Hatton Marketing

Making your website more effective is about asking questions – of your website and the people who come to it. These questions may not be easy to answer – but the answers to these questions will give you the information you need to take your website where it needs to go in order to work harder for your business.

You have to be really objective when you’re analysing your own website - put yourself in the mind of an ideal visitor to your site, and ask:

Twitter has announced plans to introduce a premium business service.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter said "these premium tools will be aimed at companies that wish to use Twitter to stay in touch with customers" though there haven't been any precise definition of what this will mean - only that it will probably include features like analytics which aren't currently provided for.

Twitter also announced that, whilst there were no immediate plans to introduce advertising, the company wanted to "keep our options open".

Google have announced that they are dropping support for Maestro from Monday 27th July for payments through their Google Checkout payment system.

The announcement was emailed to Google Checkout users on Thursday 23rd July.

You can read The Register analysis of the change here and discussions on the Google Merchant forum here.

This weekend will see another "namespace landgrab" on the internet as Facebook allows users to register "usernames" to give a short URL to their profile.

At the moment Facebook profile URLs looks like this www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1243734634 or this http://en-gb.facebook.com/people/Tim-Hatton/575053139. In common with other social networking sites such as Linked In and Twitter, Facebook now want to make the URLs more "friendly" so you can register www.facebook.com/johnsmith or whatever.

If you've got a list of broad match keywords and want to quickly generate "phrase" and [exact] match versions of them, you can build lists quickly in Excel.

The appearance on 24th January of Stephen Fry on Jonathan Ross's show talking about Twitter has propelled this microblogging service into the mainstream. Hatton Marketing talked about Twitter in our newsletter last month, but, alas, our reach doesn't seem quite as influential as Mr. Fry's just yet.

We're proud to share our latest work with you. Riverbanks Clinic, a Hertfordshire-based cosmetic medicine practice has recently launched their new website, www.riverbanksclinic.co.uk. Riverbanks' owner, Dr Ravi Jain briefed Hatton Marketing to design, write copy for, build and deliver his 300+ page website, research and implement his Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) strategy and to set up, advise and implement his e-mail marketing communcations.

The Hatton Marketing team had a great day at Grow Your Business Guildford - we had dozens of entries to our Win £2000 of Internet Marketing Services competition and will be announcing the winner here soon! Hatton Marketing spoke to a lot of local Guildford and Surrey companies about web design, internet marketing, search engine optimisation and other services that we provide. We'll be working with some of them very soon!

What with it being the summer holidays and everything, looks like the world and their dog want websites built or SEO work done for when they come back from sunning themselves on the beach (or hiding from the rain more like).

In fact, we've been so busy we haven't even had time to write in the blog.

So here's a quick summary of some new web design work we've been doing:

What an accolade! Our very own Rosie Hatton is What's New In Marketing's Marketer of the Month. WNIM is the Chartered Institute of Marketing's monthly online publication and once a month it chooses a professional marketer to tell its readers all about how they got into marketing. You can see an archived copy of the article here.