Friday 26 August 2011

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.

Tuesday 16 August 2011

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.

Monday 15 August 2011

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.