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!

Exciting Changes to Quoakle.com!

Yes we can safely say that there has been a lot of tweaking going on on our directory! Tim C Davis has recently taken over the reins from Tim Coysh and is now going full steam ahead with the ongoing work. We are very thankful to Tim Coysh for his input but due to working schedules, it was deemed impossible for him to continue. Thankfully Tim C Davis has stepped into the breach. We know it has taken a long time to get to this stage, but elegance can take time to be revealed!

Sadly, Tim C Davis will be leaving for Oz in a couple of weeks time, and will be away for a few months (What will we do without him??) so, it looks like Sean and Nigel will have to contribute to the realisation of a dream... a NEW and IMPROVED quoakle.com directory!!

See a snapshot below of what is to come!

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!

Work on the new Quoakle website continues

Just to let you all know from a previous entry in our blog that the work on the new Quoakle website continues unabated! Tim Coysh had recently started a new job so he has been extremely busy learning the ropes, but he is hoping to find time to complete his mission! It will still take a few more weeks to finalize everything as there is a lot for him to do. However we are looking forward to seeing the final product once it is finished and we will be keeping you all up-to-date when it will be finally unleashed onto the world!

LinkedIn Company webpages

We have had these for awhile, hiding in the background, so we felt it was about time that we bring them to the Social Media worlds attention! Let me introduce you too our Great Days Out Showcase LinkedIn webpage - https://www.linkedin.com/company/great-days-out-in-the-uk. As well as our Quoakle LinkedIn webpage - https://www.linkedin.com/company/quoakle-com.

Churcham Website Design

Churcham Website Design’s director, Nigel Steele, has been providing web services for over 8 years.  He set up local company, Community Pixels in August 2006 and began the massive project creating Quoakle – the innovative graphical directory.  Since then Nigel and his small team have been developing websites for a number of clients in the village as well as for other clients across the county of Gloucestershire.  Now launching as “Churcham Website Design”, the team is keen to provide affordable and adaptable web solutions to local clients and local businesses of various sizes.

Churcham Website Design recognises the importance of creating a website, but also realises that this can sometimes be a daunting process. That’s why our local, friendly, staff are here to help you every step of the way. From concept to promotion – we are not only able to help, but we would love to. That’s why we are such a hit in Churcham and the surrounding area.

Quoakle Web Media

During 2009 and 2010 the Quoakle team began to broaden the range of services offered to businesses across the Gloucestershire region and now offers support to local companies in the design, development and promotion of their own website.

Nigel and his team learned a lot of new skills and began drawing on the expertise of specialists with a wide range of talents. Skills ranging from graphic design and web design & development, to search engine optimization … keywords, Google adwords, from the use of Social media such as Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and LinkedIn to other areas of Internet marketing and website promotion … article writing, blogs, link building, from brand development to telemarketing.

Having helped out with their Internet marketing, one of the first Quoakle Web Design projects was for the well-established garden services company, Greenfields Garden Services. The Quoakle team is now supporting a number of companies with web design and a broader range of website promotion services.

Community Pixels Ltd

In August 2006, Gloucestershire Head Teacher, Nigel Steele was working on his computer when he was inspired with an idea that is changing the way people search for information on the web.

The “graphical directory” started with the idea that an imaged-based presentation of information – organised simply on one screen page – could be a new and exciting way of searching for information. Colourful logos and images could be used to connect consumers, quickly and easily, with a large number of local websites, just through the simple click of the mouse.

The company that has been developing Quoakle during the last few years is based at Churcham, just west of Gloucester. The small family business trades under the name “Quoakle.com” but is registered as Community Pixels.net, a name that aims to reflect the community ethos of the company, which wants to give all local businesses an opportunity to get known through low-cost advertising.

Social Media

It is so important these days to make sure that businesses are visible across the ever changing landscape of the Social Media world! We have seen an explosion of different ways to promote businesses on the internet over the last few years.

As we are a Graphical Directory, it made sense that we should optimize what is out there on the internet. A BIG player on the World Wide Web is Pinterest, so a few years ago we set up our own webpage - https://uk.pinterest.com/quoakle/. Another growing presence is Instagram. We only recently set up our own Great Days Out UK account.

Obviously with all of these different ways to advertise, it can be time consuming for many. Trending, tweeting, hashtags, etc are always being updated every moment of the day. Because we have a wide and varied presence on the Web, we can help companies, both large and small with advertising. We have several Twitter accounts which can help businesses gain exposure as well as our Facebook pages. See, https://twitter.com/greatdaysout and https://www.facebook.com/DaysOutUK/ as just some of the examples.

So, feel free to get in touch.

Quoakle.com will be going through a transformation soon!

Yes, as the post suggests, Quoakle will be getting a new look soon. Over the years it has seen several changes and has been expanding ever since it first appeared on the internet way back in 2006! Since then, there has been a steady increase of businesses being advertised, as well as an expansion of the number of topics and categories on display. It is amazing to think that it has been going for 10 years now!

To bring the directory up-to-date we have taken on board a young man by the name of Tim Coysh who has been assisting us in updating the Quoakle website. We are excited to see what has been done already and we are all looking forward to showing off the new look once it has been completed! So, keep your ears to the ground. Watch this space!

Great Days Out Directory in the World's Top Two Million websites!

I can't believe how long ago it is that I lasted posted on Quoakle News... 5 months!

Well so much has been happening ...

• SEO for Australian Public Speaking Trainer, Sarah Meijer
• More Australian work for a company supplying and installing Artificial Grass.
• The first in a series of new websites and conversions of current websites to fully responsive designs - Books for Schools using the Buntington Theme
• Another Buntington conversion for the website of the Christian Independent School in Luton
• New websites for Ellis Sweeps and School Playground Markings

but the most development and growth has to be on Quoakle's UK Days Out Directory ... Great Days Out!

It was during Autumn 2013, that the Quoakle team began developing a graphical Days Out Directory for families – Great Days Out in the UK. The domain name, great-days-out.co.uk, was bought quite a while earlier. It was nearly discarded as not being needed but having missed the date to cancel the renewal, director, Nigel Steele, decided to give it a go!

The team drew on the valuable experience gained through the development of Quoakle.com, the local business directory. They used the same geographical structure, and in addition expanded the reach to include Scotland and Northern Ireland. Stephen Holdstock again played a major part in the design.

It is really since February 2015 that this website has begun to take off - particularly on bank holiday weekends and in school holidays. At the moment we are averaging 15,000 visits a month and we are anticipating a really successful summer! This growth is due mainly to a strong performance on Google's search engine. Hundreds of keyword phrases are bringing new users to Great Days Out every month e.g. try out Google for "Days out in the South West" or "Days out in the East Midlands".

Today we have the exciting news that www.great-days-out.co.uk  is in the top 2 million websites in the world - according to Alexa.com!

Today we are in position 1,976,949.

Quoakle gets a new look for 2015!

This is how you remember the Quoakle home page:

Now we are excited to be displaying the new look showing the different devices with which Quoakle can be found and used:

Quoakle Websites Get A New Look

The Quoakle Team have been busy with all sorts of different projects for clients over the last few months and so have had little time for working on our own sites. However, last week Stephen began the upgrading process for a number of our own website templates.

First to receive the treatment was Community Pixels, a site that illustrates the breadth of our work, from Quoakle - the original graphical directory to Quoaklecards - the highly optimised one page website, and from Quoakle's Restaurant Directories to Churcham Website Design - the website that is a focus for our local, Gloucestershire clients.

The Community Pixels website now has a new deeper rotating banner on the home page (not shown). It also has an extending header and attractive mega footer with room for lots of important links. Quoakle's design team have gone for a smart grey for the mega footer with a bright, contemporary, light blue for the writing on the footer. As with all WordPress sites there are lots of options for sidebar or no sidebar and the use of widgets in various positions.

Next to receive a makeover was the actual Churcham Website Design website. Since 2008, Nigel and his small team have been developing websites for a number of clients in the village of Churcham as well as for clients in other parts of Gloucestershire. The Churcham Website Design site was launched to provide a local focus for the affordable and adaptable web solutions we are creating for local clients and local businesses of various sizes.

Stephen has now put this website into the same template as Community Pixels to give it a common look and feel. The mega footer and header use the same subtle and smart greys used on the new Community Pixels website. The overall look of these websites is now similar to Quoakle's Restaurant Directories, such as Swindon Restaurants and Hereford Restaurants and our popular UK Days Out directory - Great Days Out.

 Next is Quoaklecards ... still waiting for the upgrade.

Another Quoakle milestone ... half a million pageviews!

Quoakle's graphical directory has reached another great milestone ...  half a million pageviews!

Information taken from Google Analytics on Wednesday 9th April 2014 reveals that there have now been 583,436 pageviews since July 2007. Those visits were made by over 239,757 unique visitors to the directory!

Over 87.02% of visits to the directory were made by visitors who hadn't been on Quoakle before.

So lots of reasons to be encouraged by the progress that's been made especially considering the decision of the directors not to continue actively promoting the directory last Autumn and the related fall in visitors to Quoakle since September 2013. During this spring, however, visits are again rising without any money being spent on advertising the graphical directory. The latest figures from Alexa show Quoakle having its highest ever Alexa position as one of the top 2 million websites in the world at 1,761,851.

The Quoakle team looks ahead to the next six months with excitement and anticipation.

If you haven't been on Quoakle - the graphical directory yet, try it today, tell your friends and join the Quoakle-ution!

Great website developments using Google Maps

As a geographer and geography teacher, I have always loved maps.  So one of the most fun parts of developing Quoakle's UK Web Directory was designing the regions and working out how to organise the information from a geographical point of view using regions and counties ( and having to decide how to deal with new unitary authorities, ceremonial counties etc in a way that works for our users).

More recently as we have been launching a lot of new websites using the WordPress content management system, it has been fun to incorporate great maps using Google Maps. With the launch of the new Quoakle restaurant directories such as Oxford Restaurants  we have wanted to have a lot more flexibility in adding new pins or markers to our restaurant location maps.  Using the basic Google Maps was complex, so it was fantastic to find a really good plugin to do the job a few weeks ago!

The one we found was:   WP Google Maps
This is how Jean Galea describes it on the  WP Mayor blog:

The easiest to use Map Plugin! Create custom Google Maps with high quality markers containing locations, descriptions, images and links. Add your customized Google map to your WordPress posts and/or pages quickly and easily with the supplied shortcode. No fuss. no iFrames and super easy to use!

Key Features

• WP Google Maps uses the latest Google Maps API (V3)
• Super easy to use, no coding required!
• Create as many map markers as you need by simply typing in the address.
• Edit your markers with the click of a button.
• Google Maps Streetview supported.
• Define your own width, height and zoom level for your Google Map.
• Create a map in less than a 30 seconds!
• WordPress 3.0 friendly.
• No advertising or links.

Have a look at some of the new maps the Quoakle team have been creating:

Map of Oxford Restaurants 
Map of Cheltenham Restaurants 
Map of Gloucester Restaurants
Map of Hereford Restaurants
Map of Worcester Restaurants
Map of Days Out in Gloucestershire

Map of Christian Schools in the United Kingdom

Introducing the Quoakle's Restaurant Directories

During Autumn 2012, the Quoakle team began launching its new portfolio of Restaurant Directories.

The latest to hit Google's top page is Hereford Restaurants.

Building on the expertise gained through the development of Quoakle's easy-to-use local business directory, the team launched a series of restaurant directories in Gloucestershire and the surrounding counties. We used exact match domain names in order to be found easily on search engines such as Google. The following are the Quoakle Restaurant Directories now live on the web:

Gloucester Restaurants
Cheltenham Restaurants
Restaurant Oxford
Swindon Restaurants
Worcester Restaurants
Coffee Shops in Gloucestershire
Tea Rooms in Gloucestershire

So what's special about a Quoakle Restaurant Directory?

... It's quick and easy to use!
Drawing on ideas refined on Quoakle's local business directory, we wanted to create a restaurant directory with a clean, clear look, and a simple page layout. On a Quoakle Restaurant Directory, we want to promote each restaurant's brand through the prominent display of its logo as well as enable users to see at a glance exactly what they want ... and very quickly!

Our mission is to connect local people quickly and easily with local restaurants as well as helping those visiting an area to find out where to eat, as simply as possible.

... It's easy to find on Google!
Our website is consistently in the top 3 of Google on the organic listings (left hand side of the page).
Check this out by typing into Google the keyword phrase: "Gloucester Restaurants".
Using a memorable, exact match domain such as www.gloucesterrestaurants.co.uk is going to help us to make sure the website stays in that position.

... No reviews!
Lots of people are looking for reviews - so there are well known review websites. Other restaurant goers would rather hear what the restaurants themselves want to promote as their strengths - and that's what the Quoakle Restaurant Directories want to help their users to find out ... quickly and easily.

... No banner ads!
Maybe you don't mind banner ads, but our goal as Quoakle Restaurant Directories is to "do what is says on the tin" and not distract users with all sorts of other things they're not looking for.
So for example, if someone is looking for Restaurants in Gloucester, then that is what we'll present to them on our Gloucester Restaurant Directory.


Can any restaurant be promoted on this directory?
We are pleased to promote all restaurants in the Gloucester area which have a current, satisfactory or higher, food hygiene rating.

As a small, family-run company with a friendly approach, we look forward to working with restaurants as well as helping our users find great places to eat out!   Click here to get in touch!

Quoakle visits reach a quarter of a million!

I don't know quite when it happened, but some time during 25th July 2013, Quoakle's graphical directory reached a fantastic milestone ...  a quarter of a million visits!

As you can see from the stats on the left (taken from Google Analytics on Saturday 10th August 2013), there have now been 253,624 visits since our records began in July 2007. Those visits were made by over 200,000 unique visitors who looked at a total of over half a million different pages on the directory!

You can see from the stats that an average user looks at 2.11 pages and stays on Quoakle's graphical directory for over 2 and a half minutes. The bounce rate tells you that just over 60% of visitors just looked at one page then left the website.

Over 86% of visits to the directory were made by visitors who hadn't been on Quoakle before.

So lots of reasons to be encouraged by the progress that's been made. The Quoakle team looks ahead to the next quarter of a million visits with excitement and anticipation.

If you haven't been on Quoakle - the graphical directory yet, try it today, tell your friends and join the Quoakle-ution!

Quoakle goes Social!

When we talk about social media most people think of Facebook and Twitter but there are many more social media platforms out there. Perhaps the best known are Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google +.

There are obviously much better things in life to be spending a lot of time on than social networks, but if you are going to follow anyone, we'd be really chuffed if Quoakle was on your list!

Quoakle has now made it easy to find our social media accounts by displaying the colourful "social" icons on every single page of the website ... Quoakle.com .

Apparently, Google, when producing its listings, looks at "social signals". So as we would love for more people to find Quoakle's innovative graphical directory through Google, we need some social signals!

If you can follow any of our Quoakle's accounts we'd be really grateful. Just click the social icon of your choice from the bottom of any page on the Graphical Directory.

For those of our "fans" who really want to help, why not ...

• Send a Facebook status update with a link to a page on the Quoakle website
• Send a Tweet with a link to a page on the Quoakle website
• Pin a page on the Quoakle website on one of your Pinterest boards.

Thanks for all your help, but most importantly, don't forget to get away from your computer, tablet or phone for a few minutes and enjoy some beautiful fresh air and fun with real people in the great outdoors!

Quoakle Home Page Gets a New Look!

Last August, the Quoakle team began taking major steps towards the aim "to spread right across every county in the United Kingdom". The first phase saw the launch of 14 new counties, from Cornwall in the south-west to Cheshire in the north-west. The first topic within these counties was Days Out and Leisure which is beginning to feature highly on Google across England and Wales. Quoakle users are now able to flick from county to county looking for great places to visit, days out and family activities, and finding hundreds of websites with just a couple of clicks.

In the last few months, Sean Cresswell, responsible for Client Development, has been expanding the whole directory across England and Wales so that there are now pages for all 14 topics across all 64 counties. The only region not covered currently is Greater London which awaits careful strategic planning.

For Quoakle, the original graphical directory, navigation is very important indeed. Fulfilling the strapline - " a quick link to local websites" - means helping Quoakle users go from page to page quickly and easily, so they and you can find what you're looking for without getting lost or wasting time in the wrong part of the website. Development has been under way for some time to improve user experience on the home page as well as on the classic Quoakle "Logo Pages". The first phase to be launched was the new home page which users were able to navigate through for the first time over the weekend of 8th-9th April 2012.

Visitors to the Quoakle home page looking for a UK Web Directory of local businesses, will find on the page some simple instructions:

Select your region, then county, and view local businesses by topic

and will then find clickable regions on the UK map.

Users looking for businesses in Gloucestershire will need to:

Select the region South West by clicking on that part of the UK map. A box will then appear to the left of the screen listing the various counties in the South West region in alphabetical order.

Gloucestershire is listed 5th on the list. By clicking the link on the word Gloucestershire, users are taken directly to the home page for the Gloucestershire Directory.

The same simple process works for all 64 counties across the 9 active regions of the UK.

The Quoakle team remain committed to keeping Quoakle's graphical directory true to the meta description seen on the Google's listings ... " an amazingly simple search solution"

Enjoy the latest bit of simplicity at www.quoakle.com !

Quoakle Visits Up 82.32% on this time last year, from Google Organic Listings !

During the last three months, from January 6th to April 5th 2012, the visits to Quoakle from Google's Organic listings have risen by an exciting 82.32% when compared with the same period last year! This is an exciting development and is largely due to Quoakle's strong performance in the Google listings from its Days Out and Leisure pages. Take a look at Quoakle's UK Days Out home page.

Quoakle now has 64 County pages of links to UK Days Out websites! ... Activities for Children, Family Days Out, Adventure & Leisure Activities and Places to Visit. Visitors to Quoakle are now landing on Days Out pages for counties all around England and Wales. The highest numbers of visitors are landing on the following pages:

Days Out in Gloucestershire, Days Out in Worcestershire and Days Out in Bristol.

However, it's great to see an increasing number of visitors arriving at Quoakle on the pages for Days Out in Somerset and Days Out in Cornwall where Quoakle is placed No. 3 and No. 2 respectively on the Google listings. As we are only just at the beginning of the main holiday season, the Quoakle team is confident we are going to see a massive increase in visits to Quoakle' Days out pages in the coming months and a significant raising of the profile, nationally, of Quoakle - the graphical directory.