Ladies and Gentlemen, we present to you - Anvil!

Features of Anvil

1. Fully widgeted
2. Navigation widget, giving options over and above the standard WordPress navigation
3. Fireworks png file with instructions, allowing you to easily customise the theme’s look and feel without touching code
4. Parameterised php file for css, making colour and design changes a cinch
5. Designed for speed and compatibility
6. Carefully tested by professional developers
7. Developed by a commercial company, but under GPLv3 - so high quality code, with GPL benefits
8. Designed for WordPress 2.1 and above (recommended with 2.3)
9. Contact Form that’s easy to extend and customise from within the php file and which can also be configured to contact multiple users
10. Tagging support
11. Lots of lovely commenting to help you along

So, download it, customise it, do what you want with it. We do ask that you leave a credit to us. If you take off the corner tag, a little “original theme developed by Interconnect IT” type link, somewhere, would be much appreciated. We also like to hear from people who are using this theme, so by all means comment away on this post, ask questions and so on.

And now for a little legalese - the theme is offered entirely without warranty and you use it entirely at your risk. You also, in downloading the theme and using it agree to conform to the GNU General Public License v3, which can be found in the zip file . If you do not wish to conform to this license you should not use the theme or modify it. Copyright continues to rest with Interconnect IT for the code and graphic work in the theme and we will pursue breaches of the license terms.

Update: Fixed a problem with the “contact form” page template which would result in it failing to send mail unless you used the option to hard code the email address. Sorry about that.

If you wish to see the theme in action then you should visit the Anvil Demo Site where you can read about the Anvil theme features and see them all in action (link opens in a new window/tab).

  Please note - this is no longer the official source for Anvil.  To download The Anvil 1.3 Theme Visit The Demo Site Now!

Support for Anvil Theme

You have two choices - free support, and paid support.

Free Support

This is entirely at our discretion, and is available by making comments below. If you try to contact us for free support any other way, for example, through our contact form, then you accept that we will charge you for this support at our standard hourly rate.

Paid Support

Use our contact form to request support at £70.50 per hour (inclusive of VAT, £60 without), or ring if you have an urgent query which will be charged at £105.75 per hour including VAT (£90 without) and can generally be dealt with within the hour. Yes, we know that sounds a lot, but it’s actually pretty cheap compared to, say, having your oil changed at a VW garage, and they didn’t even give you the car for free.

Custom Themes

We can change the design of these theme for you. Get in touch for more information, or make us an offer. We can also scratch-build themes, write custom plugins and pretty much make WordPress do anything you like. We accept that we won’t be the cheapest custom WordPress developers out there, but we do believe we’re the best, with some of the most sophisticated WordPress sites possible. Of course, if you’re not in a hurry, we’ll be releasing other GPL themes in the future and they may give you just what you need!

WordPress Training

We also offer training at very reasonable rates. These courses can be client or site specific and can take place in either your office or at our facilities in Liverpool.

Intensive One-to-One WordPress Training

Our one day courses are specifically structured to your own requirements. These take place either in our office, or at your own favoured location. Most courses last from 10am to 5:30pm, with a break for lunch where you can have an informal break and chat with your trainer.

These courses are particularly useful for either advanced users, or those with highly customised WordPress installations.

All levels can be catered for.

These courses start at £420+VAT. Discounts may be available to non-profit organisations.

Classroom WordPress Training (Two Days)

This more conventional course is a two day course for WordPress users, administrators and editors to be held in central Liverpool, in a location convenient for hotels, parking and night-life. The course can be modified for groups from larger organisations who may have specific needs and are prepared to make an exclusive booking.

You will be taken from first principles all the way to advanced usage of this powerful web software, suitable for creating fantastic, fully featured blogs and websites.

Course Program:

Day 1

Introduction

• What WordPress can and can’t do
• Acceptable content
• Writing pages and posts
• Inserting images
• How to manage multimedia files
• Making money from your WordPress site
• Generating traffic to your site

Day 2 (Administration and Management)

• Introduction
• Configuring WordPress
• Plugins, their uses, and their dangers
• Security aspects of WordPress
• Defining the website structure through WordPress
• Administering content
• Managing users
• Moderating comments
• Managing presentation

This is a hands on course in a classroom style setting where you will be working with a live WordPress installation and computer for each attendee. The course is task led and you will be closely supervised. Student co-operation is also encouraged with group activities.

All attendees of the course will receive printed materials for later reference, a resources disk, refreshments, lunch and a subscription to our newsletter.

The course fee is £400+VAT (£470 inclusive). The prices are per attendee, for both days, and the numbers are strictly limited in order maximise the benefit of the course to students.

Our scheduled courses usualy run in central Liverpool, but we are considering expansion to other locations. We recommend booking as early as possible as numbers and trainer availability are strictly limited. If you have any questions about our courses, please don’t hesitate to contact us using our form or by calling on 0151 709 7977 during office hours.

We’re often asked if we can provide custom courses specifically tailored to the needs of certain organisations. This isn’t usually a problem but we will normally ask for a little more time in order to prepare. We can also provide these courses at your location, but suitable facilities are required.

Associated Haulage

These lovely folk can look after pretty much any Haulage, Import, Export or Warehousing problem for you. They didn’t previously have a website, but did know that they wanted to benefit from the web.

They did everything right for a client - we asked them to think about what they needed to promote. They provided us with a list. We asked them to think about how a website could help their clients - they came up with the idea of having the status of their containers on the site. This helped us to propose some solutions from which they could choose. They chose, and they got, the site you can see from the link above. It includes a custom WordPress plugin, which allows them to set and maintain the status of their containers, visible to all visitors of the site. See what you think! We’ll soon be writing more about their site in our case-studies section.

“Couldn’t be better! They gave us choices when we needed them, and helped direct us to the best solutions. Delighted.” - Alison Cunningham, Associated Haulage.

Dworak Languages

This is a little bit for us, really. We realised that there’s an increasing need for provision of multi-language websites. After all, we live in a global village now. We also know that there may be as many as one million Polish workers in the UK. They need support and are a valuable market for many businesses.

So we’re now proud to offer a full suite of Language Services under the Dworak Languages brand. It’s entirely a part of Interconnect IT, so you get the same great levels of customer service and value as before. The site itself had to be built quickly and is typical of the kind of site we can create for a close client for as little as £2000 including copy-writing, logo design and coding. It’s simple, but effective - and of course compatible with all browsers, search engine friendly, fast to load, and gets the message across.

If you need translation between a wide range of languages, or lessons in Polish or French for your company, then don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Successful selling is all about helping customers to realise their goals whilst accepting that the buyer and seller may not have the same objectives, so in web design, the first step is to define the parameters of your Web presence - what is your site for? What do you want your site to enable you to achieve? And how will a web site fit in with the rest of your strategy - do you even need one? Whatever your objectives, you must allow your visitors to achieve what it is that they have come to your site for whilst guiding them to the areas of your site that you wish to promote, in the least stressful manner possible. These aims can often be achieved simply and concurrently.

B2C

Many B2C (Business-to-Consumer) sites act as an extra sales channel for the business by presenting the customer with strategically limited product choices, in order to both streamline and maximise the sales potential in each transaction. Too much choice and the clutter will obscure the sales message, and may lead to frustration or confusion in your visitors, which will result in a lost sale. Too little choice and your visitors will conclude that your limited product range doesn’t offer the freedom of choice that online shopping can bring, and may decide to go elsewhere.

The trick is to provide the right amount of options for your target audience, and here each business will vary. Red Letter Days, a B2C site, provide hundreds of individual options for visitors because the site is designed to appeal to people who are purchasing a gift for someone else.

The company has quite deliberately limited the top-level choices to only 12 options because by carefully organising their products into clearly defined categories, they ensure that visitors can find the type of gift they require without having to navigate an endless procession of menus and sub-menus, which will quickly lead to boredom and frustration. The initial choice of gift ideas is enough to appear comprehensive but is concise enough to persuade the visitor to click through rather than click away.

Forcing or persuading a visitor to navigate away from your site should be avoided wherever possible because it means a lost sale, a potential sale for your competitors, and the possibility that news of your site’s navigational difficulties will spread. Word of mouth has always been the best form of recommendation, and with social bookmarking sites publishing opinions and comments to a worldwide audience, it has never been easier for people to compare notes on the user experience.

Of course, visitors navigate away from sites for all kinds of reasons, although growing frustrated with your site or not being able to find what they are looking for in a few clicks should not be among them.

B2B

Businesses which derive the majority of their trade from other businesses (B2B, or Business-to-Business), are expected to offer a huge range of products to reflect market demand, and the emphasis on selling and marketing will not be as high as for a B2C site because experienced trade professionals use different parameters, notably supply sustainability and discount, to judge the effectiveness of a supplier.

PartsBase supplies the aviation industry and boasts the availability of over 50 MILLION items - a figure which would deter even the most hardened bargain-hunting consumer but is probably quite reassuring to a manufacturer or repair centre in need of a hard to find component. Again, the site is simply responding to the demands of the market, yet although this time the multitude of options is designed to encourage rather than discourage visitors, the site’s owners have made it easy for members to find exactly what they are looking for by providing an array of search tools and a constantly updated inventory system.

From looking to ordering

In the examples above, both sites make it easy for visitors to be guided to the right place, albeit by different means. The company knows the client is in the right place because they have reached the product pages. The client feels they are in the right place because they have found what they were looking for, and from there they will be able to go ahead and order. How the client proceeds to order, and even the total size of that order, can be manipulated to the firm’s advantage whilst still allowing the client to achieve their goal.

Consider Dell computers. Dell’s advertising (both online and in print) uses very low prices to entice visitors to their web site, and, specifically, the ‘build your own computer’ section of the site. Once there, visitors are guided through the many options on offer, most of which appear to represent excellent value for money. While the visitor is selecting components to build his or her computer, upgrades and higher specification equipment are advertised alongside the lower priced articles which attracted the visitor in the first place, which makes the higher priced goods seem more reasonable and the lower priced goods seem a little inferior. The higher priced good is often colour coded and its superiority reinforced with attention grabbing sensationalised text.

The site appeals to the online shopper’s sense of self-worth (”If I’m building this computer I want the best!”) and their eye for what appears to be a bargain (”if X is the basic price and Y is much better and only slightly more expensive, and Z is better still and only a little more expensive than Y, then I will choose Z”). We are encouraged to spend much more than we originally anticipated thanks to subtle prompts and the illusion of choice, yet at the end of the process Dell has (probably) succeeded in selling us a computer with a much higher specification than we originally anticipated (the company’s objective) and the visitor has been able to locate a computer which seems to exactly matches his or her specifications (the visitor’s objective) by exactly the same means.

“Upselling” comes in many forms, from the innocuous sounding “is that everything?” in chain pubs at the end of our order, to the more forthright “do you want fries with that?” at the drive-thru.

Online selling takes a slightly different approach, because the absence of any dialogue means that the company’s product offering must be delivered in clearly defined terms but carefully expressed in a way which avoids begging for custom.. By guiding your visitors to areas of your site which can add value to and therefore enhance their experience, you are effectively offering them something different to or better than the offerings of your competitors, whilst simultaneously increasing the likelihood that your visitors will buy from you or use your services.

Free toy inside

Foreign exchange xe.com provides a multitude of currency-based tools and offers a range of paid-for services such as brokerage and money transfer, yet it is the site’s powerful currency converter, one of the first useful dynamic applications on the internet, which ensures that more visitors use their site than any other site offering similar services. It is free to use, devastatingly accurate, and there is no limit on the amount of calculations users can ask it to perform.

The company invested a significant amount of time and money in perfecting the application because they believed its inherent usefulness would attract visitors from all over the world. Although it is by no means the only free to use currency converter, it was the first, and it remains the standard by which others are judged, not least because it uses constantly updated data taken in real time from the currency markets, meaning it is able to reflect up to the minute fluctuations in exchange rates.

Using an application or useful tool to attract visitors to a site can be extremely successful if it is implemented with the needs of the target audience in mind. Although it is a unique example, the BBC schools website offers a multitude of interactive content for children from pre-school to secondary school age, and also provides content for teachers and parents. Unsurprisingly it is one of the most popular BBC “mini-sites” and one of the most popular children’s sites on the Internet.

Google has taken mass appeal to a whole new level with the carefully timed introduction of a number of useful, powerful, and most importantly, free tools and applications designed to increase market share and to get people to turn to Google to perform routine tasks such as word processing, emailing and organising. This has the massive benefit of drawing attention to their core competency and greatest sources of revenue, advertising and search.

On a smaller scale, sites such as Diet Freedom offer a free printable chart to help visitors keep track of their diet goals, and a confidential ‘ask the dietician’ service. Whilst they may not be the most exciting developments in food history, they are designed to offer support and encouragement to people wishing to embark on a diet, and might even provide the extra impetus for visitors to subscribe to this site rather one of the many others that are available.

As with the previous examples, the site enables visitors to find what they want with minimum hassle, and encourages them to go a little further through tailored incentives that are designed to match the particular requirements of the market. In this case it is likely that the market consists mainly of people looking for dietary advice, but also for support, encouragement, and the inspiration to keep going. With its printable chart, confidential one-on-one service and wealth of dietary information, Diet Freedom is doing just that.

Responding to customer need can take many forms, and must be a consistent theme running throughout your site. Sites which promise the earth during a slick animated introduction are useless if the main content fails to deliver. Getting your visitors to the product pages requires careful planning but both you and your clients can derive maximum long-term benefit if you get it right.

Once your visitors are at the ordering stage they must be persuaded to convert their interest, and as we have seen, custom applications or judicious product placement can certainly help. How you implement such incentives depends on the nature of your business, the demands of your target market, and how far you are willing to develop the online side of your operation.

Inherently extendible with both open and proprietary plug-ins, themes and applications, WordPress and WordPress MU have become our tools of choice for many client sites where content and ease of use our critical. Consequently, our experience of WordPress is now amongst the highest, and we understand we’re the only UK based WordPress consultants recognised by Automattic as at the third quarter 2007.

Our rates for plugin and theme development vary according to need and availability, starting at £50+VAT per hour for non-profit organisations, up to £90+VAT per hour for emergency work at short notice.

Advantages of Using Interconnect IT

1. UK based company formed near Liverpool, Merseyside in 1996. We have history, we have a reputation, and we’re accountable for our work. Yes, that means that if we did make a mess of your site (and we promise we won’t!) then you can easily pursue the legal options available to you in the UK. You can’t do that easily with an overseas firm.
2. We have good cultural understanding - that means we’re more likely to have a clear understanding of your requirements and needs. In our experience that means we’re far far quicker and use up less of your valuable time.
3. If you’re also in the UK you can turn up at our offices. We’re easy to find. In fact, we even give maps to help you - that means you can have affordable face to face meetings for complex projects. We’ll even come to see you in some circumstances.
4. Interconnect IT is led by software engineers, not hackers or people who’ve learned a bit of web stuff on the side. That gives us the depth of knowledge and experience to do the difficult things. We’re behind some of the most important software implementations in Europe, some of which handle billions of Euros and Pounds and is trusted not to muck things up. If your blog or site is critical to you then you only want to trust people with a solid reputation and approach to work.
5. All our work is properly invoiced, logged and traceable - that means you have the right paperwork, and you won’t find yourself with awkward tax bills at a later date.
6. Everything we do goes through an SVN repository, meaning that all code modifications are logged and rollbacks are trivially easy to carry out.
7. We’re commercial and professional developers - that means we’re not just there for the good times, but there when you have emergencies and problems to resolve too.

Our WordPress Services

• Theme design and development
• Plugin development
• Styling of objects
• Installation and integration of third party plugins
• Migrations from one server to another, with advice and support available
• Advice and guidance on installation, management and support of WordPress sites
• Bandwidth, performance and efficiency consulting for busy sites
• Reliable hosting (for selected clients only)
• WordPress MU installation, customisation, theme design, hosting and management for companies and organisations who want to host multiple blogs and provide a simple, low cost platform to their users

Come and Visit us in Liverpool

We’re conveniently based in the center of Liverpool - many people particularly enjoy designing with a developer who they can sit next to, bounce ideas around with and get to know well. If this is your preference our offices are a great place to work and close to many of Liverpool’s tourist attractions, making it a particularly attractive day out for many people based in the North West of England and North Wales.
If you prefer we can also come to your own office location, throughout Europe and the World, depending on the work required. In this case you may well be hiring us on a time & labour basis, and we have a specific chargeable rate for work of this nature. Please contact us for more information.

If you’re interested in our WordPress services contact us on 0151 709 7977 (+44 151 709 7977 from outside the UK) or complete our contact form for a free initial consultation.

Old dogs, new tricks

Many of the most prominent global brands have realised that a blog can provide a useful insight into work in progress for casual visitors, and a glimpse of things to come for information-hungry surfers looking for clues about the latest development. Company blogs, typically found as sub-sections of larger sites, open up a new type of dialogue between you and your customers, and, because the content is relatively unstructured compared to the more austere forms of traditional B2B/B2C communication, information can be presented in new and appealing ways.

General promotion

We recommend that a blog should be a useful addition to your site, rather than the focus of it. This is an opportunity to reveal the human side of your operation and to forge a bond with your clients, albeit in a different manner from that to which you may be accustomed. Using a blog to talk about your products in a new, less overly commercial manner can also appeal to visitors who have grown immune to the relentless ‘pitch and sell’ of modern marketing.

Newsletter

Blogs can be transcribed to an easy to read newsletter format, which your visitors can choose to opt into with no future obligation. We suggest sending out a newsletter perhaps once every two to three months which will ensure your content is varied, up to date, and contains articles and content which is fresh, and hopefully therefore of interest to your subscribers. Newsletters continue the relationship with your customers that started when they first bought from you, and will maintain an important line of communication even if the recipient isn’t currently a regular client.

Development

New Product Development is always received well by clients, and letting your visitors see how your product offering is changing or evolving is a good way to build a rapport without giving away too much information to your competitors! Information like this which may not normally be a feature of your sales portfolio can be a diverting interlude for visitors, and will encourage long term interest rather than the brief and isolated interaction of one-off sales.

In the pipeline

Similar to new product development announcements, blogs can be used to trail events, products or services that you may wish to introduce in future. The interactivity of the blog format means that you can canvas your visitors for their opinions, giving customers a sense that their feedback is genuinely sought and valued, and giving them further reason to invest emotionally in your organisation.

Conclusion

The blog format is changing the way individuals and companies are interacting, and can be an exciting way for companies to sell to clients without encountering the restraints associated with more static forms of selling. With the right tone and structure, a blog can be a new and subtle weapon to sell to your clients, and as we move towards an increasingly competitive and interactive business future, the importance of building lasting relationships with your clients can only increase. Blogs are a cost effective and engaging way to start.

Over 30,000 page views a week

Well controlled costs

High availability

Sniff Petrol is a well known and highly regarded satirical site with its focus on motorsport and the car industry. After six years, however, updating the site had increasingly become something of a chore for the site owner.

At this point friends had recommended producing a blog style site. Unfortunately, creating an attractive and interesting blog theme that moved the design of the site forwards rather than backwards had proved problematic for Sniff Petrol. This is where Interconnect IT were able to become involved, solving a whole raft of problems.

The problems solved can easily be listed:

1. Difficulty in making updates
2. Lack of creative freedom
3. Having to maintain a separate archive page by hand
4. A need for a more modern design that connects with the old site
5. RSS Feeds to allow visitors to keep up with changes to the site
6. Analytics to allow monitoring of traffic and to see which features are most popular

We also wanted to make sure that the site could be accessible to the widest range of users possible, using many different platforms.

With these criteria in mind, we created a standard blog layout with floating panels for the content, lying on an orange ‘page’, and with navigation elements shown on the page through cut-out panels. This gives the site a contemporary, layered feel.

Elements on the site are now managed dynamically - so for example, if the owner wishes to create a new category for articles, it won’t appear in the navigation panel until it’s populated with content. Then, if a visitor selects this category, it is highlighted, helping the visitor to know where in the site they’ve found themselves.

The underlying publishing platform is WordPress, a popular blogging and web publishing tool that’s put over a million websites online. By plugging into its APIs we are able to add extra functionality without causing legacy problems in the future.

WordPress allows a range of blogging functions which help the professional blogger - for example, the ability to post date features means that content can be published automatically once the date has arrived. Useful for embargoed press releases, for example.

Other useful facilities include the ability to assign posts to different ‘users’ - on Sniff Petrol a users like Crazy Dave Coulthard, D.I. Blundell and Carcoat Damphands have been defined, and posts can then be written with them as the author.

Traffic Improvement

In order to deal with the greater technical requirements of the new site, as well as ensuring higher availability and regular backups, it was decided to move everything on to Interconnect IT’s servers. The initial load was high, with over 6,000 visitors per day within just a few days. People around the world quickly learned that there was a new version of the site and traffic climbed exponentially at first. A sudden increase in traffic can sometimes be disastrous to a blog, but our well specified server barely noticed the change.

Overall, with like-on-like comparisons, the site has seen an increase in visits by over 100% - measured in the short term. It’s likely that due to the more regularly updated content that, in the long term, the site’s traffic will grow considerably.

Months Later…

Site traffic continued to climb, and is now steadily at 600% over the original visitor levels. This meant some tweaking to maintain server performance and keep bandwidth bills reasonable. This huge increase in visitors has happened because not only is the site updated more regularly than before, it’s also easier to keep track off - there are 3,000 visits a day from RSS readers alone.

If you’d like a site like this one, why not contact us on 0151 709 7977 (+44 151 709 7977 from outside the UK) or complete our contact form for a free initial consultation.

60% More Visitors

120% More Page Views

Over 80 Visits to the Enquiries Form per Month

Accurate Cutting Services Ltd, in Redditch, Worcestershire is a successful engineering company, specialising in a range of cutting services for most sectors of industry, including aerospace and oil industried. As the company grows and consolidates its already strong position in the marketplace they needed a sophisticated and flexible website to reflect both their current situation and yet be easily extended to accommodate new products and services.

Their increasing range of sawing machines sales and servicing, blade sales and servicing and so on meant that the design had to be suited to visitors with widely varying needs. Easy navigation of a large site would be a priority.

The company had previously developed its website in-house, however, due to its static nature it had become time-consuming to keep it up to date and, as a consequence, the management of the company felt that it was due an overhaul. Given the nature of developing new websites in 2007, where there are now a multitude of web browsing technologies it was decided to approach a number of web design companies to propose solutions.

Interconnect IT were the winners of this process, we believe, for the following reasons:

• Flexibility of the platform, allowing the owners to significantly extend the content, and even to an extent the look and feel of the site
• Standards based approach, meaning that there is no ‘lock-in’ to Interconnect IT as the company’s web design & development contractors
• High quality code and graphic design
• Ability to add custom applications within the environment, as required
• Professional and attentive service

Due to the geographic distance between ourselves and the client, we made extensive use of web based collaboration tools, allowing us to show mockups and design ideas, discuss them with the client, and progress to a final design much more quickly than by relying on a series of expensive and time-consuming face to face meetings.

The company is now going through the process of loading additional content to their site, a process which will take some time to achieve due to their desire for a comprehensive site covering their large range of products and services.

Since going live the company has already enquired about a number of solutions to other business problems which we can solve and we look forward to working with them in the future.

If you’d like a site like Accurate Cutting’s, why not contact us on 0151 709 7977 (+44 151 709 7977 from outside the UK) or complete our contact form for a free initial consultation.

3 New Clients in 1 Month

132 Visitors Per Month

64 Visitors Requesting Contact Details Per Month

Having recently taken over Willows Mallorca, the new owners were keen to start growing their business. The old website was outdated and failing to generate business interest and a full replacement was required. With careful budget restraints due to the costs of the take-over an effective yet simple site needed to be created.

“Within one month of implementing our new site, enquiries started flowing and we’re already having to think about taking on extra staff.”

Mark & Clair Wilkinson - Willows Mallorca

Website Marketing

Although Interconnect IT has not been directly involved in marketing the Willows Mallorca website, the owners have taken an active interest in its promotion. By regularly reviewing the analytics reporting which we install on most of our client sites, they have been able to see the results of their real-world and online marketing campaigns. They can also see which online directories have genuinely increased their visitor count and led to goal conversions (where a visitor goes to a specific page, for example the contact form) and which are failing to give a good return for money.

By providing a website whose performance can be measured, the owners of Willows Mallorca now have the confidence to capitalise on online marketing. The website itself is fulfilling its function of informing visitors and sending them to the comprehensive enquiry form, so generating new business leads.

Visitors have complimented Willows Mallorca on the simplicity and ease of use of their website, especially when compared against rival companies.

Deriving business growth from internet and intranet products can be something of a challenge if you don’t understand the myriad technologies available.

We’re here to understand those problems for you, and to work with you to understand your business and how it can succeed from its use of technology. Whether you need a website to promote your business, or an intranet to manage your knowledge and information, we have the background and experience to give you a pain-free implementation.