We'll hold your hand the whole way.
Creating a website or video for your small business? We can help.
My name is Cori Mackin and when I'm not busy creating the next best online web service CarNudger.com, I love and have a passion for helping people to tell their stories using all of this techy stuff called digital media. If you want help creating a personal or small business website, video, blog or newsletter and find it all a bit too complicated, please give me a call. I mostly work on my own, but have a group of talented friends and colleagues who I can bring in to help on bigger assignments.
About me.
I started my career in Boston, USA working as a Membership Director for Boston Neighborhood Network Television and went on to work with Cablevision (now Comcast NBC Universal) to become the Producer Director of the Local TV studios serving Belmont, Lexington and Bedford, MA. Back in my day we used deck to deck editing!! Can you imagine? Now, I just drag and drop video wherever I choose, transitions are a breeze and adding music under and rolling credits over video has never been easier!!
Helping local organisations, businesses, charities and individuals tell their stories through media is what I truly love doing. I try to break down the digital barriers and make media accessible to those who find it all a bit too tricky or time consuming to do it themselves.
Of course I would love to create a website or video for you, but realise that if you are at all like me you would rather DIY your website. So, if that's the case, and you want to do it yourself great, just know that if you get stuck, I am happy to help and teach you how to create a website and also how to best shoot and edit your videos and publish them on youtube or vimeo and teach you how to include video on your website.
Below are a few helpful website tips to get you started and to learn more about creating video I recommend you visit the Oxford University Press Journals Video & Media Guidlines.
Services:
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Website design and development
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Social media page creation and content management
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SEO
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Google, Facebook and twitter ads
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Analytics
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Project collaboration
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pro-bono charitiable work
Mobile:
+44 (0) 7503 027 370
Do It Yourself
Creating your very first, website can be exciting and fun, but it might be a bit tricky at first.
Here are a few tips to help get you started.
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Register a website
domain name
This is your www.yoursitename.co.uk I use one.com for this. It can cost as little as 10.80 for the first year to have your own site and company email addresses. one.com offer great customer service, website templates and an easy to use site builder. They also offer file storage, php and mysql. The later is useful if your website will need to be data-driven and you are hoping to bring in a someone to do any tricky back-end work. Other webhosts may charge extra for email addresses. I've been using one.com for years now and recommend them.
Create your site using
a great website builder
If you want a fancier website with more choices for templates and a much better user interface, I would then have you go to wix.com to build your site. (Wix charges extra for emails so again that's why I would have you get the domain registered and the emails with one.com) Wix is simply the best web builder I have ever used. For some essential website design tips you'll want to read this is a wix blog post. There is absolutely no need for you to know any html coding and if you ever get stuck, the help and support offered are excellent - or you can give me a call of course : )
Find the Best Photos
Find the best photos that help tell your story. There are lots of online stock photo places, however be warned DO NOT use a photo stock site that forces you to sign up to a 1 year subscription if you don't cancel your free trial!!! These are bad sales tactics, disgusting really.
Transfer Your Domain
Wix is free until you decide to add your own domain to it, so I would suggest you do this part last, unless they are offering a good promotion. Some people are happy to use the free site, which has wix ads at the header and footer of the page, but if you are running a small business this can look a bit unprofessional, that said I have chosen to keep the wix ads on this site so you can see what they look like. So when you have a domain name from one.com and are happy with the site you've created using wix.com, you will need to transfer the domain to wix using wix's online instructions. If you find this bit tricky (I did at first) I can help, give me a call.
Earn Money with Ads
If you have a large following of users to your site you may want to consider placing ads on it as a way to earn a little money from your site. Be careful though you don't want to look like a spam site. Be considerate of your audience and try to choose ads appropriate to the content you provide on your site. The web service I use to find relevant ads is Affiliate Window.
This section is actually a good example of using ads on a website. When you, as a visitor to my site, click on this Affiliate Window link I will earn a small amount of money called an EPC or Earnings Per Clic. Other links might offer a certain percentage per conversion (that's when you actually buy something after clicking on the link.) It's not much, but over time every click and conversion ads up.
The ad on the right about selling your car, while it's cute, just seems a bit out of place on this site about creating websites, but I may put it on another website I have created called www.CarNudger.com please go take a look : )
If you use ads on your site you will also need to let your site visitors know that you are using cookies. To learn more and generate a free cookie pop-up alert on your site I recommend using cookie-script.com.
Promote your great
new website & Build with SEO in mind.
Lastly, remember to promote your new site, tell all of your friends about it, and update the SEO options within your new wix site!!
On each page that you create in wix.com you can easily update the details about how you want that page to appear in google searches. And google will look at these page descriptions to ensure relevance before showing them in searches. So if you have a page
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Have fun!
Whether you call me for help or choose to do it all yourself, I wish you the very best of luck. And if this has been helpful I would love to know about it, so please send me an email so I can check out your new site.
Ask people who know me in Windsor, I just love helping people with their websites and creating videos and my biggest reward is in helping local mums and small businesses - who are working on a start-up budget - to achieve their online and video goals. Please see a few testimonials below.
I look forward to hearing from you.
All the best,
Cori Mackin
+44 (0) 7503 027 370
TESTIMONIALS
TESTIMONIAL
"Cori is the most gifted website developer I have ever met and I am immensely grateful to her for the work she has done for me. As a hopeless technophobe and lacking time and marketing skills Cori was able to advise, guide and support me every step of the way through the entire process of developing a website for my private psychotherapy practice. The success of my website in generating referrals has confirmed that Cori understood the complex nature of my work as well as the needs of my clients. Anyone who is looking to find a web designer who is able to deal with every aspect of website design and marketing should use Cori. In my opinion there is no one better than her. Antje Brown " Antje's website
TESTIMONIAL
"I contracted Cori on behalf of Surrey Music to video record our 10th Anniversary celebration which included the marriage of our Founder and CEO. From the start she demonstrated an incredible degree of perception, understanding the whole context, encompassing both the 'corporate' need and the very personal nature of the event. Tremendous attention to detail, a 'film-makers' mind, devising the elements that would be included to deliver the desired finished product, she took responsibility for so many aspects, including drafting in assistants to enable her to cover multiple angles and obtain differing perspectives throughout the 15 hour day. Her manner is highly collaborative, superbly professional in all her dealings, sensitive to personalities & protocols she brought a refreshing insight, breadth of expertise before, on the day, in the editing and post hand over. We received a superb 'documentary', a very special record of a momentous and memorable day for our Society, and a personal and intimate record of our Founder's wedding. A charming lady, an outstanding videographer whose work is exceptional. Hire her." Amanda (Baden-Powell) Fisackerly, www.surreymusic.org
RECENT PROJECTS
On 12 September 2015, I videotaped the Surrey Music 10 Year Anniversary and Wedding Celebration of the Choir Director to his partner of 16 years. It was a great big fun event with loads of singing and laughing and tears of joy. With volunteers from the organisation I shot and edited the event and captured heart warming interviews. The video here https://youtu.be/ahBzkF_eIpg is just the opening, to view the entire event please contact www.surreymusic.org
WORK IN PROGRESS
&
FEES
Creating your great new website should not cost the earth!
If in your downtime from work you would rather be out walking your dog or playing with your kids than fussing around with setting up a website or revamping an existing one, I am sure I can help.
Initial set-up - £150+vat. This fee covers the cost of registering or transferring your domain, set-up of your wix web builder subscription and webhosting, transfer of the new or existing domain to wix, email set-up, and creation of a facebook group page which links to your new site. (This fee includes the cost of the 1st year of the domain and webbuilder subscriptions.)
Design of a small website - starting from £225 +VAT for this amount I will work with you to understand your business needs and create your website. Please see a few recent examples below, and if you like what you see, I would love to help, so please get in touch.
www.Secret-beauty.co.uk
£375.00 + VAT
For secret-beauty.co.uk, I transferred the domain/web address and emails from 1&1 to one.com and created a new site using wix. The transfer took just two hours and the whole site was created within one week. There are a few bits to tidy up still, but this is a good example of what I can do for a small business.
Inbound Capital
Inbound Capital is an independent partner to small/mid caps and start ups. They asked me to create this "Tronish" futuristic one-page website. Inbound Capital are a connected, sharp and well respected team of financial investors who help small mid and start up companies get the capital and other resources they need to grow. This is just the beginning.
Antje Brown
I worked with Antje Brown to help migrate content, register, and transfer the site domain to the current web platform and source all images. I also set-up all email addresses and made them accessible via webmail on personal devices, and created business cards.
Antje Brown is a local Windsor mother who also happens to be a very successful and highly regarded psychoanalytic psychotherapist. It is a pleasure to work with her.
