Already running a successful sales and letting agency, Richardson Gill, Malcolm Gill and Andrew Richardson were increasingly asked about holiday lettings, and so formed Lyme Coast Holidays Ltd in 2010. After trialling desktop solutions from providers of holiday cottage booking software they decided to go with Total Accommodation Booking System (TABS) and also engaged the software house to create a website which integrated with their desktop software. While the software more than met their ne...

From 21st April 2015 your website will not show up in Google's mobile search results unless it passes their mobile friendly test. Learn how this change to mobile website search rankings might affect you. Google have announced that from 21st April they are going to roll out an updated algorithm that will detect whether or not your website is mobile friendly. If your site is deemed to be mobile 'unfriendly' by the search giant then it will no longer appear in Google's search results on a ...

Back in September last year, we were proud to announce the re-brand for Remous Print based in Sherborne, Dorset. Since then we have been working closely together to design and develop a new responsive website based on the new identity and brand. What is a responsive website? We hear this phrase used time and time again nowadays, and that is because it's an important factor when designing and developing a new website. A responsive website is a website that has the functionality to re-size and r...

It’s estimated that 90% of businesses are now on at least one social media channel. If you are in the 10% that aren't, unless you are Apple, you probably can’t afford to ignore it any longer. 1. People will talk about you whether you’re there or not Many businesses are worried about the damage a social media fail could do to their business. The risk is real, but not being on social media could potentially be even more damaging. People will talk about your business whether you are there...

Have you looked at your website objectively lately? When you’re head down running a company, it’s easy to forget that people are forming impressions every day based solely on your website. If your website is badly designed, hard to use or poorly maintained, it could be losing you business. Bad first impressions Looks aren’t everything, but on the internet they count for an awful lot. People make first impressions incredibly fast online, typically in just two tenths of a second. Your webs...

Business owner Richard Shearwood-Porter utilised his experience in manufacturing and consultancy to set up new business venture Construction Certification. Designed specifically to help construction companies achieve ISO accreditation, Construction Certification was targeting a niche market. For these reasons Richard wanted a simple, business-like design for a new corporate website which needed to reflect the colours that Cognique had introduced when we created the identity. No stranger to cre...

Based in the heart of Somerset, Somerlap has been manufacturing high quality wooden products for 35 years, servicing both public and trade customers. Although a well established and successful business, ambitious MD Kevin Bond wanted to strengthen their retail market share. Working closely with the Somerlap team Cognique designed and developed a bespoke e-commerce website featuring WooCommerce, the WordPress eCommerce plugin. The website is content managed allowing the Somerlap team to update p...

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the process of identifying, testing and improving areas of your website which are preventing visitors from converting. A conversion is whatever action you want your website visitors to take, this could be:Purchasing a product or service Purchasing a higher value product or service Signing up for an email newsletter Downloading a white paper Getting in touch.Why is conversion rate optimisation important? CRO can help increase the performanc...

The start of a new year provides an excellent opportunity to understand more about your company’s marketing activity. These questions should provide a good basis for finding out how you are performing, how your marketing activity could be optimised this year and what your marketing team need from you. What is the marketing strategy and how is it tied to business goals?What are the aims of the marketing strategy? How does the strategy support our business plan? What are we doing diff...

If your business has a physical location, one area you definitely shouldn't ignore is local business listings in search engines. If you don’t actively manage your business profile, search engines could be showing incorrect information every time someone searches for your business. What are local search listings? Both Google and Bing (the two most used search engines in the UK) show local business listings for a variety of searches. This could happen when:Someone searches for a busines...

Planning your marketing strategy for 2015? Here's four trends to keep in mind... 1. Content marketing is here to stay According to a recent survey, 30% of businesses think content marketing will be the most important marketing tactic they will use in 2015. Plus, more than half of B2B marketers are planning to increase their content marketing spend this year. With more competition for views, content will need to be high quality and closely aligned to the needs of your target audience. Many...

Facebook recently announced that they would begin removing overly promotional posts by pages from the news feed this year. The announcement, which is likely to have slipped under the radar of most Facebook users, said: “As part of an ongoing survey we asked hundreds of thousands of people how they feel about the content in their News Feeds. People told us they wanted to see more stories from friends and Pages they care about, and less promotional content.” According to people they surveyed...

We were approached by The Bay Tree Food Company to help them with a competition to celebrate 20 years in business. The brief was simple: design and build a website landing page where users could enter a competition to win a hamper full of goodies. The rustic landing page needed to be mobile optimised, have the functionality to capture entrants data and also integrated with Mailer, Cognique's very own email marketing system which The Bay Tree use on a regular basis. When a user enters the comp...

From January 2015 all online retailers selling digital products to consumers across the EU will need to pay VAT in the country of the purchaser. These changes affect all ecommerce businesses selling any kind of digital B2C product, whether or not they are registered for VAT in the UK. What does this mean, exactly? From the 1st of January 2015, new VAT place of supply rules come into place for business to consumer businesses selling ‘digital services’. When selling digital services, busine...

Put simply, digital marketing is the promotion of products or services by any electronic media, including computers, mobile phones, tablets and game consoles. However in the last few years it has become synonymous with marketing carried out via the internet, and most people now only think of digital marketing in this way rather than its original, much broader definition. With this in mind, this article focuses on using the internet to market your business. Why should you be doing digital market...

What do you know about the visitors to your website? Analytics tools like Google Analytics are useful to a point, but it’s difficult to get insight on the activity of individual visitors. This is where lead identification and tracking tools can be helpful. What is lead identification? Prospect or lead identification tools are software programs that can help you identify and track the activity of individual visitors. Here’s an example to illustrate why this might be useful. When someone fi...