New addition: Eurotactics
http://www.eurotactics.com
A recent addition to my portfolio is a revamped site for Eurotactics, a business development consultancy which brokers trade development between Scotland and the EU.
I met the managing director, Ian Traill, at a networking event last autumn. His existing site was designed for 800×600 resolution, was heavily reliant on images for information and navigation, and had no CMS. He had no SEO or site analytics either. A full upgrade was well due, so we set to work revamping it onto WordPress.
Ian’s use of the very bright EU colours for his corporate branding means that the colours almost act as the site’s design on their own, so it was down to us to select a few descriptive images from iStockphoto. We found an absolutely perfect conceptual picture of business networking across Europe, which we’ve used on his home page, and a few similar photos to use on inner pages. For the page where he describes the political changes that have made his business possible, Ian asked me to colour-code a map of Europe divided into the original EU countries, the “new Europe”, the likely accession countries, and the potential accession countries. (I had to chuckle as that four year university degree in international politics was finally put to good use Gimping a map.)
To position the site as a business resource, I used Feedwordpress to add an RSS feed of the latest EU-themed business news, as well as a facility for Ian to add events such as conferences and seminars which may be of interest to his business partners. And finally, for SEO, we ran a keyword analysis on similar businesses and government agencies, with some amusing results (amusing in the sense that it proved that SEO is not hard nor is it brain surgery; it simply has to be done correctly, and done at all, which is more than can be said for some nationwide competitors.)
We actually launched the new Eurotactics site last month, but I did not want to show it off until this week, when we put the final touches on it: translations of the home page in three target market languages. I used the “Shelly Method” (it’s a Wise-Women thing) to simply store each translation in its own category, rather than installing actual multilingual functionality. Same result with no extra work.
Ian’s now very comfortable updating and maintaining his web site on his own, and finds his weekly Google Analytics reports fascinating. He’s learned that having a good business web site behind you boosts your confidence as you set yourself out to potential clients and customers, which is the main goal I set for all of my web site projects.
