NHS South Gloucestershire is a Primary Care Trust whose aim is to provide and plan health services for approximately 258,800 people who live in South Gloucestershire.

Part of their continued development plan is to forge closer ties through effective partnerships with organisations and local people. Part of that process is to bring more health services closer to local people by effectively communicating them through an interactive and informative website.

NHS South Gloucestershire required a new website after their previous one became out of date and hard to navigate so after producing a website project brief, they proceeded to tender for a new public facing website and following a comprehensive tender process Generate UK won the project.

“We chose Generate UK because of their obvious enthusiasm and commitment to service.  This project demonstrates a significant investment by NHS South Gloucestershire to help increase communications within the local community and it is imperative that we get it right.  After a rigorous tender process we believed that Generate UK’s partnership approach to their clients gave us the comfort we required to take that next step” Sue Pratt - Communication Manager, NHS South Gloucestershire.

The project involved building a new public facing website which complied with W3C web content accessibility standards and conformed to priority level 2 AA. The site was to be built upon Sitekit content management system and the design was to take on a clean, concise and attractive look and be compliant with NHS guidelines and colour scheme. Overall the design, structure of the site and information was to enhance the end user experience and be reflective of the South Gloucestershire population.

The Generate UK project team worked with the PCT’s communication team and through detailed project scoping were able to understand the exact requirements. This was fully documented and used as the base for the project to move forward to the design phase. Through the production of wire frames this enabled the designs to be structured in a clean and precise fashion taken into account all sections of the website’s navigation, usability and accessibility.

The result: Generate UK used their online project experience and proven methodology to produce and deliver and excellent new public facing website for the PCT. http://www.sglos-pct.nhs.uk/

Generate UK, a dynamic and commercial thinking digital marketing company based in Newbury, Berkshire offer professional web services and a number of other related online marketing services that would add value to any commercial and public sector organisation.

We are exceptionally happy with our new site, Generate UK have excelled during the project through excellent communication, creativity, online knowledge and overall project management. We now have a website that is easy to navigate, is far more interactive and presents NHS South Gloucestershire’s information and services to the local community which is easy to assimilate thereby forging closer relations. The next step is to create a staff area for the site to help increase the levels of communications with our employees - Fiona Reid – Head of Communications, NHS South Gloucestershire

Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild built Waddesdon Manor 120 years ago on a hill 60 miles from London, in the style of a French 16^th century chateau. He was an inspired collector and the house was designed to accommodate his exceptional French 18^th century furniture, Sevres porcelain, English portraits and Renaissance works of art. When Ferdinand died in 1898 he left Waddesdon to his sister, Miss Alice. In 1922 the house passed to James de Rothschild, her French cousin. James inherited a substantial part of his father Baron Edmond’s great collection and brought this to Waddesdon. In 1957, in order to ensure its future perpetuity, Waddesdon was bequeathed to the National Trust by James de Rothschild, although his widow, Dolly continued to manage the house until her death in 1988.

Waddesdon has gone from strength to strength and today attracts on average 350,000 visitors per year.  Whilst visitor numbers are excellent it’s really important that Waddesdon seek to build upon other revenue generated areas of the organisation.

Towards the end of 2008, Waddesdon Manor decided to move away from their managed ecommerce system. They were looking for a shopping cart that was easy to use, scalable, rich in features and performance allowing Waddesdon to implement new products from new initiatives. This included a recent project where Waddesdon commissioned the Royal College of Art (RCA) student designers to create a range of products to be sold in its shop. These exclusive items are now available on the new Waddesdon Manor Online Gift Shop.

As well as efficiency the new system would also allow Waddesdon to move away from their current ecommerce subscription model, which attracted annual costs.

Due to their energy and experience in delivering ecommerce solutions Generate UK were chosen to project manage and deliver a new online shop.  To achieve all of the objectives highlighted above Generate UK worked closely with Waddesdon Manor to understand:

• Design and branding requirements
• Waddesdon’s backend ordering and fulfilment processes,  to understand how the shopping cart would fit in would fit in with the rest of the business
• How the products should be represented on the site and to the search engines
• The products and categories to help structure and implement easy navigation rules

The shopping cart scales to support an unlimited number of products and can quickly and easily be managed by anyone without HTML or other technical skills. It even integrates directly with Royal Mail for real time delivery prices, which can be rolled out across the store or changed per product.

Kim Hallett, Head of Sales and Marketing commented; the online store is a fundamental part of our business, the old system was exceptionally hard to use and made our lives miserable! It was important that when we changed to a new system it was flexible, dynamic and easy to use, whilst improving the backend sales process. It was also important that the new site look great and improved our search engine rankings. Generate UK guided us through the whole process and made the project really easy. The shopping cart is fantastic to use and we are already benefiting through a great new look and improved sales figures.

Please click here to visit the Waddesdon Manor Gift Shop

WELCOME to Generate UK’s Festive Online Marketing Workshop.

Date: 9^th December 2009

Time: 9am-12.30pm

Venue: Donnington Grove Country Club - click here for directions

A workshop designed to help participants understand and embrace a number of key online marketing activities.

The workshop will be dynamic and focused on sharing experiences with clients, partners and each other providing the dos and don’ts when it come to implementing a proactive marketing strategy!

The workshop will discuss:

• The principles of SEO – what are they?
• Business Blogging – to blog or not to blog?
• An effective website – do you have one?
• Email marketing –does it work?

The workshop aims to be delivered in an informative yet relaxed atmosphere helping Marketers and business owners become more knowledgeable when looking to contribute to their online marketing strategy for 2010.

On top of this you’ll have a chance to network with industry professionals through an hour of speed networking! Plus you’ll be entered into a special draw to win a round of golf or dinner for two!

The workshop is limited in numbers so please register here to avoid disappointment or call 01635 550431 to book your space.

www.generateuk.co.uk

The Eight Bells is an independent pub in Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire the home of the famous Midsomer Murders!

The Eight Bells is an attractive friendly pub that has been serving the local community for over 400 years.  The pub has gained a reputation as a great pub to enjoy a relaxing drink in beautiful surroundings. The menu at the Eight Bells is traditional home made pub food, which is locally sourced and produced wherever possible.

In recent time the Eight Bells have won awards for Real Ales; with the Cask Marque accreditation and also the Beautiful Beer Gold award. Recently, they were included in the Good Beer Guide 2010 and were awarded Aylesbury Vale’s Community pub of the year 2008

Unfortunately the old site did not represent the pubs great atmosphere, great service, excellent beer and pub food which it offered so they decided it was time for a change.

Generate UK worked with Helen, the owner of the Eight Bells to understand her exact requirements. Increasing traffic, improving the design and most importantly it was evident from the start that Helen required a content management system (CMS). This was to allow Helen and her team to update the website in the future with content changes, new menus, images etc

Whilst design was very important to Helen, to make sure the Pub was presented in the correct way the Eight Bells also wanted to focus on making their site highly visible within the search engines both locally and regionally.

Generate UK built a great new design and integrated it within the Generate CMS platform which now allows the Eight Bells to take full control of their own website.  Focusing on location, primary and secondary keywords i.e. pubs in Long Crendon was essential as this has now ensured that location based searches will present the Eight Bells pub high within the organic search engines.  The result of this will increase traffic and raise the venue’s profile locally throughout the surrounding counties.

This has already substantially increased the number of unique visitors to the website which has generated more visitors to the pub which in turn has delivered more business.

Helen Copleston, Proprietor of the Eight Bells Pub stated “A key challenge for any small business is finding the right company to work with who will give you honest advice and won’t charge the earth.  I found Generate UK brilliant to work with; they’ve built the Eight Bells a great new website and guided me through the whole process, advising me on keywords, design structure and even budget. They were very reasonable in cost and for what they have delivered I am over the moon!  We now have a future proof website that my team can amend as and when is needed and the content management system is really easy to use. The overall experience was great and as a result is generating more revenue, a great investment. Many thanks!”

Visit The Eight Bells Pub website

There are many social video platforms available in the market that people use to post or absorb information. A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually digital audio or video that is made available for download.

We believe that there are definitely good business opportunities for companies to create video content and post snippets of information of their services and products online.

From a business perspective, we believe this channel is underused. For a short time in 2008, You Tube took over the mantle as the second largest search engine, so this is certainly an area worth exploring.  If one Podcast or Video goes viral it could provide your company with the immediate impact and exposure it’s looking for.

The benefit of adopting the affiliate marketing model is that it’s an extremely low risk way to open up new sales channels. The downside is that it works best with a product or service that is more of a commodity than a bespoke solution.

Many of the world’s largest organisations operate their own network or belong to an affiliate one.  The main reason for this is that the cost to enter is minimal and the business method is simply that you pay based on performance. This means that as long as the affiliate meets your branding and quality criteria, you are in the beneficial position of only needing to pay once a sale has been completed.

There are two ways to approach affiliate marketing; either by joining a larger well established affiliate network, or by creating and managing your own program. Both have their merits and are worth considering in more detail.

Econsultancy.com recently predicted the UK market for affiliate marketing to grow to £4bn in online sales in 2009. This is an extraordinary figure and demonstrates the size of the channel available.

If you are considering an affiliate marketing scheme we would suggest:

• Create objectives for setting up an affiliate program.
• Identify products, services or solutions that could be used.
• Gap analysis on sales training material available and other sales tools.
• Explore your own affiliate network or join a larger established one.
• What are the rewards and criteria for being an affiliate?