Shade Company takes first steps into world of Web2.0

Spicer Canvas, a leader in the Shade Sail industry has taken its first steps to the exciting marketing opportunity that is Web 2.0.A small business personal and relationship counselling company has taken the next step online with a Datalink built website.



Spicer Canvas initially came to Datalink looking for Internet marketing solutions.  The company was doing Google Adwords through acompany called ReachLocal, however did not have access to manage theircampaigns and the paid traffic was hiding the poor performance innatural search.

The company was concerned about their positioning against competitors and wanted to explor options for search engine optimisation and improve the website landing pages.

Datalink identified problems with the performance of the existing website, particularly in terms of natural/organic Google search rankings, but also with selling the benefits of the service, educating customers, calls to action and landing pages. 

Part of the problem was that the existing website had a content management system which lacked the ability to generate friendly URLs and had poor mark-up and links which caused it to rank very poorly in Google.  When people reached the site, they didn't get a marketing message which reflected what the company did.  Part of the problem was that the company wanted to showcase a very large number of images to show off the range of solutions that it offered.

Datalink worked closely with Spicer Canvas using an Agile development model.  The project began by undertaking a consulting exercise before completing and user-centred design using wireframes and sitemaps.  Based on this one of our best creative designers put together the graphics and website design.  Datalink also provided offline marketing recommendations and setting up brochures to be integrated with the website campaigns.

The process identified some key audience profiles and suggested a range of new Web2.0 features to improve the company's communication to prospects. 

This included:

• an advanced content "tagging" system, which allows gallery items to be inter-related with products and projects
• a gallery search system for solutions
• audience and landing pages
• slideshows
• blog, socialbookmarking and RSS

The resulting website also features:

• favourites icon for bookmarking
• Google xml sitemap
• Google Analytics
• optimised google map listing
• stock image selection
  

Subsequent stages will be aimed at the website climbing the search rankings further.

Datalink's Bradley Hogan did the CMS implementation and programming with project management from Sean Fishlock.

The new website, recently launched, can be viewed at:

Sails Shade (www.1800shadeu.com.au)