Web Critic

What a great place The Royal Oak in Appleby was a few years ago. It had good food, good beer and an old style charm provided by the owners and staff. It had a culture. Everything was polished, clean and smelt of furniture polish…a nice country pub.

Something changed. Now when someone has finished eating in the restaurant, the spray gun comes out! Oh no, a young daftie with a spray gun sanitizing my neighbour’s table in the restaurant! Mmm, that smell goes well with my overdone steak which I waited 45 minutes for. We waited 20 minutes for a waiter until I just decided just to order at the bar.

The Royal Oak is about a 5 minute walk from Appleby town centre but I can’t recommend the effort. We left after one night as it was so poor and they still charged us for the 2 nights. It is now a standard commercial road side pub with little to please the visitor. I actually met the guy (in the bar) who had done the room improvements and he even admitted to them. They were comfy rooms but the finish in certain areas was primitive and shoddy.

What a pity to see a reallly good pub and restaurant going down the tube…it’s only a standard pub now…try the little chef on the A66 if you are hungry.

I have visited Appleby for over 45 years as man and boy. We even had a house there and fishing rights. The river Eden is now so dirty, even the fish have gone.

What a pity.

TWC

Peter Resch is full of steam and hot air.

TWC

Don’t even think of signing up to this scam! The Debenhams privacy guard is not very private. They take all your information , pass it on to their affiliated companies outside the UK where the rules are different and then write in the  small print on the back of the contract what the real deal is all about.

Basically, on the form on the back, they contradict practically everything that it says on the front. The terms and conditions on the website are also different to the terms on the written contract.

Debenhams privacy guard is to be avoided. Debenhams the shop will also be avoided. I can’t tell you how annoyed my good lady is!

So if you want privacy, do NOT sign up to the Debenhams Privacy Guard or any body else’s privacy guard.

The damage that Debenhams are doing to their reputation and their profits is large.

Yours very publicly,

TWC

Taylors Tea and Coffee merchants are based in Harrogate and have got to be iiP accredited or it’s just a great company with great people in it. You may also know that other great Harrogate institution, Betty’s.

So why tremendous PR?

Well, in my other life I run 2 large industrial websites www.lubricants.co.uk and www.foodlubricants.co.uk for industrial products and I got an enquiry for something that we don’t actually do but I pointed the man in the right direction and I guess it worked out for him. This morning’s post contained a parcel with 2 boxes of tea, one of them decaffeinated and a pack of Rich Italian blend coffee…Brilliant! Thank You Bryan Marshall!

These are the things that make the world go round and make that little extra bit of effort very worthwhile.

Time for a cuppa!

Till soon,

TWC…Charlie.

Peter Riley, Robert Blackburn, myself and Simon had taken the back road to Ilkley to attend the Hawks AGM. On a right hand bend we skidded and did a full one and half turns (without pike) and landed backwards in the ditch adjacent to the fence. It really was quite stylish although briefly disorientating. It must have looked like one of those precision parking experts in action! Not a scratch on the car…brilliant…young Simon is safe from parents and insurance claims!

Some moments later another car did the same although they hit the lampost that we had just narrowly missed…oops!

A car stopped and we got a lift in a people carrier with a mother and 3 very young children who kindly stopped and took us to Ilkley for the meeting. These were lovely funny chatty happy children telling us about their dogs and what colour dogs all their relatives have at home.

We were just counting our own blessings when one of the children just told us that their daddy was dead. Mum explained that indeed he had been killed in a helicopter accident just a few months previously. We all knew the story from the newspapers.

Good Luck you lovely happy children and good luck wonder mum.

Look out for good people…they are all around us.

Charlie x

Harrogate Bar and Grill provided a great meal on Tuesday night when I visited them during one of their testing nights. I understand they open officially in the next few days.

I started with Asparagus, hollandaise sauce and a poached egg done to perfection…not always easy…I have tried! The Tandoori Sea Bass and mint sauce was a delight and although it was a little light on tandoori flavour, the dish was a great success. My creme brulee was a bit standard but my companions’ various desserts were all excellent. The Chenin blanc was  also a very good wine choice.

Service wise? If they can keep up that level of individual attention and food delivery timing, then they will have  a very successful restaurant. Price wise? Hey, it’s Harrogate and food costs have gone up. For the food, wine, ambience, service and company (a well known bunch of bon viveurs were in from Ilkley and district!) I thought it was fine.

Johnie on the door helped to create a good first impression and Ashley did the necessary inside (her father is a well known golfer in Harrogate but no free lesssons were available!) 

I don’t normally do nice reviews of anything but this was good.

Good Luck Harrogate Bar and Grill! …Their number is 01423 705777 and they are at the bottom of Parliament street in the town centre.

Charlie Clayton

They don’t like paying.

They don’t like learning.

Their copy is self promotional nonsense and their images are poor and untitled.

And they think that keywords, meta-tags and everything else that they have read in Google for Dummies is all that they need to know.

Lack of imagination and low levels of determination will kill their companies.

Oh yes, and precious personalities. I spoke to a guy the other day who has received 58 written enquiries and over 100 phone calls for heating oil and he said he had not converted any. It’s a miracle he still has a job but he was so determined not to pay anything that he told me he couldn’t convert any web leads! None at all.

I think I might ring his boss.

You really would think that people might listen to someone who has been so successful online.

Ah well, their loss, not mine.

Till soon, 

TWC

So Poulters lost a client and the business caved in. Having looked at their website, www.poulters.com we can see that their knowledge of digital may be close to zero. Who else would put up an all flash site that is inaccessible to nearly 50% of corporate customers? Why, oh why, is that then? It’s because so many corporate servers do not have flash installed…it stops the staff looking at YouTube all day! Their website was truly awful…inward looking artistic nonsense.

I read an email from them to a mutual client about doing “the search engine marketing” bit after the site was launched. They also bundled SEO into this as an afterthought. Just in case anyone still thinks SEO is a “bolt on” product after launching the website, you are wrong. It is done at the beginning of the process. SEO is also not a technical or code “trick.” It is many other things including good copy writing, accessible sites and plenty use of the YOU word. My industrial website with over 140,000 visitors per year is still number 1 for all my chosen key phrases after 6 years and I haven’t refreshed it or changed it in anyway. So watch out for “we’ll refresh your website”…it could be a disaster delivered by someone that is now out of work.

Print or flat media experts can’t do web media…it’s different…that’s why traditional Ad agencies struggle. For the millionth time…”pushing old marketing messages through the new medium of the web does not work!”

So Poulters, sorry to see you go but you had it coming.

Till soon,

Yours digitally,

TWC  

As an example…an online clothing website.

1. The copy is centred around the features of the product…no lifestyle or aspirational copy.

2. No Calls To Action  (CTA)

3. The page titles are the same…written in blue at the very top of your monitor.

4. No staff photos or “Helpline personnel” on the site

5. Using your bank’s payment gateway, not your own customised one.

That’s just 5 mistakes but Jo Public and Jo The Ad Man are very creative and continue to come up with new ways to make a mess of websites.

If you think it’s like print or even a bit like print and you think this web stuff can’t be that difficult, call me and tell me that you have been more successful then me. 9 out of 10 web sites are suffering from an Internet Tragedy and Google can tell you what that is.

Stop mucking about and get some proper advice! Or you can always stick knitting needles in your eyes, it’s nearly as painful as having a lousy website but it’s not as expensive.

You have a choice.

Till soon…

TWC,

I saw some questions the other day about sticky websites.

Sticky websites are great and do stop people leaving too quickly. Yes, they have given the user a good experience and probably they will come back…you can always check your site stats to see how many of your web visitors have bookmarked your site.

Sticky websites are really good for social networking sites (web 2.0) and product or service researchers. Lead generation websites are for product buyers and this is when you help them to select a product, pay and go. Typical drop out rates between Add to basket and the Checkout  are over 50%…that’s more than 50% of your visitors leaving their basket in an aisle and legging it out of the door! Maybe the checkout was sticky! It happens a lot…poor design of the checkout area is almost standard on many websites…just when you have got the customer to select a product and put it in their basket, you blow it! …Why? Often it’s because the E-commerce techies and web designers can only see it from a position of Recall, not Recognition. That usually means poor usability and high drop out rates. Stickiness keeps them there but it’s a lot of other factors that get them to spend or take an action…and that’s when you have a successful commercial website!

Some parts of a site should be sticky for researchers and social networkers and some parts need to be slippy, quick and easy for the product seekers.

You can’t justify any investment in a website without the promise of a financial return.

Yours profitably,

Till soon,

TWC