We’ve recently put a new site live for Anchor House, a homeless charity in East London. We met the people at Anchor House during the summer and realised that we could offer a lot to them to boost their online presence.

We worked with them to create a new look site and build up a strategy for using social media to promote the charity.

Anchor House

After using twitter for some time now in our work, we often found it hard to work out what was the best application for each purpose. There are a wealth of apps and widgets out there for your desktop, browser and phone, but which is the best?

We created 101 Best Twitter Apps exactly for that reason! Here you can submit, vote and see what others thought of the apps you are going to use. See an ordered list of what others have voted on and submit your vote for the applications that you have been using.

This month we’ve launched a new site for one of our long term clients: CK Clinical. We first worked with CK Clinical in 2007 when we designed and built their first big website. Over the last two years the company has grown and is now experimenting with social networking tools to try and find new ways of recruiting in the clinical research arena.

With our knowledge of social networks and modern internet trends we were able to work with CK Clinical to design a new, clean website and link it all through Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

About CK Clinical:

CK Clinical was established in 2004 with the express aim of helping Clinical Research Scientists find jobs in the pharmaceutical industry. We are part of the CK Group of companies formed in 1991.

In 2009, CK Clinical are now a leading pharmaceutical recruitment company working with all of the leading Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology and Clinical Research companies offering more than just access to some of the best pharmaceutical jobs available but we also aim to make the job hunting and recruitment process as easy and enjoyable as possible.

View the CK Clinical website

The new site is built on WordPress CMS with a custom job search area and job listings that links through to YouTube, RSS feeds and Twitter.

Over the last year there has been a lot of discussion in the news about Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and Myspace and other social networking sites. In the wake of this there has been an influx of new businesses calling themselves Social Media Consultants. Is Social Media the new SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)? Should you be paying someone to tell you how to promote your site on social media?

At Best Served Cold we like to keep up with new trends and ideas – over the years we have signed up to hundreds of new sites – and we’ve been using sites like Digg, Reddit and Mixx for a number of years to help promote our new releases. Recently we’ve been experimenting with Twitter and Plurk and have a couple of clients who are trying YouTube as a way to gain traffic and interest.

SEO vs. Social Media

Well, that’s a bit of a leading title. It’s not a case of versus, it’s more a case of what to use and when best to use it. There is still and will probably always be a need for good SEO on a website. Along with Accessibility (the two go hand in hand) it’s one of the building blocks of a good website and needed to ensure your site gets indexed and found on search engines for the topic you want.

Social media is a broad term for a lot of different sites. It started with social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and social rating sites like Technorati. Closely followed by social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace the term has finally come to include all sites that allow communal interaction around a topic, personal accounts or news.

Modern websites are often built around a Content Management System (CMS) and as such will often have some from of social media built in – usually comments or a rating system – but to get the best results you need to look at other websites to see what they can offer you.

To take full advantage of the social media revolution a company has to consider how to get people talking about their products and services on other websites, do they write a blog, set up a YouTube account, do they Twitter, create Social Media News Releases or need a FaceBook page? There are a lot of options and it’s not always easy to understand the advantages one site has over another.

That’s where Social Media Consultants come in, they can advise about what’s best for your company and which sites you need to be joining. It’s not rocket science and with a bit of time most people would be able to figure it out themselves but, like SEO, it’s much easier to get someone else to do it!

Best Served Cold have been working with social media for a number of years and have a wide knowledge of what works and doesn’t work on various websites. If you’d like an introduction to social media and SEO for your site why not contact us. We can review your site and business and work with you to improve and build a social network of your own and, if needed, give advice on how to improve your SEO while you’re at it.

Just a couple of weeks ago we finished and launched the new CK Healthcare site.

We designed the site around the new branding for CK Healthcare, using the colours and fonts specified and linked it all through a WordPress front end with some extra code to allow for job search, applications and registration:

CK Healthcare is the new name in healthcare recruitment. Specialising in the recruitment of Allied Healthcare Professionals (AHP) and Health Service Scientists (HSS) to the NHS.

There’s still plenty of content to be added but the main site is up and running now. The site is a full content managed recruitment company site with job search, registrations and job applications.

CK Healthcare

We’ve been working on Pressitt continuously over the last few months and the latest update sees the release of our first social media newsroom: brightone.pressitt.com

If you’re not sure what a newsroom is, here’s an excerpt from Pressitt:

The Social Media News Room is a unique company landing page offering access to all of your multimedia news releases and developed to your specifications. It is a first touch for brands wanting to engage and participate with online communities, including journalists, bloggers, and even consumers researching your product or services.

We have lots more ideas in the pipeline for Pressitt, we’ll be talking about them in more detail soon!

This has been a very busy couple of weeks! We’re in the process of updating our 101bestandroidapps.com website and at the same time we’ve launched 2 new 101best sites:

101bestblackberryapps.com

101bestiphoneapps.com

These are the first 101best sites that are built around our brand new backend system that will allow for future enhancements and upgrades to be implemented more frequently and easily.

We’re going to be writing more about these websites in the coming days and weeks as we’re very excited about the future of the 101best idea. Just a couple of weeks ago 101bestwebsites.com broke through the 1,000 visitor a day mark – almost exactly a year since launch. We’re hoping to emulate that success with our 101best application sites.

You can follow the new submissions on Twitter or RSS and we have lots of plans to make the sites bigger and better. If you have any ideas or thoughts about how to make them better, or even a 101best site that you’d like to see, why not let us know…

A couple of weeks ago we launched an updated version of Get My Business On TV. We’ve added WordPress to the original site to give more flexibility and allow more frequent updates. There’s now a news section and areas for Testimonials, Jobs, Freebies and who’s searching for help in the TV world.

From the site:

Programme-makers are always on the look-out for products, services, locations and people for TV productions. We make the process of contacting them simpler and easier.

We aim to ensure no other service gets as many programme-makers and friendly businesses as close to each other as Get My Business on TV does.

So, if you’re interested in getting your business involved in TV, look no further than Get My Business On TV

Way back in 2001 Microsoft launched the much hyped and highly anticipated Internet Explorer 6. In internet timelines that’s the middle ages! At the time of release it was the best new browser for a few years. Finally we could get rid of Netscape and IE5.5 – buggy, hard to use and just horrible browsers.

But since 2001 there have been many more browsers released, there is a real competition and a couple of years ago even Microsoft acknowledged that IE6 needed to be  upgraded, it was unsecure, easy to hack and didn’t support many new features that were becoming necessary for web developers and users. IE7 and now IE8 have been released and are pretty good, well worth the upgrade. I tend to use Mozilla Firefox and/or Google Chrome for most sites and testing things.

So, why are 25 – 30% of interenet users still using this outdated browser? In many cases it’s simply a lack of knowledge that it’s possible to upgrade and then there’s the problem that non-technical people don’t know how to upgrade or don’t think it’s necessary. Finally there are some people with computers that are just too old to upgrade, we still get a few visitors to this site using Windows 2000 and Windows ME!

But if you can upgrade it’s very simple and even if you know all this already but want to try a new browser – maybe IE7 isn’t working as well as you’d hoped or you’re bored of Firefox – here’s a list of useful links to find out more and choose something new:

• Firefox 3: Firefox remains the most-recommended web browser for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux users.
• Safari 4: This is Apple’s web browser that is made for Mac or PC. This is their newest release and blows away past or present versions.
• Google Chrome: The new Google Chrome browser is stripped down for fast browsing, with superb built-in search features, private browsing and a task manager to help prevent crashes.
• Camino: Camino is an open source web browser developed with a focus on providing the best possible experience for Mac OS X users.
• Flock: Reviews recommend Flock 2 for people who “live on the web” since it has all the speed, security and options of Firefox 3, but builds in a blog editor, photo-up-loader and big sidebar to keep current with social networking.
• Opera: (Best for Older Computers) Reviews and tests recommend the free Opera web browser as fast and lean, especially for older or underpowered PC and Mac computers apt to bog down on more resource-hungry browsers.

This is a lovely bit of sticker graffiti on the London Underground, I hope it made a few people smile when they saw it – although it’s so well hidden I wonder if very many people even spotted it!

More pictures at Wooster Collective