Great Days Out - Great Innovations

As the title of our latest Blog title suggests - once again we have been looking at ways to improve the usability and appearance of the Great Days Out directory!

You will see that instead of the current 103 x 103 advertising logo's that we have been using up until now, we have increased the sizes of the individual logo's. We believe this gives our directory a more aesthetically pleasing appearance to our users. We will be slowly rolling these out across all of the UK counties, but it will take a bit of time as there are dozens of pages to update! To have a look at just one of the new webpages, go here : Great Days Out in Gloucestershire.

We have been also letting our paying clients know of the new look and so far we have had only positive responses!

You will see that we are not just updating our existing clients' advertising links, but also the Counties banners at the bottom of our webpages.

We hope you will be enjoying our updates and our constant quest to improve our website!

Tim is going Oz! It is official!

You may recall back in August of last year, Tim Davis of TCD Web Design, was planning to fly out to Sydney, Australia to attend a YWAM (Youth With A Mission) Sports DTS (Discipleship Training School). See http://quoakle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/australia-beckons-for-tim.html for more info.

Well, that was unfortunately postponed BUT it looks like he will now be going to Oz in April instead!

His blog is still operating and it will tell you more about the DTS. Here : Tim Down Under

He currently still needs to raise money to get him to Australia and to take part in the lecture phase of the DTS, so here are a few links to ways that you can support him:

https://crowdfunding.justgiving.com/td-dts

https://www.paypal.me/timothycdavis/10

To find out more about YWAM click here: www.ywam.org/about-us/

Tim plans to be away for 6 months still. He will be sorely missed in the Quoakle office!

Diamond Books for Children

We would like to introduce to you all one of our clients, Diamond Books for Children! We have been helping them with Social Media as Carole, the lady behind the project, is quite new to it all. Here is an excerpt from her website so you can find out more about her :

Diamond Books is the exciting Bible-based Reading Project that aims to develop in children a love for the Bible at the same time as helping them learn to read.

Pioneered by UK Christian teacher, Carole Leah, Diamond Books seek to nourish children with Biblical resources bringing positive ideas into their lives as well as good role models to follow. The stories will delight 3-9 year olds with the antics of several modern day characters with whom they can relate.

The vision of Diamond Books is to impart to children the knowledge of God's love and purpose for their lives - with every book being like a love letter from God to a child.

She has launched several books for children as well! One being the Creation Series, as well as the Jesus Series. Her goals or "aims" are summed up nicely here : Aims.

We look forward to working alongside her...

Feedback

We hope you have found the Great Days Out in the UK informative and helpful.

If you have any comments specifically about the website, we would be grateful to receive your immediate feedback in order to help improve the service provided for you online.

As Webmasters we endeavour to keep the Great Days Out website maintained to the highest standards but may miss seeing something which you may have noticed. Comments may refer to spelling or grammar mistakes, inaccurate or out-of-date information, broken links, or problems using a particular browser.

We are still striving to make our directory as up-to-date and easy to use as possible. Tim Davis from TCD Web Design has been instrumental in implementing and updating the website and has been a key part of the team! 

It is not always easy to keep in step with the latest Google changes. Even now we are making sure that all of our websites have SSL Certification and this can be a lengthy process. The work never seems to stop!

Below is a picture of Tim about to engage in coding warfare!

Great Days Out has a new Theme!

Following on from our previous blog, we have continued with revamping the Great Days Out directory by completely re-installing a new theme to our website! This was something Tim took upon himself with his own initiative and boy have we seen the difference!

There have been considerable improvements with the functions and layout of the website. You will see that the Home page has had a tweaks. The Great Days Out Blog has now been also relaunched as the previous version was simply not good enough and was never initiated. This will now give us the opportunity to further promote our clients, as well as hopefully helping us acquire a better Google ranking.

It has been an already productive January! We will continue to do what we can to increase traffic to the directory as well as developing our other existing projects.

A little Tweak here and there

Research on how people use the internet confirms that more and more of us are using our iPhones and tablets to go online. In order to make our Great Days Out directory more easier on the eye for the user, we were able to alter the size of the county logo's as well as the category logo's, thanks to Tim's tweaking! To give you an idea of the alterations, you will see 2 pictures below. One is before the change and the other after...

Before the changes...

After the changes

You will see that the main webpage is more filled out. It only took a few minutes to do strangely enough, but it does make a difference!

Of course there are always things we can do to improve our user's experience of the website and we will continue to do so.

A New Year beckons...

Well, didn't 2016 go fast? Where does the time go?

We are slowly picking up from where we left off. One of our goals this year is to see Great Days Out perform better on the Google rankings. It does seem that Google like to change the goal posts from time to time and it does leave us second guessing as to why certain key word phrases don't appear as high as they should on Google's listings. Be assured we are doing all that we can to rectify this ongoing battle!

We are also hoping that the Quoakle directory will have gone through it's complete transformation at some point during this year! Tim Coysh has been able to do a bit of work when he has been able to carve out some time. He keeps us up-to-date. We can't confirm when the new website will be live, but we are leaving it in Tim's capable hands and we will let you know when it is the finished article!

So, it is onwards and upwards! We wish you all a prosperous and inspiring 2017!