01/04/2011

Website rebrand with social media for Syngenta Crop Protection

About Syngenta Crop Protection

Syngenta is a world-leading agribusiness committed to sustainable agriculture through innovative research and technology. The company is a leader in crop protection and ranks third in the high-value commercial seeds market. Sales in 2007 were approximately $9.2 billion. Syngenta employs over 21,000 people in more than 90 countries. Syngenta is listed on the Swiss stock exchange (SYNN) and in New York (SYT).

Objective

Take the existing website, add in more functionality, integrate social media, blogs, forums, videos and content from 3 other external company websites into one central UK website whilst meeting the global branding guidelines.

Solution

Over a 3 month period we completely stripped the website down to the coding and rebuilt it from the ground up, into a new corporate looking website, adding in new functionality and personalisation of the site for visitors. Our team integrated our own social media system including forums, videos, photo galleries, blogs and news into the website using our remotely hosted social media solution. Promoted with an email marketing campaign on launch day.

Services

Application Development  |  Branding and Identity  |  Email Marketing  |  Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

16/03/2011

Self Catering Cottages in Clavering, Essex

About Brocking Farm Cottages

Brocking Farm Cottages is a working farm in Clavering, Essex.  They converted 3 barns into luxury self catering accommodation.

Objective

To promote the self catering accommodation, prices and facilities.

Solution

We provided a custom designed website, with booking forms, individual galleries, pricelists all within a stylish rural themed website.

Services

Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

29/11/2010

New website for Hertfordshire architectural design company

About The Sacred Space Company

The Sacred Space Company are an architectural design company offering bespoke architectural and interior design solutions to enable you to create your own personal Sacred Space, based around your individual ideas and brief.

Objective

They required a stylish website to fit in with the companies brand, ethos and feel whilst providing information on their services and previous projects to new and existing clients.

Solution

We provided this with a minimalist, stylish website, complemented with the excellent imagery of previous work in the galleries.

Services

Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

23/09/2010

Public sector leasing tool development

About Siemens Financial Services

Siemens Financial Services Limited is a leading provider of innovative finance solutions to UK businesses and public sector organisations.

With more than 250,000 customers SFS have arranged finance for 90 of the current FTSE 100 companies and more than 50% of NHS trusts and local authorities.

Objective

Siemens Financial Services asked us to design and build a simple ASP online leasing tool for Local authorities which has the functionality to produce, save and amend quotations for various capital equipment.

Solution

Using the SFS branding guidelines the website uses an intuitive process to take the user through the calculation process by keeping the website clean and simple the user can easily navigate to any part of the quotation tool

Services

Application Development  |  Content Management System  |  Graphic Design  |  Web Design

24/07/2010

Car Leasing Quotation Tool

About Siemens Financial Services

Siemens Financial Services Limited is a leading provider of innovative finance solutions to UK businesses and public sector organisations.

With more than 250,000 customers SFS have arranged finance for 90 of the current FTSE 100 companies and more than 50% of NHS trusts and local authorities.

Objective

To upgrade and rebrand the existing online car leasing quotation tool that had been developed, with new functionality and fitting into the corporate guidelines for design and layout.

Solution

The website has many advanced back end features and takes the user through the complete financing process from selecting the vehicle, obtaining, tweaking and saving the quotation through to final invoicing.

Services

Application Development  |  Branding and Identity  |  Content Management System  |  Email Marketing  |  Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design

21/07/2010

Website design for Essex self-catering accommodation

About The Lodge, Felsted

The Lodge in Felsted, is a beautifully converted cottage which were originally part of a former Victorian cattle yard, equipped to the highest standards, yet has kept its old world charm with exposed beams and vaulted ceilings.

Objective

To provide a website that shows off the wonderful facilities at the self-catering cottage and provides information on the local area surrounding it.

Solution

The website we provided has a rural feel, with a photo gallery, downloadable booking forms, and information on the local area, all pages have nice photography of the facilities to showcase the cottage.

Services

Graphic Design  |  Photography  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

16/07/2010

Logo design for Property Management Company

About Inside Out

Inside Out are a small local property management company specialising in all forms of property maintenance.

Objective

To provide a colourful logo and business card that would 'stand out' from the crowd.
The client specifically wanted to incorporate a 'paint splash' effect.

Solution

We created a paint splash effect using Adobe Illustrator and applied this to a black background making for a colourful business card, a touch of class was added by finishing the card with matt laminate.

Services

Graphic Design  |  Logo Design  |  Print Layout

15/07/2010

Logo design for online Baby Product Retailer

About Yummy Mummyz

Yummy Mummyz are an online retailer for baby products specialising in handmade bespoke baby bags.

Objective

We were asked to design a logo and website for their bespoke baby changing bag range. They asked for a clean design incorporating an illustration that could be implemented across a range of media.

Solution

Sourcing an illustration of a baby, this was incorporated with an informal typestyle
and custom tablecloth background to create colourful branding used across all print and online material.

Services

Graphic Design  |  Logo Design  |  Print Layout

08/07/2010

Branding for Siemens Financial Services Ease-e-Lease

About Siemens Financial Services

Siemens Financial Services Limited is a leading provider of innovative finance solutions to UK businesses and public sector organisations.

With more than 250,000 customers SFS have arranged finance for 90 of the current FTSE 100 companies and more than 50% of NHS trusts and local authorities.

Objective

Siemens Financial Services Limited asked us to design a new look for their online leasing tool which has the functionality to produce, save and amend quotations for various capital equipment.

Solution

Using SFS Branding guidelines we produced a clean and easy to navigate front end that makes the quotation process extremely simple for Brokers to complete.

To keep to budget constraints we delivered three main pages and supplied style sheets for the remainder of the website for SFS in-house developers to complete
the project.

Services

Branding and Identity  |  Graphic Design

08/07/2010

Brochure design for Europa Logistics

About Europa Logistics

Europa Worldwide Logistics are one of the largest privately owned Transport and Logistics company's in the United Kingdom, delivering cost-effective freight solutions since 1966.

Objective

We were asked to produce a brochure concept that could be implemented across all of Europa Logistics branding and literature.

Solution

We produced an oversized six page brochure that would incorporate flags of the various countries Europa operate in. While the front cover is eye catching the inside was kept clean and very simple making the key message easy to understand.

Services

Brochure Design  |  Graphic Design  |  Print Layout

08/07/2010

Business Card for e-Marketing Company

About e-Marketing Company

Advertise The Web offer Search Engine Marketing services to a range of clients from medium to large businesses. Their services range from natural traffic marketing such as Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media to paid advertising such as Pay Per Click Marketing.

Objective

To provide a colourful logo and business card that would 'stand out'.

Solution

We produced a four page business card printed on quality stock and making use of matt laminate and gloss UV.

Services

Business Card Design  |  Graphic Design  |  Print Layout

08/07/2010

Logo Design For On-line Worming Club

About On-line Worming Club

Wormer Club provides worming advice, reminder programmes for owners of horses, ponies, sheep, cattle, cats & dogs.

Objective

We were asked to design a logo and website which would have a professional yet informal feel.

Solution

Sourcing an illustration of a worm, this was then taken into Adobe Photoshop and tweaked to give the impression of 'impending doom'! We then applied a modern typestyle and added earthy colours.

Services

Graphic Design  |  Logo Design  |  Print Layout

08/07/2010

Direct Mail campaign for Siemens Financial Services

About Siemens Financial Services

Siemens Financial Services Limited is a leading provider of innovative finance solutions to UK businesses and public sector organisations.

With more than 250,000 customers SFS have arranged finance for 90 of the current FTSE 100 companies and more than 50% of NHS trusts and local authorities.

Objective

Siemens Financial Services asked us to design a personalised direct mail campaign for their car finance and leasing sector.

Solution

We produce an oversized postcard using dramatic stock photography and classic typography. The campaign was designed to drive users to their online car finance and leasing tool which was also produced by Toile Solutions.

Services

Direct Mail Design  |  Graphic Design  |  Print Layout

03/07/2010

Website design and CMS for Thomas Oliver UK LLC

About Thomas Oliver UK LLC

Thomas Oliver UK LLP is a specialist Wealth Management company based in Hertfordshire.  Formed in 2009, their advisers have a collective experience of over 100 years in the Financial Services Industry

Objective

To create a new website for the company that promoted their services and experience in the financial sector, the look and feel of the website had to be financial but not over complicated, allowing the user to quickly find the information they were looking for.

Solution

Our graphic designers came up with 2 concepts, the one we eventually developed uses a combination of blues as the dominant colour range with lots of white space, xml feeds provide the up-to-date stock prices.

The website is driven via a custom content management system allowing the client to update the pages as and when required.

Services

Application Development  |  Content Management System  |  Graphic Design  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

30/06/2010

Website design for Chelmsford, Essex Beauty School

About Phoenix School of Health and Beauty

Phoenix School of Health and Beauty is an established beauty training company in Chelmsford, Essex providing a wide range of courses to experienced and novice beauty professionals.

Objective

To provide them with a website to showcase their training facilities and the wide range of courses that they offer students.

Solution

The website design we provided showcases the courses, broken down into skillsets, with pdfs to download and course dates within the website, the colour scheme is easy on the eye whilst staying professional and fitting in with the beauty industry.

Services

Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

29/06/2010

New web design for UK application hosting specialist

About Digital Pie

At Digital Pie they eat, sleep and breathe hosting specialising in solutions based products, rather than out of the box/off the shelf style hosting.

Providing dedicated servers, managed hosting and application hosting to large croporate clients and to high traffic websites the hosting is all located in their hosting infrastructure in a secure London data centre.

Objective

To provide a website that fits the companies image, industry and technical abilities, that portrays them in the right light to the corporate clients and the smaller website operators.  The website needs to be updated regularly with news and details.

Solution

The website design we implemented uses lots of white space to provide a technical uncluttered feel, driven by a custom developed back end the site is all controlled by the content management system with blogs, news and all pages fed through it.

Services

Application Development  |  Content Management System  |  Email Marketing  |  Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design

28/05/2010

New website for Turkey holiday villa

About Turquoise Property Ltd

Turquoise Property Ltd rent out a holiday villa on Calis Beach in Turkey on the beautiful southern turquoise coast.

Objective

They required a small brochure style website to promote the villa, show off the facilities and booking availability.

Solution

We provided a small, image driven website that shows off the facilities for the villa as well as integrating a booking agencies system into the website to provide live booking availability.

Services

Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

11/05/2010

Car leasing quotation application

About Kia Motors

Siemens Financial Services Limited is a leading provider of innovative finance solutions to UK businesses and public sector organisations.

With more than 250,000 customers SFS have arranged finance for 90 of the current FTSE 100 companies and more than 50% of NHS trusts and local authorities.

Objective

Having produced an online quotation tool for car finance and leasing for Siemens Financial Services we were asked to re brand the system for Kia Motors.

Solution

The website has many advanced back end features and takes the user through the complete financing process from selecting the vehicle, obtaining, tweaking and saving the quotation through to final invoicing.

Services

Application Development  |  Branding and Identity  |  Content Management System  |  Graphic Design  |  Web Design

05/03/2010

New website for Herfordshire sports complex

About Haileybury Sports Complex

Haileybury Sports Complex is set within the grounds of Haileybury School near Hertford, in a beautifully appointed site of 500 acres situated within easy reach of central London.

Objective

They required a website to promote the excellent sports facilities they have to offer, details on the sports clubs using them and events they hold at the sports complex.

Solution

We provided a custom designed website that fitted in with the schools colour scheme, using lots of imagery to show off the excellent facilities and events, a custom content management system was built in to allow them to update the website themselves.

Services

Content Management System  |  Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

24/02/2010

New website for Essex windscreen repair company

About Screenwise Windscreens

Screenwise Windscreens is a mobile windscreen repair and windscreen replacement company covering Mid Essex from their base in Chelmsford. A locally owned business they are dedicated to providing a friendly service 7 days a week to their clients.

Objective

They required a website to promote the services they offered and to help gain them extra work through the search engines.

Solution

We provided a small brochure style website, with search engine optimisation for the areas they wanted to target, imagery was aloso taken of the vehicles whilst retaining the companies logo / colour scheme that was already implemented.

Services

Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

15/02/2010

New website for luxury self catering accommodation near Stansted Airport

About Tilty Priory

The Priory at Tilty is a set of three luxury, sympathetically converted self-contained listed barns in rural surroundings, available to rent on a self-catering basis.

Objective

They required a brochure style website to promote the self-catering listed barns, povide booking forms and pricing information in a stylish way.

Solution

We provided a stylish rural looking website, rich in imagery of the luxury barn conversions, booking forms and information on the area.  We took all the photography for the website in addition to providing the web design.

Services

Graphic Design  |  Photography  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

30/11/2009

New website for Gold Purchasing company in Hertfordshire

About Best Buy Gold

Best Buy Gold in Hoddesdon turn your unwanted gold and jewellery into cash by valuing and purchasing them from you.

Objective

They required a small brochure style website to inform potential clients of what they canoffer, how the valuations work and how to get in contact with them.

Solution

We provided a custom designed website, to fit the gold theme it was stylish, without much clutter on the page, large imagery helped push the theme of the website.

Services

Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

31/03/2009

New website and system for Email Marketing

About Inbox Exposure

Inbox Exposure is a personalised email marketing system with real-time tracking and statistics.

Objective

To implement the email marketing system and a website to promote it.

Solution

Our team of programmers developed the email marketing system from scratch, including the distribution mechanism, real-time tracking and statistics. We then implemented a small brochure website to promote the system with examples of emails sent and the statistics it can gather from campaigns.

Services

Application Development  |  Content Management System  |  Email Marketing  |  Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

24/03/2009

New website for personalised baby clothes company

About Baby Bumbles

Baby Bumbles provide personalised baby clothes and embroidered garments.

Objective

A small site to promote their products and services as well as providing a way to purchase them online.

Solution

We implemented a stylish website, utilising Paypal buy it now buttons as a way for clients to purchase a personalised item direct from the website.

Services

Ecommerce  |  Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design

01/03/2009

New website for national floor screeding company

About Retail Flooring

Retail Flooring is an industrial floor screeding company, working across the UK providing flloring solutions to clients.

Objective

A new website to promote the company, their services, previous work and professional image.

Solution

We provided a corporate looking website with random content areas to keep the pages ever changing and fresh whilst keeping the professional look

Services

Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

05/03/2008

New website for Hertfordshire consultancy

About SAH Consulting Limited

SAH Consulting are a team that will work with you to design and support innovative yet pragmatic solutions that will enable you to unlock the full potential of your workforce, giving you the enhanced performance your organisation is seeking.

Objective

A small website to promote their services and allow potential clients to see what they can offer them.

Solution

A small stylish website was produced with appropriate imagery to complement the content of the website.

Services

Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design  |  Website Hosting

14/03/2007

New website for Essex based car valeting company

About S R Elliott (Valeting) Ltd

Elliott's are a mobile car valeting specialist in Essex offering services at your home or workplace at a time that is convenient to you.

Objective

A website to promote the company, its services and gain traffic / business from the search engines.

Solution

We designed a simple brochure style site, to list out the various car valeting services on offer, and used some stock imagery of prestigious cars to help the branding.

Services

Graphic Design  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Web Design

24/08/2011

As we expand here at Toile Solutions the increase in staff means we can offer even more to other graphic design agencies.We already provide the back end coding / email marketing / hosting for a number of agencies in a white label basis.Helping them turn their designs into functioning websites and providing additional internet marketing services like seo and hosting to their clients.If you are in need of a technical partner to help you with the coding / back end of websites and hosting we would be more than happy to have a confidential chat with you.Please contact us to arrange a relaxed coffee to discuss how we can assist you with your projects.

Neil Meads

Tags: Hosting Servers  |  Website Programming

Keywords: technical backup, partner with design companies, website coding white label

21/07/2011

Today saw the winning of 2 contracts in London.Branding, design and build of a new cms driven website for a voiceover agency.Design and build of a new cms website for a talent agency representing actors and actresses.Both sites will be taken care of in-house by the team here at Toile Solutions.Look out for them in the portfolio soon.

Neil Meads

Tags: Graphic Design

Keywords: new contracts won

16/06/2011

From today we are pleased to announce weve gone full service!In the past Toile Solutions has been focused on internet marketing and programming, in the last few months we have increased the skillsets with some very talented designers to offer much more than just websites.We are now able to provide you with:• Corporate branding• Logo design• Website design• Brochure design• Leaflets• Business cards• Graphic designand more, our team have even designed exhibition stands and larger items, whatever your design needs are we will be happy to discuss them and help where we can!

Neil Meads

Tags: Graphic Design

Keywords: graphic design, full service

18/05/2011

As part of the exciting developments here at Toile Solutions we bring you our new branding.Our new logo has been rolled out across all our systems and websites now.The new logo and branding reflect more of the services we can offer, which we will be detailing in a few days with another important announcement.Its a very exciting time here and will open up many new areas of business for us and you!

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire

Keywords: rebrand

04/04/2011

Today saw the launch of the newly rebranded Syngenta Crop Protection website incorporating Syngenta Seeds and a custom social media system.Syngenta is a world-leading agribusiness committed to sustainable agriculture through innovative research and technology. The company is a leader in crop protection and ranks third in the high-value commercial seeds market. Sales in 2007 were approximately $9.2 billion. Syngenta employs over 21,000 people in more than 90 countries. Syngenta is listed on the Swiss stock exchange (SYNN) and in New York (SYT).Over a 3 month period we completely stripped the website down to the coding and rebuilt it from the ground up, into a new corporate looking website, adding in new functionality and personalisation of the site for visitors.Our team integrated our own social media system including forums, videos, photo galleries, blogs and news into the website using our remotely hosted social media solution.The website was promoted with a launch email marketing campaign and as new functionality is added throughout the next 12 months will be promoted regularly.

News link:  Syngenta Crop Protection website

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Social Media  |  Website Programming

Keywords: syngenta crop protection, website launch, rebrand

09/03/2011

The end of the financial year for many of us is coming in the next few weeks.At this time of year budgets are normally planned for the next years trading, if you would like help with your online marketing planning, whether you are looking at a new design for your website, updates, email marketing, ppc or search engine optimisation we are more than happy to provide help and assistance to plan ahead.Strategic marketing throughout the year can help spread your marketing costs and provide useful milestones to check results in an on-going basis.Doing regular marketing online rather than one big hit is the way to succeed and bring a better ROI for your website.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Marketing Advice

Keywords: budget planning, online marketing

17/02/2011

The programming team at Toile Solutions has expanded again.We welcome the latest addition to our team a talented asp / .net developer with php skills.R is joining us at an exciting time, we have lots happening this year in-house here.Programming is the core skillset here at Toile Solutions, teamed with talented designers we really can offer whatever you need in an online (and soon offline capacity).

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Website Programming

Keywords: new employee, new programmer

23/01/2011

As part of a major hosting upgrade to our London web hosting infrastructure Toile Solutions is now offering a range of low cost virtual servers.Windows 2008 based, our virtual servers offer the perfect server hosting for web designers / graphic designers and websites that need their own server.For web designers / graphic designers our virtual servers offer them the ability to host hundreds of websites with only the one hosting cost per month.For IT companies we can provide the virtual servers on a white label basis and offer support for them allowing you to resell them with mark up and still be competitive on pricing.Our UK virtual servers start from just £44.99 per month for a basic virtual server.Fully managed virtual servers are available along with a pay as you go server engineer service to help keep your virtual server runnning smoothly.For more information on our virtual servers please give a member of our UK virtual server hosting team a call on 01279 216447 and we will be pleased to discuss the options available.Users with more complicated virtual hosting requirements we can customise our hosting to accommodate your virtual server needs.

News link:  Low Cost UK Virtual Servers

Neil Meads

Tags: Hosting Servers  |  Dedicated Servers  |  Virtual Servers

Keywords: Virtual Server, Windows 2008, Low Cost, New Range

12/11/2010

As part of our New Year hosting packages we are now offering 3 months free hosting on all new Dedicated Server, Managed Server and Application Server hosting packages.This offer is available to new customers taking out a 12 month contract for us to supply them with their web hosting on any of these options:-Dedicated ServerManaged ServerApplication Hosting ServerManaged Hosting ServerHosted Small Business ServerThis offer of the first 3 months free will run until the end of 2010.For more information on our hosting services please contact a member of our Hosting Team on 01279 216447.Toile Solutions has a dedicated Server Team, who run our own server hosting infrastructure on our own servers in a top London Data Centre, we do not re-sell anyone else's hosting.

News link:  More information on our managed server hosting

Luke Drewer

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Hosting Servers

Keywords: Managed Server, Dedicated Server, Special Offer, 3 Months Free

19/10/2010

Toile Solutions are pleased to announce a set of special offers for our hosting servers during November.Running for a limited time we are offering 3 months free hosting for all new clients signing up for 12 months supply of a Dedicated Server, Managed Server, Application Server or Managed Hosting.The offer is limited and provided on a first come first served basis.So if you're looking for a low cost start up to your high end hosting then please give a member of our Server Hosting Team a call for more details.

News link:  dedicated server hosting in London

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Managed Servers  |  Dedicated Servers

Keywords: Managed Server, Dedicated Server, Special Offer

23/09/2010

Microsoft has released a preview of Visual Basic for Windows Phone 7.Although the operating system is not yet released this is a step to show us programmers that we can use VB to program applications for the new Windows Phone.Visual Basic or VB is one of the most popular programming languages and is the one of choice for us here at Toile Solutions.VB can be used for ASP, ASP.NET and now Windows Phone 7.We already provide mobile application development and this move by Microsoft offers another opportunity for us to use our existing skill sets in-house to provide mobile solutions.For more information on our mobile application solutions please give us a call.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Application Development  |  Website Programming

Keywords: Mobile Application, Application Development, Windows Phone

08/09/2010

The new Social Media System in beta testing at Toile Solutions is attracting more interest from large corporations.Due for launch later this year, the system has been successfully demonstrated to three interested parties this week, proving the demand is there for our solutions."Easy to use," "Very powerful," "Fully supported solution" these are just some of the comments we received.Our Social Media System is completely stand-alone from your website, we provide all the hosting infrastructure, you just set up the html templates and link into our system using coding provided, its very simple to set up and you can be up and running immediately as we will provide a complete set of templates for you to use, just style them and remove any features you do not require.For more information on our Social Media Solutions and to receive details when we are ready to do our public launch please contact us.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Social Media  |  Social London

Keywords: social media, social media solution

19/08/2010

London web design agency Toile Solutions are proud to support ByteNight, the annual sleep out in London and Cambridge in aid of Action For Children.Each year hundreds of individuals and teams from across the IT and business community spend a night in London or Cambridge exposed to the elements in a bid to raise sponsorship and awareness of Action for Children's work.Company Director Luke Drewer has joined a team to raise a combined target of £2500. Luke says "Action for Children is a great charity which aims to intervene to stop children and young adults being forced onto the streets. I was asked by one of our clients to join in and I happily accepted the challenge. It is going to be a cold night!"More information can be found on the ByteNight website www.bytenight.org.ukIf you would like to donate, please visit our teams donation pageThanks for your support!

News link:  You can sponsor Luke in his sleep out in aid of Action For Children here

Luke Drewer

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Social Media  |  Social London

Keywords: Technology, Bytenight, Sleep Out, Charity

15/08/2010

Today sees the announcement of a FREE internet marketing and hosting review opportunity for Companies with a London postcode.Many Companies could be paying too much for their hosting an/or internet marketing services, our free internet marketing and hosting review will give an honest, third party review of your current set up.We are offering this to give Companies a head start on their online marketing campaigns, now is the ideal time to review your marketing to get geared up for the latter part of the year.Our internet marketing review (only available to London postcode based Companies) will look at your seo, page structure, keywords, content and marketing.The hosting review will look at performance, specification, costs and expandability of your hosting set up.To find out more about our FREE internet marketing and hosting review just drop us an e-mail or give us a call and we'll get the process started.Please remember this review is ONLY available to Companies with a London postcode. We will be offering this to other locations at a later date.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Hosting Servers  |  Search Engine Optimisation

Keywords: Technology, Free, Marketing Advice

12/08/2010

Today saw the finishing of the latest upgrade to our Hosting Facility in London. The last few days have seen a major beefing up and the redundancy of our hosting network and firewalls, plus the addition of two new uber servers to boost our hosting capabilities.At Toile Solutions we have our own hosting team of support engineers, we run our own hosting infrastructure located in a top London Data Centre which allows us to run any hosting configuration we need to. We do not re-sell anyone else's hosting, in fact others re-sell ours!The new uber servers in London have increased our capacity to take on more application hosting and large scale websites.Our experienced server engineers run our hosting with replication and clustering in place for many of our larger clients.If you are based around London and need to host a large scale website or online application, please give us a call to find out about our hosting solutions.

News link:  Application hosting in London

Neil Meads

Tags: Hosting Servers

Keywords: Technology, Application Hosting, UK, Managed Servers

09/08/2010

Toile Solutions are pleased to announce that they are now working in association with Endeavour Technologies to deliver rich, cross platform mobile applications.Working together allows us to bring our web application building experience and our mobile websites onto powerful mobile application platforms. Endeavour has a global workforce of over 200 mobile application specialists and a UK presence.You can now take advantage of our Mobile Opportunity Assessment delivered over a 4 week consultative program where working with Endeavour we can analyse, recommend and execute Mobility Roadmaps.This is great news for us and our clients, adding to our extensive range of services, including Web Application Building, Application Server Hosting, Web Design and Project Management.

Luke Drewer

Tags: Application Development  |  Mobile Application

Keywords: Technology, Mobile Application, Strategic Partnership

10/05/2010

Today sees the launch of www.syngenta-crop.co.uk/mobile - the mobile version of www.syngenta-crop.co.uk.Syngenta, a global chemicals Company could see the value in making their website available to the increasing community of mobile internet users. With the popularity of the smartphone and with Apple's IPhone and RIM's Blackberry having a combined 63% market share it was important to ensure that Syngenta's website was not only accessible but also maintained usability throughout.The mobile version of Syngenta's website was launched at the premier Farmers event 'Cereals 2010' with excellent feedback from the farming community.

News link:  Iphone market share information

Luke Drewer

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Application Development

Keywords: Technology, Mobile Website, Syngenta, Farming

05/05/2010

Following the successful launch of RewardsChart.com back in March, membership is continuing to grow steadily.The free to use childrens reward chart system has so far attracted over 300 new members from around the globe.We currently have members from the USA, Canada, China and throughout Europe.Promoted through the organic search results and video marketing the site has gained a loyal following from day one, without spending big bucks on Pay Per Click advertising.We will continue to develop this online application as a showcase of our skills and it will remain completely free to use for all users.Future enhancements include a mobile version of the website and a dedicated kids area with gamers and learning tools to keep them occupied.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Application Development

Keywords: Technology, Kids Chart, Free Application, Online Resource, Behaviour Chart

28/04/2010

The Product Guide on the Syngenta website was one of the most popular pages on the website with over a third of the traffic hitting these pages, but with a very high bounce rate and exit rates (users hitting the product guide and leaving the website without going anywhere else) it was time for an update.www.syngenta-crop.co.uk/product-guide.aspx was updated last week and already we have seen a difference in the users journey, with the bounce rate significantly down compared to pre-update, and with the amount of time users are spending in the new products it shows that a program of continued improvement can enhance the users experience.Thinking about your users experience when planning out your website project is just as important as search engine optimisation and site structure.

Luke Drewer

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Application Development

Keywords: Technology, Product Guide, Application Launch

05/02/2010

Today saw the launch of our latest social media application.An internal forum and messaging system for the top level Management of a large International Financial Company was launched today, on time and within budget.The system allows top level Management to communicate with lower level Managers they are personally mentoring, as well as the ability to take part in International Management discussions and forums.Hosted on our own infrastructure the system has an internal document library and calendar system, controlled via a custom content management system the system has been given a warm reception by the Managers.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Application Development  |  Social Media

Keywords: Technology, Social Media, Application Launch

02/01/2010

Happy New Year, hope 2010 is prosperous and full of good news.We start off 2010 with the newest member of our team starting work.Yoganadan Prakash is the latest programmer to join our programming department.Experienced in ASP/SQL Prakash is a great addition to our existing Windows programming team who provide ASP/ASP.NET, MySQL and SQL Server solutions.

Neil Meads

Tags: Social London

Keywords: Technology, Seasons Greetings

10/08/2011

been a bit quiet on the blog front last few weeks, there is a reason, weve been working hard!Couple of major site launches and the development of our own internal products.Late September will see the launch of SharpStay a low cost fully featured website system for bed and breakfast, self catering, villa owners and small hotels.Using a template system (or custom design) the site will feature an easy to use, feature rich cms system allowing the site owners to easily:• update the site themselves• upload room details• photographs• room rates• availability calendars• receive enquiries• own domain name• professional emailAnd all for less than 10 pounds a month, so you will always know what your website will cost you and you can update it as often as you like, change templates etc.Full details on SharpStay will be in the news section once launched.This is the first in a series of in-house solutions we will be rolling out on a low-cost basis.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Website Programming

Keywords: SharpStay, low cost accommodation website, bed and breakfast, self catering, villas

19/07/2011

We're all guilty of it, i'll do that tomorrow is a common phrase when it comes to updating the company website.I'll hold my hand up and say "I do it too" its often the least priority in the daily work schedule.But when you actually do the update, like the blog im doing now, it only takes a few minutes, in fact this one is taking less time than the time to drink the tea ive got here!Keeping your website updated regularly will help keep returning visitors interested (theres always something new to catch up on), keep the search engines coming back for new content and help build up your online presence.Using twitter as a feed into the web pages is a quick and easy way to do this, using either a javascript you can place in the page (this doesnt help with seo as the content is written to the browser so is not actually part of the website coding that Google would pick up on) or using a server side script (as we do) we poll the rss feed for changes and cache a copy, then break up the xml, and display within the websites coding.If that sounds complicated, basically we display it on the page in a way Google etc can pick up on it, so an update to twitter, updates all our pages with the new headline.Try and find half hour a week, write a blog or a news item, its time well spent in the long run even if it does seem hard to fit in at the time.

Neil Meads

Tags: Social Media

Keywords: updating your website

14/06/2011

If you operate a large website producing sitemaps and submitting them to the likes of Google (via webmaster tools) is a great way to help get all your pages listed.The XML sitemaps have a limit of 50,000 entries per file, so if you are working on a site (like the one we have been) with 43,000,000 pages, then you need lots of sitemaps.Thankfully the sitemap index file is now here!By using the sitemap index you can list your individual sitemaps in one file (up to 50,000) and just submit that one xml file to google.When you add a new sitemap just update the index and it will get picked up by Google.The xml sitemap index file should look like this:http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap1.xml2011-06-12T11:12:13+00:00http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap2.xml2011-06-12T12:01:27+00:00That sitemap lists 2 sitemaps, so by submitting one sitemap index file to google you can then keep adding and adding to it, without needing to keep setting up individual sitemaps in google.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Website Programming

Keywords: sitemap index file, xml sitemap management

24/05/2011

When you are looking at the keywords for your website when performing seo, do you consider the localisation of them?For example we have been doing some seo for a company recently that provides a service, ie they have to go and physically perform a service at the clients place of work, but their website was setup using generic terms.This meant that although they were getting traffic, if it wasnt in the area they covered then the enquiries were not of use to them.By adding in the area covered, counties / main towns not only do they help come up in the searches people are performing for services within the local area, but also the enquiries that come through are of a higher interest.You may find the page views and visitors drop off by concentrating on the local area searches, but if you need the end client to be within your local area you are targetting them specifically, 10 highly targetted visitors is better than 30 from all over the country.Planning your seo around what your business does is the key to getting results and remember it will not ever be an overnight success, seo is a long term investment of time and money.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Search Engine Optimisation

Keywords: seo, local searches

11/05/2011

Middle day of the Internet World show today at Earls Court, took the team down to London for a look round at the latest industry exhibition.This year it seemed to offer more, there were lots of companies offering the same things, managed servers, hosting etc, but lots more smaller companies offering more niche products (although some we could easily build ourselves if needed!).The magician on the red stand was as entertaining as ever (he's really good, pay a visit!) video seemed to be making more of an impact this year, weve been looking and experimenting with green screens and chroma keying here which was useful to see some of the equipment being used by other companies.Had a good chance to talk to the various payment proessors this year as we have our own specific needs for them later in the year and a chance to review the nominet portal was an eye opener for them I think (we were a bit frank!)So thats that for this year, 2012 will be here before we know it!

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Managed Servers

Keywords: internet world 2011, earls court

13/04/2011

Are you using twitter for your website / product promotion?Ive not been that big a fan of twitter, still prefer emails myself to keep in touch, but the more you use it the more benefits you can see.As a mass talk to your contacts tool its really easy, quick due to the limit on characters and you often get instant(ish) responses back.By embedding the twitter rss feed into your web pages, you can then keep your website looking a bit more fresh and up to date as well.The only word of caution I would employ is how often you post, we all have the one person on our following list who lives on twitter: woke up, getting dressed, brushing teeth, eating toast, drinking tea the volume of messages makes them less enticing to read.Used in the right amount twitter can enhance your promotions, use it carefully and you will build up an audience, if nothing else its fun and easy to do!

Neil Meads

Tags: Search Engine Optimisation  |  Social Media

Keywords: twitter

16/03/2011

Internet world is coming up at Earls Court in a few weeks, are you going?Our industry exhibition can be similar to some, but if you look year on year at the different trends and products on offer, you can see new emerging markets.That is what we look for when we go there, sure theres the great magician just inside the door as always on the "red" stand, very entertaining draws in a crowd, but sometimes its the smaller companies who are providing the new services ahead of time.IPTV, advances in live 3d rendering and others caught our eye last year, theres companies offering the standard stuff: ecommerce, dedicated servers, managed servers etc which is fine (we offer them ourselves!) but the niche markets are the ones of interest.Speaking to the smaller companies gets you talking to fellow developers not sales people and gives you that insight into not only their services, but how you can partner with them and integrate into your own technologies.Maybe we'll see you there!

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Website Programming

Keywords: intenet world 2011

09/02/2011

Email marketing done correctly can be a very cost effective way of marketing.Not only on that initial send out, but by using the tracking of click throughs you can see who is looking at what products and services and use that information in follow up campaigns.Unlike a postal campaign email marketing is real-time and provides feedback, something you cannot do with a mailshot unless you ring up every one and ask them what they looked at, did they read it etc.Email marketing provides detailed feedback: -• Who opened the email?• Which links did people click on?and moreAllowing you to send more targetted campaigns in the future by collating the information together.Sending out the emails from outlook may be a quick way to do it, but you lose the tracking capailities a professionally sent can provide, losing you valuable data for follow up campaigns.

Neil Meads

Tags:

Keywords: email marketing

06/01/2011

The new year sales are in full swing, hope your business was ready for them.Planning your year ahead online can bring big rewards, getting your seasonal items ready ahead of time, building up the search engine positioning in advance of when people will start searching is all part of your online marketing strategy.Making sure you can pre-load the special offers and christmas items ahead of time, will make your life easier and less stressful.Now is the time to sit down and plan the year out, once you have this year done, next year will be a breeze as it will be so similar.

Neil Meads

Tags: Search Engine Optimisation

Keywords: planning your year online

01/01/2011

2011 is here!Happy new year to existing and future clients.Hoping the economy picks up and your online marketing takes off.Big plans here for this year, will be rolling out new services and offerings as the year goes on.

Neil Meads

Tags: Website Programming

Keywords:

25/12/2010

Merry Xmas...Whose looking after your hosting today, making sure its running as it should?Our team are keeping things running smooth as silk.Im not the only one working today!

Neil Meads

Tags: Hosting Servers  |  Managed Servers

Keywords: hosting support

25/12/2010

I'm working too, no let up in service from us over the Xmas period!Merry Christmas!

Luke Drewer

Tags: Managed Servers

Keywords:

13/12/2010

Its the time of year the ecom sites take a hammering...Last minute shopping (or as late as we dare leave it before the delivery wont make it).Most of the big retailers i've been using are runnign fine, one a little sluggish, but still usable.How is your site going? Is it coping with the extra traffic this time of year brings?Loving the way the bigger retailers are very promintently displaying the last order date for guaranteed delivery, very enticing to dive in and make the purchase!

Neil Meads

Tags: Hosting Servers

Keywords: Xmas shopping

12/11/2010

Web hosting companies are ten a penny these days with new ones springing up all the time and design agencies just reselling someone else's services, which is fine to a point, if you have a small brochure style site you are unlikely to encounter many problems.But if you have a large online application, do you really know what servers your website is running on? Who is running the server infrastructure? What security measures do they take and how backups are done (if you are thinking now that you should check to see if your site is actually being backed up, please call us!)At Toile Solutions we own the physical servers we run, and its a big stack of them (I know because I signed the cheque!), all housed in racks in a top specification London Data Centre.Our server team run the servers, firewalls and networking within the hosting infrastructure (we also own and run that hardware.) Unlike many companies who are simply re-selling anothers service, we are in complete control, so can offer whatever you need.We currently run large scale websites delivering 5 million+ database driven pages per month, online payroll and financial applications, e-commerce sites and we are about to start deploying virtualised small business server online. Our server team have done extensive work for large international financial institutes, which means we are also a secure hosting environment.If you are thinking of renewing your hosting or your servers coming round to renewal in an uprgade cycle why not give us a call, we are happy to talk techy if you wish or explain it all in easy terms, whatever floats your boat.I nearly forgot to mention were offering 3 months free server hosting to all new clients who sign up for 12 months..... (ok i didnt really forget i just left if til last for a big ending!)Toile Solutions - more than just a Web Design Agency in London!

Neil Meads

Tags: Hosting Servers  |  Small Business Server  |  Dedicated Servers

Keywords: Dedicated Servers, Virtual Servers, Small Business Server Online

27/10/2010

Question: What Do You Want From Your Audience? Answer: A Reaction?Whether you are looking for your audience to buy your product, sign up to your newsletter or enquire about your services you want them to react - right?There is nothing like getting a reaction than to stir up some human emotion. Example of the human reactions your website would generate could include pain, love, laughter or compassion. An obvious industry to look at would be the insurance industry. They use NEGATIVE human emotion to persuade you to buy into their services - they will show you what would happen if your house burnt down or you suffered a major injury. Our approach is to stick to POSITIVE emotions. My old Manager said to me "If you send me anything in the post, make sure it makes me laugh; it's the only junk I will bother to read!"Have a think about your own products and/or services and think about what emotions you can stir up whilst ensuring there is a call to react.

Luke Drewer

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Social Media

Keywords: Website Content, Online Emotion, Visitor Reaction

22/10/2010

It may only be mid-October but you need to plan ahead!Is your website ready for the Christmas shopping period?Have you left it too late to maximise this year's online shopping period?By now as a retailer you should have your Christmas products all entered and sitting in your e-commerce system, ready to launch now or a little closer to the big day.If you have your products online already then you will be starting to enjoy the SEO benefits gained through early listings on Google, Bing etc, it takes time for pages to be indexed and ranked, so listing them that little bit earlier will give you that head start.How has your site performance been recently?If you have experienced any outages or slow running speeds, then an upgrade to the hosting would be advisable, if your site is very slow or crashes due to the extra Christmas shopping traffic you won't maximise your sites potential during the holiday build up.After Christmas it's sale time, can you easily add any discounts via your e-commerce system?If the answer is "NO" you should be thinking about how to tackle that, as it will take some time.The post Christmas sales also place extra strains on servers with more and more traffic, so again monitor your sites performance and consider upgrading if this is an issue.Do you know who is offering your website the support over the Christmas period?If your site goes offline in the build up to Christmas or over the New Year who is responsible for getting you back online?Support is crucial at this time of year, every hour that you're offline you're losing money. Make sure your investment in your website is providing what your need to run your business.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Hosting Servers  |  Search Engine Optimisation

Keywords: ecommerce, xmas shopping, new year sales, server performance

18/10/2010

Making your website stand out from the crowd is something we specialise in.Anyone can knock together some pages, programmers can build the content and you can get stock imagery for the pages, but so can everyone else.Google and the other search engines are looking for unique content. Writing good unique content for your website is a must, but why stop there? The imagery does not have to be the same as everyone else. Remember, you can get traffic from the image searches as well.We've just completed a second nights photo shoot in London.Our Web Design London team were out capturing more imagery for our website, making all our images completely unique. What you see on our website is taken by us, and so will help it stand out.Unique websites take a little longer to do, but the benefits for the long term are much greater.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Social London

Keywords: web design london, photoshoot

12/10/2010

When planning out a website, it takes time, do it correctly the first time and it will pay off in the long term.Too often we see clients who want to dive straight into designing the site, before they even know what sections/functionality/content the website will have. Until the content is decided upon the structure of the menu cannot be decided upon, and that will impact the layout as it could be a horizontal, vertical or both style menu system.At Toile Solutions the detail is the first thing we will get right, once all the information is gathered the rest will fall into place.One analogy we use is "its like trying to build a house without the plans" you don't know what it looks like, how many rooms there are, where the doors go, etc, etc.Careful planning of a website will help with updating and expanding in the future and is vital before proceeding with the design and seo elements of the build.For more information on Web Design in London pleae get in touch.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Marketing Advice

Keywords: web design london, site planning, menu structure

04/10/2010

Imagine you are having a conversation with a client...What Questions Are Your Clients Asking? How Are You Answering Those Questions? Think About It - Does Your Client Understand Your Answer? Are You Clearly Explaining What You Mean? Does Your Client Get It?Now apply the same question that your clients are asking to your website. Does your website clearly answer those questions? The only difference between your client asking you a question and a client asking your website the same question is that you only have microseconds on a website to answer it. Also think about the way you are answering your clients on a website - does your answer have personality? For example - think about the following question:-Q: Can you tell me how I can contact you?A: It's up there on the tool bar - open your eyes!Or how about an answer with personality:-A: Hey, we would love to hear from you - simply call our number clearly displayed on every page or fill in this short form. While you are doing that would you mind giving us some feedback? We value every response.Web conversations are crucial in every website and can be achieved through copy and design.

Luke Drewer

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Social London

Keywords: Web, Conversation, Client, Questions, Answers

27/09/2010

How many of you spend hours each week checking and re-checking your Google positions?Quite a few I bet, I have been a self-confessed Google checker myself.We've noticed a bit of a jump, drop, bounce trend in the Google updates recently, client sites climb a few places drop nearly twice as many and then re-appear in the listings higher than the first initial gain.Is this a procedure Google are following now? I'm not sure, it doesn't appear to be the same with all sites, some are updating in the index quite regularly, others weekly, which is inconsistent.One thing we have found is that you can spend your time more wisely writing valuable unique content for your website, instead of checking where your home page appears too often.If you must check your site every few hours there are some great seo plug-ins for Firefox that will allow you to do checks quickly, SEO, SEOquake and Firebug should be installed for anyone doing websites, just to keep checking your work.As always with your website, keep the content unique, update it regularly, do it right from day one and the results will come with hard work.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Search Engine Optimisation

Keywords: Google, SEO, ranking updates

21/09/2010

Twitter's announcement of new improved functionality to their tweeting system is going to be a welcome boost to companies who actively use social media to promote their business, but what will you do with it?At present you are restricted to the 140 character tweets that are short, snappy and easy to write, which is why they get updated so often.New functionality will allow you to show mentions, retweets, searches and lists in your timeline.Related content and mini profiles will show you more information about user's profiles you are on.The most interesting new functionality from a social media marketing point of view is the ability to embed photos, video and media content into Twitter. Twitter has formed partnerships with YouTube, flickr, twitpic and others allowing you to display their content right in your Twitter timeline along with your tweets.This will allow a more interactive experience within Twitter without having to rely on the tiny links to photos and media, but will it be better than facebook? Facebook already allows you to add in the photos and video clips in your timeline.Only time will tell whether Twitter content will prove better than facebook in social media marketing, as they roll out the updates in the next few weeks, we'll be adding some media to check it out and see how it performs.Make sure you don't miss out on the opportunity to promote your business / brand with the new tools.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Social Media

Keywords: Twitter, New Functionality, Embed Images, Video

16/09/2010

Faster, cleaner and greater HTML5 support - Microsoft have launched Internet Explorer 9 Beta. Microsoft claims to beautify the web, so will it deliver or frustrate.In the old days developing websites with only a couple of browsers on the market was nice and straight forward, nowadays with the intense competition in the browser market compatibility testing is an important part of the process of building our clients websites.Opera, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari - browser competition is fierce, with Google's increasing dominance in the browser market place. Our Web Design London team are focused to ensure that our web project meet compatibility across the browser set.

Luke Drewer

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Website Programming

Keywords: html5, website programming, internet explorer 9

06/09/2010

Don't hide your content!If you have good content don't hide it away! Bring your dynamic content to your homepage providing rich snippets of relevant information and quickly giving your audience what they want - easy to find, up-to-date information.Examples of content that works well on the homepage are News, Blogs and Video Galleries. The key is to provide just enough relevant and interesting information to make your users want to click through to your content pages. Keep your content fresh and make it available to users.

Luke Drewer

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire

Keywords: website content

31/08/2010

Had a fantastic weekend in London at the Notting Hill Carnival with family and friends. The rain quickly subsided and the sun came out over the parade.Everyone was having a fantastic time and the colour, music and creativity was amazing. The passion for creating the costumes was clear to see and made me think of some projects back at our Covent Garden, London office.Our creative team are an amazing bunch and the passion for what they do is clear to see in their project work.Whether it's designing the flamboyant costumes at the Notting Hill Carnival in London or creating amazing Website Design in London, hard work, dedication and passion pays dividends.

Luke Drewer

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Social London

Keywords: Notting Hill Carnival, Web Design London, Covent Garden

26/08/2010

What Should be in a Web Project Spec?Every now and then we get sent some really bad specs here at Toile Solutions.Being Content Management and Application specialists our work is often very complicated and coding intensive, so making sure the spec for the project is right is absolutely crucial.Making sure the spec is 100% correct is important for both the client and us.For the client it ensures they get exactly what they want and for us it ensures we can accurately quote for the work we are going to provide.In the past month we have had the following gems:-"A site that is the same as eBay, same functionality etc ...""It needs to connect to our back-end office system and generate some reports and data for us ...""... it needs to allow me to sell products, I like the way Argos' site works!"" I want the entire process automated, so it just sends me the money ..."All of the above, as you can see allow a huge area "open to interpretation" which a spec should not allow.Of course, we also get the other extreme, a hugely detailed spec for a site that is very complicated where the client thinks that they have saved a huge amount of time by producing it so the site will cost peanuts to produce. Whilst we like peanuts, this is not an accurate statement!Before starting any projects a detailed spec needs to be produced, this is something we are willing to work with clients on to ensure everything is covered. Writing a proper spec also shows you how much work will be involved in the project, and so should help you to budget for it correctly.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Application Development

Keywords: Web Design, London, Project, Specification

20/08/2010

'Social Media' It's Not in the London Dictionary!No, it's not the London Dictionary, but the Oxford one, 'Social Media' has made it into the Oxford Dictionary, along with 'Interweb' & 'Defriend'.I always thought Interweb was the word my mum used because she kept confusing it with the word 'Internet'! Perhaps that's why it only joined the dictionary 20 years after it appeared as an alternative way of saying 'Internet'.Oxford English Dictionary (not the London one!) analyses over two billion words used in online or printed media which is why the words selected are a snapshot of the world we live in.Notting Hill, London, Carnival - I can't waitI am looking forward to travelling up to London in a couple of weeks on the Southend to London express! I have not been to the Notting Hill Carnival before and am looking forward to taking my children and joining some of our family for a fun packed day!I will be taking my camera with me, soaking up the atmosphere and will enjoy the London scenery. I will probably be going past the London office, on the London Underground and maybe try out one of those new London pay as you go bike.. all in all, its gonna be a London themed day!

Luke Drewer

Tags: Social London

Keywords: Social Media, London

19/08/2010

Performance Tips Part 1Performance is now a key factor for Google, so where do you start when trying to increase the performance of your website? Well, there are three key areas to consider:-1) Programming - how your site is programmed, and if database driven, how that code talks to the database can impact site performance2) Webserver Software - whether using Microsoft IIS or Apache, the webserver software has an impact on site performance. Microsoft.com reported a 10% increase in site performance when they upgraded from IIS version 6 to IIS version 7.3) Hardware - it goes without saying that depending on your site's requirements will depend on the level of hardware required to drive it. The faster the processors and amount of memory will all have a part to play with performance.The most important part of performance tuning is benchmarking. Find out how you are performing now, tweak then see how that effects performance.Check back for more performance tips... Coming soon!!!If you would like to see how our managed hosting compares to your current supplier, give our London hosting team a call.

Luke Drewer

Tags: Hosting Servers  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Marketing Advice

Keywords: Site Speed, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Performance

18/08/2010

Another busy week at our new London office!Continual improvement is a key aim for us, we are planning our new Customer Care Centre to ensure all of our customer calls are answered and efficiently logged, this is a high priority for us.Our new ticket system will speed up support and ensure problems are resolved to a high standard. Being custom programmed means it will be fit for purpose and easy to use.To see how we care for our customers why not give our services a try, we retain 99% of our clients year on year and nearly all have recommended us to friends and colleagues.

Luke Drewer

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Application Development

Keywords: Web Design, London, Covent Garden, Support

10/08/2010

It's amazing what you can buy in a supermarket today, whether you are shopping in London for your fruit, a nice bottle of wine or even to run a print of your best Facebook snaps. It seems ASDA are to offer photo printing of Facebook shots, the supermarket giant ASDA has teamed up with Fuji and PNI Digital Media to offer photo kiosks in a three month deal which will allow you buy your Social Media snaps whilst dashing in for your weekly supplies.Toile Solutions, a London based Web Design Company have been developing innovative Social Media Applications for some time and can help with your company's social media strategy.

Luke Drewer

Tags: Social Media

Keywords: Social Media, ASDA, Facebook

08/08/2010

It is the weekend and new projects are buzzing around my head today. It is true that sometimes it is difficult to switch off but the opportunity for ideas does not always come when you want them to.I read a fantastic book a while back, I remember it well. A chap was looking into the science of opportunity and had gathered a room of students to watch a pre-prepared video. The video was a basketball match and the audience was asked to count how many goals each team scored. At the end of the video the question was asked - everyone chipped in with their answer.When they had done, the chap said - right who saw the gorilla? The audience wouldn't believe that there had been a gorilla run across the court so the video was played again. Sure enough, a man dressed as gorilla ran through the match half way through the game. The audience had been so focused on counting the score that they had not seen the gorilla.Ideas come when you are least expecting them and if you focus too hard on trying to think up ideas for a particular project, you may miss the opportunity all together.Thinking clearly about a project is one of our strengths, not losing sight of the end goal.

Luke Drewer

Tags: Marketing Advice

Keywords: Creative Marketing, Ideas, Projects

05/08/2010

What is the Most Requested Feature Made to YouTube?Answer: To increase the 10 minute limit.YouTube have responded and announced on their blog that they are increasing the limit to 15 minutes, now you can have your 15 minutes of fame. Using video on your website can enhance your users experience - our own video work is in production and will be integrated into our website shortly. Carefully planned and executed video can greatly benefit visual edge.Three benefits of adding video to your website:-It's Visual - users look for a visual experience when surfing. Most of us would rather see something before we have to read it and more are likely to take the whole video in as opposed to skimming through text.It's Attractive - you want to attract and keep people on your website. Video keeps users entertained whilst visiting your site and so they are more likely to stick around for longer.It's Human - It is the next best thing to touching and feeling your products or services, it makes the process of informing your audience about your product or service much more human - people buy from people.

Luke Drewer

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Application Development

Keywords: YouTube, Feature, Request, Update

04/08/2010

Today I've been working on the layout for a mobile website, it's a scaled down version of the main fully interactive site which really opens your eyes up to one of the most important points of website design.Navigation, Navigation, NavigationMaking the users experience of a website is key in the careful design of a site. We spend quite a bit of time looking at how we integrate the menus into a website to make it as easy as possible to surf around the site, whilst still looking stylish.On a mobile phone with the real estate on screen at a premium the navigation really is key, you don't have the room to add the menu on all pages, but still need to make it easy to get around.A simple breadcrumb can solve some of these issues, allowing the user easy access back to the home page from anywhere and keeping the full menu only on the home page screen keeps things nice and tidy.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Application Development

Keywords: Mobile Website, Navigation, Design

01/08/2010

With so many different social media platforms out there it is difficult to know which one to be using for your business.I have seen so many websites with a long list of social media platforms that you can follow them on - but are they all kept up-to-date?When deciding, the best question to ask yourself is "What are my clients using?"Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn?Pick just one or two and do them well rather than spread yourself too thin and end up with lots of empty accounts. That's what we do here at Toile Solutions, regularly updating our blogs and linking in with a Twitter feed.

Luke Drewer

Tags: Search Engine Optimisation  |  Social Media

Keywords: Social Media, Twitter, Facebook

27/07/2010

Had a real late night out in London tonight.As part of the new website (which you are now looking at!) we needed some iconic London shots for the background of the site.With everything we do here at Toile Solutions, we don't just rush off to istock, to get those same images that are used everywhere, we packed up our camera gear and headed off to the Big City.Walking round late at night (in the rain!) we spent a good few hours taking shots of iconic images, tourist hotspots and the not so famous areas of the City.You can see our work randomly changing in the background of the website. As time passes, we will continue to add more and more images, to keep the site looking fresh and unique. We may even make them available as wallpapers at some point in the near future!

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire  |  Social London

Keywords: Web Design, London, Photoshoot

08/06/2010

Today Google announced that they have completed the introduction of their new search engine indexing system known as "Caffeine." Caffeine is focused on bringing website content such as blog posts, news, video, images and web pages into the search results index much quicker than before. Previously the results were stored in layers and the web pages gradually moved up at different rates into the live Google search results.To keep up with the way the internet is growing so quickly Google have developed the Caffeine indexing system which analyses the web in smaller chunks and continuously updates the search results, which will mean fresher, newer stories and information appearing in the organic search results.It appears to be important now more than ever to keep your website updated regularly with new content to keep your listings high and of interest to the search engines.The Caffeine update may have an impact on your websites listing and we are well positioned at Toile Solutions to help you with your search engine optimisation, give us a call for more information.

blog link:  Search engine optimsation services

Neil Meads

Tags: Search Engine Optimisation  |  Marketing Advice

Keywords: Google, Caffeine, Update

20/05/2010

One of the scenarios we have had a spate of lately is clients who we just provide hosting for calling us up to tell us our servers are down as they have no email and website.Whilst they may think they are being detectives in their diagnosis (they were incorrect by the way, our servers are monitored 24/7 so we would know before them!) it seems to be increasingly that domains have not been renewed.Where people are changing email addresses and not using a domain one they own, they are missing out on their registrars emails and the domains are then being suspended due to lack of renewal and thus their website and emails go off!We all have to renew insurance policies, tv licence and other annual renewals, keeping your domain renewed is just as important.Keeping one email account forever just for renewal emails is one way of doing this, another is to let us manage the domain names for you, we will ensure you are notified leading up to the renewals, or if you prefer we will just auto renew them each year until we receive a letter from you asking us to stop.Protecting your domain names is very important, companies are automatically snapping up expired domain names when they become available (you may have seen the holding pages that just link to other sites) so take steps now to ensure you keep hold of yours.

Neil Meads

Tags: Domain Names

Keywords: Domain Nane, Renewals, URL, Protection

29/04/2010

It's that time of year again when we all head off to Earls Court to see what's new and innovative in online world at Internet World, our industry's trade show.Via tube, train and car we all met up outside Earls Court 2, had a coffee and got down to business, checking out the competition and seeing what's new and upcoming.Various seminars on Search Engine Optimisation, User Experiences and E-commerce backed up what we already practice as well as opening some new methology in what we can do in the future.Hosting was quite interesting this year, with a big push on cloud computing, this is something we already do in our own hosting infrastructure on a small scale, but it's always good to see what everyone else is doing and where they are going.Video Streaming was hard to track down but we found a couple of software and hardware companies providing solutions that we will be following up within the next few months as we push online videos as part of our seo campaigns.So all in all a good day, rounded off with the traditional stop off at The Ace Cafe for a beer and large lunch!

Neil Meads

Tags: Hosting Servers  |  Application Development  |  Search Engine Optimisation

Keywords: Exhibition, Internet World, Earls Court, London

15/04/2010

Google have announced that site speed is now a new signal that the search engines are looking out for when indexing your website.If two sites have similar content but one loads quicker than the other, then that site will provide a better user experience ultimately, and so is likely to be favoured more now in the search results.At Toile Solutions we have been talking about the importance of site speed for sometime and the effect it has on userbility - so not only do we ensure the code is optimised for speed but also that the hosting of your website is on a suitable platform.If your site is particularly busy or database driven, moving to a lower density or dedicated server is now more important than ever in the drive for more traffic from the search engines.

blog link:  Managed servers for maximum site performance

Luke Drewer

Tags: Hosting Servers  |  Search Engine Optimisation  |  Marketing Advice

Keywords: Server Performance, Website Speed, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO

15/03/2010

Getting current, regularly updated content onto your pages is always the key goal of any search engine optimisation campaign, but is there a way of achieving it without spending countless hours each day creating the content in the office and publishing it up?"Yes" is the quick answer. "Using social media within your own Company's website" is the longer one!By integrating social media into your own website, you can set up your own website community, making it a hub people will return to again and again.This has two benefits to you as the website owner. Firstly, your website becomes 'sticky' and visitors will keep returning again and again.Secondly, the users create the content themselves, which gives your community more and more unique content without your own staff having to generate it, so its a win win situation, the users get a great community they can find information within and enjoy taking part in, whilst generating content for your site which will in turn attract more visitors.Having identified social media as a major part of the future of the way seo is carried out, Toile Solutions is currently working on a centralised social media system that will allow easy integration into any website.

Neil Meads

Tags: Application Development  |  Social Media

Keywords: Social Media, Web Design, London

11/02/2010

Today was one of those days, constant sales calls from the usual suspects...Q: Do we want to change our electricity supplier?A: NoQ: Do we want to change our gas supplier?A: No we don't have gas!Q: Would we like a conservatory?A: We are on the 1st & 2nd floors of the building. Then again, maybe I should have requested a quote!Then the call I always love:"We can get you top of Google, guaranteed, no problem, 24 hours, no need to change your website, we can do it all remotely, only £600...."Now this we know is as about as real life as the gadgets we saw on 'Tomorrows World' twenty years ago (I'm still waiting for butler robots!)So after listening to their pushy pushy sales pitch, I decided to turn the tables, asking:"How does your work help with my sites internal linking structure?""How can you help with my keywords in my text by not changing it?""I have no title bar data or H1 tag is that ok?"You can almost hear the cogs turning as they flick through their pre-written speech for the answers, at this point they usually hang up!If it was that easy there would be no point in doing Search Engine Optimisation, but luckily it is, it's an art and something we enjoy doing. If you would like to talk to a Company that won't lie to you over SEO, here we are!

Neil Meads

Tags: Search Engine Optimisation

Keywords: Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Misleading, Sales Calls

20/01/2010

How time flies!It doesn't seem five minutes ago that we were kitting out the new office with desks, chairs, air conditioning, meeting room, green screen equipment and networking.Yet here we are now twelve months on and double the size we previously were. More staff, lots more work and almost to the point of outgrowing the offices...Luckily for us, we have a good bakers round the corner so the anniversary cake was easy to get hold of and was rather tasty!!For those of you who haven't visited us at the new offices yet, just give us a call and let us know when your coming in and we'll get the kettle on and the biscuits in!It's often easier to explain what you need face to face and we are an internet marketing company that prefers that to endless emails back and forth.

Neil Meads

Tags: Web Design Hertfordshire

Keywords: Technology, Web design, Hertfordshire, Anniversary