Pamela Howard to recieve OBE

Yet another Chichester Design customer is in the media spot light. Professor Pamela Howard from Selsey is to receive an OBE for her services to drama. Professor Howard has been in the business of designing theatre sets, directing performances, educating aspiring thespians and curating exhibitions for more than 40 years.

Congratulations Pamela from all of us at Chichester Design!

www.PamelaHoward.co.uk

Job Satisfaction

Our job satisfaction is seeing our clients businesses thriving assisted by our designers skills...

Sam & Janet Mahoney came down from London and have set up one of Chichester's finest restaurants, and a serious delicatessen to match.

Hidden away in Baffins Court - just off St John's Street, Chichester, you'll find the Field & Fork 22-seater restaurant on one side, and the Field & Fork deli with home-made produce and local meats, cheeses, vegetables and fruit on the other all backed up with a strong brand image.

Read the review featured in the Portsmouth News

Facebook for Business

We've already set up a few Facebook pages for our customers and we've just got around to starting our own. Facebook enables us to connect with our customers in a similar way we connect with our friends.

Here's some useful features your business could benefit from with Facebook.

Facebook Social Ads
Promote your website or Facebook Page with highly-targeted advertising. Make your ads even more effective by attaching them to News Feed stories about the users' friends. Receive detailed analytics and reporting through Facebook Insights.

Facebook Pages
Connect with your customers on Facebook similar to the way they connect with their friends. Through a Facebook Page, users can show their support by becoming a fan, writing on your Wall, and other actions that automatically generate News Feed stories.

Facebook Beacon
Allow your customers to share with their friends the actions they take on your website. For user actions you define, Facebook Beacon will publish a story in the user's profile and to friends' News Feeds with a link back to your site.

Facebook Insights
Gather insights on who's engaging with your Facebook Pages and who's clicking on your Social Ads. You can also see how much your presence is spreading virally without promotion. Facebook Insights is a free service included with Pages and Social Ads.

Facebook Platform
Facebook Platform enables you to create social applications that let users interact with their friends and your business. With many deep integration points, platform applications are effective ways for your business to leverage the social graph.

Facebook Polls
Run a survey targeted to the demographic you define and get answers in as little as 30 minutes. Ask your target audience about their attitudes or get feedback before you make business decisions. Watch the results in real time as users respond.


If you would like to talk to us about setting up a Facebook page for your business, then you can get in touch with us via our website: www.ChichesterDesign.co.uk/contact.html

Chichester Design – the future of design is here

We serve as web designers and developers of choice for many established design and advertising agencies in and around Chichester, West Sussex.

Increasingly, Chichester Design has been kept busy with a wide variety of projects. Just some of those we’ve been involved in this year include developing websites for large estate agents as well as for world renowned design agencies and city legal firms.

We love working in this way as it keeps things fresh for the team, and allows the development of excellent business relationships with other design and marketing related companies.

Gone are the days of "full service" design or advertising agencies with dozens of staff that are each trained in all the required media disciplines just in case a job should come along for which they'll be required. It's simply too expensive to run a design house in that way.

Today's economic environment is one where budgets are tight and results must be proven. Many UK businesses now find themselves caught between risky overseas outsourcing and paying top whack for an impersonalised service from over-priced London agencies with huge unsustainable overheads.

Well, the future is here with us. It may be small but Chichester Design is a perfectly formed business, which comprises of experts specializing in what they do best backed up with excellent project managers who have the skills to get the job done on spec, on time and on budget, with minimal fuss.

If you’re a design or advertising agency and want to provide any combination of web design, photography, online marketing and graphic design services to your clients, but you don’t have the time or inclination to get your hands dirty with the likes of XHTML, CSS and server-side scripting, why not speak to us before even more of your competitors beat you to it!

Perhaps, you’re a front-end interface designer looking for some cutting edge database driven, PHP MySql, Ajax web development to sit behind your user interface to provide a solid reliable website. Whatever your business design requirements, Chichester Design are here to help.

Just contact ben [at] chichesterdesign.co.uk or give us a call on 020 8133 3122 today.

Bayleaf Garden Services

Chichester Design is pleased to announce an exciting new website for Bayleaf Garden Services, a family run business based in the Chichester area.

As well as creating a fresh, organic look and incorporating vibrant images, Chichester Design have highlighted the wide range of gardening services available throughout.
The other key features of this website are the fantastic gallery, showing some of Bayleaf’s most inspiring creations, and the Gardening Diary, which takes visitors on a journey through the gardening year, offering an array of useful information on all things gardening.

Not only is this website extremely easy on the eye it is simple to navigate and reveals Bayleaf as the local garden service that you can truly trust.

www.BayleafGardenServices.co.uk

Santa Fun Run

Yesterday morning Lucy and I took part in the in St Wilfrid’s Hospice Santa Fun Run which took place at Fontwell Park Racecourse.

Entry to the event cost just £10 and for that we received Santa Claus outfits, including snowy white beards, which had to be worn throughout the run.

Just as we recieved our outfits we realised that the merry pack were already under starters orders so we sprinted over to the race track to which we recieved a few c'mon your late shouts from the grandstand. Still struggling with my oversized Santa trowsers we set off from the very back of the field. Impressivly we jogged our way through the sureal pack of Santas to get to about 30th out of about 250. On the last half mile we were spurred on having been overtaken by a handfull of well trained professionals - around the age of 8!

Anyways, we finished without stopping and we'll be back next year!

Ho ho ho!

I’m a Google Pro - Certified!

I am now a fully qualified Google Advertising Professional! This means I passed the Google Advertising Professionals Exam and have met Google's other requirements:

• Accepted the terms of our programme.
• Managed at least one AdWords account in a master account for 90 days.
• Built and maintained our 90-day spend requirement.
• Passed the Google Advertising Professional Exam.

By attaining the prestigious 'Qualified Individual' status, I receive:

• Google's recognition as a tested and proven AdWords expert.

• The official AdWords Qualified Individual logo you see above. This logo will be displayed on our website and other Chichester Design materials to showcase my skills and help attract even more clients.

• A 'Professional Status' page which profiles Chichester Design and displays Google's validation that I am an authentic Qualified Individual within the Google Advertising Professionals programme.

• Promotional credits which can be applied to new client accounts to help bring in more business.

• A warm, fuzzy feeling for this grand accomplishment.

Drop me line to have chat about how I can help you increase brand awareness, increase sales, maximise your return on investment, lower your cost per click and bring qualified visitors to your website.

What does 'CAPTCHA' stand for?

Have you ever filled in a web registration form on websites like Yahoo! and Google where you have to type in some text from an image of some distorted characters or words?

This is a security measure called CAPTCHA. A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. CAPTCHAs are used on websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate masses of annoying spam. Currently computers find it difficult to read distorted text as well as humans can, so this means bots can't hijack forms protected by CAPTCHAs.

Your Website's contact forms must have some type of security in place else you'll get a nasty spam bot come along and hijack the form to send hundreds of thousands of spams resulting in your server ending up on other peoples servers black lists. These attacks can even bring down the whole server and all it's websites with it. The first you'll know about it is your host getting very annoyed with you because your website has just sent out half a million spams. They'll also turn your server off unless it's fixed within a few hours.

If you need help with preventing your contact forms from getting abused please don't hesitate to contact us.

For more information on CAPTCHAs see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

return2earth, environment, ethics and business

Chichester Design has created both the branding and website for return2earth eco-networking and investment, a business concerned with ethics and the environment.

Return2earth's branding is centred on the premise that: "Together we can grow, together you can grow". The logo comprises a tree, where the leaves symbolise teamwork and networking and the trunk, which is an arrow, represents investment and input from the businesses' members.

The idea behind the website is to unite like-minded people in order to create green-focused business opportunities and to get across the seriousness of the business without emanating an overly corporate feel. This has been achieved with a fresh, organic, professional look, a direct yet friendly tone and easy to navigate web pages.

As well as providing information about how visitors can become involved in return2earth, from networking with other green businesses to pitching for funding for green-focused businesses, the website incorporates green pages where visitors can promote their businesses, news about all things green and a blog from Jason Kendall the company director.

www.return2earth.co.uk/

Enabling Grants for Websites!

If you're lucky enough to be a Chichester based business you will be pleased to know that the Chichester District Council recognises that your business is growing and changing, and you will appreciate how expensive it is to support growth. If your business could benefit from receiving financial assistance in any of these areas you should apply for an Enabling Grant:

• Establishing your first website
• Converting your business to e-commerce and/or Internet trading.

Enabling Grants will pay for 50% of the cost of a project, up to a maximum of £750, and are not restricted to the examples above. Let them know what you want to do and they will let you know if they can help! Many of our customers have obtained this unique grant helping their businesses benefit from a professionally designed on-line presence through working with Chichester Design.

Download the Enabling Grant Application Form [66kb]
Download the Enabling Grant Scheme Details [29kb]

For further information contact Anna Hayward - Economic Development

Tel: 01243 534669

Chichester District Council
East Pallant House
1 East Pallant
Chichester
West Sussex
PO19 1TY