We specialise in dynamic websites, online stores and E-newsletters.

We’ve been working with the Get Bike team for almost 2 years now and after drastically reducing their Google Adwords spend and increasing their ranking in the main Google results we are making good progress (have a look at CBT London in Google: that’s number one of about 1 million and that’s just one term.)

Internally they now have an intranet based Booking Calendar to book in the thousands of people they help through their Compulsory Basic Motorbike Training each year. As part of our gradual roll out we have just released the Online Booking Element which checks their intranet for booking availability and allows pupils to reserve a space on the web site.

Rather than re-invent the calendar system, we have used Yahoo’s excellent calendar plug-in too - part of the set of user interface tools Yahoo have kindly released to the developer community. We also use Ajax technologies so that the office based system automatically updates itself whenever a new online or office based booking is made. As you can see from the booking system we are going for a gradual release - it’s not fully automated yet, because the pupil must be able to provide their licence to take the course, although we are hoping to move that way soon.

Once a booking is made online and confirmed or in the office then Get Bike’s internal 3rd party accounting system is automatically updated with the pupils details and their payment information.

It looks that we will seriously save admin time, decrease the mistakes in the paper based system and allow people to book out of hours: this truly fits with our vision for Online Business.

Next up it’s time to make the Get Bike site look as nice as it performs.

We’re pleased to announce probably our most significant development to date: the Homebase.co.uk store locator. This service uses the Multimap service to provide ‘find you nearest’ store functionality for the UK and Eire on the Homebase web site. We turned the implementation round in a few contracted days to deliver this fully functioning store finder. Do you need to show your customers where your stores are on your web site, or need your store finder upgrading or enhancing then get in touch.

We’ve also upgraded the Carparks4u.com web site which now uses the Multimap API (XML based) to deliver it’s mapping which provides enhanced functionality such as data piracy prevention, enhanced search engine optimisation, click tracking and reporting. If you need a php based application to do this - then we’ve already written the code so maybe we can help, and if you need further integration with your internal systems then we’ve already done the hard work so we can concentrate on the cool bits.

As we mentioned earlier Yahoo and MSN have now joined forces with Google to allow you to submit a sitemap file of your web site so that these search engines will crawl your web site correctly and make sure it shows up in their search results. The news is that Yahoo will now let you do this here for their search engine: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request although like Google you’ll need to register first or have a Yahoo account. These sitemaps really come into their own for dynamic websites which keep changing or ones that have hundreds of pages. Come on MSN you’re lagging behind!

The first thing we do for our Search Engine Optimisation clients is set them up with a Google Sitemap, which is a little file that contains a list of all the pages on your web site. Google then checks this file and looks to see which ones you consider to be the most important and when you updated them last. It then uses this information to go off and look at your web site and put the correct pages from your web site in it’s search results. It’s a great idea and gives some quick wins without a huge amount of server configuration, and of course if you’re clever you can use the list of pages to give your users a site map too. If you’re really intrigued this is what a sitemap file looks like!
It had led us to neglect the other big search engines a little because Yahoo and Msn didn’t have a similar method, but not now! What makes this particularly news-worthy is the fact that Yahoo and Msn didn’t go off and write their own system but instead have chosen to adopt Google’s! Of course they added a a few updates to the system but now it is possible to let all the major search engines know which pages you have on your web site. The new collaboration is at www.sitemaps.org - it doesn’t look that great but it’s a very powerful system.