Mobile Friendly
More than a quarter of online shopping sprees taking place on mobile. Apple iOS devices shoppers accounted for 79% of mobile purchases in December 2011. Throughout the month, mobile share of online shopping sessions grew steadily, rising from 23% at the beginning of the month to 31% by 31 December.

Mobile shoppers spend more than desktop shoppers: During the month of December, average order value on mobile devices was £111.86, compared with £102.20 on desktops.

Shoppers purchasing from their mobile devices represented just over 8% of total sales. On Christmas Day, 43% of all shoppers were on a mobile device and on Boxing Day the number declined slightly to 40%. iPad and iPhone dominate mobile shopping: just over 97% of the sales originated from an iPad or an iOS-enabled device in December 2011.

We have just launched our mobile friendly Bunbury Boards eshop, providing personalisation, gift messaging and wrapping.

Features
- bespoke design
- unlimited categories with categories management
- drill-down navigation based on custom attributes
- search engine and SEO friendly urls
- multiple sorting options for products
- user accounts
- orders management
- customers management
- contact form
- shopping cart
- unlimited custom text pages
- shipping and tax estimation based on destination
- google sitemap
- unlimited number of images for each product
- inventory management
- transactions management
- multiple payment options, such as PayPal integration
- multiple shipping methods
- billing address and shipping address, user editable
- dashboard for authenticated users, where they can see their orders statuses
- various detailed reports: orders, products in carts, abandoned carts, most viewed, low stock
- featured products
- search
- two display options for products: List and Grid
- seo optimisation
- Up-selling and cross-selling
- newsletter sign up
- newsletter sending and subscribers management
Advanced Features
- custom product options, including ‘Gift wrapping’ and ‘Custom engraving text’
- multiple currencies and currency rates management
- add to wishlist and wishlist management
- products comparison
- product tags
- catalog price rules and shopping cart price rules, such as coupons or discounts based on quantity or price
- integrated blog
- polls
- products reviews
- customer reviews
- integrated backup tool

Please do contact us for advice on how we can help your online sales. 

It is the quality not quantity of enquiries that matters. All too often the quality of enquiry reflects the quality of the website. Just as the High Street shop front filters the passing shopper, so should your site.

We recently launched a new site for Competitive Car Leasing, partner to some of the leading fleet funding companies in the UK. Since going live, the new site has attracted a better value customer and is achieving a substantially improved enquiry to sale conversion rate.

Customised, relevant and up-to-date newsfeeds on a website will improve your search engine ranking and provide a solid connection with your market.  Unique news feeds can also be exploited across other platforms and distribution channels including RSS, email marketing and PR campaigns.

The Benefits of News Feeds
Instant delivery of unique, relevant and topical news feeds will ensure your website is always up-to-date. Those who want to read your articles will keep coming back increasing the number of repeat visitors. Your site will also be seen as the place to go to for news about your industry. With the articles residing on your own website, there will be no need for any more external links to news articles, keeping your hard-won customers on your site.

• Be seen as an ‘authority source’ for your industry
• Important keywords can be included in xml and in the article body copy in order to help identify news pages to the search engines.
• News articles can link to the most profitable internal website pages to aid navigation for readers and to direct web crawlers.
• News can be automatically reformatted for clients, subscribers and readers in the form of an e-newsletter to encourage traffic back to your site.
• News pages are dynamic, which helps search engines regard the site as current.

Levels of service

Research and copywriting For Unique & Frequent Content
We will plan, direct and commission relevant freelancers to prepare unique articles for your site, relevant to your strategic objectives and your specific audience.  Articles are not duplicated in the same form across the World Wide Web, which is important to search engines seeking high quality content.

You, as the client, will have full control over the types of stories written. You can change the brief at anytime and we will ensure that all news feeds will conform to and change with your SEO strategies.

Alternatively, a less expensive system is to publish RSS feeds from news sites.

Publishing
We will develop a system to add a separate static page to your site to encourage search engines to explore and crawl a website more frequently (including important keywords in the news url to help identify the page). Articles can be archived to encourage further crawling of the site, and to provide an invaluable online knowledge resource to site users.

Processing Engine
We can help locate a suitable tailored or RSS feed and develop a processing engine module within your administration console, allowing the site administrator to:

- View all stories
- Search / sort
- Edit / delete / publish/ unpublish
- View how many feeds were received and stories imported
- Persent stats on a realtime chart on the console dashboard

We can also develop dynamic front end photo and video galleries. We can time the delivery of the feed to suit your needs, for example when viewing figures are high or when readers log on in the morning.

Interested?
Please contact us for further information and a range of choices.

Whether it is a phenomenal website, online marketing strategy, complex software solution or mobile app, we guarantee price and delivery date. Our creative team in Cheltenham, UK and our dedicated team of software and website specialists in our Bucharest office work seamlessly together to successfully deliver:

Corporate websites
Document and Content management systems
Online customer helpdesks
Billing and trading systems
Online sales environments
Membership management
Personnel recruitment and administration platforms
Property and sales platforms
Discussion forums and voting systems
URN FMCG promotions
Auctioning systems
Booking and reservation platforms

As marketing becomes increasingly technology led, The Marketing Farm is ideally placed to provide all the marketing disciplines you need under one umbrella, seamlessly integrating great concepts with smashing technology to generate value and results. Contact us to find out how we can help your business.

We develop customised ecommerce solutions, feature packed to meet the very needs of the customer. We now provide three fixed price solutions.

Please contact us for further information. Below is our fixed price menu for the publishing industry.

Standard Package

• Hierarchical category system
• Shopping cart
• PayPal integration
• Static pages
• Users registration
• Users management
• Orders management
• Order status, order history in the user’s account
• Forms (contact, feedback)
• Search facility – by book title, book author, category name
• Books linked to multiple categories
• Books running out of stock listing in the backend
• Books listings with pagination controls and sorting options
• Most popular books listing
• Multiple media files attached to a book (images, audio files, covers)
• Newsletter sign up form
• Newsletter subscribers management and mass mailing with sent emails archive
• Carousel on the homepage with featured titles
• SEO optimized code

Gold Package
The GOLD package has all the features of the STANDARD package, plus:

• Book reviews
• Wish List for logged in users
• ‘Look inside this book’ feature
• Authors listing
• Author dedicated pages (bio, books, image, links)
• Social networks integration (facebook LIKE button, facebook widget, twitter feed)
• Forthcoming Titles listing
• Related Books listing
• Book Bundles – where “bundle” is defined as a group of books that can be presented and sold as a product with his own price, ISBN, etc
• Tag clouds
• Books tags (used for navigation, SEO)
• Ajax forms (inline validation, user feedback)

Premium Package
The PREMIUM package has all the features of the GOLD package, plus:

• Blog system with categories, comments (custom or through the use of Disqus.com or Facebook comments), blog archive, post tags
• RSS feeds
• Discount rules and coupon codes
• Shipping rules
• PayPal Pro Integration (requires SSL)
• Sphinx search which provides search by relevance
• Search terms capturing so admin will know what people want
• Daily database backup
• Website monitoring (uptime, speed)
• Website upgrades (per upgrade or monthly)
  Free hosting

Original thinking in terms of SEO is as important as the mundane.. the tagging, keywording, newsfeeds etc. Self content generating sites to feed into your main site are not new. Many businesses will have forums. However, we have spied a growing number of Q&A sites where visitors join to post questions or answer them, and vote accordingly. Unlike forums, there is little competition in this market, but those that are churn out considerable content and hence page ranking and traffic. 

A Q&A site helps your online community to share knowledge. People with questions quickly get the answers they need. The community dynamic is enriched by commenting, voting, notifications, user points and rankings. Any web searches are questions, so Q&A content is also very search-engine friendly, bringing new visitors to your site. They are not beautiful sites, but they put function at for the fore: answers to questions.

Examples include:

http://stackoverflow.com/ with a PageRank of 6

http://serverfault.com/ with a PageRank of 6

http://superuser.com/ with a PageRank of 6

People want to share a question, and people like to answer!

We have today launched one under the name EquineTalk at http://eqtalk.com/ . Our SEO team are now seeding the site with users, questions and answers and once it is rolling on Google we will link it through to feed traffic into our client, Hauctions  http://hauctions.net/ with banners and links.

If you would be interested in a similar Q&A site tailored and customised to your sector as a traffic driver, please contact us.

A new ‘look’, some fresh copy and incorporation of some of the latest software plug-ins is all it might take to get your website tuned up again. With an increasing number of viewers now browsing from mobile devices and tablets,  it is a timely year to review. 

These are a few of the questions we will ask you

Has Your Target Audience Changed?
Target audiences never stand still and their changing tastes, ambitions, opinions and demands must be reflected in the make-over.

Usability, Browser Compatibility and Navigation Check
Your website may look attractive on your browser, but what about an ipad or on a TV? Is the navigation layout now confused by more recent site extensions and now need a rethink?

What Can The Sparkle Effect Be?
Websites invariably lose their sparkle with age. If you browse through the pages and feel the site is looking drab and boring, you know it is time for a makeover. If you think this, then your website visitors will probably think this as well!

Search Engine Positioning and Optimisation
The search engine environment is more competitive than ever and the means of generating traffic are getting ever more clever and complex. We think outside the box and will suggest novel methods!

The Media Trust. For some clients we work closely to develop new features and promotions on a monthly basis. 

RIPS International. Designed and developed with a simple CMS system, this site continues to be maintenance free with a contemporary and relevant design after 18 months of going live.

Ask For A Free Appraisal
Our objective in all our website makeovers is to create a vast improvement in the way your website looks, functions and performs for least cost. Please contact us for  free appraisal of your current site.

Successful communities have discussion at their core, and our discussion board we developed for our client, New York based EMS Financial Services LLC, is proving a considerable success. Called EMS TrafficBoard, it gives telco buyers a platform on which to post their best rates and to connect with buyers. It is membership based and encourages users to use the EMS portal as their clearing house.

By tailoring and branding an existing software framework, IP.Board, we can help achieve your business goals with a platform that fosters vibrant discussion for a very reasonable cost. Please contact us for further information.

Benefits of Discussion Boards
The initial challenge for most websites is generating traffic. However, the bigger challenge is making sure that once visitors get there, they don’t click away after ten seconds with the impression that your site has nothing to offer. The “stickiness” of your site plays a major role in determining whether your visitors become customers, and whether your site will support itself with measurable value to your business or organization.

Relevant content on your website is the most important factor in keeping your visitors’ attention and discussion provide just that: relevant user generated content.

By adding a discussion board to your website you will be able to communicate with your website visitors and generate and sustain more repeat traffic. One can also learn some important information from the comments made. A Board will help you to understand your visitors’ mind and interest and help you take the lead and steer in their interest. When you will know their interest you can improve your marketing…

Please contact us for advice on how online communities can help your business.

The competition, offers 18-25 year olds the chance to be mentored by top journalists – with one lucky winner getting the chance to have their column printed in The Sun. Find out more here.

We have just taken live a customised ecommerce solution for an independent educational publishers, Brilliant Publications. It is the second such site we have completed for independent publishers this year, following on from Sportsbooks. We develop bespoke systems that are feature packed to meet the very needs of the customer. They supply the wish list and we develop the specification and solution!

The Brilliant system has been developed with a multiple of features including:

• Bespoke site design and branding
• A customer database within the backend
• A site wide search facility
• Newsletter signups, data capture, online feedback and contact systems
• Customer generated product reviews
• Complete client content management system
• Integrated blog
• Web analytics including all visitor tracking and conversion reporting
• On page SEO
• Social networking integration (Facebook, Twitter and RSS, Send to a Friend etc)
• Teaching resources zone
• Most popular books selection facility
• Dynamic front page showcase
• Facility to link Ebook’s unique ISBN to the printed ISBN
• ‘Related books’ display function
• Product bundling
• Book series options
• Optional playlist for mp3 files
• Multiple shipping price structure.
• Credit account and card payment options
• Internal stock control
• External stock display (Available in 7 days / 21 days / Not yet published)
• Postponed payment collection for books not yet published/back in stock
• 13 digit ISBN as the unique key for product identification
• Integration with the client’s Publishing Management Software
• Ebook download provision of 30 days for unlimited downloads
• Online quiz facility

Please contact us to see how we could help your business improve the ecommerce experience for customers and administrators, increase traffic and improve sales conversions and values.