Joomla 'Content Management System' & eMarketing specialists Starberry, recently completed the web design process and web development for MAP Environmental - www.mapenvironmental.co.uk

MAP Environmental commissioned the development of their corporate website to communicate their Solar business offering to both the Commercial and Home Owner sectors.

MAP are one of the UK's leading manufacturers of Photovoltaic Solar Panels and have a nationwide network of Installation Partners who are exclusively contracted to MAP Environmental.

With the forthcoming launch of the governments 'Feed In-Tariff' initiative, any excess solar engine created will be purchased back at the going rate and transferred back on to the national grid.

In preparation for the impending boom in solar engine, produced from affordable and subsidised PV Panels installed throughout the UK, MAP have commissioned Starberry to plan and develop an On and Off Page SEO program to dramatically increase their search engine keyword ranking across all major search engines including Google, Yahoo and Bing.

This in-depth Search Engine Optimisation program includes a combination of keyword and competitive analysis, Directory, Press Release and Article submissions. Forum posting, Blog development and commenting, along with Social media creation and Social bookmarking which will also help to increase the keyword rankings. All these techniques will be combined to improve MAP's overall SERP's (search engine ranking positions).

Finally, a targeted Pay Per Click ( PPC ) campaign will be running in parallel. The knowledge and learning from the Paid Search campaign will be fed back in to the Natural Search ( SEO ) program.

The overall aim of the SEO and PPC campaigns is to increase the visibility of the MAP Environmental brand and further drive 'qualified' enquiries and overall sales of PV Panels and Solar Panel installations for MAP across the UK.

If you are interested in having a CMS website designed and developed for your business and or SEO and Paid Search services, please Contact Us

Starberry are proud to have designed and developed a brand new 'content management system' and 'international residential sales platform' for CB Richard Ellis. We have been working together with a CBRE global steering committee, to develop a residential property sales website that features properties for sale from over 30 CBRE Offices in 20+ countries around the world. The website has specifically been designed to allow CBRE to easily grow this number of offices and publish new rich content online, using the CMS via an amazingly simple, but powerful 'web based' Dashboard with multiple levels of access, depending on user defined permissions.

The new CBRE Residential website consists of five main content types; Contacts by Country/Offices, Properties broken down by Global view to a Region level, followed by Country and Office levels. This same hierachical breakdown of information is followed with the CBRE Services, Property News and Research/Reports. This concept of aggregating rich content, dynamically created and managed at global, regional, country and office levels, offers massive benefits to CBRE and their customers alike. As a CBRE customer, whether an institution, investment bank or an individual private investor, looking for residential property, services, news and research at a global, regional or country level has never been easier to access.

The phrase 'think global, act local' has truly been taken in to affect with this beautifully designed and architected, international residential sales property website. In fact, our Starberry tech web development team would prefer to refer to it as residential sales 'software application' or better so, a 'web app'. The website functionality not only includes multiple levels of search by global, regional, country and office views, but also allows you to subscribe to all or any of this information depending on your criteria via RSS feeds and email alerts that can easily be updated, switched on and off as you wish via MyCBRE which is a free service to all registered users.

Behind the scenes, the CBRE Residential offices around the world can receive and share the realtime data capture. Depending on password protected user permissions, they have access to all or any part of the 'captured data' via the 'web based' Dashboard. CBRE directors and management now have their own version of 'big brother' in place, allowing them to easily view global activity from any web enabled device, including their mobile phones, as and when they so desire.

If you would like to learn more about how Starberry could help design and develop similar software applications for your organisation, be it a global or local focussed requirement, please Contact Us. 

Yes, everybody's talking about "rhubarb"...

Some 15 years ago, was the last time, brothers Rus & Ben Sellers worked with Lucy Gemmell to develop a name and logo for her home grown catering business - "rhubarb".

Today, we are proud to launch the new "rhubarb" CMS website, which is truly a mouth watering experience wherever you explore within the site.

The business is split in to three key parts - the core business, Private Parties and Corporate Events, where "rhubarb" cater to the 'rich and famous', including the likes of Royalty, Elton John and even 007!

Then there is their growing Retail business, including their first "rhubarb" Food Bar in London Heathrow's Terminal 3 and Gallery Mess, Restaurant/Cafe/Bar, in partnership with The Saatchi Gallery at Duke of York's HQ, Chelsea.

Finally their are the "rhubarb" venues, at the races, on the river and in the country, plus over 70 accredited venues they cater at.

With it's group of companies and team of 75+ staff, a fresh approach to their online presence was a must. Starberry have designed and developed the new "rhubarb" content managed website to 'cater' for this energetic business that is growing at the rate of knots.

Whether you choose to navigate through the wealth of 'sumptuous' content or just sit back to be entertained, the edible food photography and video footage throughout, will be sure to impress. This website has been described as being more like watching TV, than anything else!

You can keep up to date with "rhubarb" by subscribing to their Latest News/Blogs via RSS and Email or you may just prefer to follow them on the social networking websites Twitter or YouTube.

The combination of innovative Web Tools utilised for this website include, a comprehensive 'Open Source' CMS, Search Engine Friendly and fully editable Flash Pockets, an integrated and seamless photo and video gallery, with an impressive 'full screen' mode, and an easy to use web based Image Management Dashboard. The blog feeds are managed by Google's Feedburner, plus there are a variety of data capture forms for capturing Enquiries, Quick Quotes, CV Submissions and more, through the password protected Back Office. Google Analytics has been installed to ensure "rhubarb" full visibilty of the activity, site wide.

Starberry have developed online tools that work in harmony together and most of all empower even the least tech savvy person with the ability to keep the site 'live' and bursting with 'rich and 'fruitful' content.

If this website has 'wet your appetite' please Contact Us
 

Fanela approached Starberry to develop a new online strategy for their trade garment printing and embroidery business.

With a business model that is pretty unique for the corporate clothing industry, Fanela were very keen to exploit the opportunities that the web could bring to their business.

Fanela offer their customers the ability to order printed and embroidered garments with no minimum orders. They also offer exceptionally fast production times.

Up until now, all orders were taken over the telephone and manually entered into the Fanela quoting system. Starberry were asked to develop a fresh look and feel to their web presence, including the fine tuning of their corporate identity.

For phase one, a simple online ordering form has been added to the website supported by a searchable clothing catalogue. This empowers the Fanela customers to register securely on the website and to search  for their required garments, view trade pricing and select print processes, volumes, sizes etc, without any need to speak with Fanela.

When the order requests are submitted, Fanela has all the information in their system to be able to respond almost instantly, without having to re-enter all the information manual, removing a layer of potential human error, and further increasing their incredible response times.

Along with the phase one's simple quoting system, Starberry have added lots of quality imagery, video and testimonials to demonstrate Fanela's capabilities and to show off their impressive production facility.

We are currently reviewing Fanela's backend order processing and CRM system with the aim to interface this with their customers, to create a realtime ordering system that will offer the ability to see exactly where your order is in the production line, right through to tracking it's delivery.

If you would like to know more about developing web based applications, please enquire now.

Contact Us

"Why did we fly 5370 miles to California and travel from San Francisco to Mountain View"?

We decided that it was important to attend the "first ever" Twitter Conference in Silicon Valley to make sure that we could hear, first hand, how Twitter is developing into a social networking platform that is here to stay.

"Twitter is the Realtime Web" offering a wealth of opportunities.

There were some very inspiring keynote speeches delivered over the two day event - below are the keynote titles that where up for discussion, and some downloadable session slides (below);

Day 1:
"The Business Value of the Twitter API" by Alex Payne, Lead API Developer for Twitter
"Best Practise - I am a Twitter God(dess) and So Can You" by iJustine, Tara Hunt, Dave Peck & Steve Broback
"What makes a Great Twitter App" by Loren Brichter, Britt Selvitelle & Dom Sagolla
"How Twitter will make a Billion, and How you can make a Million" by Jason Calacanis
"Twitter Strategies: Real World Success Stories" by Jeff Pester, Bryan Rhoads, Warren Whitlock & Justin Kan
"Visualising Twitter" by Damon Cortesi, Jeff Katz, Dan Zarella & Steve Broback
"Twitter Goes Mainstream: What are the Issues and How will they be Resolved" by Jennifer Leggio, Jonathan Matkowski & Richard Brewer-Hay

Day 2:
"Twitter's Potential - An Investigation into the Possibilities" by Anamitra Banerji
"Mining Twitter: Extracting Value From Conversaions & Connections" by Soren Macbeth, Brian Solis, Warren Sukernek & Steve Broback
"What the 2008 USA Election Teaches Us about Politics & Twitter" by Kathy Gill, Jason Preston & Sarah Granger
"Case tudies in Community Building" by Jeremiah Owyang
"Corporate Tweeting: Strategies and Tools for Co-Ordinating Workflow" by Jon Ziber, Morgan Johnston, Sudha Jamthe, Ross Mayfield and Jerry Michalski
"How Twitter and the Real Time Web Change the Dynamics of Web 2.0" by Robert Scoble, DL Byron, Stowe Boyd & Jason Preston



Here are many of the session slides from the presenters at 140 | The Twitter Conference, pulled together into one convenient location. If you're looking for Slide Shows from the event, you can try grabbing them here:

Click here for #140tc Session Slides

If you would like to understand more about our learnings from the #140tc Conference, we would be delighted to share this information with you.

CONTACT US
 

For decades we have all received numerous cold call letters from Estate Agents. The usual theme suggests they might have a potential buyer for your house or flat - This was almost the full extent of their 'copy writing' requirements, outside of the traditional property particulars that litter our letterboxes.

Those days are over. Words online are now everything to everyone - 'Keywords and Phrases' rule the web.

If Estate Agents really want to embrace the internet, and really want to get to the top of Google, they should be getting all their staff to write !

A note, a story, some feedback, an area guide, a white paper, some local know how or a tweet makes the world of difference to your search rankings.

'New' News is what we all want and that is exactly what Blogs, Social Networking & Bookmarking sites, Twitter Channels, Search Engines, Feedback widgets, Email & RSS Feeds are all proving to deliver.

The question you need to ask yourself is "what Keywords and Phrases would your potential customers use to find and engage with your products and services"?

Once you understand which words and phrases are the most popular, you can then begin writing the words in to your websites 'Meta Data' and bidding on them with Google Adwords Paid Search campaigns and working all the social media marketing avenues made available to you.

Recently our client Marsh & Parsons, a leading London Estate Agents, wrote a story about Green Shoots, that appeared simultaneously on their Blog whilst being posted to Twitter. This lead to three TV appearances for their Managing Director, Peter Rollings on London Tonight, CNBC and Channel 5.

Write 'the RIGHT keywords' and you can literally watch the stream of NEW customers come right through your (website's) front door.

If you would like Starberry to help you understand the keywords that count and make them start to work for you, just click on the contact us link below.

CONTACT US

Starberry have created 4 exciting ways to play the online version of the 4D Sudoku puzzle. You can now choose to play 'Easy', 'Medium', 'Hard', or 'Expert' versions. Where 'Easy' has 2 levels already completed, 'Medium' has 1/2 completed, 'Hard' has 1 level completed, and 'Expert' mode you start from scratch!

In version v1.0 of the game there was only one way to start playing the game and that was from scratch. This version was a runaway success from launch -  back in September 2008, and has had over a 500,000 people playing it from 134 countries!

Thanks to the very positive feedback from all the fans of the online game, we have added this new gameplay. For a quick 'Coffee Break' game 'Easy' or 'Medium' are the purfect options to ease yourself into the pleasures of 4D Sudoku. For those of you who demand a real challenge, and have a little more time on your hands the 'Hard' or 'Expert' modes are the place to start for you ;-)

The team at Starberry has also given the game interface a sleek and sexy makeover - plus you can save your game for later, get cheats, shortcuts with keyboard commands, and the chance to see your name in the high scores.

As an extra bonus, you can win up to 25% off a Hand-held 4D Sudoku puzzle to use in the 4DS Store, just by playing and correctly completing your games!

So what are you waiting for - Go on and play the 'new and improved' 4D Sudoku online now >>
http://www.4dsudoku.net/play

If you just can't wait to get you hands on a Hand-held 4D Sudoku puzzle visit the shop now, where there are discounts to be had when you order 2 or more puzzles at the same time >>
http://www.4dsudoku.net/shop

Wordle is a fantastic web-based toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your 'clouds' with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

All you do is enter the URL of any blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an RSS feed. This clever program sets to work to provide very cool visualizations that somewhat capture the thrust of their content. The image above was created by running the Starberry RSS blog feed through Wordle, which really does capture the essence of Starberry ;-)

The size of a word is proportional to the quantity associated with that word, which, in the case of free text, is the word count. For instance, if your text consists of the words "starberry starberry starberry banana banana papaya", then "banana" will appear in a font size twice that of "papaya", and "starberry" will appear in a font size 3/2 as large as "banana".

Wordle was created by Jonathan Feinberg on wordle.net. It was designed to give pleasure, and not to provide reliable analytic insight. That said, I have found unexpected uses for it, from presenting the "gist" of a text to displaying a personal identity in fun and illuminating way.
 

What's everyone Twittering on about!

Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networking website out there. Even Facebook is keeping a very close eye on this seamingly lo-fi network.

Once you have set-up your account (for free), you can instantly start following others, without waiting to see if you are accepted. You can instantly start writing your own micro-blogs (described as Tweets), just like SMS, but with the addition of pictures and links back to your website.

We set-up all our blogs to feed to Twitter. Your followers can then pick and choose what to read and drill down further for the full story.

Even celebrities are realising that they can connect directly with their fans, whilst keeping them at an arms length. Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) stole the march in the UK and has over 150,000 followers, and Jonathan Ross (@wossy), Chris Moyles (@chrisdjmoyles), and Philip Scholfield (@schofe) are already hooked.

Twitter recently played a part in President Obama's (@barackobama) campaign to victory. I am proud to say he is now following me and me him!

Though it can be a bit like watching and being on Big Brother, the potential for sending instant relevant news, out to your valued followers and onto a public network, is a powerful web app to have on your mobile or Mac/PC.

Currently, there are many web applications being developed that are making good use of Twitters powerful API, using Twitter as a carrier of information passed directly to other web apps.

I think this is just the beginning for Twitter, and the Starberry Constellation are already developing some interesting ideas of our own with Twitters easy to use API such as social media marketing.

To learn more about how Starberry (@5tarberry) can help make Twitter become part of your Online marketing Strategy, contact us now.

CONTACT US

-- Post From My iPhone

Starberry are proud to announce the launch of Vision Homes 'new developments' content managed corporate website and property portal.

The brief was to develop a new corporate website that would appeal to potential customers, supplier partners and corporate banks. The main website has been designed to promote a variety of new developments with a centralised search function.

From the moment you arrive on www.visionhomes.co.uk you get a taste of what's on offer including external architecture and quality interiors, fixtures and finishings. You can search available property by Google Map or by list and you can even take a glance at some past 'sold' projects The property listings offer an overview for each new home, however development specific microsites are only a click away, where you can find details such as a backgound to the development, site plans, floor plans and specifications.

There are a wealth of pictures within the flash galleries and in some cases video fly throughs. Best of all, the entire group of property websites are all centrally managed from Starberry's Digital Dashboard. The Dashboard allows Vision Homes non-technical staff to manage and update all aspects of the sites from a web based application, in realtime.

Visit some of the Vision Homes microsites:

www.paradisepark.tv
www.claphamcourtterrace.com
www.br1central.com

If you are interested in a demo of the Starberry CMS and Dashboard or further information CONTACT US