A Fresh Approach to Bridal Shop Software

BRIMAS software improves bridal shop efficiency by reducing administrative tasks, eliminating waste and maximising sales and marketing opportunities.

UK IT support company, Clicknetworks is to officially launch in March 2011, the World’s first platform independent browser based software, to help bridal shop owners manage their business more efficiently and retain more customer’s by adding value to their sales.

The new software called BRIMAS (Bridal Retail Information Management and Accounting System) enables owners to manage their shop anytime, from anywhere by centralising the vast majority of wedding shop processes into one single online software system and database.

BRIMAS combines the central features of a Point of Sale (POS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), stock inventory, diary planner and accounts management system into the one program, aiming to deliver significant time and cost savings to the bridal shop owner.

“By integrating features found in many different programs and by eliminating manual tasks and time consuming paperwork, Brimas not only reduces costs on software, hardware, stationary and accountancy fees, it also gives shop owners the freedom to spend more time concentrating on the creative parts of their business rather than the mundane administrative tasks”, said BRIMAS Business Manager, John Mahaffy.

The software is designed specifically for bridal industries and was developed in the UK over a two year period working in close consultation with bridal retailers and suppliers to create a product that meets the needs and expectations of modern bridal shops and boutiques.

Mr Mahaffy said, “Bridal shops today are faced with a number of technology and software options to enhance their business, however very few are designed to meet the specific needs of bridal retailers”.

“While most bridal software packages focus solely on organising your business, BRIMAS takes it to the next level by helping you build a profitable and scalable business by streamlining customer development and automating marketing practices”.

“After the first day of listening to shop owners it became clear that many of them were struggling to effectively use technology and the internet to build their sales and run their business more efficiently”

“We recognised early on the importance of providing software that does not box clients in or force them down a particular process. Each and every shop is different and unique but they all share some core processes”, said Mr Mahaffy.

The sale of a wedding dress can involve several different stages and appointments.

BRIMAS caters for this unique type of sale by offering a multi-stage approach to the process.

This accommodates for the 'stop and start' nature of wedding sales whilst keeping overall control.

Various stages of the sales process which BRIMAS tracks through to completion:

• Gather initial customer/wedding information quickly
• Browse and shortlist products anytime
• Finalise dress selection
• Record customer measurements
• Order dress and accessories
• Manage appointments
• Print and electronically store contracts and invoices
• Manage fittings and amendments

The BRIMAS system includes various tools to aid with bridal shop management.

The system is capable of tracking and storing a wide range of data which is then made available to a manager for marketing campaigns and financial control.

A reporting suite featuring interactive charts and graphs makes it easy for shop owners to understand their business at a glance including key metric sales data such as:

• Best selling dresses
• Best selling accessories
• Most shortlisted dresses
• Most shortlisted accessories

“BRIMAS makes it easy for bridal shops to increase sales by selling a better experience to their customers than their competition can provide”, said Mr Mahaffy.

To access BRIMAS all you need is an internet connection and a web enabled device, this means the system can help bridal shops fit their business around the customer’s lifestyle.

For example, BRIMAS makes it possible for staff to conduct a sales consultation and measurements within the privacy of the customer’s home and outside of core opening hours.

“Creating a personalised experience, especially for brides with special needs is essential when you have customers contemplating a huge purchase. The more proactive a retailer is, the more likely it will be to pull in the right customers”, said Mr Mahaffy.

BRIMAS also makes it easy for shops to proactively take more appointments from their website to retain more customers.

BRIMAS reinforces the bridal shop’s reputation for excellent customer service by offering customers the opportunity to book appointments online through the booking function.

The “Book an Appointment” web lead facility enables shops to conduct an initial consultation gathering the important details prior to the customer visiting the shop. This allows shop owners to order stock, prepare and control first impressions before the customer enters the shop.

A key requirement in the design and development of BRIMAS was to make the interface easy to use and as intuitive as possible, so that shop owners would not have to spend large amounts of time and money on training staff to use the system.

BRIMAS has been designed with a friendly touch-screen interface that can be run from any web-enabled device, including PCs, Macs, tablet PCs and mobile phones. 

To ensure that Brimas meet their customer’s expectations, they employ their own full-time technical support, customer service, and software development teams here in the UK.

The company is currently seeking UK bridal shops to participate in the Beta testing phase of the product before its official launch in March 2011. For more information and to register your interest in participating in the Beta Testing program please visit: http://www.brimas.co.uk/register/

Ends

Notes to editors

1. BRIMAS is an online Bridal Retail Information Management and Accounting System developed by Clicknetworks Ltd based in Glasgow, United Kingdom. The system has been developed over a two year period following a close consultation with bridal retailers and suppliers. The online software is fast, secure and easy to use, and no computer skills are necessary. Affordable for shops of all sizes, and available from £35 per month, the system requires no expensive set-up or hardware costs and allows the shop owner, to manage their shop anytime, anywhere.
   
   
   Website: http://www.brimas.co.uk
   
   Email: info@brimas.co.uk
   
   
   
   
2. Clicknetworks Ltd was formed in 2005 by a team of IT professionals from a variety of professional backgrounds who came together to provide a complete end to end IT support, services and solutions to the business community. Based in Glasgow, the company has grown over time purely by customer recommendation to
   
   
   Website: http://www.clicknetworks.co.uk
   
   Email: info@clicknetworks.co.uk
   
   
3. For more information please contact: John Mahaffy, Brimas Business Development Manager, Clicknetworks Ltd. Phone: +44 (0)141 530 9116 or email:  john@clicknetworks.co.uk
   
   

BRIMAS - Bridal Shop Software Launched

Clicknetworks recently launched a new product for the UK Bridal Industry at the British Bridal Exhibition in Harrowgate between the 12th and 14th of September. The Bridal Shop Software called BRIMAS (Bridal Retail Information Management and Accounting System) has been developed over a two year period following a close consultation with bridal retailers and suppliers. The online wedding and bridal software is fast, secure and easy to use with no computer skills necessary! Affordable for shops of all sizes, requires no expensive set-up or hardware costs and allows you, the shop owner, to manage your shop anytime, anywhere on any platform or device (i-pads, i-phones, touchscreens, blackberrys etc). For more information visit the BRIMAS Bridal Shop Software - Beta Preview Website.

Clicknetworks invests in fibre optic & high performance virtual machine cluster

Clicknetworks has announced its plan to build an ultra high-speed fibre optic broadband network.

The investment in the new technology infrastructure comes just shortly after the company announced they were to move all of their client’s data to a high performance virtual machine cluster.

The virtual machine cluster is reported to run on a 2 terabyte iSCSI SAN custom built by the Clicknetworks Computer Engineering team.

“The high performance virtual machine cluster will enable higher availability and greater density for our managed data. This means our hosted websites will be faster and our client’s data will be faster to access as well as providing a faster and more reliable backup”, said Craig Smith Systems Architect for Clicknetworks.

Clicknetworks software development team are currently developing a number of cloud based applications where high loads and high demand are anticipated. It is hoped that the new investment in information technology will enable Clicknetworks to support that future demand as well as enable their business clients to capitalise and use a technology framework usually reserved for large corporations and scientific / educational institutions.

“If we take a look at the big players like Microsoft and Google as well as look at current industry trends and the popularity of many cutting edge online applications that are based on subscription services, it is clear to us that the future of IT exists in the cloud. Software as a service is something we are going to see become common place in the not too distant future”, said Andrew Beattie, Digital Strategist at Clicknetworks Ltd.

Enhance your website through Microformats & Google Rich Snippets

Microformats and rich snippets allow you to enhance your website in the SERP's (search engine result pages) and indirectly increase your clickthru rates and visitor traffic. Over the past year, search engines such as Google have started using Microformats to enhance their search results for users. Let’s look at how this can work with reviews, people and events.

Reviews




You may have noticed in Google's search results product reviews appearing before the rest of the search result listings. Sometimes these reviews feature star ratings. Google calls such listings ‘rich snippets’, which are most often based on the hReview microformat standard. If you have product reviews on your website, hReview gives you the opportunity to mark up single user-generated reviews and an overall score of multiple reviews. In the image above, reviewer name and date of review can also be included in the search result.

More information on how Google uses the hReview microformat

People



If you have searched for a collegue or friend in Google before you may have noticed that sometimes their name, location and job title is in the SERP's. These results are rich snippets that Google uses based on the hCard microformat standard.

hCard is dedicated to marking up data that describes contact and social networking information. hCard can describe names, job titles, locations and the name a person is associated with.

More information on using the hCard microformat from Google


Events



Some website's like The List, have event information displayed in Google's SERP's. This is because they have marked up their events data using the hEvent microformat standard. hEvent describes information such as event location, start date and time, and event name.

More information on using the hEvent microformat from Google


Benefits of Microformats

Microformats benefit the search engines in that it enables them to understand the data they collect more semantically and to easilly extract this data and incorporate and syndicate it across other contexts and mediums. This means they are able to deliver more relevant and timely results faster and easier to the end user.

Microformats also enable website's to distribute their content more effectively and thus indirectly gather more visitors through increased click-thrus to that data. If you are a website with lots of information on reviews, people or events then you should consider investing the time to convert your existing data to a microformat that will have a real effect on the bottom line of your business and give you a major advantage over you competitors in the SERP's.

Google do not accept all website's that have rich snippet microformat data, but are instead reviewing sites on a case by case basis. To be included in Google's rich snippet SERP, they recommend webmaster's submit their website's for review through this form.

If you would like to find out how Clicknetworks can help your company or organisation enchance its online presence and gain more traffic through microformats and rich snippets then simply contact us.

Google Caffeine and its impact on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

There has been a lot of buzz recently in the blogosphere about Google's new planned search architecture update codenamed "Caffeine". This new architecture has been designed to return results faster and to better deal with rapidly updated information from social media services including Facebook and Twitter. Google claims that the new search tool will improve the speed, accuracy, size, and comprehensiveness of Google search.

In the latter half of last year developers were given a preview opportunity to test out the new search architecture in the Google Caffeine Sandbox. Our initial testing showed that the new search update was very quick returning results in around half the time of the current setup. Other differences we noted was the impact upon search engine optimisation which seems to focus more on heavier keyword weighting and the importance of the domain's age.

So when is Google Caffeine going live?

There is a lot of speculation on blogs that Google Caffeine is live on around 80% of data centres. Unfortunately, there has been no official confirmation from Google yet that the new service is live, however some users will note a different Google search and results interface and some website owners will notice a shuffle in their rankings.

Ensuring your website does not lose its current ranking

We suggest that website owners and SEO specialists should take notice of Google’s rules in Webmaster Central to ensure they do not lose their rankings in the search results for major keywords. More specifically we suggest the following:

1. Do not copy other website’s copy. Google now checks for duplicate content and will penalise site’s with similar text content. Obviously, the website that has been online the most will contain the original content and won’t be penalised.

2. Do not duplicate the same content over and over again through doorway pages on the same domain. Your website may be flagged for duplicate content and you might lose significant positions for all your major keywords.

3. Do not hide keyword text or provide different results for Google other than what a normal user would see. Google has made it algorithm more sophisticated recently to catch out people who abuse the system. Exceptions to this rule can include tabbed content. As long as the content can be opened and closed by a user script this should not be a problem.

4. Do not link to suspected link farms or site’s which seem to be setup only for the purpose of obtaining a better Page Rank.

5. Do not Spam the Open Directory or Yahoo Directory with multiple listings for the same URL. Google does take into consideration whether a site is indexed with ODP and Yahoo and awards a higher weight for sites that have been included. Yahoo informs us that they are currently in the process of weeding out and penalising sites that have attempted to bypass their one URL policy. Those websites that have multiple listings in Yahoo may very soon find out that there domain has been permanently banned.

We advise all our clients to play by the rules. Yes there are unscrupulous SEO companies out there that will perform black hat techniques to get their client’s website to the top of Google, but for how long will their shady techniques last? I suspect not long as the major search companies perform ever more sophisticated checks to ensure the quality of their indexes. Matt Cutt’s from Google tells us that the single most important thing for webmasters to ensure good future rankings for their website in Google, is to provide high quality original and engaging content for their key audience. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?

Epilepsy Scotland's 2010 WAGS Dinner

Clicknetworks were proud to sponsor Epilepsy Scotlands 2010 WAGS Dinner at the marriot hotel Glasgow, Friday 29th april.

This years event was extremely well attended, Guests were entertained by Still Game Host – Sanjeev Kohli, along with Guest Speakers former Rangers Player Kevin Drinkell, Radio Clydes Lorraine Herbison, Well Known Ayrshire Speaker, Hugh Drennan and Slvia Kelly.

One of the main Prizes on the Night was the Chance to win a new Apple IPAD, by purchasing a key for the safe, over 120 keys were sold on the night and 1 lucky winner will soon be the proud owner of the new IPAD.

Mind Mapping - migrating your thoughts from mind to desktop

As a software development company, we will often get provided with very open-ended tasks that tend to require some good old common sense and organisation in order to develop the ideas from concept to .NET Application.

Whilst some people may be better organised through writing extensive documents and papers and others prefer an audible (sound of their own voice) approach; personally I am strongly of the visual type. I understand concepts and ideas best when I can see them laid out in front of me using short "to the point" language and with necessary connections drawn out and connected. One powerful way for someone like me to organise and connect ideas together is by developing personal mind maps.

If you've never created a mind map before, why not give it a try when planning your next project or meeting! It's much faster and easier than you may think and is certainly worth every highly organised minute!

While many other pieces of software exist to help you in migrating your floating thoughts from mind to desktop screen, if you're not ready to invest in power commercial products such as MindGenius (http://www.mindgenius.com) or Inspiration (http://www.inspiration.com) then my personal recommendation is to give FreeMind a go!

Available from http://freemind.sourceforge.net/ , FreeMind is a handy open-source mind mapping tool that allows you to develop mind maps from the smallest basic layout of your big ideas to the grandest designs of complex *interactive* maps. See their website for some fairly extensive examples!

With great little built-in icons and handy "snap-to" movement, FreeMind lets you get the job done quickly with minimal fuss and learning curve! When your ready you can export your MindMaps to a variety of formats including PDF, XHTML (with Flash for interactivity!) as well as SVG, JPEG and many other commonly used formats.

If you do eventually feel like moving up to more powerful software the format of FreeMind's files is all in XML allowing you to import your existing FreeMind mind maps with minimal bother - so provides a perfect starting point for anyone who would like to give mind mapping a go.