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.

Forest of Dean Bluebells launch Quoakle Web Media's Glorious Gloucestershire Film series

Today Quoakle launched the first video in its Glorious Gloucestershire series! The subject matter chosen centred around the beautiful bluebells in the Forest of Dean and was filmed a few weeks ago.

The Glorious Gloucestershire series is Quoakle's first venture into the "world of moving pictures" and aims to promote the county of Gloucestershire, steeped in history and full of natural beauty, with its many fabulous tourist attractions. Popular with visitors from the length and breadth of Britain, as well as visitors from abroad, Gloucestershire has so much for the locals to visit too. Quoakle aims to make some the great attractions across the county more well known.

Thanks to Ben and Joe for their hard work filming and editing "Forest of Dean Bluebells".

Glorious Gloucestershire. Forest of Dean Bluebells.mov

www.youtube.com

Good News Centre - Newent - the latest Gloucestershire website created by the Quoakle team

The Quoakle team continues to offer a growing range of services to businesses across the Gloucestershire region - supporting local companies in the design, development and promotion of their own website.

Having recently completed a website for the well-established garden services company, Greenfields (which is proving to be very successful), the next exciting project was the re-designing of its website for the popular Coffee House and Christian Bookshop at Newent, the Good News Centre.

The project started with one of those "divine appointments" when Quoakle's head of Client development, Sean Cresswell, having just returned from a mission trip to India, got chatting to Centre manager Donna Clark. He happened to mention he worked for a Christian company that created websites and a very positive business relationship was begun.

Nigel Steele, the project co-ordinator for Quoakle, couldn't wait to produce something really special for the Good News Centre having enjoyed many visits to the bookshop and coffee shop over the last twenty years.

After initial research into the websites of other Christian bookshops and Coffee Shops across the UK, Nigel talked with Donna and agreed the style and feel that she wanted the site to have - a vibrant, welcoming and contemporary look. Graphic Designer, Sam Gretton, was asked to produce a design for the new website and came up with three different versions. The one which was chosen was something very close to what is now live on the web.

Some creative adjustments were made to the design, having shown the drafts to one of the trustees and then the work was handed over to Web Developer, Dave Southey, to create the templates and do all the complicated work with coding! The reliable content management software - Joomla was used to power the website.

One of the final stages was the taking of hundreds of photographs to to enable us to present various aspects of the Centre and its work most attractively.

The new Good News Centre website aims to show what a great place it is to visit, for coffee and tea, for meals, for Christian books, gifts, Christian Music - DVDs, CDs, Fair trade items and lots more! Thanks to the great photography of Stroud-based Tom Barnfield, the website really is able to present the Centre as the attractive setting it is for local people as well as visitors.

Quoakle's latest website can be found at www.goodnewscentre.com

You may even spot Quoakle's Administrator, Naomi Clayfield, who we took along for the photo shoot with some other friends of the Centre.

Quoakle is also very pleased to advertise the Good News Centre on its innovative online business directory on the page for Restaurants in Gloucestershire.

Follow one of the links in this article to find the new website, then take a trip out to Newent to find out what a great place to visit the Good News Centre really is!

Quoakle's new website design services

During the last year the Quoakle team have broadened the range of services offered to businesses across the Gloucestershire region and now offer support to local companies in the design, development and promotion of their own website.

One of the first projects was with the well-established garden services company, Greenfields. When Churcham-based Greenfields Garden Services needed a new website for their expanding business, they looked no further than the other side of the A40 to Quoakle's team of website specialists.

Greenfields Garden Services was started in 1988 by Chris Snell, comprising of one push along

mower, a few hand tools and a small van and now employs over 40 people with a large client base across the South West, Midlands and Wales.

Greenfields original connection with Quoakle was when they became the very first business to advertise on the innovative online business directory in September 2006. Greenfields helped with the official launch of Quoakle helping to plant hundreds of daffodils along the A40 in Churcham . During the last year, Quoakle's website promotion specialist, Nigel Steele, has been providing advice and help at Greenfields' Kitesnest Lane base for a range of internet marketing activities.

Greenfields managing director, Chris Snell, said "The internet is the way all business is going now so the work Nigel and his Quoakle team have been doing for us has been invaluable."

The new Greenfields website reflects the way the company has grown over the last few years. It's now involved in eight major areas of work: landscaping, grounds maintenance, tree surgery, fencing, the design and installation of children's play areas, a wide range of services for schools, safety surfacing and adult fitness equipment.

The new website can be found at www.greenfieldsltd.co.uk

Our best compliment so far has come from one user who told a member of Greenfields' staff, "This is the best website I've ever seen!"