or organization. An animal shelter from Connecticut, for instance, might include these keywords where relevant throughout their website text: Connecticut animal rescue, animal shelter, pet adoption, pet grooming, dog adoption, cat adoption, etc. You don’t want to overdo it, in fact if you use the same word too often you could get penalized by the search engines.

- Don’t Just Recycle Your Old Content



Clients ask us all the time if we can pull the content off of their old website or brochure and just paste it into their new website. Recycling old content without at least looking it over is just a bad idea – trust me. When you are creating a new website you have a great opportunity to refresh your old content that may have become dated (such as product lines, pricing, locations, etc.). Obviously it’s alright to reuse some of the content from your old website or brochure but you should check it over to make sure it’s up to date, well written and doesn’t contain any typing errors.

- The Importance of Great Headings



You have some great tools at your disposal to make your content more visible to search engines and more interesting to your visitors. One of those tools is your Heading tags: Heading 1 (h1), Heading 2 (h2) and Heading 3 (h3). Each page you write content for should have one main heading which you should style with the Heading 1 tag. For search engine purposes you should only use Heading 1 once per page because it tells the search engines what that page is about. For other headings one your page you should use the Heading 2 and Heading 3 tags depending on the importance or level of each heading.

Put some thought into each heading that you create. It should be something that is catchy and that draws your readers in. If a page has a lot of text content, people will generally scan the headings of the page to find what they are looking for.

- Submitting Your Content to Your Designer



Once your content is done, you’ll want to get it to your designer in a way that is easy for them to use. A great way to do this is to type it up in a single Word document and email it to them. You should be sure to clearly state which page the content is for. Alternately, if it’s easier for you to create a separate document for each page you can do that as well.

Get online with Broadband NI

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We have just completed a website facelift on the popular Broadband NI site.  Focusing solely on broadband within Northern Ireland, Broadband NI explains what broadband is and how to get it.

broadbandni

There is also an easy to understand comparison between the different internet providers with reviews specific to each provider.  We added functionality so you can share your own dealings with installing and using their internet services.  This has also been extended to the mobile broadband and bundle packages pages on the website.

Another unique feature we developed is users can now add a WiFi hotspot listing to be added to the database, and be displayed on the WiFi hotspot page which has been customised to allow various search and sort filters.

Broadband NI is a valuable resource of information and reviews for accessing the internet in Northern Ireland.

Visit Broadband NI

Search Engine Marketing – Real Time Results

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Google makes its money out of advertising – so it should be no surprise that this is one of the areas where it focuses much of its product development resources. Google Advertising (Adwords) allows the customer to have complete control over what ads they show, what keywords they show up for, how much they are prepared to pay per day, and how much they are prepared to pay per click.

It gets better – Google Adwords is now fully tied in with Google Analytics – the all-singing all-dancing web statistics service. The result of this is that you can now get pretty close to ‘real time’ Return On Investment feedback on your online spend. This is especially true for companies selling products directly online;  Say you spend £10 on advertising one morning – and as a direct result you generate 3 new sales worth £15 – you instantly know this is probably worth spending a bit more money on. If on the other hand you spend £40 over the course of the day but get nothing as a result – then you know that you are doing something wrong and its time to take a step back and re-evaluate before spending any more. This instant feedback makes Google Adwords a very useful tool for Search Engine Marketing.

Getting started with google analytics is dead simple – and if you look around you might even find a free £30 voucher to get you started!

Website NI E-Marketing service launched

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After several months of research and development, Website Northern Ireland is delighted to announce the launch of our new emarketing tool.

Speaking at the launch of the new service,  Daithi Conlon (MD) commented:

“Early client emarketing campaigns had been carried out on an ad-hoc basis, but in the face of consistent customer demand we have now developed a top-of the range emarketing tool to help our clients to stay in touch with their customers in a cost effective way.“

The new websiteNI emarketing tool provides clients with an easy-to-use interface for reaching customers, as well as a wealth of metrics such as how many people opened your emails, what links they clicked, bounce rates, who unsubscribed, and much more about the effectiveness of your campaign.

WebsiteNI Launch E-Marketing Tool

WebsiteNI Launch E-Marketing Tool

If your company could benefit from staying in touch with your customers in a cost effectice way, then contact us today to find out more about Website Northern Ireland e-marketing service.