MAKING IT - OUR BUSINESS
JULY 2011: We are very sad to have heard that one of our most trusted colleagues, Suzi Cotton, has passed away following an accident in Egypt. Rest in peace Suzi, we will miss you. Best wishes to all your family, friends and colleagues - past and present...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
MAKING IT - OUR BUSINESS: APRIL 2010 - LEAN TECHNIQUES
This is part of an article Sue wrote for a publication in Cornwall. Some of it is relevant to householders as well as businesses.If you want to be more environmentally conscious as a business you need to consider ways to green your supply chain. Organisations of all sizes are implementing sustainability initiatives throughout the supply chain not only to achieve regulatory compliance, but also to improve brand image and often to save money too.
The most effective greening of purchasing would be to consider carefully each item individually to ensure that you actually really need it and it isn’t just a habitual purchase. After reducing your purchases where possible the next considerations would be the lifecycle environmental impact of your goods. This would include manufacturing, shipping/transportation, use and recycling or disposal. It may also lead to considerations of Lean* techniques, such as making sure you don’t store goods but get them “just in time”.
Here are a few supply chain strategies that can be used to reduce purchasing waste.
Buy local. There are great social, economic and of course environmental benefits of supporting your local economy. This is not appropriate in all cases though as sometimes there is a greater environmental benefit of buying a truly green product and incurring some extra transport miles.
Ship to point-of-use. In the manufacturing sector these strategies are employed when raw materials or components are shipped directly to the point of assembly, this reduces transportation costs and the need for protective packaging.
Don’t transport water. When you buy cleaning materials for example you will be transporting a lot of water. If you purchase concentrated solutions you can add water at the point of use, ideally using environmentally friendly products obviously. This would reduce packaging, weight and transport costs.
Are your suppliers green? They may sell you environmentally friendly products but do they have an eco policy themselves. Make sustainability a part of your tendering process
Have green procurement guidelines. This can result in savings from getting better deals with trusted suppliers and avoiding ad hoc non-green purchasing.
There are many other green considerations that will also save you money. This will range from the obvious switching off policies for lights, computers, water taps etc to reducing power in your data centre to working from home.
For more tips see http://www.greeninformation.co.uk
* Lean is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing
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MAKING IT - OUR BUSINESS: MARCH 2010 - SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short is about trying to get your website featured at the top of a Google search (it is about Yahoo, Bing and other search engines too but most people have heard of Google so I will use that example).First of all, there is no company that can guarantee you a top spot on Google’s front page. There are a number of best practices that will make it easier for search engines to both crawl (look at) and index your content. Search engine optimisation is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimisations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site's user experience and performance in organic (as opposed to paid for) search results.
Here is a list of the key suggestions that you can do yourself.
1. Offer quality content and services
Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means. Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site's reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content. Make sure you create content primarily for your users, not for search engines, where possible use the words that your users will search under (key words). Links to your site from other sites will improve your page rankings. Beware of link exchange companies as their reputation could adversely affect the reputation (and therefore ranking) of your site.
2. Write better anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable text that users will see as a result of a link, and is placed within the anchor. This text tells users and Google something about the page you're linking to. Links on your page may be internal—pointing to other pages on your site—or external—leading to content on other sites. In either of these cases, the better your anchor text is, the easier it is for users to navigate and for Google to understand what the page you're linking to is about.
3. Promote your website in the right ways
While most of the links to your site will be gained gradually, as people discover your content through search or other ways and link to it, Google understands that you'd like to let others know about the hard work you've put into your content. Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject.
Don't forget about offline promotion - Putting effort into the offline promotion of your company or site can also be rewarding. For example, if you have a business site, make sure it’s URL is listed on your business cards, letterhead, posters, etc. You could also send out recurring newsletters to clients through the mail letting them know about new content on the company's website.
4. Add your business to Google's Local Business Center
If you run a local business; adding its information to Google's Local Business Center will help you reach customers on Google Maps and web search.
5. Keep the content fresh
Search engines like new pages and so do readers.
6. Keep working at it.
As I am sure many people have found - you can be at the top of the search engine one week and nowhere in sight the next.
This is just a short article about SEO but more can be found on Google’s own website and elsewhere.
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MAKING IT - OUR BUSINESS: FEBRUARY 2010 - REMOTE WORKING
One of the big decisions we made when we first set up the business was that we would always work from home and our staff would do likewise. This was for a number of reasons. Since we do most of our work on computers it can basically be done anywhere and why would we want to pay rent for an office and then have to travel there?A key consideration was to keep our carbon footprint down. We didn’t want to use more energy heating and lighting another premises when we were also keeping our home warm (we take it in turns to look after our little one). We also didn’t want to waste time, money and carbon travelling to an office.
The people that work for us each have a home office too. Someone from another design agency asked how we manage client projects and brainstorming without being face to face regularly.
What we do is use the technology. Although being out in the sticks here we don’t have a very fast broadband but it is sufficient. We have a secure wireless LAN at home and use 37 Signals software (Highrise for managing the customer database, Basecamp for managing client projects), which means that any of our people can see the shared files, milestones, task lists etc securely over the internet. We have Skype for Instant Messaging, free phone calls and video calls. There are many possible programmes to use for Brainstorming from virtual worlds like Second Life, to Google Wave, mind maps and shared white boarding.
When we had the snow in December and January we were able to carry on working as normal although we did spend a lot of time looking out the window and talking/emailing about the weather; just like a normal office then…
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