The Client

The Environment Agency is the leading public body for protecting and improving the environment in England and Wales. It’s their job to make sure that air, land and water are looked after by everyone in today’s society, so that tomorrow’s generations inherit a cleaner, healthier world.
They strive to achieve this goal in many different ways; Influencing and working with Government, industry and local authorities to make the environment a priority. Taking action against those who don’t take their environmental responsibilities seriously is another.

The Challenge

One of the issues faced by the Environment Agency is the illegal dumping of toxic and other waste, also known as fly tipping. Aside from individuals who will quite happily dump a shopping trolley in a river, there are ‘organised’ fly tippers, that is, people or illegal carriers who dump large quantities of waste in order to avoid the charges associated with disposing of it responsibly.

The Environment Agency needed an advertising campaign that would not only raise awareness of the environmental and social issues associated with fly tipping. But also make businesses and communities aware of the fines that are incurred for the illegal dumping of waste.

The advertising campaign needed to be designed to appear on billboards and bus backs in the south Bristol area for a period of 6 months during 2007.

The Solution

The designers at Deckchair quickly came up with a few concepts for the campaign. One of the ideas was to show the reality of the fly tipping situation in South Bristol. A lot of the illegal carriers dump dangerous rubbish, chemicals and white goods in the back lanes of residential areas where young children play and could easily be harmed.
Using a young model (Florence, my daughter) and a renowned fly tipping location Deckchair’s creative team produced a hard hitting image with incredible impact to fulfill the brief.

The billboard:

The bus back:

The Result

The campaign has recently been honored at the National Environment Agency Communications Awards 2007 through Clare Rogers (project manager) with an award for ‘best visual interpretation of our brand’, and was short listed from over 100 entries. We are absolutely thrilled with this great result for our client. This of course is aside from the huge success of the billboard campaign itself.

Press Coverage

We achieved good local press coverage for the campaign with articles in The Bristol Evening Post and The Western Daily Press. Also, national press coverage with articles in the Chamber Link Magazine and Design Week.

Bristol Evening Post, Clare Rogers of the Environment Agency and Florence pose in front of one of the billboards in South Bristol.

Western Daily Press use the poster for their article.

Testimonial

Clare Rogers, Campaign Manager, Environment Agency said:
“Faced with the challenge of communicating a message to a hard-to-reach audience, we needed considerable creative input and some fresh ideas, stepping right away from our traditional corporate style. Deckchair gave us a range of great concepts to test on our audience, then delivered the complete package, based on our market research.
It’s rare to find a company so responsive to what you are trying to achieve. The results are stunning and our design has won a communications award for ‘best visual interpretation of our brand’.”

Leaflets

To back up the billboard campaign, the Environment Agency asked Deckchair to produce a duty of care leaflet to be distributed throughout Bristol, Bath, North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire Council boroughs. The leaflet is designed to make people check the waste carrier’s licence of any waste removal services that they employ. Using a model we recreated the typical scene of a ‘man with a van’ collecting unwanted items from a household. The message comes across loud and clear in this neat and informative leaflet:

Promotional

Deckchair also produced a fun and eye catching fridge magnet as a promotional item to be handed out at events to help to drive the message home:

Final Report

Clare Rogers at the Environment Agency asked Deckchair to produce a 40 page final report for internal use to compile the strategies and information for the BREW (Business Resource and Efficiency Waste programme) ‘Cleaning up Bristol’ Campaign. The report has been beautifully put together in a perfect bound book printed on recycled paper.

Do you need creative design for a campaign? Give us a call 0117 9299150 or pop by and meet the team.

Toni 

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What better way to illustrate to you what we can do for your business than to show you a case study of an ecommerce website that we designed and built for a client recently:

The Client

Chew Valley Trees are a long established nursery who specialise in hardy, native and ornamental trees, shrubs, hedging and fruit trees. They are situated at the bottom of the Mendip hills and their 18 acre nursery continues to grow both in size and product range. Their plants have featured at major national venues such as the Chelsea Flower Show, Hampton Court Palace and Westonbirt International Festival of Gardens. Professional and amateur gardeners alike have benefited from their helpful service and knowledgeable advice.

The Challenge

Chew Valley trees needed to reach a wider UK audience in order to expand their selling power. Their existing website was only a single page that wasn’t able to give any idea of the range and variety of plants and trees that they sell. It was also not optimised for the search engines and therefore not being found by a wide enough audience.

The solution

Deckchair quickly produced some initial designs for a full ecommerce website and after discussions with the Chew Valley team, started to build the website. The overall design and layout is appealing to the market sector with plenty of pictures, descriptions and tips. The navigation is intuitive and allows the customer to browse the product categories to easily find what they need, before proceeding to a secure payment system to buy the products.

The Chew Valley team has the ability to update the products, pictures and descriptions easily through a simple admin system. This enables them to add new products themselves and keep the website fresh and up to date. A news section allows them to add interesting and topical information making the website a valuable resource in the gardening and landscaping sector. It encourages their customers to return to the website on a regular basis.

Of course the website was built from the ground up to be search engine friendly and is optimized for niche key phrases such as:
Ornamental trees
Native tree shop
Trees online

They are averaging 150 hits a day and 78% of those are coming through google. The conversion rates from these visitors are very good and improving month on month.

The Result

As a direct result of their new website and it’s search engine positions, Chew Valley Trees is now a flourishing online business and their sales figures have soared. Not only are they reaching a UK wide audience through the website but the company profile has been raised and has increased the number of people visiting the nursery too.

Testimonial

“We could not have been happier with the level of service received. The genuinely friendly approach and sympathetic understanding of what we were trying to achieve were professionally translated into a website that we are delighted with. Nothing was too much trouble.”
Julia Scarth, Owner, Chew Valley Trees.

Are you a business owner who wants to take your business online with an ecommerce website? Give us a call we are happy to talk to you about your options and we can give our expert impartial advice on the best strategy for your company

Toni

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SPA Fine Champagne Ltd, Bath, is a new and dynamic family run company headed by Andy Russell and his two sons Stephen and Phillip.  Andy Russell says: “Our objective is to offer champagne and sparkling wines, fine wines and spirits at competitive prices without compromising the service to our customers.”

Andy approached the web design team at Deckchair to design and produce an ecommerce website that would give his exclusive customers an easy way to order online.

The website has been designed using SPA Fine Champagne’s existing branding, it has an intuative navigation and search feature making the products easy to browse, view and order. The website also features a full content management system which means that the products, catagories and text can all be updated by the SPA team.

Andy gave Deckchair this testimonial: “Deckchair was recommended to me by a personal friend and right from the start of our relationship with Ollie and his team I found them easy and a pleasure to work with. I am a technophobe but Ollie managed to build us a fantastic and usable website, on time and on budget, that even I can use. I will without doubt recommend him to you and will be using him again to build other websites in the near future“.

If you are thinking of setting up an ecommerce business and you would like some advice or guidance give us a call or pop by for a cup of tea!

Toni

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Once you have designed and optimised your website, you need to check your stats regularly to see how well it is working for you. You can then make educated adjustments to your web design or page content.

Sign up to Google Analytics (It’s free) and you will be able to track visitors in intricate detail from where they enter the site to where they are exiting, which pages they are viewing, how long they are on the website. Also, where your traffic is coming from ie referred websites or search engines.

You can set up ‘goals’ on your website so that you can track conversions. For example if you want to know how many visitors make it to a certain page but drop out before they actually buy the product, this is very easy to do. All this and much more, so give it a try!

That’s all the tips for this week folks, have a good weekend!

Toni

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Submitting your website to certain online directories will bring not only extra traffic but good inbound links to your website as well. So, good for your SEO and your business will be found more easily on the seach engines.

I would highly recommend FreeIndex, as their name suggests it is FREE! There are many other useful features on this website; you can add images, testimonials and get your clients to leave reviews on your company profile. Very easy to do

If you write a blog or have a blog based website I would recommend going to Technorati to claim your blog!

Join me tomorrow for your next top SEO tip

Toni

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Once you have written the relevant content for your website (See yesterday’s blog), it is now very important that your Title tags are written correctly and you are making the best use of them.

Your title tag is the heading of each web page that appears at the top of your screen. It is very important that you optimise these by describing the key phrase for that page as well as including your company name. For example a web page describing pink bananas sold by Bananarma Ltd in Bristol should read:

Pink Bananas Bristol – Bananarma Ltd – bespoke bananas Bristol

Join me tomorrow for your next top SEO tip

Toni

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I’m sure no one will disagree with me that Content is still King in Search Engine Optimisation terms. When writing the content or copy for your website you need to keep the focus on your target audience. What are the phrases that your potential customers are using in the search engines?

Spend a little time using a tool like wordtraker and you will see not only what key phrases people are using but also how many other websites are competing for them. (It even has a free trial to get you started!). When you have found your niche key phrases, take the time to write a separate piece of copy that focuses on each one and turn them into separate pages of content for your website.

This is the best way to build up good, relevant content for your website that focuses on what your target market is searching for.

Join me tomorrow for your next top SEO tip!

Toni

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Top SEO tip No. 1 – Domain Name

If you are about to choose the domain name for your business website, then bear in mind that Google will favour a keyword rich domain name. What I mean by this is;
 If your company sells green widgets in Bristol, you will be better off choosing the domain name www.greenwidgetsinbristol.com as opposed to your company name.

This of course is only one factor in your overall SEO strategy and this one aspect alone will not give your website first page Google listings for those keywords. It can, however give you an advantage over your competitors who have a less descriptive domain name.

Join me tomorrow for your next top SEO tip!

Toni

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I was reading this book ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle to my youngest daughter the other night and I was struck by the thought that really this book has become somewhat of an institution. I remember my mother reading it to me as a child and I loved it too.

The illustrations are such a unique style, in fact the whole design of the book is what makes it so memorable and successful. As I’m sure you all remember it has the little holes in the pages that children love to stick their fingers in:

And of course the favourite page that all children want to rush on to because it makes the parent talk very fast! Genius:

I then started to think about other book illustrators whose work has been absolutely instrumental in the success of the publication. For me, when I first read ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ by Hunter S Thompson with illustrations by Ralph Steadman, I was just blown away. How perfectly the illustrations worked with the story, in fact, they made the story for me.

Apply this to Web and Graphic Design

In any graphic or web design project it is vitally important to get the balance and relationship right with the text and the illustrations or pictures so that they are complementing each other. Even if you are designing a simple flyer or leaflet you must apply the same rules;

1. It must be designed firstly to catch your eye and your attention using a sympathetic balance of text, graphics and imagery.
2. Then you must feel compelled to give it a closer look and read it.
3. Then if it has been designed well, the imagery and the message should leave enough of an impact for it to become memorable. Hey presto job done!

Have you got a favourite illustrator? Have you been influenced by the work of someone in particular? How effective do you think a design can be with no illustration or imagery at all?

Toni

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As always at the start of a new year, it is a time for reflection, taking stock and starting afresh with new ideas. I am hoping that 2008 will bring new exciting challenges and adventures for the Deckchair team. One of the main things on our ‘TO DO List’ is to redesign our blog. It is rather uninspiring to look at and it is a bit shameful that it has taken us 6 months to get round to thinking about it.

There are lots of things I think we should include aside from the obvious much needed asthetic redesign. And of course it goes without saying that I would be most grateful for any advice or suggestions from any of you:

1. Add in the Dofollow plugin as Randa Clay mentions in her I follow blog. It will give more incentive to visitors to leave comments as the search engines will recognise the link.
2. Make it more obvious which of the Deckchair team is writing each post by adding an author picture at the top of the post. (might have to do a bit of arm twisting on that one, designers are so shy!)
3. Add a community panel (if that is what it is called?) so that recent visitors and commentors can be seen and can see each other. As on Paul Enderson’s blog Reflections.
4. Add a counter that clocks the number of times each blog post is viewed. This is mainly for my benefit as I don’t get many comments at the moment and it will make me feel better if I see that lots of people have at least looked at it.
5. Add a ‘popular articles’ list down the side of the blog to make it easier for people to get to the good stuff.
6. Add the similar posts plugin as suggested in David Airey’s blog Top 5 essential wordpress plugins.
7. Make it easier to subscribe to the blog.
8. Some of these plugins look interesting on Elliot Swan’s wordpress plugins worth having blog. But still working my way through understanding what most of them are!
9. Search function of some sort to help people find what they are looking for.

I am sure that this list will grow and change as we start the makeover process so watch this space! Again, if you have any useful tips or suggestions we would be most grateful

Toni

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