Today seen the launch of racing team Lee Morgans Racing with a new mobile compliant content managed website.  The website is integrated with social marketing channels; Youtube, Twitter, & Facebook and will be followed with an search & social marketing campaign to raise the profile of the Lee Morgans Racing team.

Built on the wordpress platform the website is mobile and tablet compliant using  responsive design principles.  The site features an events system to highlight the seasons racing and custom posts to allow simple content updating in house.

View the site live here: www.leemorganracing.co.uk

We have recently completed a new B2B site for Newcastle Car Dealer Finance company Eurodrive - built using WordPress CMS.

Eurodrive Motor Finance is one of the UK’s leading independent car finance specialists, providing car dealers with access to a multiple of car finance solutions from many of the UK’s top lenders.

Love Ormskirk was the results of Ormskirk business woman Katie Givens from Pandora’s Box bid for part of the £1 million fund to rejuvenate town centers.  After narrowly missing the main prize Ormskirk businesses decided to launch a project all of their own.  The mobile compliant website was built to showcase local businesses and services and provide the latest offers, news and advice from the Ormskirk business sector.

To view the site click here.

At Northwest Online we believe hard work should be rewarded, which is why we took our hard working staff on a trip to Alton Towers last week.

Somehow we managed to catch the last of the good weather and had a great day out.

Google has announced that it will start charging for it’s product search listings – also know as google shopping.  The change will start in the US in August and although no dates have been announded for UK roll-out it’s likely to follow soon after.

Google announced this in the charge structure:

• All merchants who create Product Listing Ads by August 15, 2012 will automatically receive a monthly credit for 10% of their total Product Listing Ad spend through the end of 2012; and
• Existing Google Product Search merchants can receive $100 AdWords credit toward Product Listing Ads if they fill out a form before August 15, 2012.

In addition to these changes Google is bringing out Google Trusted Stores program. Google Trusted Stores is a badge for e-commerce sites which gives users information on the background of the merchant and includes ratings for customer service and shipping.

Find out more on the Google Blog Post.

Google recent algorithm update now as has an official name; Penguin.

We covered the recent announcement from Google’s Matt Cutts a few weeks ago that an over optimisation penalty will come.  The first iteration of that update is now online and Google also published the article ‘Another step to reward high-quality sites’ with some more information about the update.

Google has also provided a Penguin Feedback page, so if your site was affected by the “Penguin” web spam algorithm update on April 24th, 2012, and you don’t think it should have been affected then you can submit a request online.  The form requests a sample URL for the affected website, associated search queries, and a comments box for feedback.

Google Over-Optimisation / Penguin Report

If you are worried that your sites violated the guidelines we can produce a detailed report covering both on-site and off-site penalties that your site has incurred for as little as £30. Find out more about our Google Penguin Reports now.

With 3 new and exciting web projects awarded this week, it looks like the first week in April will be a busy one.

Our first project  is a complete rebuild for an existing baby toy hire website for Midlands based company; Mini Lodgers .  This site will undergo a radical rebuild with a new bespoke front end and database platform  which includes software to manage equipment and toy rental, full online diary and stock management system.

The second project is another rebuild  for a Johnsons Cleaners subsidiary Alex Reid ST. The new site will have a full content management system  and advanced search engine optimisation modules.

The final project is another rebuild and child themed site for SpaceWorld; a Liverpool children’s indoor play centre.  With local competition taking up the best search engine positions we’ll be looking to make radical improvements on both the site design and search engine optimisation.

A recent announcement by Googles Matt Cutts at the SXSW  labelled Google Help me Rank better could pre-empt a radical shake up of search engine listings.

So many Search Engine Optimisation companies have been wondering (and hoping) for this type of update for some time now and if successful it should remove the advantage that many keyword spammers and over-optimisers have been gained.

Matt Cutts said: “What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes, but there is something we have been working on in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and a great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

What is it they say about builders and their houses? Well in a busy web agency getting time free to redevelop our 8 year old website has been difficult to say the least.

Existing clients might have noticed big changes around these parts with the redesign of our website and the updates to our portfolio.  If this is your first time on the NWO website let me tell you, it’s a big improvement!

The new website has been designed to show off the work we’re proud of, with large images and a healthy amount of content to give you a full run-down on our services.

At NWO, we know clients like to feel secure in the knowledge that their web designers have the knowledge, skill and design flair to produce a top quality website for them. Take a look around our website portfolio and you’ll see we tick all the boxes for you to get in touch.

As always, you can send us an email using our contact form or give us a call on 0151 426 9977.

It’s almost Christmas time and here at Northwest online we like to get ready for the festive season in style.  This year is no exception and we’ve got a massive 13ft Christmas tree brightening up the office.  Check out the photos below to see it for yourself!

We hope all our clients have an excellent Christmas!