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Posts Tagged ‘website build’

Impressive ROI for Jamaican Tourist Board Dad Dancing microsite

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

Earlier this year, as one of Draftfcb’s trusted technical partners, we were commissioned with the build of a website which was part of a digital marketing campaign to boost traffic to the Jamaican Tourist Board with a’ Dad Dancing’ online competition. The main feature of the Dad Dancing site was it’s integration with the YouTube API;  we created a custom skin and customised the YouTube player API to make it chromeless (enabling the player to create their own controls). Once all the HTML and javascript coding of the site was done, our expert front-end developer finished the skinning and integrated the Google tracking code so that the site traffic could be monitored easily by our clients.

The Dad Dancing online competition to get more families interested in booking holidays in Jamaica was pretty successful as they’ve achieved a 40% increase in booking enquiries since the campaign started. Pretty impressive stuff and not a bad ROI for a total budget of £16,000.  To see the full case study written up by Draftfcb’s marketing director Laura Holme read on here.

We have since learned that the Dad Dancing site won the Best Consumer Campaign in the MAA Best Awards 2011. Congratulations to the wonderfully  creative Draftfcb team in London!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/best-awards-2011/full-list-of-winners-best-awards-2011

URL naming tips for web masters (& web mistresses)

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Here are some basic guidelines on URL naming and structuring to follow when building a new website from scratch.

Use of keywords
Someone should have already identified the high value keywords which will provide the highest traffic volume to the new site. These keywords should be present in page URLs to help improve the site’s SEO.

Describe the page content
The URL of a page should accurately describe the page content so when someone views the address bar or a pasted link, they should have a good idea about what the page is about. Also, describing the page content accurately with the URL will also help the search engines catalogue your site more effectively.

URLs with multiple words
URLs with multiple words are best separated using a hyphen, not underscores. Google have stated that hyphens are identified as word separators, whilst underscores are not. Also, hyphens are better from a usability perspective so they should be used whenever a URL requires multiple words.

e.g. http://www.felinesoft.com/services-system-integration.aspx

Keep the URL short
Short URLs help when users directly type in the URL and also ensure maximum keyword density whilst avoiding looking like spam. Avoid using conjoining words similar to “a”, “and” etc…

Do not use case sensitive characters
Only use lower case characters in URLs as using upper case characters can cause a few issues.

Stick With One Structure
To make future development easier stick to a standard convention throughout. Don’t apply the above guidelines to just one section, put them into practice across the site.