What is Nimble?
Nimble is a Social Business Platform that combines relationship management and social engagement into an affordable web-based solution. The system integrates all of your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Email contacts all into one place. If that isn’t good enough for you, Nimble also brings together all of your conversations on these platforms so that you have a true representation of all your interactions with a customer in one place.

Why Nimble?
There are a lot of CRM solutions on the market today so why should you choose Nimble?
Nimble is the only solution that integrates all of the “4 Cs” – contacts, calendar, communications and collaboration. It is also the only solution that effectively brings together your communications from all of your social media accounts as well as your email (We like this feature, we like it a lot!).
The team behind Nimble are fantastic and their vision for the product is outstanding.
Nimble currently integrates with HubSpot, Wufoo and MailChimp and there are many more integrations that are coming too.

Our Experience
We have used a lot of CRM systems over the years including SugarCRM, HighRise, ZohoCRM and CapsuleCRM to name just a few, but we were never quite satisfied. At one point we even decided to start building our own CRM system, but then we found Nimble. We have never used a solution (ours included) that is able to bring all of our customer information together as well as Nimble does. We live out of Nimble, it is the base upon which all of our work is organised and we love it.

Learn more about Nimble!
As a Nimble solution partner, we would like to show you how to leverage Nimble to start building relationships and connecting with even more customers. Shoot us an email if you’’d like to set up a training session or just have a chat about Nimble. Or feel free to connect with us via Twitter or Facebook.

StopTheHacker works along side our existing anti-spam, anti-virus and network firewalls. The product scans our websites daily in order to make sure that they are free of viruses or malware, as well as monitoring multiple blacklists including Google, Yahoo, Bing, Spam, Malware and DNS Blacklists. If a website is found to be infected StopTheHacker will notify us immediately, passing on a full report of the problem so that we can take the appropriate action to resolve any issues quickly and with minimal disruption.

You can see an example health report below:

Pricing usually starts from $10 per site, per month however we are pleased to announce that we are able to offer this service to all of our web hosting customers for FREE. Starting from today all of the websites that we host will be protected by StopTheHacker.

If you would like to find out more about StopTheHacker please check out their website or give us a call.

Earlier this month we launched a website for Kettering start-up Locarn. Locarn provide an innovative new delivery solution for people that are unable to take delivery of items during the day.

The service involves you directing the parcel to Locarn’s depot in Kettering, you are then notified by SMS when they have your parcel. You can then go online and order a delivery slot between 6pm and 12pm on weekdays and 10am and 10pm on weekends. The delivery slots are broken up into 1 hour chunks giving you full control over when you would like your parcel to be delivered.

We think that it is a really great idea and hope that it really takes off. If you live in the Kettering area and have problems with receiving deliveries during the day then check out their new website.

Our involvement included designing and building a website to market their service as well as building a customer portal that allows users to go online and book deliveries and track their parcels. We also built the administration system used at the depot for tracking parcels, orders and customers.

It has been a really exciting project to work on and we wish the guys at Locarn the best of luck with their new venture.

Here is a list of some of the regular sections that will feature in the newsletter.

• Practical ‘Tips and Tricks’ to grow your business using the web.
• Case Studies of companies that have had great success using the web to increase sales and customer interaction.
• Featured Articles that take you through how to use services like Google Analytics and AdWords effectively.
• Question & Answer section where we answer queries put to us by our readers.

We’re really excited about sharing these tips with you so that you can supercharge your company’s growth online.

The first issue will be out at the beginning of next week. Sign up today to make sure that you don’t miss out!

This month’s featured app is LinkedIn‘s brand new HTML5 app aimed at mobile users.

What is HTML5 you ask? Check out this wikipedia article for a bit of background and then come back and read the rest of this post.

Covering all the bases

On Tuesday LinkedIn released it’s latest suite of apps aimed at trying to increase the amount of users that are active on the site daily. Along with revamped mobile apps for Android and iOS, LinkedIn surprised many by releasing a HTML5 app into the wild.

The new touch-friendly interface allows you to quickly check your latest updates and share content with the LinkedIn community. Most of the features that you get when using the full desktop site are also included such as profiles and messaging and LinkedIn has said that they are looking to release more features in the near future. There is also speculation rising that the app will include a business card reader at some point in the future, sparked by LinkedIn’s  acquisition of Silicon Valley start-up CardMunch earlier this year.

Tech Talk

LinkedIn’s developers have used Node.js on the server side along with Backbone and Underscore on the client side to deliver a 10x performance increase compared to their previous mobile web experience. Mobile development lead, Kiran Prasad recently revealed to VentureBeat that the new app is only a mere 50K when compressed, this includes all of the frameworks that the app utilises.

Round-Up

We think that LinkedIn have done a really good job with this new app. They have managed to craft an interface that looks and feels much like that of a native app. It’s great to see companies like LinkedIn leading the way with the HTML5 revolution and there is already talk that Facebook is developing it’s own HTML5 mobile app.

You can check out LinkedIn’s new HTML5 mobile experience at touch.linkedin.com.

Contact us today to arrange a FREE on-site consultation.

* Web Hosting would usually cost £47.88 and Domain Names £8.99 (.co.uk) or £12.99 (.com).
* Please see the offer terms and conditions for rules and regulations.

This morning we launched a brand new website for Fleckney based, Emplas Limited. You can see the site here.

We think that this data is useful to all of our customers that are currently using Google Analytics and therefore we have decided to summarise the information in this blog post.

A Brief Overview

This data shows that compared to the previous year, websites have seen a slight decrease in the number of pages viewed per visit, the average time spent on a site and the bounce rate.

Metrics by Country

The table below shows  the three main site metrics for the UK, US and China. The figures in parenthesis are the change compared to the previous year.

This data is interesting as it shows that the quality of UK site visits has decreased with more people leaving without looking at more that the landing page as well as a decrease in the amount of time people are spending on a website. This aside UK visits are, on average, still better quality than China and marginally better than the USA in all categories apart from the time people spend browsing a site.

Traffic Sources

Referral visits have seen the largest drop in the time that people will spend on a site, down 1minute 48 Seconds on the previous year with CPC Search (Cost-Per-Click Search Advertising) and Organic Search both seeing a slight increase.

Web page bounce rate has decreased across the board with the largest drop (4%) in direct site visits. This means that more people are staying to browse a website than before however the total number of pages browsed per visit for direct visits has decreased by 0.5.

The table above shows the percentage of site visits that originate from each of the four categories. Referral visits have lost share with search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing collectively gaining 1%. There has also been a small increase the share of direct visits and visits from other sources.

Operating Systems

This tables shows that Microsoft’s Windows operating system still holds the biggest market share accounting for 84.8% of site. The company has however lost 5.1% on the previous year which has almost entirely been accounted for by ‘other’ operating systems.

An explanation for this rise in the ‘other’ category could be the surge in popularity of mobile smartphones and the increase of mobile browsing. A recent study undertaken by Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 68% of american adults with smartphones use them to access the internet in a daily basis*.

We hope that you find this information useful when analysing your own websites performance. If you have any questions please post the in the comments section below or tweet us @DeveloperCity.

* “35% of American adults own a smartphone”, Pew Internet and American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2011/PIP_Smartphones.pdf)
** Unless stated otherwise all data presented in this post was provided by Google

To show the share menu simply use the following code:

Intent intent = new Intent(android.content.Intent.ACTION_SEND);
intent.setType(“text/plain”);
intent.putExtra(android.content.Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, “Your Link”);
intent.putExtra(android.content.Intent.EXTRA_SUBJECT, “Some extra text if you want it”);
startActivity(Intent.createChooser(intent, “Share via”));

I hope this will help you out. Post any questions in the comments section and I will do my best to answer them.

Today we are pleased to announce that we are making Google’s Analytics service available to all of our website customers.

Google Analytics is a free web service that provides useful information on the people that visit your site such as visitor numbers and the most popular pages. The service also provides more in depth data that can be useful when planning marketing campaigns such as map overlays that show the geographic location of visitors as well as where the visit originated from (e.g. Search Engine, Partner Website).

We will be contacting all eligible customers within the next day or so to see whether they would like to sign up for free reports from this service.