Our Digital Services Manager, James Bird, was in London yesterday for the annual Online Marketing Masterclasses event, organised by Econsultancy. This industry event was attended by marketing professionals from the likes of Tesco, Marks & Spencer, The Guardian, Virgin Atlantic and John Lewis.

The day was split into three sections: Acquire, Convert and Retain & Grow, with speakers from The Telegraph, BSkyB, Dell, The Carphone Warehouse and others sharing their experiences of search engine optimisation (SEO), social networking and ecommerce.

As well as being a great opportunity to share experiences and ideas with likeminded professionals and do a spot of networking, it was reassuring to hear industry experts at such a high level advocating practices and approaches that we employ on web marketing projects for our clients.

We are planning on distilling much of what was covered to present in a future seminar. In the meantime, if you would like to discuss your online marketing and how we can help, get in touch.

For the fourth consecutive year Absolute has been chosen to produce the prestigious Castle College University Level Courses Guide.

We were delighted to win the three way pitch with what we feel are some of our most creative designs for this exciting sector.

Following on from the success of the Further Education Prospectus earlier in the year, our success came from really challenging the brief and pushing the brand even further.

In addition to satisfying the graphic design and print production requirements of the marketing team, all of the designs submitted for the pitch were presented to a panel of current HE students at the college. The result; our designs were all in the top three selected!

The 76 page document will enable potential students to find out what's on offer at the College and explain the additional support services available to them.

We can't show you the chosen design as this won't be published until the New Year, but here are some of the runners up.

Kensington OH was formed by three leading occupational health consultants who wanted to offer expert advice to businesses without a full time Chief Medical Officer and needed help with forming strategies and solutions for problems involving health and work.

Absolute was asked to undertake a full marketing communications strategy for the new business, ranging from brand development and stationery, through to a sales brochure and a CMS driven website.

Although the website only contained five pages and a contact form, as with all of our websites, we used our own CMS to build the site. This has the advantage of being very Search Engine Optimisation compatible, allowing our clients to individually specify title pages, URL re-writing, H1 H2 H3 headers, alt tags and meta data in addition to on-page content.