Credit crunch could have a positive spin for UFindUs customers

“Whats in your wallet?” That’s the slogan of a well known credit card company who are trying to entice new customers to use their card. There is no doubt now that the economy is slowing down and that people are exercising an element of caution over their spending but this said it doesn’t mean that it is all bad news.

The majority of customers using the UFindUs network are small businesses, some sell luxury items and arguably these may be the first hit when the purse strings get tightened. Many however are tradespeople, you know, the sort who do building, plastering, joinery or plumbing work. A lot of these are essential trades and if people arent moving home then chances are they may prefer to ride out the storm staying put in their own piece of England.

Chances are it is a more sensible option to extend rather than trade up. Maybe upgrading their kitchen will give their home the new lease of life which negates the need to move. When I moved at the end of last summer you could certainly feel a change in the market even in the 4 months between putting my old place on the market and getting the keys for my house. I can’t say I didn’t have concerns. As an ex estate agent I was in a unique position last time round to see the market throw on the brakes literally overnight.

In my part of the north west the ripple effect of a stagnating market hit us in June 1989 and week on week we watched as the sales dried up and the market went into a sharp nosedive. What we then saw was an increasing number of appointments to appraise peoples homes who you knew would never move. More often than not they would be fact finding before they instructed the builder to change the garage into a playroom or bedroom.

I personally think that the current situation on the high street will have a positive effect on quite a few of our customers who are prepared to embrace a changing marketplace and make sure their businesses adapt to market conditions. Internet traffic is increasing, our directories, which include Smile Local, are busier than ever before. Last month we had just short of 11.5M searches carried out across our network which must have contributed to a fair proportion of business transactions

Businesses should use the present time to plan ahead, take a fresh look at their business and move forward with confidence that there are people out there who still have the income to use their services. Maybe we should all adopt the motto that “if you fail to plan then you plan to fail.”

We love Google at UFindus

Google has just been voted the UK’s No.1 brand.

 

The survey,which takes into account the opinions of 1500 professionals within the industry,has seen the BBC get bumped off the top spot where they have been for the past year.

Voting on 500 brands the panel elected the internet Goliath as number one brand and shunted the Beeb down to 4th place.

This follows on from a poll last year which officially recognised Google as the worlds best known brand.

Looking round the UFindUs office it is rare that there will be any other homepage showing apart from Google so I don’t think that this latest accolade for them will be a big surprise. However what you also should look at is the fact that in the top 50 the average age of the ”brand” was 90 years old, Google is the only one in the top 50 which was founded after 1990!

How about that for the power of the internet. 

UFindUs – a sure fire winner

Last week UFindUs.com received another internet accolade form Hitwise. Hitwise are recognised within the industry for the accuracy of their data and are part of the Experian group. 

Having been acknowledged in 2006 as well, we have now taken 7th place in the top ten sites receiving the most web traffic for the category of Business and Finance directories.  It is a tremendous achievement and proves that UFuindUs may not be a site which will win brand awareness awards but when it comes to doing the business we keep on performing.

The interent is a an odd place and very often if a business should even be bothered to ask where the customer heard about them the answer will be I found you on the internet. More accurately it should be “I found your listing on UFindUs” or “I got your number from your website (which has achieved high rankings courtesy of UFindUs).

That aside we are concentrating on maintaining our top 10 position,and, with the rapid surge in traffic that the other Customer Street sites like Smile Local and More UK are seeing its a real win win situation for CustomerStreet customers.  

Getting the most out of your UFindUs package

Its really easy to forget, when your this side of the fence, that not everyone knows or understands how the Internet works. As a business our teams here at Customer Street and UFindUs don’t assume that just because someone has taken out our package they will immediately know how to make the most out of the opportunity we put before them.

We realised a long time ago that we don’t just stumble across happy customers, we create them. We have a great product which for over5 years has continued to grow and develop alongside the Internet. But, and there is always a but, the way things work on the Internet changes on a weekly basis. What was right last week may not be right today.

We cant expect the average Customer Street or UFindUs customer to possibly keep abreast with these changes as they happen. At the end of the day they have businesses to run themselves. What we can however do is make keeping up to date with these changes a lot easier.

Our search manager Lee Johnson is on hand to get relevant snippets of information out to our customers by way of his almost daily posts on his SEO blog.  As consumers we should never underestimate the power of what can be achieved through the power of the Internet, and as Customer Street customers you shouldn’t underestimate the wealth of resources that you can draw on to make sure that the services we provide you with continue to offer excellent value by delivering a service second to none.    

Check out Lee’s blog and store it as a favourite so that you dont miss out on any of his hints and tips.

Check out the new Customer Street Website

Yesterday we launched the all new Customer Street site which has been designed to be more informative and easier to use than the previous version.

If you have a few minutes then why not check the site out  by clicking on www.customerstreet.com. Use the site to log into your own account and check out our advertisers area. One great new feature there is all the down-loadable documents which incorporate  the first steps guides to make sure you get the most out of your new package. It also includes terms and conditions to print of and read through at your leisure.  

A Million more homes go online!

Anyone who dismisses the power of the internet must surely be getting ready to accept defeat.

The national statistics office has revealed that over the last year nearly a million more homes have taken up internet access. That means a staggering 61% of UK homes now have access, compared with 54% last year.

84% of web enabled households have a broadband connection installed, an increase on the year of 15%.

This in itself has backed up our own findings here at UFindUs which show a huge upturn in usage of our directories and portals which include Smile Local and Lets Look Beautiful.

Rapidsite evolution comes a step closer

The long awaited launch of the new rapidsite software has come a step closer.

This truly is a big deal to not only us here at UFindUs and Customer Street but more importantly to our customers.

Over the last few years we have continued to develop our range of products and services, keeping pace with the ever changing demands placed on us by our customers as well as staying one step ahead of our competition. I think that in general we have been able to achieve both things.

An area that we have however tended to overlook, and which has brought us more brickbats than bouquets, has been our templated websites which we provide free of charge for the majority of our customers. Stuart Laverick, our developer assigned to this  mammoth task has now been left alone long enough to be able to finish an alpha version of the new software.

This prototype has been passed to Stuart Forrest, our technical director with the brief to “do his best to break it”. Stuart will now undertake to pick as many holes in it as possible, checking it thoroughly to see if it has any coding errors before it goes onto the next stage which will involve the creation of the new template skins.

If you haven’t come across the development blog why not check it out, as even from a layman’s point of view it makes interesting reading to learn about the many processes which deliver something we feel will only improve further our ability to continue to deliver a first class service.

Toni Schneider – wordpress is making the world a smaller place

I have just seen an interview with Toni Schneider on WallStrip. He is the CEO of Automattic. He doesn’t really do labels so his colleagues affectionately call him the “band leader”.

If you get time then check out the interview, you may need to bear with it whilst it buffers. Listening to him put me very much in mind of our own Customer Street Technical Director, Stuart Forrest. The longer I work within this industry the more people I am coming across like both Toni and Stuart.

These guys, and many more besides, never seem phased by anything, they are approachable, passionate about what they do and most of all are natural. Nothing is for show, they are who they are and a big part of why they do what they do is because they feel they can make a difference that will shape peoples lives for the better.When you listen to Toni he is very frank and open about the things he’s asked in the interview and not full of his own self importance like many CEOs in other industries.

At the end of the day the public are the ones who ultimately decide how good they are and they know that the public can on occasions be very fickle so they take nothing for granted. I would like to think that if you read Stuarts own blog you can get an insight into the man and the passion behind Customer Street.

UFindUs Customers Upgrade to Customer Street

Anyone with a UFindUs package will be aware of the immense power that the directory has developed over the past few years since it was created. As with all things to do with the web however times change and products have to evolve.

UFindUs still continues to offer a internet presence that is difficult to beat, the ability to get your website found on the major search engines, usually in very prominent positions and the prospect of increasing business.

Customer Street has been developed to act as a new media advertising brand of which UFindUs is now a part of. It is marketed alongside other directories, these being Smile Local, More UK and over 130 of our Customer Street Trades portals covering just about every type of retail and service sector product imaginable.

If you are interested in learning more about upgrading your existing UFindUs package to take advantage of all Customer Street can offer then please email ad@customertreet.com and we will be more than happy to get some of our advisors to give you a call.

A blog about about business and roses

For the last couple of years UFindUs as a business we has grown at a fantastic rate, the result being that we have a wealth of industry knowledge that many will envy. Each day brought about new challenges, a bigger customer base and sometimes more headaches. In some respects we grew faster than our infrastructure and over 12 months ago we made a conscious decision to speed up the development of what goes on behind the scenes in order that we could the business forward and develop new products which will truly set us apart from the crowd. At this point I would like to make a quote, copied and pasted from another blog I came across but sadly can’t remember who it was to give them credit for it.

‘Pruning is an important and necessary step in growing roses. Pruning keeps the plant healthy. It promotes new growth, removes dead, broken or diseased canes and trains roses to a desired shape. Pruning encourages flowering, either more blooms or larger blooms, and is essential to keep modern rose varieties blooming repeatedly all summer long.’

Maybe referring UFindUs to a rose bush is erring towards the poetic, but we have done a lot of pruning this last year, cutting out the dead wood, training new stems to grow in the direction we want them to. We have started to see all the buds begin to open with the launch of two new directories, Smilelocal and MoreUk. Both have different markets, Smile is aimed at the under 30’s with a bright funky feel and MoreUk is aimed at the 50 plus age range, with instantly enlargable text and a simpler more functional feel to it. Both sit side by side with UFindUs to create a formidable presence on the search engines. There will be an abundance of larger and more fragrant blooms to come in the following months and years. The sweet smell of success can only get stronger for our customers as they really reap the rewards of all the extra exposure that we are now able to offer.

Graham Armstrong – UFindUs