Category: Development

Reciprocal Links through our Great Days Out directory

We are grateful to Acorn Farm and many other businesses like them who we advertise on our Great Days Out directory who have given their time to help promote us on their respective websites! You can see their advertising link here : https://www.great-days-out.co.uk/merseyside/Below is an example of one our banners on their home page :We also have a link of ours placed without one of our banners. Climbing Works have placed it on their Sponsors webpage located just above the Day Out with the Kids banner. See below :We have dozens of businesses across the UK now who are promoting us with either just a link or with one of our banners. This helps our ranking on Google as we both benefit from the linkage.

Great Days Out Directory in the World’s Top Two Million websites!

I can't believe how long ago it is that I lasted posted on Quoakle News... 5 months!Well so much has been happening ...SEO for Australian Public Speaking Trainer, Sarah MeijerMore Australian work for a company supplying and installing Artificial Grass.The first in a series of new websites and conversions of current websites to fully responsive designs - Books for Schools using the Buntington ThemeNew websites for Ellis Sweeps and School Playground Markingsbut the most development and growth has to be on Quoakle's UK Days Out Directory ... Great Days Out!It was during Autumn 2013, that the Quoakle team began developing a graphical Days Out Directory for families – Great Days Out in the UK. The domain name, great-days-out.co.uk, was bought quite a while earlier. It was nearly discarded as not being needed but having missed the date to cancel the renewal, director, Nigel Steele, decided to give it a go!The team drew on the valuable experience gained through the development of Quoakle.com, the local business directory. They used the same geographical structure, and in addition expanded the reach to include Scotland and Northern Ireland. Stephen Holdstock again played a major part in the design.It is really since February 2015 that this website has... Read More

Quoakle gets a new look for 2015!

This is how you remember the Quoakle home page:Now we are excited to be displaying the new look showing the different devices with which Quoakle can be found and used:

New website for RE Specialist, Roy Pitcher

Our latest project is for the widely experienced educator, Roy Pitcher. Roy is based in Alsager, the town where our director, Nigel, was brought up. Roy has been a school teacher, educator and trainer of teachers, author, consultant, inspector of schools and educational video producer over two generations at virtually all levels in the U.K. As a Christian teacher of religious education and pupils with special needs, he was concerned to find a basis for enhancing pupil attainment through multi-method approaches. When he became a teacher trainer he developed the concepts and practices that he describes in his new book "Jesus - a Master Teacher". Roy was soon to be launching his new book at the Christian Resources Exhibition in Manchester in October 2014, when he approached Nigel about helping him with a website.Most of the content we were able to copy across from another site and place within the Quoakle "Mega Template" that Quoakle Web developer and designer, Stephen Holdstock, has created this year. New graphics were created and pages added such as useful links and a facility to help users purchase the book. Some of the content was re-organised to aid the user experience. The new website works well on all... Read More

Quoakle Websites Get A New Look

The Quoakle Team have been busy with all sorts of different projects for clients over the last few months and so have had little time for working on our own sites. However, last week Stephen began the upgrading process for a number of our own website templates.First to receive the treatment was Community Pixels, a site that illustrates the breadth of our work, from Quoakle - the original graphical directory to Quoaklecards - the highly optimised one page website, and from Quoakle's Restaurant Directories to Churcham Website Design - the website that is a focus for our local, Gloucestershire clients.The Community Pixels website now has a new deeper rotating banner on the home page (not shown). It also has an extending header and attractive mega footer with room for lots of important links. Quoakle's design team have gone for a smart grey for the mega footer with a bright, contemporary, light blue for the writing on the footer. As with all WordPress sites there are lots of options for sidebar or no sidebar and the use of widgets in various positions.Next to receive a makeover was the actual Churcham Website Design website. Since 2008, Nigel and his small team have... Read More

Great website developments using Google Maps

As a geographer and geography teacher, I have always loved maps.  So one of the most fun parts of developing Quoakle's UK Web Directory was designing the regions and working out how to organise the information from a geographical point of view using regions and counties ( and having to decide how to deal with new unitary authorities, ceremonial counties etc in a way that works for our users).More recently as we have been launching a lot of new websites using the WordPress content management system, it has been fun to incorporate great maps using Google Maps. With the launch of the new Quoakle restaurant directories such as Oxford Restaurants  we have wanted to have a lot more flexibility in adding new pins or markers to our restaurant location maps.  Using the basic Google Maps was complex, so it was fantastic to find a really good plugin to do the job a few weeks ago!The one we found was:   WP Google MapsThis is how Jean Galea describes it on the  WP Mayor blog:The easiest to use Map Plugin! Create custom Google Maps with high quality markers containing locations, descriptions, images and links. Add your customized Google map to your WordPress... Read More

Introducing the Quoakle’s Restaurant Directories

During Autumn 2012, the Quoakle team began launching its new portfolio of Restaurant Directories.The latest to hit Google's top page is Hereford Restaurants.Building on the expertise gained through the development of Quoakle's easy-to-use local business directory, the team launched a series of restaurant directories in Gloucestershire and the surrounding counties. We used exact match domain names in order to be found easily on search engines such as Google. The following are the Quoakle Restaurant Directories now live on the web:Gloucester RestaurantsCheltenham RestaurantsRestaurant OxfordWorcester RestaurantsCoffee Shops in GloucestershireTea Rooms in GloucestershireSo what's special about a Quoakle Restaurant Directory?... It's quick and easy to use!Drawing on ideas refined on Quoakle's local business directory, we wanted to create a restaurant directory with a clean, clear look, and a simple page layout. On a Quoakle Restaurant Directory, we want to promote each restaurant's brand through the prominent display of its logo as well as enable users to see at a glance exactly what they want ... and very quickly!Our mission is to connect local people quickly and easily with local restaurants as well as helping those visiting an area to find out where to eat, as simply as possible.... It's easy to find on... Read More

Quoakle goes Social!

When we talk about social media most people think of Facebook and Twitter but there are many more social media platforms out there. Perhaps the best known are Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google +.There are obviously much better things in life to be spending a lot of time on than social networks, but if you are going to follow anyone, we'd be really chuffed if Quoakle was on your list!Quoakle has now made it easy to find our social media accounts by displaying the colourful "social" icons on every single page of the website ... Quoakle.com .Apparently, Google, when producing its listings, looks at "social signals". So as we would love for more people to find Quoakle's innovative graphical directory through Google, we need some social signals!If you can follow any of our Quoakle's accounts we'd be really grateful. Just click the social icon of your choice from the bottom of any page on the Graphical Directory. For those of our "fans" who really want to help, why not ...Send a Facebook status update with a link to a page on the Quoakle websiteSend a Tweet with a link to a page on the Quoakle websitePin a page on the Quoakle... Read More

10,000 search results for Quoakle on Google!

At the beginning of August 2006, no-one had heard of Quoakle... that's because the word didn't exist!  If you put the word "quoakle" into Google's search box absolutely nothing came up.  Nearly seven years later there are over 10,000 links to different pages on the web that make reference to the innovative online graphical directory. As you would expect, the No.1 entry for "quoakle" on Google's top page takes you to the UK web directory itself, to the home page of quoakle.com.

Record number of visits to Quoakle on May Bank Holiday 27th May 2013 – 602 visits!

Bank holiday weekends are always going to bring lots of visitors to Quoakle's graphical directory as internet users look for Days Out activities on Quoakle's popular Leisure Directory. However, internet traffic coming to Quoakle last Monday was even higher than expected. Visits to Quoakle on Monday May 27th 2013 smashed the previous record of 508 visits in one day. Director, Helen Steele, commented, "It's great to see that more and more people are discovering just how useful Quoakle is!"