Blog: Proud to announce...

We are thrilled to see that so far over 2,000 people have voted for their winning bride-to-be in Elephant Yard's Bride of The Year competition. There were nearly 1,000 votes in just one day, and we're taking votes for another eight days yet!

It all began a few months ago, when we were at a meeting with the Elephant Yard retailers and we decided to host a Wedding Fayre. To kick it off, we planned to run a Bride of the Year competition and offer a multi-thousand pound wedding package prize. Ambitious? At the time we thought it was very ambitious!

But now, with less than two weeks till the event, and just over a week until the voting closes, having been on two radio stations, editorial in many newspapers, write-ups on blogs, posters up all over Kendal, and a buzz on social media… we think it was a piece of (wedding) cake.

We're hyper excited to see a winner chosen and awarded with the colossal £5000 package prize. We're taking bets on how many votes we'll get in total!

The event is on Sunday October 14th, and we'll let you know how it goes. This has certainly been a lesson in "the sky's the limit'" and "hard work pays off" - but until the event, we're not done yet...

We've just put another website live. A type of website development that's a bit of a departure for us, and I think I'd be right in saying that it's been a steep learning curve for all involved.

Essentially it's a website designed to sell one product, an e-book written by Kendal businessman Tim Marston. The book distills his 10 years of Wikipedic knowledge of gig booking, inbound marketing and search engine optimisation.

A lot of websites of this nature would be deployed with a relatively plain website design to sell an e-book or similar, the idea being the site can quickly 'pivot' to accommodate another product if the market demands it. But not Tim, or us for that matter. Why?

Brand Design

Tim recognises the value of a strong brand identity from his experience with fire performers Juggling Inferno, so the How to Sell Your Act brand was designed from the start to be adaptable for further products. How to Sell Your Business, How to Sell Your Desert Island, and so on and so forth, because we're sure he's got more than one book in him!

Content Managed Website

The website is built on our in-house content management system, and uses these modules: 

• a fully integrated blog, allowing Tim to post blog entries containing 'teaser' excerpts from the book and encourage purchase
• a testimonials module allowing customer feedback to be included throughout the site to build confidence in site visitors 
• a case studies module where Tim can share his customer's successes with visitors and potential customers

Apart from a few other very useful behind the scenes modules used for page management, search engine optimisation and social media integration, the site is actually pretty light on functionality itself, integrating as it does with some well established web apps to supply the other services. 

Email Marketing Integration

AWeber was chosen for email marketing over our usual fave system Campaign Monitor on this occasion as it plays very nicely indeed with Click Bank - among other e-commerce systems - performing clever tricks such as: 

• automatically moving email subscribers between lists, based on an e-commerce transaction on the Click Bank site - from prospects to customers, for example
• automatically sending periodic follow up emails based on an action, such as joining a list
• adding email subscribers to different lists such as affiliates, prospects and customers from the How to Sell Your Act website using the AWeber API

E-commerce Integration

Click Bank was the preferred e-commerce provider this time over our in-house e-commerce website solution as it: 

• has a global community of affiliate sellers in place that will sell a product on a vendors behalf, the vendor receiving a commission from each sale
• takes care of the credit card/payment authorisation process on a vendors behalf

Brand, Website and Print Design

We've tried to strike a balance between the hard sell that this type of site demands and also ensuring that the site reflects the time, effort and experience that Tim has put into writing his e-book, which The Creative Branch designed too. Follow this link if you'd like the chance to read the book. But it'll cost you! 

7lb 8oz Sadie Rumney V3.0 was deployed on Sunday the 17th April at 1.08pm in Lancaster, around one week ahead of schedule.

Mother and daughter are both doing great. Congratulations to the Rumneys from everyone at The Creative Branch!

The brief from Sean the MD at Atlantis Kitchens in Kendal, Cumbria was to convey the care, craftsmanship and thought the team at Atlantis put into every one of their kitchen or bedroom design and installation projects.

Although the site is built on our standard Core content management system, as with Atlantis's kitchen creations, the design is anything but standard! 

Sue used an oversized accordion on the home page to quickly get across the key messages. Using this wide format also allows the kitchen shots to shout WOW as loudly as they deserve to. 

Inside, the mix of stylish case studies, glowing customer testimonials and reassuring information about the Atlantis ethos should be enough to tempt those hungry for a new kitchen to fill out the enquiry form or pick up the phone and book a free home design visit. 

Yum. Atlantis love kitchen design, we love web design!

The Creative Branch are delighted to help the retailers in Kendal’s Elephant Yard Shopping launch their a new initiative to offer a series of small treats to local charities and community groups throughout the year. The programme kicks off with a £100 donation to Paul Rose of Wise Owl World towards his fund to build new aviaries for his ever growing family of rescued owls.

Peter Boyd of Elephant Yard explains: “As a group, the retailers wanted to support local community groups and charities on a regular basis. The idea behind the Elephant Yard Community Treats initiative is to offer small donations each month. So we’re inviting schools, charities and any group that serves the local community to apply for one of our treats.”

Click here If you would like to nominate a group, school, organisation or charity for an Elephant Yard Community Treat. Good Luck!