E-shop, Search Engines, Newsletters & Help

The newsletter database has grown from 0 to 10,000 recipients in 6 months, we do not purchase lists and all of our contacts are confirmed organic. The success story:

The table below show the histroy of emails sent by us, as you can see we have proven very successful in our first 6 months.

	Sent	Bounces	Opens	Clicks	Forwards
Overall	66722	9.3% (6235)	35.6% (21530)	25.9% (5583)	0.1% (25)
Last 3 months	28212	5.5% (1545)	36.9% (9834)	19.9% (1961)	0.1% (14)
Compare with other sites	---	18.3%	37.0%	8.9%	3.3%

Source: Constant Contact (August 2007) - www.constantcontact.com

 

The eshop has the most comprehensive list of maps, guides and books on the forest, available to purchase in a safe, easy to use environment. Our immediate plans are to begin selling local produce, starting with hand crafted wooden items.

The dynamic pages of the website are only successful if the industry and staff update them daily. Ten training sessions are available free of charge for the accommodation sector, this has meant that we have moved from 16% updating to over 70% in under one year. Staff training occurs every month, where staff are trained and given responsibility for maintaining certain section of the site.

 

Search Engines
One of the main objectives for thenewforest.co.uk was to become the organic first placement for all New Forest searches. From research, the most popular search term for the area is “the new forest”, followed by “new forest”, which we are now firmly in the top spot. The position is due to an emphasis on ensuring our sites concur with the needs of the search engine, bots, spiders etc. There has also been investment in Adwords to help concrete our position on the main search phrases while increasing our position on in other search terms.

Back links – The site currently has 285 backward links to our site (links on other websites to our own), this has grown by 100% in 12 months. This obviously is a major factor in good organic search engine results.

 

Help is at hand
Visitors to the site will not be dazzled by poor graphic design. This is the first important aspect of the site. The site has been designed using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to ensure consistency throughout, this is also an industry standard.

The site was initially nowhere near compatible with the W3C standards for disability. We have been working on the points made by the validator to ensure we comply and are now in a “transitional” stage. We also have contrasting colours, scalable text size and ALT descriptions on all images.

Our access pages give the most comprehensive information on the area, we have been commended by numerous related groups and the information has been widely promoted.

A visible “contact us” link is available for visitors throughout the site giving an email, postal address and contact telephone number.
Industry have a direct contact phone number that they are able to use for any queries regarding the system, they also have a dedicated email to send questions or events.