1. Introduction
   • Discussion of your role and responsibilities within your organisation and aspirations for how you wish to work in the future
   • Understanding how passive, action and active learning methods are applied in the leadership exchange programme
   • How to view what is done every day from a fresh perspective
2. Overview of Service Transformation
   • Key concept explanation of the ‘model for leading service change’ which addresses how to create the future by commissioning people, engagement through people management and delivering improvement by turning ideas into action
3. Case Study
   • Real-life case study dealing with problem identification, team engagement, overcoming frustrations, barriers to change; parallels drawn with your own working environments
4. Lean principles, tools & techniques
   • Introduction to the philosophy and practices of a Lean business model
   • The challenge to apply the Lean strategy within our working environments
   • How to identify time issues and waste that we experience every day
   • Understanding why and how business process improvements are customer focused; leading to advances in quality, delivery, cost and importantly the experience of the service user
   • Explanation of how to assure ‘right first time’ through detecting issues, responding with a sense of urgency and problem solving with root cause analysis
   • Reviewing what ensures process flows are service user driven and how this prevents lead-time extension
   • Active discussion of how to develop, communicate and implement standardisation as a basis for achieving a consistent, reliable and repeatable processes as well as providing the platform for continuous improvement

• Lean techniques (problem solving, meeting control, A3 documents, standardised work, team engagement, PDCA cycle, work allocation, a day in the life, visual management, process mapping, 5S)

1. Decoding resistance to change and how to give leadership to a change programme
2. Scoping individual participant’s live projects and agreeing learning set follow up methods and schedules
3. Q & A

Rhymes Nursery celebrates its tenth year of providing childcare in Redditch.

The nursery is based in a converted farmhouse that dates back several hundred years. It has beautiful beamed ceilings and a welcoming feel that just can’t be found in most of the other modern purpose built nursery buildings where other nurseries provide childcare in Redditch.

During that time It has always enjoyed brilliant Ofsted ratings and the nursery is generally full!

Most of the children in its care are relatives or friends of previous occupants. this shows great testimant to the quality of care provided such that recommendations and referalls are the largest source of each year’s new intake.

Staff members rarely leave, an amazing eighty percent of the current teams have been employed at the nursery since its opening in 2000. The ongoing presence of a a stable team ensures continuity of care throughout each child’s stay at the nursery.

Care is available form 07.30 – 18.00 each day of the week, the Nursery closes on Bank Holidays and for one week over the Christmas period but is open at all other times. Freshly cooked – nutritionally balanced meals are provided, these are all cooked in house and a new menu is prepared on a weekly basis. However parents can choose to opt out and prepare their own food that will be served to their children at meal times.

The cost of care will vary according to each child’s attendance pattern, there are no fixed programs of care, provided that there is availability children can attend the nursery from just a few hours each week. Equally care can generally be offered during holiday periods for those parents who work in education and may need specific help over that time.

Rhymes Nursery - the premium provider of childcare in Redditch

]]> http://www.salesfunnel.co.uk/articles/website-design-clients/childcare-in-redditch/feed/ 0 http://www.salesfunnel.co.uk/articles/website-design/professional-v-amateur-website-designers/ http://www.salesfunnel.co.uk/articles/website-design/professional-v-amateur-website-designers/#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 12:21:29 +0000 admin http://www.salesfunnel.co.uk/articles/?p=79 Professional website designers lose count of the amount of time the following statement has been uttered, or variations thereof, when the question of whether a business requires a website:  “no it’s ok, my friends son can do websites and is sorting me one out“.  This is usually followed by a call some months later to the effect of:  “my mate’s son built me a website but it’s awful and isn’t in Google . . . can you help?”!

This is an all too prevalent issue and it’s understandable, particularly in today’s economic climate that ‘the bargain’ is searched for when looking to employ any service. However, there are so many pitfalls with IT and website design and development that by and large this can really be false economy.  The range of skills required to design, develop, host and maintain a website can be wide and varied and it is nigh-on impossible to find someone with no industry experience who has learnt to make a web page using Microsoft Front Page during an ICT course at school who would have anywhere near the depth of understanding and technical ability to produce a website that will serve the purpose for which it was built.

It’s not a matter of just ‘having’ a website but a matter of having a website that is graphically eye-catching, contains logical/transparent navigation, is written with well optimised/keyword-rich textual content, has all the correct coding practices in place, conforms to the World Wide Web Consortium website coding convention guidelines, conforms to accessibility guidelines etc, etc, etc.  In fact, there are dozens of principles that need to be applied to produce a good website that again someone who doesn’t work as a professional in the business wouldn’t know.  Furthermore, there is a vast difference between web animation, web design and web development for example and an amateur ‘Jack of all trades’ is not going to be proficient in all areas sufficiently to do them justice leading to a website that is deficient in key areas.

Obviously, we are a website design, website development and search engine optimisation (SEO) company and so would be pro the  professional approach but from experience with our client base, many of whom had gone down the ‘friend’s son’ approach previously, we can say hand on heart that it’s tantamount to throwing money away in most instances!

The key, therefore, is to have a website that instantly grabs the interest of the viewer and holds it for a sufficient amount of time for the viewer to engage with what you are promoting, be it goods, services or information. We cover logical website navigation elsewhere on this site but another key factor is visual impact. Remember, your website is basically your shop front and online viewers are passing trade: they won’t be tempted ‘inside’ your business if the shop front is not enticing with a good window display etc. So if you imagine your website as a traditional shop front, what do you think would draw-in passing trade? Obviously a shop front displaying reams of text won’t do it as no one would be prepared to read through it all in order to see if there’s something of interest to them and a broken window, shop sign with peeling paint or no reference to what the shop is selling on the frontage would be equally as unappealing.

In a website design setting, therefore, what is required is a design that isn’t over verbose with long-winded passages of text and contains visually eye-catching images that depict your services, some of your goods or premises etc depending upon the nature of your business or organisation. This is where the key element of graphical/image quality comes into play. Nothing will give an instant bad impression on a website like poor images and graphics. Unfortunately, a large number of website fall right into the trap of ‘having a friend’s son who can do websites’, for example, and resulting in a very cheap website that is so poorly designed that potential viewers will just go elsewhere. Furthermore, taking the budget approach of taking photographs of premises, staff, goods etc on mobile phones and scanning images from brochures, logos from business cards etc and mounting them on a website will equally lead to a very, very poor and amateurish result . . . surely defeating the object of having a website in the first place?

All website, of course, must have some graphical content and the golden rule is that these must be of a high quality. Think back to our shop front analogy; would you open a shop where the signage was written with a felt tip to save money on a professional sign writer? It is relatively inexpensive to get a professional website design company to integrate quality images into your website largely by the following methods:

1. Photography: if you require actual photographs of your premises, staff, facilities, goods etc, ask your website designers if they provide onsite photography services
2. Stock Images: website designers will know of various image archives for which copyright licenses can be acquired for use on your website. These archives can often be viewed by clients so that the images required can be viewed jointly prior to their purchase
3. Graphic Design: a professional website design company will have graphic design skills and will be able to produce graphics/logos etc ‘from scratch’ to your specifications
4. From the Printer: many businesses have logos created and letterheads etc from which pertinent bits can be extracted for website design and copies of the graphic files themselves can usually be obtained upon request from the printers

If you follow the above principles you will be on your way to a visually appealing website that will promote your goods and/or services to our potential client base and not defeat the object of promoting your business online from the outset!

When a search engine, such as Google, sends its bots to spider/crawl a website to analyse its content for indexing it will attempt to ascertain the theme of the website. For example, if you are a builder then when Google indexes your site there should be sufficient ‘clues’ there for Google to understand what the website is about and it can then rank your website in relation to other builder’s websites. This process, in part, is related to keyword density – that is, the amount of times your keywords/phrases appear in the copy of the website. However, the old process of repeating several keywords over and over again on every page doesn’t really wash with the complex algorithms Google and other major search engines use and indeed overuse of repeated keywords can lead to a website being down listed or even banned from search engine results for ‘keyword stuffing’.

So how do you know what to include? Well, the copy (along with a few other pieces of code which we won’t go into here) should still contain your keywords repeated several times and various synonyms and variations (builder, builders etc) but with the development of complex search engine parameters this too is now not enough. The latest buzzword is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) which sounds rather more complicated than it actually is in practice but is essential for understanding how search engines, and in particular Google, index and rank websites and what can be done to improve their positions.

In short, Google indexes millions of websites daily and stores the information gained in vast datacentres and uses this information to provide listings when you make a search and to work-out which website should rank higher than another. In relation to LSI, as previously discussed when Google arrives at your website it attempts to get the theme/subject of the website so let us presume you are a builder and so Google has discerned that your website is about a builder. What it then does is access its vast database of website information, finds all the other websites that it has identified are for builders, builds a list of common keywords and phrases from across all those sites and then looks to see if they appear in your website.

For example, say out of 100 builder website Google has in its database the phrase ‘plastering’ occurs prominently in 15 of them, then it is logical to assume that your website would have the phrase ‘plastering’ in it. If it does, Google gives your website a ‘brownie point’ which gives you a slightly better position in its ranking than if it doesn’t. Obviously the process is a little more complex and multi-layered but the idea is that Google knows what phrases tend to be associated with every imaginable business sector and if it finds them in your website it lends weight to your rankings. Furthermore, these are not to be confused with keywords per se, it is already aware that if your a builder then the word ‘builder’ is a keyword – LSI keywords are related terms and phrases gleaned from the analysis of similar websites.

Whilst you can hazard a guess at what these phrases will be, a good search engine optimisation (SEO) consultant will utilise various software and online resources to produce an LSI keywords ‘cloud’ which will show the LSI keywords related to your actual website keywords. These LSI keywords can then be ’sprinkled’ throughout the website copy so that when Google comes crawling it will see your website as containing all the ingredients to attain a healthy ranking in its search engine results.

The upshot of these two pieces of information is that if someone arrives at your website and can’t see the information they require within 3 seconds of their arrival, or have to navigate an unfathomably layered site navigation structure taking them beyond 3 clicks before reaching the desired information, then they will trot off to the nearest search engine to find another provider. Of course, if you operate a website you don’t necessarily know the extent of this issue and may feel that your website is very user-friendly however, bear in mind that you will be familiar with your site and what you feel is a sensible and transparent way of structuring the information you wish to present throughout the website may not be commensurate with the view of potential customers. This is a common issue and concessions really need to be made to a professional website designer who will be aware of research and common practice and should be able to structure a website that satisfies the various criteria or creating a user-friendly website.

A common means for gauging whether or not your site is structured in such a way as to allow ease of navigation for a viewer is to have a statistical analysis tool installed on the website – such as Google Analytics – as this will show you the page at which people arrived at your website, how long they stayed on that page and where they went to next. If, for example, the majority of people arrive at your site at a particular page, stay on it for 4-5 seconds and then leave for another site then your website really isn’t grabbing their attention and showing them the information they require. This is called the bounce rate (ie people arrive at a website page and bounce straight off the website again) and the higher it is, the more of a problem you have with your website!

Of course, it’s not simple a case of having to have all your information displayed on the home page of the website. What all websites should have is a transparent navigation/menu structure where each tab/link is named something logical pertinent to the page on the website to which it navigates. Thus, someone viewing this website that requires web design can clearly see the navigation tab at the top of the page for web design and go straight to the relevant section.

If your website, and/or business, offers a wide array of services or products, then of course it is not possible to have a specific menu tab/link to each individual product and/or service on display on each page but it is still essential that a viewer should be able to navigate to any page of the website from any other page without frantically using the browser’s back button, for example. Therefore, a structured menu with sub-navigation elements should be used. For example, if your business sold clothing then the menu would be huge if a tab/link to each item of clothing was presented on each page and so the menu would list categories (trouser, shorts, coats, for example) that would contain sub-categories to allow a viewer to ‘drill-down’ to the precise item they required in a logical manner.

In today’s highly competitive online marketplace however, competition is fierce for top 10 positions on the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) and the search engines themselves have developed highly sophisticated algorithms that take into account dozens of factors when indexing a website with a view to including and ranking it within their searchable listings. It’s no longer a case of cramming as many instances of keywords into each page – in fact this can lead to a site being punished in the rankings – and old tricks of placing keywords at the foot of a page in the same colour as the page background are definite ‘no-nos’ and can lead to a site being dropped by a search engine altogether. Therefore, in order for a website to achieve, and maintain, a consistently high position in the major search engines now requires a complex set of procedures to be implemented across the website, and increasingly off the website.

The major principle, of course, is that if your website appears on the 20th page of Google results then no one is ever going to see it – the rule of thumb is that if your website doesn’t appear in the first three pages of results then no one will see it is itself becoming outmoded with increasingly impatient web users largely viewing the results on the first page when a search is entered. It’s therefore essential that website owners achieve high rankings or lose out on the potentially infinite online market for their product/service to their competitors.

Try for yourself, think of a two to three word phrase that you feel precisely sums-up the goods and/or services you offer – a phrase you think your potential customers would be typing into Google to find a business such as yours – then enter it into a major search engine and see how many results appear: that’s how many sites with which you are in competition for search engine rankings. For example, even a relatively ‘niche’ product that is regionalised such as ‘bakers in Birmingham’ yields over 386,000 results on Google!

There are, of course, many search engine optimisation ‘companies’ and ‘consultant’s around who make rash promises! You know the sort of thing: “We guarantee a number 1 Google listing in 5 days” etc . . . Sadly, as appealing as such claims may be to the business person who has a poorly performing website, there is absolutely NO WAY to guarantee a position on a search engine’s listings. New websites are coming online daily, existing websites are changing their content, search engines are changing the way they index sites continuously, links to website from other sites ae constantly changing and a myriad of other elements are in a constant state of flux and so it is IMPOSSIBLE to state with any degree of certainty how high a position a website can attain in the search engines. Furthermore, some unscrupulous companies offer ‘black hat’ techniques to get a quick result which are nefarious measures that can, and do, result in websites being banned by search engines – hardly benefficial to the unwitting businesses who employ such search engine optimisation ’specialists’ services!