Record number of visits to Quoakle on Easter Monday 2012 - 508 visits!

The holiday weekend was always going to bring lots of visitors to Quoakle's graphical directory as internet users were looking for Days Out activities on Quoakle's popular Leisure Directory. However internet traffic coming to Quoakle was even higher than expected. Visits to Quoakle on Easter Monday April 9th 2012 set a new Quoakle record of 508 visits in one day beating the previous record set just 2 days earlier. Director, Nigel Steele, commented, " Our Days Out pages have been the most popular part of the directory for some time and this weekend's visits have underlined this fact and mean we are looking forward to the 2012 Spring/Summer holiday season with great excitement."

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.

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.