I hope this message finds you well. We want to express our gratitude for choosing Four Lakes as your trusted web development and hosting provider. Your continued support has allowed us to grow and improve our services over the years.

We understand the importance of transparency in our business relationship, and we believe in providing you with the best possible service. To maintain the high quality of our services and keep up with rising operational costs, we find it necessary to make some adjustments to our pricing structure.

Effective from 1st November, there will be an approximate 10% increase in our web development, web support and website/email hosting fees. This adjustment is a result of the ever-evolving technology landscape, increased infrastructure expenses, and the need to invest in advanced security measures to protect your online assets.

We want to assure you that this decision was not made lightly, and we remain committed to delivering the same level of excellence and support you have come to expect from us. Our team will continue to work diligently to provide you with reliable hosting services and top-notch web development solutions.

Please note that your existing service agreements and contracts will remain unchanged until their respective renewal dates, at which point the new pricing will come into effect. You will receive a detailed invoice reflecting the adjusted fees when it is time for your next billing cycle.

We understand that changes in pricing can be challenging, and we are here to answer any questions or concerns you may have regarding this adjustment. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us.

We value your business and the trust you have placed in us, and we look forward to continuing our partnership for years to come. Thank you for your understanding and continued support.

Warm regards,

Colman

The post Adjustment in fees appeared first on Four Lakes.

We aren’t the only people to appreciate the MailChimp success story, though. They were recently named Inc Magazine’s company of the year, with particular attention paid to their entirely self-funded rise to their current position as market leader in the SME email marketing arena.

A new direction

Being quite an innovative company, perhaps it should not be a surprise that, rather than rest on their considerable laurels, they have now branched away into one of those complementary areas themselves. A few days ago, MailChimp announced the launch of a new service, namely Landing Pages.

It’s an interesting departure, and one that utilises a couple of MailChimp’s existing areas of expertise. They already had a web hosting infrastructure that allowed email campaigns to be accessed as a web page as well as an email (particularly useful for maintain an archive of previous campaigns), as well as a graphical email design tool that readily lends itself to creating simple web pages too.

What are Landing Pages?

Before we delve into the pros and cons of the MailChimp service, it’s worth quickly recapping Landing Pages as a concept, as not everyone will be familiar with where they fit in the marketing cycle, even if we all have used them at some stage or other.

Put simply, a Landing Page is a web page with a very focused purpose. In it’s simplest form it will most likely consist of some text, an image or two, and a very clear call-to-action (CTA). That CTA might be a newsletter signup, a product purchase, a social media action (like, tweet, etc) or occasionally something else.

Landing Pages are an integral part of a marketing ‘funnel’, or a series of actions that lead a visitor to an end goal. A simple funnel might consist of:

1. Facebook Ad that prompts a visitor to buy a product from your website.
2. Product page on the website

Two steps that carry out the essential processes in any funnel – attract and take action. Even in this most basic of funnels, there is a landing page function, in this case being the product page on your website.

More complex funnels extend those steps in a couple of ways. Quite often, you can’t just place an ad and expect to get a lot of traffic ready to purchase your product or service. There is an element of nurturing involved, whereby prospective customers are first persuaded that they need whatever it is you are offering, before then being prompted to get their credit card out. So a more complex funnel may have a number of steps:-

1. Advert for free download (e.g. budget analysis)
2. Download page with newsletter signup
3. Email containing free download
4. Further emails to build trust and familiarity
5. Email about product/service, typically with special offer
6. Web page with more detail on special offer
7. Purchase page

In fact, this isn’t an overly complex funnel, but it illustrates how quickly a fairly simple process can grow into a multi-step process involving a number of different media. In this example, we have a couple of purpose-built landing pages that help to move prospective customers through the process as easily as possible. In step 2 we would probably have a very simple page with a very obvious email signup box. In step 6, the page would probably contain a fair amount of text, and maybe relevant images too, with a button through to the purchase page very prominent, perhaps multiple times.

More complex needs?

When you start putting more complex sales funnels together, perhaps with multiple landing pages, measuring the effectiveness of each step in the process becomes very important, and a bit more complex. Without getting into the analytics needs for the funnel as a whole, the more function-rich landing page services out there (e.g. LeadPages, Unbounce, etc) offer most than just a suite of pre-built templates to choose from. Typically they will also offer:

• mobile responsiveness
• dynamic text and other elements (e.g. different text shown depending on whether the visitor arrived from a Facebook or Google ad)
• detailed analytics (as well as the ability to integrate Google Analytics)
• A/B testing (e.g. show different options to random visitors and track which converts best)

The MailChimp offer

So where does the new MailChimp service fit into this model? As you’d expect, the primary target of their new Landing Pages offering is those people whose needs are at the simpler end of the scale. Although there is some scope for more complex functionality which we’ll come back to in a bit.

Firstly, though, lets have a quick look at how to create a landing page. If you are familiar with creating email campaigns in MailChimp, then Landing Pages are going to be an absolute cinch! All you need to do is create a new campaign, choose ‘Landing Page’ as the campaign type, and then go ahead a design your page. Have a look at this video on the MailChimp website to see the whole process in action.

Beyond the basics

You’ll notice there are only 2 templates to choose from – one aimed at growing your email list, and the other designed to promote a product or service for sale on your site. Whilst that might seem quite restrictive, and certainly reinforces the opinion that the service is aimed at simpler funnels, there is still a good deal of flexibility in the page designer should you wish to get creative. In fact, there is no reason why you can’t start from scratch and build a page that looks exactly the way you want (with some restrictions).

Since most landing pages, however complex the funnel they sit in, either add subscribers to a mailing list, or have a clear CTA to click through to another website, you’re covered for most scenarios. I wouldn’t be surprised if more page templates started to appear before long too, in the same way that MailChimp’s list of email templates has expanded over the years.

One area in which the MailChimp landing pages are lacking is in analytics. There are some basic stats offered as standard for each campaign – views, clicks and subscribes. But if you want to get to a more granular level (e.g. which CTA button on a form gets most clicks) then it looks like you are out of luck for now. There is a code module you can add to the page, which at first glance seems to be a prime candidate for adding the Google Analytics script. But initial tests seems to suggest that any embedded script is stripped out.

Equally, there are no A/B testing facilities, so in order to try different combinations to determine the best performing option you’ll probably have to cobble together a more manual process (e.g. 2 ads with the same text pointing to different landing pages).

Who should use this?

The new MailChimp landing page offering is not designed to replace a dedicated, full-featured service like Unbounce or LeadPages. Rather it is aimed at those who are looking for something quick, easy to build, and cheap (i.e. free for most). If you are already using an existing MailChimp email marketing setup, then it’s a no-brainer to avail of the MailChimp landing pages until you outgrow their functionality. If you are contemplating a more complex funnel, and require advanced features such as detailed analytics or A/B testing, then you are better looking at a dedicated service elsewhere.

The post A quick look at Mailchimp’s new Landing Pages appeared first on Four Lakes.

Hi, my name is Colman and I have a confession to make. It’s not an easy thing to say, and I hope you can understand the reasons why this has happened. I wish things had been different, but it just kind of happened, and then it was too easy to let it be. But I assure you it is something that I will be making a huge effort to put right over the coming weeks and months.

Yes, I know I haven’t told you what it is yet. I’m sorry, I guess I feel a bit of a fraud and its always hard to admit your own shortcomings. But that’s how we learn and grow, right? Making mistakes is natural, and as long as we examine the reasons why they happened and apply the learning to future decisions then we can get something positive from it, right?

So, bearing that in mind, here’s the big admission….

I get very little work through my website!

I know….a web design company that doesn’t utilise the very resource that should be its main source of leads. Shameful, eh! In my defence, I’ve had lots of repeat work from existing customers, and they have referred new customers to me on a regular basis, so there never seemed a need to go looking for new customers any other way. The website was just a way for those leads to find out a bit more about Four Lakes, rather than attract them in the first place.

But now that needs to change. Four Lakes has some ambitious plans for the next couple of years, and in order to achieve those lofty goals the website will have to start attracting new customers.

A bit of background

Four Lakes has been in existence about 10 years following my redundancy from an IT management position within a government-funded business support organisation. It was initially started as a means of providing some income whilst also being a stay-at-home dad, allowing more flexibility and the opportunity to choose my own hours.

But as my daughters have grown, and one is now at university, the need to be constantly available for school runs and so on has diminished. Indeed, there is now more pressure to a be a source of cash for school trips, visits with friends, etc, etc. I’m sure others parents of teens are very familiar with those requests!

But the desire to grow the business is not just about wanting a bit more ready cash. On a deeper level it is more about creating something positive, a thriving business that fulfils the need most people have to provide for themselves and their family in a way that is intellectually and emotionally stimulating. In essence, I was running a hobby business and now want to turn it into a lifestyle business.

Ideas

With that goal decided in my mind, I figured it was time to take it to a wider audience. So I took up an invitation to attend a local business mastermind meeting, PureB2B, over a lovely lunch in a local hotel. With a bunch of other business people attending, many of whom had already created successful businesses, I was able to gather some useful suggestions and some welcome encouragement to push forward and transform Four Lakes. There was a definite sense that the basics are in place and are solid, so it is really a case of getting started on making the changes necessary to attract more leads, convert them into more customers, and nurture those customers more effectively than before.

One of the specific suggestions from the lunch was that it might be an interesting exercise to document the transformation of Four Lakes from its current state into a lifestyle business. Initially I though it was a good idea, as it would be a ready source of blogs and social media posts. These offer the opportunity to form a great case study of the sort of process any company can go through to carry out the same transformation, and allow me to develop some processes that can be repeated for any future customer projects.

Having had the chance to consider it further, though, I think there will be an added benefit to documenting the process in this way. One of the problems with carrying out work on your own business, I have found, is that it is far too easy to prioritise client work when it comes in. Being able to charge for work is difficult to argue against, even to oneself. However, the discipline of setting targets that are communicated to blog subscribers, twitter followers, etc. means that working on the business will carry a greater priority and will be less likely to be sidelined.

It’s not just about me

My contemplations about documenting the process of taking Four Lakes from a hobby business to a lifestyle business threw up another intriguing possibility. What if this was a more involved process for all those interested in it. After all, when I presented my situation to the business mastermind group, everyone around the table had opinions, experiences and knowledge that were freely offered as suggestions to help me find a good path forward. Could this small business group be replicated on a looser, wider scale for this exercise?

Again, there are multiple benefits to taking this approach, in my view. Firstly, having access to the opinions of as many people as possible is usually a good thing. Of course, choosing the right opinion to listen to within a multitude of conflicting ones is a possibility too. However, generating a bit of an online buzz should also be a good way to increase traffic and engagement on social media accounts, and ultimately drive visitors to the Four Lakes website. As this is a long term goal, then the lessons learned from running a social media campaign now should be invaluable for the future.

I’m still researching approaches to this that will be relevant to the type of exercise, and likely timescale. However, some initial searches show that the hashtag #hobby2lifestyle is yet to be used on Twitter and Facebook, so at least for now I’m going with that.

Let’s go

I’ll be posting over the coming weeks about various aspects of the work to transform Four Lakes. I will also start pushing stuff out to social media too, from snippets that I come across in my research through to questions about which particular direction to take. So keep an eye out for blog updates on the RSS feed, posts on the Four Lakes Facebook page, tweets on the Twitter feed, news on our Google+ feed, and updates on the brand new Four Lakes LinkedIn page (something else I need to learn about). All tagged with #hobby2lifestyle ready for you to engage with. It’ll be fun, informative and hopefully profitable for everyone involved.

The post Time to eat our own dog food appeared first on Four Lakes.

• A number of pages describing what you do in enough detail to connect with visitors and encourage them not to move on
• Supporting images, videos and design elements that create an appropriate ambience for what you are selling
• One or more means of getting in touch with you, such as phone number and/or contact form
• Means of tracking site visits (analytics), and perhaps even on-site behaviour (more advanced analytics and/or heatmapping)

Successful websites do all these very well, in addition to having mechanisms in place to attract visitors to the website in the first place.  For many businesses, their primary goal for website visitors is to encourage them to get in touch, so that the conversation can be continued. However, more and more we are seeing a particular issue with website contact forms which is causing all that effort to be wasted, and hot leads from potential customers to go unanswered.

Email – an imperfect tool

To understand why there is an issue with contact forms, first we must explore briefly the tool used to convey the information – email.

With origins as a very simple messaging tool back in the late 60s and early 70s, email has fulfilled a basic human need – communication. As a species we have an innate drive to both gather and convey information within our tribes. It is why language evolved thousands of years ago, and why in today’s world the most popular smartphone apps are those that allow us to interact with others – Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc, etc.

For all their popularity, though, no other online service comes close to the ubiquity and volume of email. It is estimated that, in 2017, approximately 270 billion emails are sent every single day. That’s over 2.5 million emails every second!

From an early age, most of us will create one or more email accounts to use for communication and as part of an identification process. Indeed, most social networking services will require you to have an email account before you can use their service.

But email is not without its problems, and foremost among them is SPAM, or to give it its more proper name, unsolicited email. It is the act of sending marketing emails, or emails designed to trick people into infecting their computers with viruses, to people who have not requested them in the first instance. Spam emails are something that most of us will have experienced, and perhaps even been tricked by a particularly clever one. It is estimated that currently over half of the email traffic around the world consists of spam emails. Shocking as that statistic is, it is actually an improvement on the situation from 5 or more years ago, when over 80% of emails were reckoned to be spam.

This reduction in the proportion of spam is, at least in part, due to improvements in the mechanisms used to combat it. These measures have taken the form of advances in the protocols used to define and transmit email messages, improvements in the tools used by the major email hosting providers to identify spam, and increased efforts by law enforcement to identify and eliminate spam ‘farms’. These advances, though, are at the root of the issue with website contact forms.

Websites and emails

One of the tools used by spammers to generate their huge lists of email addresses to target with their spam is to ‘scrape’ email addresses from websites. Scraping is the use of automated tools that scan the public pages of websites looking for text that looks like an email address. Once added to one spam list, email addresses tend to find their way on to many others. In essence, once the floodgates open then its pretty much impossible to stop spam being sent to an email address.

With this in mind, many businesses either ‘obfuscate’ email addresses on their website (i.e. use some code that makes the address invisible to scrapers), or don’t put one on there at all and instead use a contact form. In addition to removing your email address from your website, another advantage of a contact form is that you have a little more control over the information that is sent to you…you can require a phone number to be provided, for instance.

Once the visitor fill out the contact form and clicks the ‘send’ button, normally that generates an email that is then delivered to one or more addresses defined in the form’s admin panel. In the past, this has been a fairly simple and effective way of being notified of a new, interested visitor to your website, so that you can look to foster that interest and develop a sale. But more recently there has been an issue with this.

Spoofing

One of the trick that email spammers use to try to make you believe that an email is from a valid organisation is to make the ‘from’ address on the email something recognisable. So instead of getting an email from shady@spamcompany.com they instead send the email from trustme@brandname.com After all, if you got an email that purported to be from, say, NatWest (a large UK bank), but the from address was joe785623@gmail.com then you’re not likely to trust it, right?

In the early days it was very easy to swap the ‘from’ email address like this and send the emails out. Indeed, there is a facility in emails that allows you to specify a different ‘reply-to’ address on an email which typically isn’t seen by the email recipient when reading the email. That way, if they hit reply then the resulting email goes back to the spammer and not to NatWest.

You might think that differences between the ‘from’ and ‘reply-to’ addresses, particularly differences in the domains of those two email addresses, should be one of the items that spam filters use to identify potential spam. But there are some valid scenarios where this can happen, including your website contact form.

Typically, when the email is constructed, you will set the ‘from’ address as something like website@yourdomain.com and the ‘reply-to’ address as the visitor’s email address. Why not set them both to the visitor’s email address? In the past, that was OK, but now that tends to trigger another anti-spam measure.

Authentication

In an effort to combat increasing levels of spam, a relatively recent addition to the email handling protocols is a pair of authentication methods – SPF and DKIM. SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, allows you to define which servers are valid senders of emails for a domain. DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, is a means of adding information to individual emails, using a public/private key mechanism, so that each email can be validated as having originated from the sending domain itself and not from a third party. Whilst neither of these are essential to ensure emails are delivered, the lack of SPF or DKIM for a domain will be viewed by some spam filers as a, relatively minor, red flag.

For website contact forms, SPF in particular can cause a problem. If you set the ‘from’ email address to the website visitors address, then their domain would need to have validated your web server as a valid originator of emails. Of course, that’s not going to be the case, and so your contact form email being sent from your web server to your email account could easily be flagged as spam.

Setting the from address to ‘website@yourdomain.com’ avoids this scenario, as long as you have set your web server up as a valid sender of email for your domain, of course.

Transactional emails

Whilst this simple change to your contact forms may be all you need to improve deliverability, there are potential pitfalls still. In particular, any change to the location of your website’s server is likely to cause emails to fail. So if your host has an issue and needs to move your site at short notice to another server, in the upheaval you may neglect to define that new server as a valid sender in your SPF record. Or if you integrate a 3rd party service, on a different server, with your website, again you need to update your SPF record. You may even find that if your website serves content over a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare, where the form could be filled in on one of a number of different server worldwide, you again experience issues with emails not being delivered.

The safest way to avoid these issues is to utilise a transactional email service. Transactional emails are defined as those emails that are sent automatically as part of a process, typically on your website. They are not the day-to-day emails you send from your desktop, and not the marketing emails for which you might use a service like Mailchimp. Instead, they are such things as order confirmations, password reminders, and of course contact form entries.

Setting your website up to hand all automatic emails over to a 3rd party service avoids all these potential pitfalls. Regardless of what server is hosting your website, the emails are always delivered from the same place. Indeed, part of the setup process for any transactional email service involves sorting out the SPF and DKIM frameworks, thus boosting the likelihood of delivery.

An added benefit of some transactional email services is that some element of tracking can be added too. The service we utilise here at Four Lakes allows us to track email delivery, bounces, and even clicks on internal links. It’s not designed to be used for marketing purposes, but can be a great support tool.

If transactional email is something you think would be useful for your website, then head over to our contact page and drop us a note. You know that email will get through to us! 🙂

The post Why your website contact form may not be working appeared first on Four Lakes.

What is a child theme?

Let’s cover the basics first. What’s a child theme, and why should I consider using one.

Firstly, I’m assuming that you know what a WordPress theme is. If not, then playing around with child themes is a step too far. You need to go back in the paddling pool with your water wings before you jump into this deep pool!

OK, enough of the metaphors. As you know, themes are ways of implementing a website design in WordPress, often with the addition of extra functionality over and above ‘vanilla’ WordPress. Most modern themes allow a degree of flexibility over that design implementation. For instance, they will provide a means of uploading your logo. Often allowing you to easily change the colour scheme too. In short, they let you tweak the theme to make it unique to you and your business.

Great, so that’s all I need, right?

Well, possibly. But if you have worked with WordPress for a while, you’ll know that often there is a need to go beyond a theme’s built-in customisation. Let’s look at a typical example that we come across on a regular basis.

For many business websites, adding breadcrumbs to a site design is desirable. From an SEO point of view, they make it pretty obvious to Google (and other search engines) how your site is structured. From a usability viewpoint, they make it easy for a site visitor to work their way back up a hierarchy. This might be needed if, for instance, they follow an external link to a product page, and want to explore other, similar products.

Some themes include breadcrumbs as additional functionality, many others don’t. If we are building a site for a customer and the chosen theme doesn’t have breadcrumb functionality, then it’s fairly easy to add it.

Our usual method of adding breadcrumbs to a website is to utilise that aspect of the Yoast SEO plugin. This excellent plugin adds all the essential SEO functionality that most websites will need, and gives you a couple of nifty extras too, one of which is the ability to construct meaningful breadcrumbs. All you need to do is add a couple of lines of code to the relevant php files.

Add code? That makes me nervous.

Quite rightly so, adding code to a website shouldn’t be undertaken lightly. But lets just assume you, or your web developer, have taken all the necessary precautions and managed to add the code successfully. You now have breadcrumbs on all the relevant pages of your website and Google is happy!

In time, being a security-conscious site owner, you see that there are updates required on your site. You know keeping everything up-to-date is an effective way to plug security holes, so you take a backup, and start updating. The core WordPress update goes through, and your site is fine. Great, so you then update your plugins, including Yoast SEO. Again, no adverse effect on your website.

Finally, you see that there’s a new version of your theme available. So you go through the update process (sometimes this is a bit more involved than plugin updates), and your breadcrumbs disappear! How did that happen?

How do WordPress updates really work?

Whether you are updating WordPress itself, plugins or themes, the update process effectively downloads the new version of the plugin/theme, and overwrites the relevant files in your hosting account with the new ones. Any configuration that you may have done for the theme or plugin is retained, as all that information is stored in the database, and that is not touched by the update process.

If you remember, though, we implemented the Yoast SEO plugin’s Breadcrumbs by adding some code to certain theme files. So when the theme is updated, those updated files get overwritten by the standard files in the new version of the theme, which don’t contain the breadcrumb code. The end result: your breadcrumbs disappear!

A Child Theme will avoid that?

Yes indeed! Let’s have a quick look at the basic principle behind a child theme.

A child theme is similar, in principle, to looking at a picture through a filter. If the filter is clear, then you see the exact same picture as you would without a filter. If the filter, however, is tinted, then you see an altered version of the original picture, even though nothing has actually changed in the original.

A child theme is a filter for your active theme. It allows you to selectively alter aspects of that theme without having to change the theme’s files.

In slightly more detail, if a particular php file exists within a child theme’s file structure, then that file will be used in preference to the original file. So, with our breadcrumb example, we typically copy the relevant php files (e.g. single.php) to the child theme’s file structure and make the necessary alterations there. Then, when there is an update to the original theme, the original file can be replaced without the alteration made to the child theme’s version being lost.

So I only need a child them when I want to change something?

Technically, that is correct. However, it is much better to implement a child theme early on than wait until you know you will need to change a theme’s files. That’s why we’ve made it standard practice here at Four Lakes.

If you want to get your hands dirty and try implementing a child theme yourself, then there’s a great guide over at the ManageWP blog. However, the good news it that there are a number of plugins that will do the work for you, and utilise some of the lesser-know features of child themes to boot.

For our favourite theme, Divi, there is the excellent Divi Children plugin.

For other themes, the Child Theme Configurator plugin is pretty straightforward and effective.

Of course, if you’d like us to help you with this, or any other aspect of setting up or maintaining your WordPress website then all you need to do is get in touch.

The post WordPress Child Themes – why they are so important appeared first on Four Lakes.

To be honest, we have been intending to do this for some time. It was slightly embarrassing to build great-looking, responsive websites for our clients whilst not having precisely that for our own online presence.

I guess the old adage about tradesmen tending to their own houses last has an element of truth to it!

With our new site we have remained true to the Four Lakes brand whilst evolving the website in line with more recent online design developments. In doing we, we have taken the opportunity to highlight some of the great features that we offer clients. Look around the website to see such items as…

• a truly responsive design, accessible across all devices
• great use of striking imagery and bold design elements, within a clean and simple layout
• strong integration with multiple social media platforms

Behind the scenes we have features that aren’t readily apparent to visitors, but are very important to website owners…

• powerful SEO capabilities
• strong security to protect from hackers and malware
• easy-to-use content management facilities
• detailed website analytics
• and much more

We hope you like the new design. As always, we are open to constructive criticism, so if you happen across something that doesn’t look right to you, or behaves differently to your expectations, then please do get in touch, or leave a comment below. If you really like the new look, then we’d love to hear from you too.

The post Something old, something new… appeared first on Four Lakes.

fe3 is a change and leadership communication consultancy based in London. They work closely with organisations to help make them attractive to potential customers; in other words increasing their corporate magnetism!

Karen Drury, the founder and driving force behind fe3, contacted Four Lakes when she realised that her existing website not only contained out of date information, but was also in dire need of a design revamp.

We worked closely with Karen, following a highly iterative process, to ensure that the new website’s design, structure and content were an accurate reflection of the standard of work fe3 offers to their own clients.

Features

• Blog
• Content Management
• Mobile/Tablet oriented responsive design
• Enhanced SEO functionality
• Use of strong imagery to convey the organisation’s ethos

The post fe3 appeared first on Four Lakes.

GAP Systems are the developers of Smartflow – the market leading software solution for new product development, marketing and artwork approval. Smartflow consistently streamlines and enhances the processes associated with bringing new products to market, and is applicable to pretty much any vertical market, including those with stringent regulations such as food and pharmaceutical packaging. GAP Systems have an impressive portfolio of clients, including such household names as Kingfisher, 3663, Next, Habitat and Castorama.

GAP Systems initially contacted A1WebStats with a view to enhancing the online profile of their existing website, and improving conversion of visitors to enquiries and, ultimately, customers. It quickly became apparent that their existing website needed a major overhaul in order to allow those ambitious targets to be met. As we have worked successfully with A1WebStats on a number of projects, they had no hesitation in recommending Four Lakes as the right company for the project.

Whilst GAP were keen to retain their existing website design cues, Four Lakes quickly identified that there was an opportunity to rebuild the website from the ground up so that that all the features needed to attract and convert visitors could be added, whilst also implementing a modern, responsive design. This would ensure that mobile users in particular were not disenfranchised, an increasingly common issue. We even took the opportunity to utilise Smartflow to manage the creation and layout of page content across the site. The resulting website looks superficially similar to GAP’s existing site, but under the skin offers them a much more powerful marketing tool.

Features

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As one of the leading, and long-standing, violin experts in the South East of England, Malcolm Tysoe Ltd. needed a web presence to match. Four Lakes was engaged to create such a compelling website, one that would showcase the incredible instruments that Malcolm Tysoe offer and demonstrate their knowledge and expertise. Malcolm Tysoe were also keen for the website to allow them to sell instruments and accessories online for the first time.

We helped Malcolm Tysoe choose an appropriate WordPress theme, and extended the functionality to ensure that a great browsing and shopping experience is offered to website visitors. We were even able to implement automated processes that take into account the unusually complex worldwide shipping options, such as sending a cello case to Japan!

Features

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Four Lakes were engaged by the US distribution and marketing arm of this famous French cheese, manufactured in the Jura region and one of the first cheeses to obtain AOC designation. The brief was to produce a website that would provide all the necessary resources the US retailers need to successfully sell the cheese, whilst following the Comté site design guidelines.

Four Lakes modified a WordPress theme, and added extra functionality through the use of carefully selected plugins, resulting in a site that marries great features with a compelling design.

Features

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