thinkdave.com website maintenance services

Today I’m proud to announce the launch of the UK Water Directory, a not-for-profit online directory and blog to help UK based water companies promote themselves online.

I’ve been mulling this project over in my head for close on 4 years, and until now I’ve found a myriad of excuses not to build it. Thankfully, I decided to knuckle down a few weeks ago, and with the help of some WordPress plugins and a bit of PHP wizardry by Chris Cagle, the directory is built and looking good.

If you’ve ever seen the backend of a WordPress blog, you’ll recognize the design of the UK Water Directory as being rather similar. I wanted members of the site to feel that they weren’t leaving the site when creating listings and adding content to the site, so rather than re-design the backend of the WordPress installation I decided to implement the same design elements in the front end. All in all, I’m pretty happy with the way it worked out.

While I don’t expect the growth of the UK Water Directory to be astronomical, I’m just glad to finally be able to give something back to the water industry after all these years. And as I’m not trying to use the directory to make any money (well, not directly, anyway), I’m perfectly happy to let it grow at it’s own pace.

Head on over and take a look. And if you happen to know anyone in the water industry in the UK, please tell them about it. Every little bit of publicity helps.

In the previous installment of my small business guide to online lead generation, I spent some time establishing who my market is and how much money I’m willing to spend generating qualified sales leads. If you haven’t read the article yet, you can find it here. You may also want to read my introduction to online lead generation.

Google Adwords isn’t enough

While calculating my budget I discovered that I don’t have enough money to invest with Google to buy the advertising needed to grow my business. According to Google’s calculations, I would need to spend £1500 on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to achieve my goals. (more…)

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been getting some great feedback from visitors to this site, as well as from prospective clients. Your compliments and comments are appreciated, and have given me some great ideas going forward.

One idea that I’ve been wrestling with since starting my business is ‘by-the-hour’ website maintenance. Thanks to your emails, I can deduce that many small businesses aren’t looking for the full arsenal of services I include in my website management plan. All they want is a few changes here and there, on an ad-hoc basis. Sounds fair, and it confirms what I suspected all along.

So with that in mind, by-the-hour website maintenance services are now available. And for a limited period I’m offering a free hour to all my new clients. To take advantage of this offer, all you have to do is sign up for 2 hours or more.

If you’d like to know how what improvements I would make to your website in 3 hours, contact me with your details and I’ll let you know. In the meantime, take a look at what’s on offer.

And keep the feedback coming. I love it.