Following the great success of the Buy Wine page in conjunction with the in-house Green and Blue wines designer a new home page was designed and was made to function on the web by Sumobaby.

The previosuly unutilised central content now features some of the most important information, upcoming promotion and  events. The homepage relfects the charm that the Organic & biodynamic wine shop, bar and deli has to visit.

Summary: Q4 performance on Q3

The festive season finds many people on the Internet turning to e-commerce type sites of which Sumobaby has few that it currently monitors. As a result on aggregate traffic had fallen by -7% Q3-Q4 ’09 however those clients that are paying for SEO services saw an increase on +21% Q3-Q4 ’09.

Traffic distribution

On aggregate traffic sources remain much as I would expect them with some minor variation

The highs and lows of each traffic source needs to be taken in context of a particular website, so where you may think that a low direct traffic volume would indicate poor brand awareness it may not be the case if that site happens to particularly excel in SEO.

Search engine distribution

Q4 ’09 search engine distribution

Google maintain a 90% share on search referrals, static on previous quarter. With the only change being that Aol. steal one percent from Yahoo!’s share.

This distribution will be interesting to watch over the upcoming year with the Yahoo! & Bing search alliance deal being finalised and cleared in various territories.

Problem: Using a background image in a word document, converting to Adobe Acrobat PDF will loose the background image.

I had been looking to empower one of my clients to create better looking literature without having to get us to build all of them in Illustrator. Word templates seemed the way to go, better looking day-to-day business communication and anything more complicated would come to us t design & lay-up.

• Having first tried using the header and footer feature in Word found it too hard to recreate the style, copy & position the logos + only to find logos/colours opaque.
• Then tried using the background image [Page colour >  Fill Effects > Picture (in Office 2007 this is all under the Page Layout tab)] which looked perfect except when converting a document to PDF it lost the background image. No settings I changed seemed to change this, nor using the “print” to PDF on the PC.

Finally the solution:

Add your image as a Watermark, simples.

Word 2007 > Page Layout tab > Watermark >  Custom Watermark > select the picture > untick Washout (This will mean the background image isn’t faded).

If you wish to design a background image to fill an entire word document at 100% scale I would suggest 800 x 1300.