I’ve been going to a fair number of work-related events lately and what’s amazed me (more than the huge amount of bacon rolls some people can consume in 30 minutes!) is how poor an understanding some business owners have of their company’s own web presence.

Even basic information such as number of visitors.  The classic line from Mr One Man Business is “my web guy told me I got 30,000 hits last month“…that’ll be around 3 visitors a day on an image and script-heavy, Frontpage-designed site then?

Knowing how busy your website is is important, but other stuff needs covered too…stuff like “where am I on Google?”, “what does Google see when it finds my site?”, “what are my competitors up to?”, “who links to me?” and most importantly, what straightforward steps can I take to improve things?

This might end up being a bit of a crazy move, but we’ve decided to help small businesses out by offering to carry out FREE website audits .  For no cost, we’ll take a look at your site, generate a very useful report and give you some pointers on how to improve your web presence.  No strings, no obligations.  As if we weren’t busy enough!  Madness!

Perhaps I’m a bit brainwashed (lately I’ve been reading the excellent What would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis ) but seeing these two stories appear side by side on Digg made me chuckle a bit…

As if Yahoo doesn’t have enough problems trying to fend off Bing’s market share (even though they might be in each other’s pockets shortly), they’ve also just been caught paying for lap dancers!  Naughty geeks!

Meanwhile, over at Google…they’ve just officially launched the Google Music Search service which looks pretty cool.  Type in a song, artist or even just some of the lyrics and Google’s search feature will find the songs and even include an audio player in the results to let you hear it!  Clever geeks!

Latest in a long line of clever gadgets from the ‘do no evil’ corporation.  They’ll get us all in the end.

“Web design glasgow” is an interesting search term for me….it’s not worth a huge amount of traffic but it’s certainly a term I’m interested in improving my rankings on.  After all, Web design is what we do and Glasgow is where we are based…

If you’re scratching your head a bit over this, search for “mewmewmucktarah” and it might enlighten you a bit to what I’m up to…

Who says there’s a recession on?  Well, we do….but that’s alright because we take a unique recession-savvy approach to web design which means all of our clients get a whole lot of web stuff for a whole lot less.  And by using our initiative and over ten years of web design and marketing experience, we save them loads of that other valuable commodity…TIME.

That said, you wouldn’t know there’s a recession on, given the amount of new web design work that’s come in this week.  We’re positively itching to get started on:

Mono Cafe Bar, Stereo Cafe Bar, The 78 and The Flying Duck. We seem to be carving out a pretty little niche on the bar, club and restaurant website front and we’re delighted to welcome these tremendous Glasgow gig, food drinking and dancing establishments into the family.

We’re taking over all of their webwork and you can expect to see some grand improvements to their websites soon as well as us facilitating a full-on embrace (no tongues mind) of social media.

We’ve also started working with Ecosse Travel and Scotland’s Chauffeur, two high-end personal transport companies that have enlisted us to carry out some website optimisation over the coming months so they achieve better search engine prominence and increase their business.

Last and by no means least, we’ll be working with our friends at Bulletproof ID to develop a new online presence for Smarter Grid Solutions.  We’re particularly pleased with this one as it means I get to indulge myself in my specialist non-web topic of renewable energy.  Speaking of which, we’re almost ready to launch the new UK website for Al Gore’s Climate Project.  Yes you heard right… Al Gore.

So, lots going on.  And there’s always room for more so contact us if you think we can help you.

Fanny Trollopes, McMillan’s Emporium and Moskito Cafe Bar have all recently launched websites powered by UBIcms – our own state of the art and highly adaptable content management system.  They join longtime Ubisan clients Cottiers, Macsorleys and The Rodel Hotel on our roster of hotel/food/drink clientele.  This comes on top of a recent post where we announced the addition another four venues.

Great that in these tough times when we should all be staying home and eating porridge on toast that there’s still an appetite for good, locally sourced produce cooked well, people then want to dance it off and er, still go their holidays.

How many websites do we need to get in this sector before we can say we’re experts in this niche?

Have you got a pub, club or restaurant and need an affordable, effective web presence?  Can you afford not to? Contact us.

Recession-savvy…is being aware of the recession and how it affects your business.  It’s about being just as aware of the dangers as you are of the positive opportunities.  A while ago I wrote about speeding up during the slowdown and it’s worth checking out.

If you don’t allow yourself to get freaked out during these tricky times then you might just clear enough space in your head to think about how to get ahead.

Web design…is what we do best and when we apply our recession-savvy thinking to your web project you’ll get some pretty impressive results without breaking the bank.  It doesn’t stop with the website either – we look at cheap ‘n’ cheerful ways of using the internet to market your brand and sell your products.  We don’t just think outside the box, we live outside it.  My God, that sounds cheesy but it’s true.

Here’s some questions you shouldn’t be afraid to ask anybody that might be getting involved with your website/web strategy…

• What’s the least amount of money I can spend to achieve the biggest impact?
• Do I really need a website?
• What’s the first three things you would do to improve my site?
• Can you provide me with some client success stories?
• Is there anything you’ll do for nothing for me first to prove you know what you’re talking about?

Feel free to ask us!