The Village Websmith - Web Design & Development in Your Area

Starting Over

She's moving on from her old life and into the perfect cottage in the country. Miles Rattenbury's passions? Old cars and new women! Romance? He's into fun rather than commitment. When Tess crashes the Freelander into his breakdown truck, they find that they're nearly neighbours yet worlds apart.

Despite her overprotective parents and a suddenly attentive Olly, she discovers the joys of village life and even forms an unlikely friendship with Miles. Then, just as their relationship develops into something deeper, an old flame comes looking for him… Is their love strong enough to overcome the past? Or will it take more than either of them is prepared to give?

Abenhall is a tiny, ancient village in a secluded quiet valley near Mitcheldean. The parish includes the settlement of Plump Hill, on the Mitcheldean to Cinderford Road as it climbs into the high Forest.

Once part of the Westbury Hundred (which was known as Dene at the time of the 1086 Doomsday book) Abenhall is on the Flaxley to Mitcheldean Road. Originally a mining and iron making centre, it is notable for its 14th century Church of St Michael, which is built of local red sandstone and has excellent contemporary carvings relating to the Forest of Dean's industries. These include a shield bearing the arms of the Freeminers on the west wall and the fabulous mid -15th century octagonal font, that has tools of miners and metalworkers incised on its St Michaels at Abenhall sides.

St. Michael's Church - originally built as a chapel of ease, the church was expanded in the 14th century to include nave, south aisle and tower. The arms of the Freeminers can be seen on the south side of the tower and on the 18th century font. St. Michael's Church - Abenhall is 1.5 km south of Mitcheldean and is set in beautiful surroundings on the edge of the Forest. Old Parish baptism, marriage and burial registers, from 1596, are stored at the Gloucestershire Record Office. For more information, please call us on the number shown, or click in the header of any page to email Abenhall-forest-of-dean@villagewebsmith.co.uk.

Welcome to Stunning Saturday; Or should that be Strategic Saturday>

The day of Saturn, Roman god of agriculture, a day for growing your business.

Perhaps it should be 'Strategic Saturday'. To continue the analogy with agriculture, success begins with planting the right kind of seeds in the right kind of soil. Today, how about analysing where your new customers and enquiries come from? We all have limited resources in terms of time and money to put into business promotion, so it is vital to make sure that the investment is put into the places that bring the best results.

Once you have that information you can compare the effectiveness of all your promotional channels. If you don't routinely ask new contacts where they found you, today may be a great time to adopt the habit.

The first thing is to list all the places where people may hear about your business it might look like this:

• Word of mouth
• Website enquiries
Exhibition or show attendance
• Vehicle signage
• Local newspaper
• Charity event sponsorship
Mailshot or leaflet drop
• Outgoing telesales campaign

Once you have a list, you can put them in order of the number of new sales that they have generated. How does that look? Are the results surprising? What do we do with the information?

Well, there are two ways of looking at everything as we mentioned on Thrilling Thursday this week. However, these two ways ars a little different. Promotional channels may take a surprisingly low place in the league table because the message that is being put there is not as effective as it might be. For example, are you still running the same advertisement in your local paper that you were two years ago? Has your website been updated this year? Are your leaflets visually attractive and powerfully worded?

Once you are happy that the message delivered via each medium is as good as it can be, then the under-performing media can be ignored in favour of investing more resources in the better performing media.

To take this one step further, the people that come to you via your website have a wide range of sources available to them from which they can come up with your address. This can modify our view of the first league table. For example, an enquiry may have come through your website because the address was noted from a newspaper advertisement, a business card passed on or seeing your signwritten vehicle somewhere. It is therefore important to analyse website visitor figures in their own right. This will help you get a truer understanding of your enquiry levels and can totally change the conclusions arrived at from the first analysis.

Does your website give you the information that you need to make those value calculations? If not, talk to the Village Websmith. To start accurately evaluating prospect and customer sources, call us on 0203 239 0350 or click in the header of any page to send an email.

Abercraf is well known for these attractions: Waterfalls caves and close by the National Red Kite Centre.

Abercraf is also close to our headquarters in Shirenewton, Monmouthshire, which helps us to maintain our policy of only working face to face with customers to make sure they get the best results quickly when writing the content for their web sites. This is a much quicker method of establishing what aspects of a business are the most promotable and getting the order of things. So, if you have a small business in Abercraf, just get in touch with the Village Websmith and experience the difference of truly personal web design for yourself. For more information, please call us on the number shown, or click in the header of any page to email Abercraf-s-wales@villagewebsmith.co.uk.

Newsletter Pages for Online Viewing or E-Mailshots

Newsletters are a very powerful sales tool, providing a resource to circulate information that doesn't have a natural home anywhere else in your website. From small snippets to major new items, Newsletters can hold a wealth of useful stuff. Webintheox? newsletter files can hold up to 20 stories per page with a header, up to 10,000 words per story, an image and choice of layout. Add to that a header graphic, text intro and footer, and you have a huge capacity for news. New this month is automatic date selection, so that you can work on a number of newsletters at once, the previous one being replaced with the current when the due date is reached. To keep you closer to your markets, you can also mail out a version of the newsletter to your entire online database or just a highly selected few. Better still, all of your old newsletters are available to read from the archive, which means that they are all indexed by the search engines so you keep on getting recognition for your work even when the new edition is published.

Aberdare is well known for these attractions: Country park fabulous indoor market and Aberdare Park home of historic motorcycle road races.

Aberdare is also close to our headquarters in Shirenewton, Monmouthshire, which helps us to maintain our policy of only working face to face with customers to make sure they get the best results quickly when writing the content for their web sites. This is a much quicker method of establishing what aspects of a business are the most promotable and getting the order of things. So, if you have a small business in Aberdare, just get in touch with the Village Websmith and experience the difference of truly personal web design for yourself. For more information, please call us on the number shown, or click in the header of any page to email Aberdare-s-wales@villagewebsmith.co.uk.