- Home
- Blog
Neil Turner Software Blog
This is the blog of Neil Turner Software. Here we will give news of projects that we are currently working on and our thoughts on anything that takes our fancy in and around the internet industry.
Wednesday 03 March 2010
Hawthorn Environmental Services goes live
We have just lauched the new website for Hawthorn Environmental Services. Hawthorn Environmental Services provide help to businesses and consumers to become more green and in the process save money on their energy bills.
The company already had a website, but it looked dated and was hosted in a content management system that had too many features for the site. We took the site, gave it a fresh modern style and put it into our own simpler CMS.
Monday 15 February 2010
Pushing Hard On A Number Of Websites
It's been a while since our last blog because we have been working hard on a number of projects.
We are nearing the completion of a redesign of a new client's website - they provide advice on sustainable solutions in the domestic and business environments. The new website that we will be launching by the end of the month is a vast improvement on their current site.
We are also building an ecommerce site for a local ladies fashion boutique here in Gerrards Cross. Our designers have done a fantastic job on this one and we are looking forward to launching this online boutique later this month or early in March.
Finally, the large system specification document that we have been working on for a change to the Premia Solutions system has now been completed and development of the specified changes will start shortly and will keep us busy until late March.
Thursday 21 January 2010
Keeping your website up to date with latest news
The recent cold and snowy period caused much disruption to business, transport and schools. It was during this spell websites were used to keep people up to date with the latest information such as weather, delays and affected opening times. However we learnt first hand that some businesses are still not using their websites effectively for relaying important information even though the tools should be readily available to them.
The nursery that one of our children attends has had a website up and running for about six months now. It’s a flash based site that shows the standard information about the nursery, its fees and contact details. It’s clear that the target market for the website is the parent looking around for a nursery (however not optimized well at all - even for their name) rather than parents of children that already attend.
During the snowy period the nursery staff experienced problems getting in to work and consequently there were a number of days when the nursery was closed or had amended opening times. Getting news about whether the nursery was going to be open and closed was difficult - usually the news was received by the parent calling the nursery just before leaving home in the morning - and then only if the call wasn’t engaged or even worse going through to voicemail. On one occasion the news was relayed by a note that had been put up on the front door of the nursery.
We found it a shame that the internet hadn’t been used more to make disseminating the closure news easier for both the nursery and the parents. Effective use of the nursery’s website could have meant that latest news was shown to parents on the home page - being able to change copy on a website home page at short notice should be possible for all businesses and a business that cannot should really be asking questions of their web designer.
Other solutions that could have worked equally well that immediately spring to mind are a global email to the email addresses of all parents. Email lists like this are not difficult to maintain, emails are quick and are effectively free to send out. Maybe even a Facebook group in this age of social networking, or finally, even though a cost would be involved, could be automatically sending a text message to each parents mobile phone.
