Search Engine Success for Somerston Hotels

Our client, Somerston Hotels, one of the top UK franchisees of the Express by Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express and Ramada Encore Hotels brands, has seen an encouraging boost in the performance of its website, despite an overall industry downturn.

An increase in web traffic and online bookings has been achieved through a reinvention of the company’s online presence in partnership with new media agency Alienation Digital.

Somerston Hotels launched a new suite of websites at the end of March 2009, and attracted a 17% increase in visiting traffic within the first month. In the same period, 43% more visitors were referred to the site from Google as a result of a carefully managed search engine optimisation campaign.

Alienation Digital won the project following a competitive tender process in which agencies were briefed to present 33 unique hotel presences without the cost and complexity of a separate website for each hotel. Alienation Digital’s solution was to unite the hotel websites within one content management system, with individual templates designed for each of the four separate brands: including a central portal site for the Somerston Hotels brand.

Find out more on our web design Glasgow agency site

Glasgow New Media Agency to Work Free for a Day

Despite the grim economic news, Glasgow new media company Alienation Digital has just recorded its most successful year ever. Managing Director, Neil Barr, puts this down to an understanding of how to deliver return on investment to customers. Customers range from the public to the private sector and include numerous charities throughout the UK.

Alienation now wishes to say thank you to the market for its confidence and will offer the resources of the entire company free for one day to a registered charity. That is one day of 15 experts’ time dedicated to helping the selected charity raise more revenue. This could be, for example, building or improving their web site, improving their search engine rankings, introducing them to the delights of Twitter or video e-marketing.

Alienation Digital’s experience of designing and developing websites for the Third Sector includes clients such as Acevo, Children’s Hospice Association Scotland, Richmond Fellowship, Cranstoun Drug Services and Beatson Institute for Cancer Research. Typically Alienation can provide a return on investment of less than 9 months when they engage with their customers, and that translates to them as an increase in revenue.

Managing Director Neil Barr has said; “Following our most successful year to date and our continued success in 2009, I am delighted to be able to give something back by offering the agency free for a day. Our experience in the Third Sector has shown that charities can really reap the rewards of a great website, by using it as a tool for fundraising, volunteer recruitment, or simply to communicate their work to the people that need them most”.

To be considered for some pro bono work, simply call 0141 575 9700 or e-mail workforfree@alienationdigital.co.uk to register your charity for this fantastic prize. This could be the fastest Return on Investment your charity has ever made!

Three May[jor] Contract Wins this Month

May has been a fantastic month for new business at Alienation Digital, and although there’s still a way to go until the end of the month, we just couldn’t wait to tell you about these three new contract wins.

Web Design for MOBO Awards

In 2009, the MOBO Awards will be held in Glasgow. It’s the first time the awards ceremony has been held outside of London since it began in 1995. Glasgow City Marketing Bureau has asked Alienation Digital to design a website that will be central online portal for fans of the event. The site will initially go live in June and new features will be added right up until the awards ceremony on September 30th.

Web Design for TBD-UK

Funded by the medical research council, TBD-UK is a research body set up to focus on Tuberculosis research. A site has been commissioned to promote the work of the group to a wider audience, and help its mission to promote further research in the area. The site will allow TBD-UK to integrate further into the research community and provide useful tools such as a molecule database that allows scientists to compare their work from remote locations.

Intranet Development for CHAS

Continuing our fantastic relationship with the Children’s Hospice Association Scotland, we have been commissioned to develop an intranet that will allow staff across the various hospice sites to keep in touch with each other, keep abreast of the latest information and remotely access services such as room bookings.

New Website Launched to Raise the Profile of Free Business Advice in the North East of England

During the recession, unemployment figures have risen above 2 million in the UK, and small businesses are closing at a rate of almost 300 a week. Statistics such as this indicate that it has never been more important for businesses to have access to impartial, expert, free advice.

Today we announce the launch of Events North East, the new website which will be the online home of Business Link events in the north east of England.

You can read more about the new website on Alienation's web design agency site.

Are we giving too much away to Google?

Google has built its empire on providing exceptional services that we all use for free, but with the introduction of Google Profiles, Simon Bennison at Alienation Digital is wondering: Are we giving too much away to Google?

For some it’s an opportunity to have more control over your own image on Google, for others it’s simply another way for Google to have more control over you and your online presence.

Last month, Google set up Google Profile to “give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name”. The tool allows web users to set up an online biography, upload a photo, include links to other social network profiles, and tell people about your location. This is nothing new: MySpace, Facebook, Bebo et al. have been providing this platform for years, but none of them have the control that Google has over the Internet, none have close to the same number of users, and importantly none of them have the diversity of products that Google has. Wired Magazine thinks you should “be afraid”.

For many, the main concern is that Google are developing more and more tools that have the capacity to build complex profiles of all of us. Similar reservations have been voiced many times before: when Gmail introduced advertising that targeted keywords in your emails; when iGoogle gave you the opportunity to unite all of your information sources in one homepage; and when Street View introduced unparalleled interactive maps of our cities.

Read the rest of this article, and more at alienationdigital.co.uk

Alienation Goes Carbon Neutral

If you visit the Alienation Digital website today you will notice a new spring feel that coincides with a refresh of our portfolio and the announcement that we are now a carbon neutral web design company. Our new portfolio page is packed with a bunch of new web design projects and you can find out more about our quest to become a carbon neutral web design company. We have begun by offsetting 25 tonnes of carbon as well as developing a plan to reduce our carbon footprint year on year.

New Website Launched for myplace

myplace is a £200 million government programme, delivered by The Big Lottery Fund on behalf of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). Its mission is to provide world class youth facilities across England, including some of the most disadvantaged areas of the country.

Visit the Alienation Digital website for the full story, or visit myplace by clicking on the image.

Jargon Buster: Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Don't let your agency blind you with science. Alienation Digital's blog is going to war with the jargon that makes things sound much more complicated than they need to be. Here we explain Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) so that you can use it in your next meeting ;)

LSI is a system of indexing that looks to understand the meaning of a page by extracting words with similar meanings. Where search engine optimisation previously focused on repetitions of keywords, LSI scans entire documents to look for common themes, synonyms and meanings.

There is already evidence of Google beginning to experiment with ranking sites in this way. You can test this yourself by performing a search with a ~ symbol before your keyword.

Try some searches for yourself and see what you come up with, here are a couple of examples:

~Scotland: Returns results highlighting Glasgow and Edinburgh

~Apple: Look at the third page that this search returns - it's for Microsoft.

If the search engines fully embrace this method of indexing, this will revolutionise the search marketing industry. What do you think?

For the full story, and more blog articles, visit alienationdigital.co.uk

Somerston Hotels Website Launched

Alienation are delighted to announce the launch of the new web presence for Somerston Hotels, owners of 33 UK hotels including the Ramada Encore York, Express by Holiday Inn London Hammersmith and its newest addition, the Holiday Inn Express Lincoln City Centre.

35 micro sites, designed on 4 separate templates, are all interlinked using a bespoke hotel management component, which takes information from each hotel website and displays it on the Somerston Hotels central portal site, as well as a Special Offers site developed specifically for the Somerston brand.

If you'd like to read more about the project, or take a look at some of the other projects we've worked on, please visit Alienation Digital's web design agency website.

New Web Site Launched for Scotland’s Colleges Mean Business

Alienation attended the Business to College Awards on Wednesday night at Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh. The awards ceremony is unique in which businesses nominate the colleges to be commended for the services they have provided.

Our new website designed for Scotland's Colleges Mean Business invites businesses to 'pick the brains' of the colleges, who employ over 5000 experts across Scotland to provide education, training and specialist consultancy to businesses.

New Web Site Launched for Hamilton Park Racecourse

Alienation today launched the new website for Hamilton Park Racecourse in Lanarkshire.

The contract was won following a competitive tender, and our web designers developed a concept that communicates the prestige and quality of the venue through prominent photography supported by a refined graphical style. Interactive features include video streaming from Racing UK, a background that transforms to suit the time of day, and an owners’ league table.

For more information on our website design process or to find out more about other web design projects we have worked on, please visit our agency website.

Recognition for 1st Class Web Design

The Recommended Agencies Register (RAR) features the most highly regarded agencies in the United Kingdom, and Alienation Digital has been nominated for inclusion in their 2009 book.

Generated entirely from independent research, the register ensures that ‘hidden gems’ can be rated alongside more established agencies:

“Only the best agencies make our list. Not the richest. Not the ones with the most friends. Or the ones who pick up the most lunch tabs. Just those who are quite simply the best at what they do. Only they make the Recommended Agency Register.”

New Website: Children's Hospice Association Scotland

Here's a link to Alienation's latest website, which we designed and built for the Children’s Hospice Association Scotland (CHAS).

The website has been developed to promote the great work that CHAS do right across Scotland for children with life limiting conditions. It provides an accessible online platform to tell the story of life at CHAS from those who benefit most from its services. It is also an important marketing channel to attract support for the hospice and includes an online gift shop, links for online donations and information about applying to volunteer.

Karen Playfair, Marketing Consultant for CHAS had this to say about working with us on the project:

“It has been great working with Alienation on our website. You have done a fantastic job, with minimal input from us – the whole process has been an absolute pleasure”

Welcome to the New Blog from Alienation Digital

Alienation Digital is an award winning 'full service' new media design agency in Glasgow. Since 1997, our services have added value to our clients' businesses.

By providing simple and focused web site solutions, our team of highly skilled and motivated web designers, web developers, project managers and digital marketing experts make our client's websites stand out from the crowd, providing great customer experiences and generating exceptional return on investment.

Web design, web development and internet marketing are not just about technology, but how that technology is implemented. Strong project management processes, security measures, fixed costs and aftercare support mean risk free web projects.

Alienation Digital is based in Glasgow, Scotland but serves clients across the UK and internationally.

Are we the greatest web design agency on earth?