Gareth Chidgey

White Label Services

Gareth Chidgey — Fri, 04 May 2012 10:44:08 +0000

Finding good freelancers is tough, I know, until very recently I was the digital director at a leading Manchester agency. I can settle the worries that you have right away, I know what it is like needing that freelancer at your finger tips for up to date information and progress on a project. When working with agencies and direct clients alike, I use real time project management software which means that you will have deadlines and milestones set out from the start. I have set process’ and proper documentation, which means that if you want a full project service, the only thing you have to deal with the client, I will even sort out the wire frames and specification.

3 Week Delivery

I pride myself on on-time delivery and on a normal WordPress project where I handle everything excluding your client, I can guarantee 3 week delivery if sign-offs are done on time.

Low Cost

Due to very low overheads, my costs are great too. It will work out more cost effective to accept a fixed price quotation from me for your projects, than it would to hire in the same skill set into the team and risk overrun and low utilisation. I only charge £300 + VAT per day.

Non-disclosure

I always sign a non-disclosure clause as part of my standard terms with Agency Clients, so there is no worry of your work appearing on my website – unless you want me to show it off!

Email Marketing

Gareth Chidgey — Fri, 04 May 2012 10:43:52 +0000

Email marketing is the cheaper and more measurable online equivalent of direct mail. Rather than have 1,000 letters created and posted with no real way to measure how many went straight in the bin, why not get a mail template created and send it to 10,000 people for the same cost. Not only is your reach far greater, you can also get reports back to test the effectiveness of the campaign and see who opened it, who clicked onto your website and then follow that up with them. This idea sells itself, so I’m not going to go any further into it!

E-commerce Websites

Gareth Chidgey — Fri, 04 May 2012 10:43:37 +0000

Selling things online is big business, large high street chains and small business’s alike are finding that the low relative cost of trading online direct from a warehouse can help hugely with keeping down overheads compared to a physical shop. Many of the most successful retailers now sell almost as much stock online as they do offline. If you sell an product, you should make sure that you are online. I can offer help getting you there, whether it be a simple WordPress shop or an all singing Magento shop. The hard work all goes in at the beginning, then you just watch it pay for itself.

Search Marketing & Pay Per Click

Gareth Chidgey — Fri, 04 May 2012 10:43:23 +0000

Search Engine Optimisation

Having a website is just the start, like any other shop front, you need to then promote that shop front. Search marketing is lie putting up billboards, flyers or sending mail to attract customers, but the advantage is that it is far more focused and far far cheaper. There are two ways to work with Google, the first is by creating a good website, with fresh new content relevant to your services, then getting links to that content. This is called Search Engine Optimisation, it’s slightly more technical than that, but there is more volume of work to be completed than complexity. If you read a few books, you could probably do this yourself, but if you have a business to run, you will likely be better to outsource this.

Pay Per Click

If you want to have the quickest and most versatile way of attracting the right visitors, pay per click is perfect. The reason Google is one of the largest business’s in the world is that PPC is so cost effective and works so well. This is not something I would recommend doing yourself, you will probably be throwing money away in either the time sapped by refining your campaigns or by not having enough time to spend. The reduction in spend after outsourcing PPC can usually offset the cost of the outsource and save you the time and energy.

Classy Texture

Gareth Chidgey — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:59:06 +0000

This beautiful theme is clean but with just a touch of texture giving it warmth and style. This theme makes use if the ‘Hero Banner’ Block to enable you to put the key information you need to right in front of your visitors.

Shadows of Blue

Gareth Chidgey — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:40:14 +0000

A minimal theme based around simple use of colour to focus the user on the content. This theme makes use of a custom Block called the “Hero Banner”, it is used to bring out the main focus of the banner area in a sales friendly way. All content for each of four slides is content managed through the headway visual editor. The effects are all generated automatically, so all you need is a flat image and the content of each slide.

Website Design and Development

Gareth Chidgey — Thu, 03 May 2012 12:52:32 +0000

The vast majority of the work that I do is in the design and build of websites that work fantastically. A successful website is more than just a pretty one, though that is an important factor.

Your Websites 4 Key Components

1. Website Design Aesthetics & Branding

Whilst it is true that on the whole your brand can be very much overlooked by new visitors to your site, it is also true that returning visitors like to get enough of a feel that they can instantly identify your business from their last visit. This is hard to accomplish without drowning out the message of your site, which is to engage with you, not just look at pretty pictures. It is accomplished through clever use of brand colours complimented where needed with other colours to give the feel that your customers will like.

Imagery and tone of voice are also key ingredients, and can make the difference between a good site and a great one. With all my sites, you have complete control of these, so you can adapt how you present yourself to the world as your business grows.

2. Website User Experience / Psychology

The most overlooked, yet most important part of a website is to guide the user to where you want them, many studies have given you 3-6 seconds to capture a visitors attention with what they are looking for. This is a small amount of time, but it is possible by controlling the hierarchy of information within the architecture of the website. By subconsciously guiding your visitors to a contact form, phone number or other action point whilst giving them the right emotional stimulus, your websites conversion rate will be increased dramatically.

3. Website Search Engine Optimisation

There is a lot more to search optimisation than filling out a few meta tags, whilst the majority of the ranking is through inbound links and prominence in social media, a website will struggle to rank if it doesn’t appear relevant to the search phrase. But making a site attractive to both search engines and users can be difficult. Search Engines love long content, but users like things in short sharp and simple chunks, so breaking content up visually can make a huge difference.

4. Website Build Quality

For a site to be successful, it needs not just to work on different browsers, but to work well, to work quickly. Something I take great pride in is making sure that a website is as fast as it can be. I use a number of techniques for this and can provide a report an load time on the website. How many sites have you visited recently that have taken far too long to load? How long did you last on them?