The chosen Charity was Help for Heroes.  Help for Heroes raises money to support members of the Armed Forces who have been wounded in the service of their country. We feel this is a worthy cause and we have done our best to raise a bit of money for them.

How have we done this?

Well, firstly we made it a special day by having it as a  fancy dress day with the theme “Action Hero or Barbie”.  The ‘Soula’ team came as a Ghostbuster, Lara Croft (An unusual choice for a man), Dr Who, Goth Barbie, Biggles, Zorro, Aragorn and Captain America.  The winner of the “Best Costume” award eventually went to our very own Biggles.

Stocks

Some people volunteered to be put in the stocks, others were volunteered!  With a small charge to throw sponges a good time was had by all, outside the stocks at least!

The deal – Pay a couple of quid to  throw soaking wet sponges from a reasonable distance and soak your colleague as much as possible.  This proved very popular with a full turn out for each drenching.

As you can see, the rules were not always obeying and a few VERY wet workers spent a chilly damp day in the office.

BBQ & Cakes

A big chuck of the eventual total came from food.

A lovely barbecue expertly prepared by Martin raised quite a lot of money form a hungry workforce in the Soula offices with meat from our very own client, Westin Gourmet.

With the aroma of the gourmet meat spreading across the estate, curious staff from other offices added to the coffers and were queuing 8-10 deep at times.

Cakes were also on offer as store bought and home made cakes were available for dessert once the meat had been devoured.

Connect 4

A 50p ‘winner takes nothing’ Connect 4 competition ran periodically throughout the day.

Organised into a Champions league style group followed by kno0ckout format.  The competitiveness of the team didn’t get in the way of the fun.

After 4 hours and neatly 30 matches, Nathan “Rambo” Towers  came out on top.

All in all we raised a great £730 for charity and had a good time in the process.

A NOTTINGHAM design agency that has doubled in size in the last 12 months is now looking to grow by a further 30% with the appointment of four new key staff members.

Website design business Soula says that, over the last two years, it has experienced a “huge” increase in enquiries from companies and organisations looking to invest in digital marketing solutions.

Managing director Martin Pykett said: “I have to say, without embarrassment, that we are experiencing a boom period.

“Clients are looking for new and more sophisticated options to keep their brands front of mind with customers.”

Soula’s clients operate in industries like music, health, education and finance, with an increasing number of enquiries from the pharmaceutical sector and gambling organisations.

If you are interested in working for Soula – see our latest vacancies here

After a great deal of discussion and debate, the path we have chosen will be as follows.

The domain is aged eleven years and has a very strong pagerank. The problem is that it hasn’t been active for a number of years.  So first and foremost we wanted to get something live and indexed by the search engines.  That will happen this week when we launch Slimming.com Pre-Launch.

Essentially, the pre-launch site will just be a product review site with a few informational articles in the Knowledgebase.  We will get the site up and generate some links to it so that it gets back on the radar of the major search engines.

Then on August 17th we will launch Slimming.com Stage One.  This will consist of an expanded Knowledgebase, some online weight management tools and an e-commerce store through which people can purchase various weight loss products and slimming pills, including many national and very recognizable brands.

We are excited about this project because it offers affiliates a great opportunity to promote something different and potentially quite profitable.  Because Slimming.com is a store offering many products rather than just one, we feel that the average order value will be much higher than other promotional options.

Having said that, we also recognize that the conversion rate of visitors to purchases will inevitably be slightly lower.  However, we will consistently test the site to ensure that we are incrementally yet constantly improving the conversion rate.

Finally, we will be providing our affiliate partners with a number of marketing tools to help them promote our site.  These will take the form of traditional banners and images but will also include a pre-launch email sequence and compelling articles to generate interest as August 17th approaches.

If you are interested in promoting Slimming.com as an affiliate you are invited to visit the affiliate marketing network at MoreNiche.com and watch their Merchant Offers as we get closer to launch date.  If you’re an affiliate you will be pleasantly surprised with what we’ll have to offer.