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Selling Christmas turkeys on-line.

turkey e-commerce

When you mention e-commerce, the  first products that spring to mind are perhaps laptops and i phones or flights and hotel rooms. If you told us 6 months ago that we’d selling thousands of turkeys on-line we’d probably have laughed. It seems that our customer’s users did not have the same misconceptions.

For the last few months we’ve been working on not 1 but 2 busy websites that have channelled their focus at this time of year to selling Turkeys and Christmas dinner packages to their clients. with all orders and payments taking place on-line. 

Both McKee’s Country Store and Bradleys of Maghera have been very in-tune with the needs of their customers. They’ve identified that a large portion of their customer base are more than happy to order their Christmas dinner packages on-line. Taking (at least a little of) the hassle out of Christmas. 

McKee’s Country Store & Restaurant

McKee’s is a successful Farm Shop in the Holywood Hills just outside Newtownards. With a great history, tradition and loyal customer base they’ve decided to make things as easy for their customers as possible, allowing to choose from a section of Christmas dinner packages and pay online.

Customers can collect their Turkeys, Veg and desserts on Christmas Eve with a fast track service setup to make the process as hassle free as possible.

Bradley’s Outside Catering & Deli

Bradley’s of Maghera offers more of a deli service for their customers. Understanding their customers they’ve opted to create individual Christmas dinner packages and desserts. They’ve made these available on their website and promote the service on social media.

In both cases Beacon13 has designed, configured and supported the websites, e-commerce stores and payment gateways responsible for this surge of Turkey sales. We hope that no vegan extremists will target us for the death of so many birds. 

Considering e-commerce? 

Beacon13 not only designs and develops world class e-commerce solutions, we also support our clients with growing their business on-line and promoting their new stores. So please feel free to get in touch to discuss your project.

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A social media strategy with the Loughs Agency.

Loughs agency digital strategy

The Loughs Agency (based in Derry~Londonderry, on the banks of the river Foyle) is a body that supports and governs marine wildlife and leisure activities in and around Lough Foyle and Carlingford Lough.

In 2018 Beacon13 was commissioned to design, deliver and support a new social media strategy for the agency. The agency would be addressing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn & YouTube. 

As with any strategy or plan we had to establish a baseline. (You must know where you’re at before you can plan where you’re going!). We completed a full report on followers, views, subscribers and friends on social media. 

We then set out to establish the state of each profile and roles on the platform. As with many companies & organisations, we often find a number of accounts on each platform. Sometimes used for departments or brands but often unnecessary.  

We went about consolidating various accounts to give the agency one clear voice on social media. All relevant parties were given access and roles as required.

The agency had a re-branding exercise in conjunction with the new social media strategy. So all profiles needed new logos, background images and associated graphics. 

Once we had all of the above in place we worked with the agency to establish how much time and resources they had to commit to social media. We established their short term and long term goals.

Matching up these two things allowed us to create a strategy for posts, comments, replies, video uploads and post content over time. We also created a schedule and plan for sed activities. 

The Loughs Agency is now well underway with their new strategy and meeting real tangible targets as well as reporting effectively to their board on progress.

We’d like to thank the Loughs Agency for their commitment to Beacon13 and we look forward to supporting them in the future.

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5 reasons we love WordPress

wordpress website developers northern ireland

WordPress runs 32% of the internet. More and more of our client’s are asking about WordPress websites and updates. Here’s 5 reasons why…

5. WordPress Plugins allow you to create functionality to suit your business. There’s simple plugins for maps and social feeds but there’s also more complex plugins for property sales, job listings, e-commerce and more. The majority of which are free to install. (Often some functionality is kept for a premium version though.) One of the best plugins is Woo-commerce which essentially turns your website into an e-commerce platform.

4. Yoast makes search optimisation(SEO) super easy. Yoast is a plugin for WP that allows you to change meta data, titles, keywords and descriptions that appear in Google and search engines. Yoast will give you tips to improve your page to better appear in searches. (All you need to to do is get green lights!)

wordpress seo yoast

3. Blogging is still awesome for content marketing. Regular blogging allows you to create and share original content about your business. The added bonus of blogging on your WP site is that your creating loads of relevant content for Google. In short, Google loves blogs!

2. It’s free! Well technically. It’s free to download and install WordPress. And around 90% of the plugins are also free. The cost comes when you’re considering hosting. Hosting a WordPress website requires a little more resources than a static website. (Mostly because there’s a database attached so effectively you’re hosting a website and a database.)

1.  It’s super easy to use! Yep, the number 1 reason our client’s use WordPress and the number 1 reason we’d recommend it is that it’s it sooooo easy to use. Every blogging dashboard in the world has been loosely based on the WP dashboard. It’s simple, clean and work’s nicely on all devices.

Continue reading “5 reasons we love WordPress”

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Property website experts? It seems so…

property marketing ireland

Our property related portfolio is growing exponentially. To a point where we’ve developed a very unique skill set that’s become very attractive for building developers, estate agents and mortgage companies. 

At Beacon13 we don’t set out to create a niche in any particular industry. We believe the fundamentals of good web design and digital marketing should apply to all businesses from all industries. Over time, however, like any company, we find ourselves developing skills, experience and popularity in certain industries.

Property experts

Organically our demography of clients has become very heavy with one particular industry…property. We’ve now developed dozens of websites for building developers, estate agents, mortgage companies and property professionals.

victoria meadows
Victoria Meadows in Ireland. Photographed and marketed by Beacon13.

When completing any new project, we’re forced to dissect our client’s business. We look in depth at their customers, their products and services and their business model. To design and build an effective strategy we must have a complete understanding of how the business works and their goals for the foreseeable future.  This allows us to reverse engineer the perfect solution.

Spending 1000s of hours dissecting the property industry, particularly in Ireland, has allowed us to gain unprecedented knowledge of what works and what doesn’t.

Social Media Strategy

Not only are we designing and developing intelligent property solutions for the web; we’re also supporting our property clients with effective social media strategy.

Years of promotional work within property and finance has giving us the experience to help our clients; sell properties fast, signup new customers for finance products, raise brand awareness for their business and fundamentally help them grow in the property industry.

“We support well established companies helping them grow. And we help new businesses to establish a foothold in the industry.”

We look forward to continued growth within the property industry. To see how Beacon13 can help your company, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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American medical company continues their relationship with Beacon13 for web design and development

beacon13 medical websites

Rennova Health Inc. revisit their relationship with Beacon13 commissioning a new CMS website for their subsidiary; Health Technology Solutions Inc.

Beacon13 has been developing and hosting websites for Rennova Inc since 2017. Among the projects where a series of hospital websites for acquisitions by the US medical firm.

Health Technology Solutions

In 2018 Rennova will be restructuring their company in which the technology arm of their company will fall under the umbrella of Health Technology Solutions Inc.

Rennova have commissioned Beacon13 ltd to provide digital identify, web design, CMS functionality and hosting for the new company. The new project will be hosting in Beacon13’s US dedicated hosting environment.

“We look forward to working with Rennova again and in particular the new HTS team on an exciting health technology web project. We’re well positioned to support HTS with anything they might need to support their digital business journey.”

Hosting

As a US based company to provide speed, security, authenticity and integrity, it’s important to have a dedicated hosting solution based in the US. Beacon13 has created a hosting environment with Microsoft Azure, located in the US to facilitate Rennova and HTS projects.

Beacon13’s relationship with Rennova has been mutually beneficial and we look forward to supporting the Rennova and HTS team in the coming months and years.