Digital enlightenment
Hand drawn bespoke videos with captivating sound and voice
over for websites, YouTube and presentations.
You can’t help but to take notice of messages delivered in this way.
See more at http://www.sketchvideo.co.uk
For more information of how Toucan can help further your online success please contact us:
Tel: 01279 871 694
Email: simon@toucanweb.co.uk
Web: www.toucanweb.co.uk
Copyright Toucan Internet LLP 2012©. All rights reserved.
Presentation packaging manufacturer GWD Ltd. of Harlow commissioned Toucan Internet LLP to redevelop their website to clearly display the company’s skills in making bespoke presentation packaging.
The new GWD website complies with all the necessary web construction standards for wide acceptance and the big sequencing display images are rendered using a technology that is functional on iPads and iPhones too as well as conventional PC screens. Don’t underestimate the growing number of users of these i-devices making buying decisions by browsing websites; so make certain your next website is as good on these mobile devices as it is on a desktop computer screen.
Noel Greenwood, Managing Director of GWD Ltd. said “Being able to clearly display our novel and innovative presentation packaging designs to customers is so important and the new website from Toucan does this so well.”
See www.gwd.ltd.uk
If you are looking for a reliable business class website development, please have a chat with Simon @ Toucan Internet LLP, details below.
To find out more about how Toucan Internet LLP can influence your online success please feel free to contact Simon at the contact points below.
t: 01279 871 694
Copyright Toucan Internet LLP 2011©. All rights reserved.
Many of the points detailed below are on a scale rather than being black or white when comparing one provider with another.
Support
For websites to work properly they have to have an adequate level of technical support at the time when it is needed by the developer and the business. Delays will hinder development and inevitably increase other operational costs.
Toucan Internet’s quality standard is that you will be able to contact a human being who can understand and correct the issue you have or be just one step back from that person. You will always get a human being to talk to during normal UK office hours. We do not use automated call handling, just real people who care and invariable know you as a customer. We also have the patience to take the time to explain the details you need in plain English.
This best summed up by one council who transferred all their hosting to Toucan Internet LLP from a budget web host provider because of the lost hours spent waiting in call queues and alike when technical support was required. They now simply call us and the matter is in hand.
Out of hours we have a Support Request system in place http://toucanweb.co.uk/ti_status_request.php and a notification service for bigger issues at http://toucanweb.co.uk/ti_status.php.
Website Performance
For businesses that require the best possible advantage with Google it is worth bearing in mind that one of the many criteria that Google uses to rank a website is speed of delivery of the web pages and their content. There are two parts to the speed of delivery, one is the quality of the website code and the second is the speed of the server and the supporting network. Our servers are right on the UK’s Internet backbone in a datacentre in London’s Docklands, affording our clients excellent connectivity.
A number of our websites are in the top 5% of the world’s fastest websites as independently reported by Google.
Economy hosting gives the provider a lower revenue and as such they have to max the servers to generate adequate return by putting as many customers websites on a server as possible. At Toucan Internet LLP our competitive business class rate means that we can balance the loads on our servers and keep significant resources in reserve. This is turn gives impeccable reliability and up time plus fast delivery of websites.
Email Services
Invariably the web host provider will be the email provider. With the same level of care and customer support, Toucan Internet LLP provides email services for practically all requirements:
· POP3
· IMAP
· Cloud – Hosted Microsoft Exchange
· SMTP
Plus Toucan Internet LLP supports this with world class email security that screens inbound mail for Spam and viruses including providing an online quarantine box, white & black listing and a daily digest of your quarantine box.
The need to configure your email accounts on your local business servers and devices is accommodated as Toucan Internet LLP has good working relationships with many local IT support companies and liaises with any IT professionals you may already have in support.
Bespoke Services
If your web developer requires additional services, modules or configurations specific to a special requirement, then we accommodate this too, subject to a security audit of the solution.
Comprehensive business class services with personal support
We care about your business.
About the Author
Simon Thomas of Toucan Internet LLP has 18 years direct marketing experience prior to embracing the new Internet marketing channels that emerged in 1995. He heads the multiple disciplinary team of professionals at Toucan Internet LLP supporting clients of all sizes and markets where the client is looking for a professional Internet marketing partner with a long proven track record.
To find out more about Toucan Internet LLP please feel free to contact Simon at the contact points
below.
t: +44 1279 871 694
e: simon@toucanweb.co.uk
w: www.toucanweb.co.uk
There comes a time when the corporate website that once met all your criteria starts looking a little like yesterday’s offerings design-wise and is now missing the mark from a marketing perspective. Tell-tale signs may be subtle such as the visitors bounce* rate increasing as the website fails to convince visitors that you are a worthy offering or the signs may be more obvious in that the website is just not up to date with expected content such as social media integration, compliance with popular browsers and standards or being ready for the mobile market place.
From experience the following is a consolidation of some of the points you may need to consider when undertaking the rework of your website.
Your Objectives
Define the objectives of having a website as once you’ve done this all the subsequent decisions you have to make fall in place as they are either in line with these objectives or they are not.
Your Blueprint
On large projects there can be much detail that really must be concluded before the project starts. Once concluded the entire web development team will understand exactly what has to be delivered and when, and as the website owner you will also know that it will meet your defined objectives.
The blueprinting process often opens up the minds to further specification improvements and content as it encourages all involved to review the finer detail of the website facilities.
Websites that are properly blueprinted have always turned out to be good performers and the relationship between the development team and the customer has been excellent.
Cost-wise; as the project runs to a mutually agreed plan there is far less scope for budget irregularities.
Your Current Website
When you put together your initial website, there would likely have been great thought and deliberation as to what was included and how. Despite the old website now looking dismal beside the competition’s new feature rich website, so many companies will totally disregard the good that is present in their old website. Be very careful not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”. Apart from quality content that may need to transfer to the new website after reworking, the search engines and other referrers will have linked to the pages in your website.
Your Development Team.
In the past your website may well have required the basic skills of a developer and maybe a designer. Consider the content and your aspirations and ask yourself if your current incumbent team is complete and can offer you:
The Internet marketing team you choose for the next part of your journey needs to have a lot more bases covered than was the case a few years ago if you are to rise above the bland mediocrity of basic websites and have a true commercial success.
The Creative Design
This is the most subjective of all the components. Having a professional creative team that understands both design for web and the norms of your market places will undoubtedly make for a professional result that wins business. So many creatives are stuck in the “design for print world” and do not engage with the dynamic medium of a website. With dynamic new technologies such as jQuery and AJAX, webpages are written to dynamically change according to input giving more efficient pages and a much improved customer experience.
The creative team will work with you and your developers to conclude the navigation tree so that your information is presented in the most effective fashion and in such a way that we lead the visitor through the punchy introduction via the convincers to the call to action. If that simple process is not instinctively engrained in the team’s approach then find someone else.
The Platform and Programming
Do not be wooed by a web development team that wants to build your website with some obscure technology. Stay mainstream with all your resources unless there is a very good reason why not to. If you go “off piste” then you’ll find that there are fewer developers prepared to take your website on with a technology that they do not support and fewer pre-developed resources online so you’ll be paying for bespoke development from scratch for new modules. Examples of mainstream solutions include Linux with PHP & MySQL or Microsoft with ASP & SQL.
Your Online Marketing
The possible routes to market online are now extensive and affordable to all. Have a sound plan in mind that will accommodate all channels including social media, newsletters/mailings, website news, blogging, article publication and other avenues that fit comfortably in your marketing mix. Importantly remember that your website and online marketing are not to be done in isolation and absolutely must seamlessly integrate with your internal systems and traditional marketing. Choose a web development team that understands the benefits of combining multiple channels of communication and better still offers them.
The opt-in newsletter/mailings can be extended further by adding an autoresponder series so that your worthy pre-prepared messages are delivered periodically to your schedule.
Once a website is launched the online marketing offered by your web development team should monitor performance in line with the client’s objectives and the Internet norms and in turn make website changes according to the feedback received. Continuous improvement and following marketing opportunities are key to keeping your website commercially successful for years to come. Keep testing, measuring and improving.
Your Website Hosting
Budget hosting should be avoided; slow servers that are maxed out for profit will cost you dearly. Slow delivery of website content not only turns visitors away but also has an effect on your Google ranking. Your web development marketing company should be monitoring this as one part of your search engine marketing they do for you.
These are just some of the key elements from 16 years of experience and worth considering when redeveloping your website.
About the Author
Simon Thomas of Toucan Internet LLP has 18 years direct marketing experience prior to embracing the new Internet marketing channels that emerged in 1995. He heads the multiple disciplinary team of professionals at Toucan Internet LLP supporting clients of all sizes and markets where the client is looking for a professional Internet marketing partner with a long proven track record.
To find out more about Toucan Internet LLP please feel free to contact Simon at the contact points
below.
t: +44 1279 871 694
For business keen to stay in Google’s favour have been asking questions about the introduction of Google’s Panda / farmer update to the UK on April 11th
“What does Google Panda / farmer mean for my website?”
or importantly,
The first thing you should know is that Google has a set of rules called an algorithm for returning search results. You can split it into two parts. The first part returns all of the pages that are relevant to your search term and the next part ranks them in order of relevance to your term. This is intended to return web pages that you will be interested in on the page one.
The Google Panda update is a change to the way the second stage works. Google has implemented Panda to try and make the way that web pages are ranked more relevant and so delivery better results to you when searching.
Google was under criticism recently regarding the quality of its search results. The cause of this was Spam content in many forms and guises, most notably:
Google is always changing their algorithm to try and make search results more relevant. The reason that Panda has had such media attention is due to its level of impact. Google suggests that the change will impact “11.8% of our queries” (a query refers to a single Google search), which is quite significant considering that Google suggested in 2008 that there were 1 Trillion unique web page URL’s. No doubt this has increased since then. I reference URL’s instead of pages because it is part of Google’s algorithm to evaluate which URLs point to relevant new content vs. repeat content.
Google will never tell the general public the exact working of its algorithms. All they will tell us is the effect that the algorithm is trying to achieve.
In sort the algorithm change aims to identify Spammy duplicate content. The ultimate goal is to penalise content farms and Spammed back links. Do you have an online SEO strategy that involves Spam’like or automated processes to generate back links and content? Chances are that this is the type of thing that will be penalised.
Google wants you to be creating content for humans to read, not search engines.
In some situations Google will also use information regarding the sites that users block to influence how it ranks pages.
Don’t create Spam content to try and hit search results. Write high quality tailored content that will be relevant to what a user would want if they arrived on your page from a search engine.
If you are building back links then try to build them from quality sources that are relevant to the content of the pages that they are linking to.
Remove Spam content from your website. If you have lots of Spam content on your website then there is a chance that Google could flag the whole site as a content farm. If you have multiple landing pages with tailored content then try and make sure that each page is relevant to the user that is likely to visit it; and if possible write something small and customised for every page so that Google can see that it has unique content.
I would recommend that you take the time to read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. They are very open about the standard of websites and the sort of content that they are looking to rank highly.
This change is definitely one that I think is for the general good of the internet. It is going to drastically change the Spam building strategy that a lot of “SEO Specialists” employ and it will put a positive slant towards the SEO marketers who are gaining high rankings through quality copywriting.
I would suggest investing time into writing high quality content is the most important thing here. If you would like advice in this area then contact us at any of the points below and we will get our professional web copywriter who specialises in writing content to achieve search engine performance to contact you.
The Official Google blog post on “Finding more high-quality sites in search”
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html
Web index size:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html
Questions on quality of Google results and spam:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/28/AR2011012807515_2.html
Websites that Google block:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-more-of-what-you.html
Google Webmaster Guidelines:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
Article by Andy Ward and Simon Thomas @ Toucan Internet LLP
To find out more about how Toucan Internet LLP can influence your online success please feel free to contact Simon at the contact points below.
t: 01279 871 694
Copyright Toucan Internet LLP 2011©. All rights reserved.
Intellectual Property (“IP”) affects all businesses in one way or another. In most instances it will be the website that attracts IP protection of some description. IP covers trade marks, copyright, patents and designs. In the case of websites the most likely area that will be of interest to a business is trade mark and copyright. The Intellectual Property Office (“IPO”) website defines “Trade Marks” as;
“symbols (like logos and brand names) that distinguish goods and services in the marketplace.”
Trade marks can be protected in one of two ways, either by registration with the IPO or under the principle of passing off. Registration is a simple process that can be undertaken online via the IPO website and has better protection rights than passing off. Passing off is the common law action where provided you are able to show that, the mark is yours, a reputation has been built up around the mark and you have suffered loss, you gain protection. Obviously the registration of a trade mark makes enforcement much easier.
Copyright protects original work that is created using independent skill and effort and provides the owner of that work control over how it is used. Copyright extends to websites, pictures, articles etc. When creating a website you need to consider who owns the copyright. If it is created in house then the copyright is owned by the business. If the website is created by an external contractor then unless otherwise agreed contractor will own the copyright. You will need to make sure that any contractor who is creating a website for you checks the content of the website for any copyright infringement issues involving 3rd parties such as, the use of pictures or layout of the website.
Copyright only provides protection from someone copying the original works. Should it come to your attention that part of your copyright has been infringed your protection lies in the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. In order to protect copyrighted works through the Courts the first step is to show that there is access to the material in the first instance. In the case of a website this is easy to do. If the work is copied in its entirety then the proof is easy to evidence. In cases where part of the work has been copied or amended the Court will focus on the core of the material to determine whether there has been an infringement. It is a good idea to get a copy of the site you consider has infringed your copyright as it exists at the time, in most cases by printing off a copy. This is to protect against the potential for a site owner to change their site in the future.
For legal queries regarding IP, please contact the author of this article, Tim Carter, who is the
IP expert at Attwaters Solicitors.
t. 01279 638888
e: Tim.Carter@attwaters.co.uk
To find out more about how Toucan Internet LLP can influence your online success please feel free to contact Simon at the contact points below.
t: 01279 871 694
e: simon@toucanweb.co.uk
w: www.toucanweb.co.uk
Copyright Toucan Internet LLP 2010©. All rights reserved.
As part of our service review and requests from clients we have now added email autoresponders to our list of business class services.
This autoresponder service is available free of charge to all of Toucan’s customers who subscribe to POP3 or IMAP email facilities.
The autoresponder is entirely configurable to your needs:
To set up your autoresponder you just need your:
Clients can access their autoresponder at:
http://www.toucanweb.co.uk/ti_what_email_autoresponder.php
To find out more about how Toucan Internet LLP can influence your online success please feel free to contact Simon at the contact points below.
Toucan Internet LLP
t: 01279 871 694
e: simon@toucanweb.co.uk
w: www.toucanweb.co.uk
Copyright Toucan Internet LLP 2010©. All rights reserved.
Florida Fractional Deals is an enterprise that is pioneering fractional ownership of properties in Florida, both as an investment as the market recovers and as a holiday base in one of the World’s most popular holiday destinations.
Mr Allan Dick, the proprietor of Florida Fractional Deals, required a simple one page website plus advice on how to make it impress visitors, but on a very small budget.
He said “We needed to prove principle so the budget was tight for our chosen web developer as this was all upfront investment. Toucan Internet suggested the attractive rotating image gallery with a zoom facility, plus image scrollers further down the originally designed page and a personalised autoresponder to all enquirers.”
This budget website plus the quick logo “was exactly what my business required”, he added.
Simon Thomas of Toucan commented that whilst they typically cater for larger web development projects, smaller enterprises such as this are of interest as they can grow into bigger business with the right support.
To find out more about Florida Fractional Deals contact Allan Dick, see the Florida Fractional Deals website at www.floridafractionaldeals.com
To find out more about how Toucan Internet LLP can influence your online success please feel free to contact Simon at the contact points below.
t: 01279 871 694
e: simon@toucanweb.co.ukw: www.toucanweb.co.uk
Copyright Toucan Internet LLP 2009©. All rights reserved.
St Margarets Coach Hire of Stansted Abbotts has had their website marketed by Toucan Internet LLP and the marketing reports that came back showed a large number of visitors from mainland China.
Keen to capitalise on this, St Margarets chose to include an additional Home Page on their site in Chinese as written and proofed by Toucan Internet’s translators.
Simon Thomas of Toucan Internet says “All too often people forget the possible reach and influence of their website and if St Margarets Coach Hire start to capitalise on the large number of Chinese visitors to their site then the summer may well see them providing bespoke coach tours of the UK to many parties of visiting Chinese tourists”.
To find out more about St Margarets Coach Hire of Stansted Abbotts please visit their website at www.stansted-airport-coach-hire.co.uk
To find out more about how Toucan Internet LLP can influence your online success please feel free to contact Simon at the contact points below.
t: 01279 871 694
Copyright Toucan Internet LLP 2010©. All rights reserved.
9-12 Bell Yard is a leading criminal barristers’ chambers in the City and they chose Toucan Internet as their web designers earlier this year. Apart from the main web projects, Toucan’s creative design team has been engaged in producing a number of items in various media for Chambers, including email campaigns, digital Christmas cards and a hand drawn website.
The annual Chambers’ party aboard HMS Belfast was a real success and Toucan designed and produced the impressive corporate folders together with the event invitations for the night. These designs were based upon a newly evolved logo icon taken from designs that had been created as part of the development work for the Chambers’ new website. 
A Chambers’ spokesman said “We are delighted with the creativity and support Toucan has brought to every project they have worked on so far.”
The folder and modified logo are designed to give great value in that they can be used on more than just one occasion. The generic chambers folder will double as a CD presentation folder for distribution of material such as course notes, whilst the modified dynamic glass effect logo will feature in the forthcoming website.
Simon Thomas, Partner of Toucan Internet said “This is a great example of how a brand identity can be effectively used across different media. Toucan’s strength is that we have all the resources required including creative designers, Flash developers, programmers, systems people and the team approach to make these projects a success for our clients”.
For more details about 9-12 Bell Yard :
Web: www.9-12bellyard.com
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7400 1800
Email: clerks@9-12bellyard.com
For more information or details on how Toucan could enhance your marketing and promotional material please call or email.
Tel: 01279 871 694
Email: simon@toucanweb.co.uk
Web: www.toucanweb.co.uk
Copyright Toucan Internet LLP 2009©. All rights reserved.