One Month in Already

Well, it is hard to believe that January has come to an end! It seems that Christmas was only just yesterday and here we are now into February already!? Things have been going full steam ahead, despite the odd cough, dizzy head and chest infection! Tim is still away but will be landing back in the UK in little under a months time. We have certainly missed him. 

Both Nigel and Sean have been able to hold the fort minus Tim's invaluable skills, but it hasn't been easy to say the least. 

We hope that you have all had a good start to the year. We trust that 2018 will be a good one!

Happy New Year!

Well, 2017 went really quickly didn’t it? We are now already over a week into the new year!

It has taken a few days to recover from the mince pies and over indulging. We hope all of our clients, friends and families had a wonderful time together. We hope 2018 will be a year of blessing and prosperity to one and all. The Quoakle team carry on regardless and we are looking forward to Tim Davis returning to these shores next month. If you would like to know how he has been doing down under, you can find out more from here, Tim Down Under

Spring Update

You may recall back on the 28th of February that we had said that Timothy C Davis, of TCD Web Design was going to Australia for 6 months, well unfortunately it never worked out and was postponed until September 2017!

Even though there has been a couple of cancellations for Tim's YWAM (Youth With a Mission) placement, he hasn't given up and all being well, will be flying out to Sydney, Australia in September after all. As stated in a couple of previous blogs, the duration will be 6 months in total and as also previously stated, he will be sorely missed!

Nigel came back from a wonderful time in New Zealand last week after being away for a few weeks. He was able to spend some time with his youngest Daughter and Son-in-law, who were expecting a baby at any moment! It was a bit of a family reunion, as Helen (wife) and Hannah (eldest daughter) were able to be there to help out and support the new addition to their family!

Sean will be flying out to Lapland from the middle of June and will be on a missions trip for almost 6 weeks in total. We trust that Great Days Out UK will carry on regardless without him!

You can see that the Quoakle team do get around and are seasoned World travellers! LOL!

Character Counter

We at Quoakle.com, would like to introduce to you all this handy little website entitled, 'Character Counter'. It is an online letter count tool. It can help you find the perfect length for documents, tweets, SEO title tags, SEO title descriptions and much more.

It can be hard to find the perfect number of characters for documents, emails, etc… The Character Count tool can help you know exactly how many characters you are writing. Just start writing in the box below and keep an eye on the number of characters as it continues to count characters for you. Once finished you can simply click the copy button to copy all your text or if your unhappy with your text you can click reset.

The tool is brought to you by TCD Web Design and Quoakle.

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!

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!

Great Days Out New Look

The Great Days Out website has just gone through a few look changes. A brand new background image is now visible on the website, and the homepage has a great looking header image.

The new background image is the next stage of a rebranding exercise and a definite step up from the old background image. The new background image really brings out the page content. By taking the banner image from our twitter account and tiling it we were able to create a great looking website background.

Once the background image had been added we felt that the homepage needed something extra. We then had the idea of adding a great quality header image to it. After a few minutes spent deciding on an image to use. It was placed onto the homepage using php.

We are very pleased with the new changes!

Recent work on Instagram

The Great Days Out team have been busy with our Instagram account, and have taken the bull by the horns so to say, with promoting our clients.

We had a skype call with a guy called Steven the other week, who works for a company called iMarvel and we were able to pick his brains about how best to use some of the various social media outlets out there on the internet. #Hashtags were mentioned, amongst other means and ways to acquire followers and 'likes' and since then we have started to implement some of his ideas.

With this in mind, we then launched a few of our Restaurant websites on Instagram too! Our first account was Gloucester Restaurants, but since then we have set up : Cheltenham Restaurants, Hereford Restaurants, Swindon Restaurants, Oxford Restaurants, Bristol Restaurants and Bath Restaurants.

We have been expanding our vision of Restaurants in the UK! We will give you an update in our next blog. Stay tuned.

Below is a snapshot of the Great Days Out Instagram Home page...

Autumnal Update

Well things have been progressing well with the roll out of all of the additional webpages on the Great Days Out directory!

We can proudly say that all of the additional Categories are now live and functioning correctly on the website. It was quite a big task, but with Timothy Davis and Samuel Taylor's help, we were able to get them all up and running!

We have had a number of clients who have been renewing with us over the summer and on into the fall. Treasure Trails, Aerial Extreme and Rock UK, who are national companies, have been happy to stay with us for another year. Not forgetting of course the many smaller, family run sized businesses too! This has been a real encouragement to us as it has given us the opportunity to promote both large, medium and small companies alike!

We are still getting people contacting us from all over the country as well, asking about advertising with us. This has not been limited to a certain niche in Family Attractions either, but across all Categories ; from Water sports to Arts & Crafts! With these new webpages, we are able to give a more robust advertising package to all of our clients!

Below you will see how the Categories' icons look on our website!

Great Days Out is getting Greater - Update

This is just another quick update regarding what we have been doing on the Great Days Out directory!

We have been continually creating new topic pages on our directory. It is ongoing work and does take time, but we can let you know that we have set up the following topics :

• http://www.great-days-out.co.uk/parks-gardens/
• http://www.great-days-out.co.uk/transport-trips-tours/
• http://www.great-days-out.co.uk/adventure-activities/
• http://www.great-days-out.co.uk/water-activities/
• http://www.great-days-out.co.uk/sport-leisure/
• http://www.great-days-out.co.uk/arts-and-crafts/

This means that there will be 12 Topic webpages which will cover the 12 Regions of the UK! 

These latest URL's are still in the incubation period but will be unleashed on the unsuspecting Internet world very soon! Our hope is that we will see an increase in visitors to the directory as well as increasing our Google rating. This will also give existing clients the opportunity to have more advertising links on the website. All in all, a benefit to all concerned!

Below is a snapshot of the new #Arts and #Crafts webpage.

Exciting News from Great Days Out and other stuff

Over the last couple of weeks the brains behind Great Days Out have been busy looking at ways to improve the use-ability of the directory. It was felt that we needed more content but also more webpages.

You will be seeing some changes on the website, where we will be launching various topics on the directory. This will give visitors a more robust experience. We have already set up 'Animals and Wildlife Parks' and from there, we will be rolling out more topics - from 'Great Outdoors' to 'Historic Buildings'! It's quite exciting to see the website expand in size and content.

A few months ago we mentioned about changes to our Quoakle website too. Due to the size of the website, this will be taking a lot longer then expected. Added to this, Tim Coysh had started a new job in the beginning of the summer, so delays were inevitable. Regardless we will try to keep you all up-to-date on all of our latest news.

Finally, it looks like Tim Davis won't be going to Australia until April of next year. Fortunately for us, he will be around until then which we are truly grateful for! His assistance in these various projects have been invaluable. He will be missed when he goes to Oz.

See some of the new icons for our Great Days Out directory below...

Australia beckons for Tim

On September 16th (in little under a months time) Tim Davis of TCD Web Design, will be flying out to Sydney Australia to attend a YWAM (Youth With A Mission) Sports DTS (Discipleship Training School).

Youth With A Mission (YWAM) is a global movement of Christians from many cultures, age groups, and Christian traditions, dedicated to serving Jesus throughout the world. Also known as YWAM, we unite in a common purpose to know God and to make Him known.

He has set up a blog with more info on the DTS. Here it is: 

http://timdownunder.org.uk/

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 will be gone for about 6 months, so we will miss his input and his skill sets! We wish him a safe journey and that he will have a great time down under!

Client Creation Mastermind

Well an end of era had taken place on the 29th of July! Myself and a few others from the Forest of Dean area had been attending Charlotte Greenman's Client Creation Mastermind course on a fortnightly basis since April of this year. For all that were in attendance, it has been an excellent course!

We have appreciated Charlotte's insight and her easy approach in sharing her vast wealth of knowledge and we are grateful for her input. In every session something new was learnt!

Here is an excerpt from her website Accredited Marketing which sums it all up :

We show business owners and sales professionals How to Generate Hot Leads and Easily Convert Them into Clients for Life to Ensure Repeat Business.  We also help businesses convert more telephone conversations into qualified appointments, sales and loyal clients.

We wish her every success for the future! We could not recommend her highly enough!

Below are a couple of photos of our last day of training!

An exciting New Partnership

It has been a couple of weeks since our last blog, this has been due to the fact that we have been contacting a lot of existing clients on our Great Days Out directory and have had their renewals come up. Thankfully most have decided to stay with us for another 12 months which has been fantastic for us of course!

However, we have even more great news! On the 8th of June, Sarah from Family Saver Card contacted us via our Days Out UK Twitter account and asked if they could work with us. Well we were instantly intrigued and after having several correspondences with the people behind the idea, we felt we could really help them with their SEO and promoting them on our directory! 

To find out more about this amazing business, please click here : https://familysavercard.com/our-story/. We think they have a brilliant service and have a lot to offer families right across the UK! If you don't believe us then check them out for yourselves.

Instagram

Here in the Quoakle office, we have been using Instagram over the last few weeks as we were aware what potential there was promoting not just ourselves but also our clients. As it stands, there are over 300 millions users of this clever app and has an ever increasing number of people coming on board.

For those of you who may not be aware of Instagram, here is an excerpt taken from their own website...

What is Instagram?

Instagram is a fun and quirky way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures. Snap a photo with your mobile phone, then choose a filter to transform the image into a memory to keep around forever. We're building Instagram to allow you to experience moments in your friends' lives through pictures as they happen. We imagine a world more connected through photos.

So, we have also jumped on board! You can find us here : https://www.instagram.com/greatdaysoutuk and here : https://www.instagram.com/quoakle. Happy instagraming!

One of the best Telemarketing Consultants out there!

Last Friday, Nigel and Sean were able to attend Charlotte Greenman's Client Creation Mastermind course in Coleford,Gloucestershire. We have gotten to know her well and in times past had helped us with marketing and promoting Quoakle. We have found her approach to be incredibly friendly and laid back but also very informative and after just spending a couple of hours listening to her share about her knowledge and experiences in the marketing world makes you wonder how you ever managed without her!

If you are a business in Gloucestershire or further afield and are unsure on how to make the most out of your advertising on the internet, then we couldn't recommend her highly enough!

Here she is posing for the camera after last Friday's session. The photo below is the Great Days Out website being displayed on the large TV screen behind Charlotte.

To find out more about her fantastic services, just click here : Accredited Marketing

Another recently made masterpiece...

We thought we would give you all a 'heads up' in to what we have been doing lately! We don't often get the chance to let people know about all of the websites that we have been working on, so we thought we would start by doing so with a couple that we had just recently finished.

May we introduce Kingdom Kids Club as well as Kingdom Pre-School!

We will try to keep you up-to-date with our latest and greatest websites!

Greenfields Garden Services Ltd

For a number of years now, Nigel Steele and the Quoakle team have been working with Chris Snell, the owner of Greenfields Garden Services Ltd.

As his business was located just down the road, it was thought that we could help him with advertising his business. Since then, the Quoakle team have helped Chris create several websites as well as promoting his various businesses through Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media networks.

• www.greenfieldsltd.co.uk
• www.outdoor-classrooms.co.uk
• www.play-and-learn.co.uk
• www.play-area-repairs.co.uk
• www.greenfieldscatalogue.co.uk
• www.wooden-garden-gazebos.co.uk
• www.school-playground-markings.co.uk
• www.play-area-designs.co.uk

It has been a very fruitful partnership and we look forward to helping them get the most out of what the internet has to offer. In fact, we are currently revamping some of their websites as we speak as well as setting up yet another website!