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Over the last few weeks we’ve done a few small brochure style web sites for small companies that have either approached us or we know as suppliers or associates.

In this posting I thought we’d give three of them a mention mainly because we like the client’s business and want to give them a kick-start into the search engines and secondly because they were nice little projects to do. The pages of our blog get spidered by the search engine robots on a fairly frequent basis, so any site we link to from them will similarly get quickly spidered and as a result, included into Google’s index.

Anyway, here goes. Enjoy.

Conference Venue in West Yorkshire – Woodlands Conference Centre

This site is one for the business conference centre here on the Ponderosa Business Park where we are based. It’s a cracking venue, offering lots of good features including free WiFi, wireless connectivity to projectors and a capacity for up to 70 conference delegates with a full restaurant style menu for food. This is supplied by its sister company, the Lakeside Restaurant a few yards up the road. So if you’re looking for a business conference centre near Leeds, Wakefield or Huddersfield the Woodlands Conference Centre offers some great rooms to hire.

A Good English Restaurant near Wakefield and Dewsbury – The Lakeside Restaurant and Bar

The sister company to the Woodlands Conference Centre, this newly opened restaurant sits beside a small lake within the Ponderosa Animal Centre, here in Heckmondwike. The restaurant offers a great venue for an evening meal, family celebration or event including weddings. We often pop-up for a quick Panini on a lunchtime. Yum, yum! Give it a go if you’re in the neighbourhood.

Professional Car Valeting – Bespoke Valeting Solutions

This is a small site for the guy who valets our cars on a regular basis. He actually specialises in valeting high performance sports and super cars and whilst we’re not quite in that league with the motors we drive (well not yet anyway), we like him as he’s quite reasonable with his prices. Added to that he does a good job at keeping our cars spic-and-span

Last week, we had a day out and attended a business-to-business exhibition at Doncaster Racecourse.

The day was spent wandering around the various exhibitors, making new contacts and catching up with some old ones.

Throughout the day we spoke to about 10 companies as we meandered the various stands; some of them we didn’t really have an interest in using and some we did: eitherway it was good to get out of the office for a bit and to “chew the fat” with other business owners whilst getting a bit of networking done at the same time.

As we spoke to people we liked the fact that our name badges, each of which had a bar code on it, were scanned; no doubt there so the organisers could measure the success of the event and so the individual exhibitors could have easy access to a database of people who had expressed an interest in their services. A pretty cool use of bar-coding gadgetry to be honest.

That was a week ago.

Now you would like to think that anyone who invests time and money into an exhibition stand and then mans it for 2-3 days, would be pretty keen to follow up on any hint of a sales lead whether it be a direct “interest” or with the people who entered their business cards into the “free draws” that so many exhibitors featured on their stands. (We know there isn’t really a prize-draw and that it’s a business card gathering technique - but we’re fine with that. It’s all part of the game).

But a week on, nothing.

Not a dickie-bird, phone call or email from anyone we spoke to. What a wasted opportunity! Even after a week, we’d still be happy to take a call from any of the companies we spoke to; but a week on our memories start to become fuzzy and they’ll need to help us remember who they are if they do get in touch. Talk about letting a hot contact go cold!

So today’s lesson is simple; if you do any sort of advertising or marketing and someone expresses an interest in your services as a result of that sales or marketing activity. For goodness sake, don’t let it go cold. Follow it up as soon as you can. Otherwise you’ve wasted your time at the outset.

On a fairly frequent basis we get emails and letters from people who are looking for employment.

Such people may be looking for web design and development positions or they may be looking for administrative style jobs.

We always reply even if it’s a polite rejection letter as we consider this to be good manners. After all, there’s nothing quite so disheartening than sending out letters left, right and centre when you’re looking for work and not getting a reply.

Anyway, whichever way you look at it; one thing is certain. If they do come and work for us it should be understood that we are in the “communications business�. That is to say, the work we deliver to our own clients helps them communicate with their own customers. So it stands to reason that anyone we employ must themselves, be able to communicate effectively across a whole range of mediums either with their internal colleagues or directly with clients.

With this in mind, we find it very strange that people would send us employment enquiries full of mistakes. This in itself says “I don’t know how to communicate in writing�. However they do and on a regular basis as well!

Some of the typical mistakes we see in letters and CVs include;

1. Typographical errors. This indicates a lack of proof reading, a lack of knowledge of the English language, or the lack of a dictionary in the house. One applicant had even spelt his own name differently on his CV to the one he used in his letter. What does that tell you?
2. The use of slang in a formal letter. One applicant had used “texting language� (txtspk) in his cover letter. Into the bin it went, even though his online portfolio was good.
3. The use of American spellings as opposed to English ones. Grrr… let’s not go there!
4. Poor page layout.
5. Grubby letters – one had blood on it!

Now it’s a few years since Debbe and I left school and we don’t have any kids, so the “what are they are teaching them at school these days?� debate is not one of our most knowledgeable areas; however we can confidently say based upon our experiences, that it’s not grammar or how to spell.

The other aspect that is guaranteed to get an application dropped straight into the bin without being read is the obvious lack of research the applicant has invested into their enquiry.

These are relatively easy to spot, for example; the letter that is sent to a “Whom it May Concern� or to the “Managing Director�. That is to say, not a named individual. With us, it’s dead easy to find out who’s who. Just look on our web site. Laziness I call it.

At the extreme we’ve even had employment enquiries from people who have skills that are of no relevance to our industry. One candidate sent in a CV telling us what a great landscape gardener he was for an advertised administrative position. Useful to someone I admit, but not to us.

So there you have it, rant over.

If you do plan to drop us a note with an enquiry for employment (we do welcome them despite our whinge above), to help yourself; please consider the following:

1. Give us a reason why we should employ you.
2. Make sure you send your letter or email to a named individual. Debbe Dobson is a good name to use, she looks after HR.
3. Make sure your application does not contain mistakes, uses good layout and if by post, good quality paper and envelopes – it speaks volumes.

On a final note for this blog entry: whilst shopping in our local Morrisons supermarket in Heckmondwike the other day. I found they like to spell their aisle signage in a unique manner.