New Dropdown Buttons Go Live

For Quoakle, navigation is a high priority - helping our users go from page to page quickly and easily, so they and you can find what you're looking for.

At the bottom of each page, you will have noticed links to other topics in that county, and also users have been able to travel from e.g. our 'Pets' page in one county over to another 'Pets' page in a different county using the simple dropdown menus.

Well - now there are buttons to make it even clearer to new users that Quoakle works in this way!

Try it out now! Go to Quoakle the UK Web Directory and choose your topic. I fancy going out to a restaurant, so I'd choose Gloucestershire, then Restaurants to look for local Restaurants. What a great selection! However, I'm also willing to travel a bit, and live close to Herefordshire, so now I can click on the Other Counties button at the top of the page, and instantly look at the Restaurants available in Herefordshire. Simplicity itself!

We're excited that more people using Quoakle are going to see much more easily how to move around the website. We hope you will do too!

No. 1 on Google for Cheltenham and Gloucester Restaurants!

For several months Quoakle has been No. 1 on Google for the Keyword Phrase: Cheltenham Restaurants. This has been bringing thousands of visitors to Quoakle's easy-to-use Restaurant Directory.

Now the restaurant directory is starting to receive visitors who have typed in the Keyword Phrase: Gloucester Restaurants.

Great news for all the restaurants advertising on Quoakle's Gloucestershire Restaurant Directory!

Steve Jobs, Apple and Quoakle

Steve Jobs has stepped down as CEO of Apple, handing the reigns over to Tim Cook, Apple's COO.

While Steve Jobs will remain involved in Apple as chairman of the company, he will no longer run Apple on a day-to-day basis.

To celebrate the end of his career as CEO of Apple, we thought it would be good to publish a quote from Steve Jobs that really must apply to Quoakle!

Steve Jobs on designing products:

“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.” – Steve Jobs in an MSNBCand Newsweek interview, Oct. 14, 2006.

It would be great to know what Steve Jobs thinks of Quoakle, but I don't expect we will ever find out. However, the Quoakle team will certainly be continuing to strive to maintain and develop "an elegant and simple solution" for Internet users looking for local businesses.

Half a million click-throughs and counting!

More good news from the Quoakle office! Over the past five years, Quoakle's graphical directory has made searching for local businesses quicker and easier for thousands of users.

Since August 2009, Quoakle's innovative page layout and simple presentation of information has enabled users to connect with local websites literally hundreds of thousands of times. The most recent statistics from Quoakle's CMS reveal the passing of the landmark half a million click-throughs to local websites.

With the current dramatic expansion of the Days Out and Leisure Directory, the Quoakle team is aiming to reach one million click-throughs within the next twelve months.

Quoakle launches 14 new counties!

A year ago, on the 'Introducing Quoakle Video', director Nigel Steele said "Our aim is to spread right across every county in the United Kingdom".

Last week the team made major steps in that direction with the launch of 14 new counties, from Cornwall in the south-west to Cheshire in the north-west. The first topic within these counties is Days Out and Leisure. Having observed Quoakle's rise to number one on Google for the search term "days out in Gloucestershire", Nigel took the decision to push ahead with this major expansion of Quoakle's Days Out and Leisure Directory. Soon users will be able to flick from county to county looking for great places to visit and family activities and finding hundreds of websites with just one click.

Nigel is pictured above next to the newly launched Days Out in Cheshire page. The expansion into Cheshire was something which gave him particular pleasure, having been born in the Cheshire market town of Nantwich.

Activities for children

The summer holidays are here! And so, for the time being, is the sunshine. We can only hope that the wonderfully unpredictable English weather will hold out for a few weeks longer. So whilst you've got the chance, why not take advantage of the favourable atmospheric conditions and get the kids out of the house!

Quoakle.com offers links to a wide and varied selection of activities for children, for you and your brood to choose from. From animal parks and zoos, to country houses and gardens. From pottery making and other crafts, to whitewater river rafting! Regardless of your thirst (or lack of) for wild adventure, Quoakle.com can help you to find the perfect activity for you and your family.

And even if the sunshine isn't here to stay, you can also find a variety of indoor activities on the site, helping to keep those rainy days interesting.

To find your family's next day out, visit UK Days Out.

Excellent 6 month Google Page Rank results for Quoakle

Quoakle's innovative graphical directory reports great improvement in Google Page rank during the last 6 months. The page rank rose at least one unit on 37 "logo pages" and the highest ranked page is now Days Out and Leisure in Gloucestershire at Google rank 4.

The chart below shows a comparison between Google rank for Quoakle pages as on December 23rd 2010 and then as on 23rd June 2011.