Eek. Spring has suddenly sprung into summer and summer into a drizzly version of spring, and all the while Tight Jeans and Jelly Shoes has remained as silent as a church mouse engrossed in a Bryan Jacques novel. Just where has the time gone? What on earth have we been up to? And while we’re at it, wouldn’t it be rather nice if the past simple of knit was knat?

Top 5 Spring/Summer Adventures

1. The launch of Lo-fi DIY
Aimed at renegade boys and tearaway girls with an adventure in their hearts and a taste for making things by hand, Tight Jeans and Jelly Shoes have launched a special monthly crafting night in association with vintage lovelies Ophelia Button. Taking place monthly at the Northern Quarter Craft Centre in Manchester city centre, it’s the perfect place to fashion a button brooch, knit a tea cosy or test out some performance poetry. For more information please visit the website of Manchester Craft Mafia.

2. Email sparketing for ArtsMix
Sparkly French Sophie of community arts organisation ArtsMix has engaged the Jelly Shoes contingent to add a little wit and whimsy to the group’s monthly email newsletter. Dedicated to the promotion of all things crafty in West Yorkshire and beyond, ArtsMix is the arts organisation behind the splendid Sunday craft market at Chancellor’s Court and the new spangly Loft project. Check out the latest events or register for their email newsletter at www.artsmix.co.uk

3. Oiling the wheels of Kuwait Finance Group Watheeqa
The internet is a funny but wonderful onion. Who’d have thought that a major financial institution in Kuwait would choose little old jelly shoes as its copy partner out of the myriad of internet marketing agencies out there. But thanks to our top notch search rankings – and our don for web copy – that’s exactly what happened this spring. Once the copy is complete, their website will be constructed to the highest specification courtesy of Tight Jeans build beauties Solutions Four. Watch out world!

4. Tight Jeans melt with Maison Bertaux
When you’re not admiring the Noel Fielding poems which adorn walls or tieing yourself in knots over which crème anglaise daubed dainty to post in your beak, you might take a moment to have a snoop around the delighful boutique in the basement of this wonky French patisserie on Greek Street in Soho. It’s truly to die for see. Run by a madame with a real nose for the sublime, no self-respecting belle would be de rigeur without a vintage inspired fripperie from this house of fun.

No wonder the Tight Jeans and Jelly Shoes team decided that it absolutely must get involved and lay its cloche hat at the alter of madame and friends. Who knows what the future may hold what with our copywriting skills and the delicousness of the items in that basement.

5. Tight Jeans and welly boots Mr Weatherman sir
Yep, striding the lanes of West Yorkshire in our wellington boots like a troop of horsey young ladies fresh out of Swiss finishing school. Lord love the traditional British summer and the puddles it produces.

As the web continues to become our cultural and communicative mainstay, so us copywriters are thrown more and more upon the skirts of this whimsical dame. Whether we choose to delight or dismay in the rolling tides of technological change is very much a personal choice, but it is clear that - like it or lump it - the future of writing lies very much in the realms of electronica rather than the ink-spattered media of the past.

And irrevocable changes to the way we write are already manifesting themselves throughout the industry as a result. The web makes very real and distinctive demands of those who choose its stormy seas as their lexical home, and many a strong sailor has already been lost to the sharp undercurrents of web accessibility, usability, and search engine optimisation.

These key factors have been responsible for shaping a new form of web-based expression, recognisable for its pared down lexicon and sentence structure, as web accessibility guidelines, usability studies and online advertising gurus all hail the era of simplicity over style. Short, practical, one-line statements are now the very thing so that the screen skimming world can digest information without the need for excessive concentration or contemplation.

Does all this normalisation of the fabric and form of our writing indicate an increasing subsidence of intellect among the reading and writing public? Or is it just that we lack patience when it comes to sifting the giant vat of information that is the web?

More than likely the former is tempered with liberal lashings of the latter, as anyone who regularly uses the net readily recognises the frustrations associated with sourcing and assimilating good quality, relevant information online. The change is also clearly spurred on by the positive intentions of the social inclusion camp, who seek to enable everyone to use the net regardless of nationality, educational background or disability.

And of course no one should begrudge this lofty aim, but you can’t help thinking that we’d never have had the Train Spottings, Mrs Dalloways or A Clockwork Oranges of this world if our writers were limited to a homogenous style and vocabulary that everyone could understand.

We’ll just have to keep some of our more unusual favourite words for scrabble I suppose.

For more creative copywriting thoughts please visit the home of our website copywriters.

Big changes are now afoot in the Tight Jeans and Jelly Shoes camp as we take our first tentative steps towards cross county domination.

Any doubts we may have had as to the prudence of our crossing the Pennines at this juncture have disappeared like the early morning wisps of fog in the sunshine as we settle into our wonderfully wonky new loft perch in the Northern Quarter.

Creative copywriting in Yorkshire and in Lancashire! Now there’s a recipe for fun and frolics. And what with our close working partnership with Yorkshire’s internet marketing elite and Manchester’s loveliest gang of web designers, it seems that we’re pretty much set up whichever geographical peg we choose to hang our hat on.

A well heeled foot in both counties no less!

And Overedge Studios, the scruffy lovable barn that we call our Manchester home is just perfect as our new roost. All it needs is a few more pendant lights and some well chosen vintage armchairs and we’ll be away.

Word seems to have got out that one of the finest creative copywriting forces in Yorkshire has crossed the Pennines too as we’ve already being pestered to work on lots of exciting new projects.

Hurray!

Read more about our latest adventures at our website copywriting home.

Manchester’s wonderful vintage-inspired accessory business Ophelia Button is appearing at the prestigious Kids.Modern exhibition in London on 24th February. Put on by those clever people at Showhome, Kids Modern promises to be awash with quirky desirables for kids and kidults created by leading international designers.

Think playful hanging pendant lamps, bright 60s pattern cushions and vintage style modular furniture with clean lines and colourful fittings, and marry that with lovely knitted owls, make your own wall paper and funked-up liberty style Scandinavian prints and you’ll be getting somewhere close.

Did we mention that supercool 70s snip and sew brand Clothkits are re-launching at the exhibition too? Remember those kooky marvels that your mum used to whiz you up as you eagerly poured over the catalogue? Well they’re back!

As Ophelia Button’s general PR and copywriting company, Tight Jeans and Jelly Shoes will be there on the day to cover all the exciting events as they unfold.

“I’m so excited about Kids.Modern that I can hardly bear it,” puts in Ophelia Button’s diminutive mastermind Nico Dawson. “I’ve been working hard to put together a very special collection of children’s jewellery for the day, along with a new collection of button canvases on various themes.

My Kids.Modern collection is inspired by the quirky lines and bold colours of 60s and the tea party glamour of the 40s and 50s. Everything is made lovingly by hand from vintage buttons, buckles and forgotten treasures coupled with today’s colours and durable fastenings.

Children appreciate really good design as much as adults do and I intend to give them a collection which will make them squeak with delight! ”

Kids. Modern takes place at Dulwich College London SE21 on Sunday 24th February between 10am and 4pm. Admission £5.

Don’t forget to look out for the launch of Ophelia Button’s new e-commerce website too! News coming soon at the home of our website copywriting.

Our professional Yorkshire copywriting team have been lucky enough to be engaged to work on the new website of leading artistic practitioner and emotional intelligence coach Vivienne Mee this month.

Using entertaining and engaging performance-based methods to help individuals and organisations understand how to manage change, transform cultures and achieve personal goals, Viv has over 20 years experience of helping people to find their vision and start looking towards a brighter future.

Leading artists, actors, business leaders, and politicians all regularly employ the empowering philosophy and methodology of Vivienne Mee Associates (VMA) to help them to operate at a truer and more engaging emotional level. And we’re starting to feel the power of their sunny approach rubbing off on us too!

“It has been brilliant to work with Vivienne,” comments Tight Jeans writer Katie Brown.

“Finding excellent clients which whom you really relate is one of the best parts of professional copywriting. Yorkshire is full of wonderful boutique businesses all providing valuable and highly skilled services and it’s fabulous to be asked to get involved with some of the really exciting things that are going on out there.”

More information on the VMA project coming soon at our website copywriting home.

While still evolving at a rapid rate, the world of new media advertising and promotions has already begun to emerge as a very different animal to the traditional agency model. Gone is the conventional partnership between creative director and copywriter; and in its place the burgeoning love affair between SEO consultant and copywriter.

As internet marketing agencies do bloody battle for top search rankings, with teams of link consultants working like battery hens for the golden Witchetty grub, so the stakes continue to rise for online copywriters.

Producing glorious sales concepts, witty, arresting straplines and persuasive product information in line with visual parameters no longer cuts the mustard. Without an exceptionally strong keyphrase analysis and a long term search strategy at your side, you won’t be able to create market sensitive copy which reaches its target market and makes the sales you’ve been charged with generating.

So where’s the vital project information going to come from? Who’s going to research, assimilate and format the data that will enable you to create hard hitting and commercially powerful copy?

Why your new best friend of course - the professional SEO consultant.

Armed with a variety of analytics tools and an incredible nouse for how to play the online market, your brand new digital bedfellow will help you to identify unique sales angles and effective methods for achieving maximum search visibility.

Shack up with a messianic number cruncher with creative flair and killer instinct, and with their input you’ll be able to create copy which sets the world on fire and brings the search engines racing, sirens blaring.

Together you’ll be able to offer genuine long term benefits to clients too, with your dexterous SEO consultant monitoring changes in the market and you regularly tweaking the online copy to the reflect the findings of their ongoing research.

Find the right SEO consultant to work with and you’ll optimise your online clout tenfold. It could be a genuine match made in heaven with the god Google beaming benevolently down upon both of your heads.

Lovely.

Read a Q&A session with leading SEO Consultant Rob Hartley at the home of Yorkshire online copywriters Tight Jeans and Jelly Shoes.

We love commercial copywriting. Spinning witty web taglines out of inauspicious indices and fashioning propitious paragraphs from maudlin prose is our bread and butter at Yorkshire’s Tight Jeans and Jelly Shoes.

We thrive on weaving assonance and eloquence in each and every reference. Our homophones have overtones so subtle they elude reproach. Compound adjectival phrases, a leap of faith across the pages, collocation and pronunciation, articulation and punctuation. (Sorry we digress).

There are a number of basic rules which govern commercial copywriting as with any sort of writing that is intended to be read and understood. You’ve got to ensure that your grammar and punctuation are spot on so that people can easily apprehend your meaning and derive the impression you intend them to derive from what you’ve written.

Standard punctuation allows copywriters a certain amount of freedom to stylise their prose. Separating a list of items with semi colons instead of commas for example, or using a colon instead of a comma within a sentence enables you to either elevate the tone or create dramatic tension.

In general however, rules are rules and if you want to be clearly understood by your readers you need to use standard punctuation in a commonly accepted way.

There’s only really one punctuative character which divides copywriters, editors and readers across the English speaking world in terms of its correct usage, and that’s the humble hyphen.

Read more about the plight of the hyphen at the home of Yorkshire’s commercial copywriting lovelies Tight Jeans and Jelly Shoes.

It’s every website copywriter’s dream to be given the carte blanche on a large scale, public facing website. The ‘here’s the keys, now make yourself at home’ approach is a rather great privilege and means you’re held in pretty high regard by whoever has given you the green light to put your stamp all over their lovely shiny new website.

It’s a good job the website copywriters at Yorkshire’s Tight Jeans and Jelly Shoes abound in initiative and genuinely know their assonance from their elbow isn’t it? Otherwise the organisation behind new official York tourism website ‘Know About York’ might have been in for a nasty surprise when version one went live in early 2008.

Read more about the new project at the home of Yorkshire website copywriters Tight Jeans and Jelly Shoes

Especially at this time of year. So it’s a little unusual for us to be donning scarves and coats and trooping off for an outdoor meeting with a client. Their name should’ve been a give away I suppose.

Garden Euphoria are a new outdoor living brand with some pretty unorthodox yet inspirational ideas about how we should be using our gardens and when. What with Winter garden party accessories, tables and chairs that become vases when they are not being used, luminous gravel and giant garden beds for people rather than flowers – the mind boggles.

Learn more about the unlikely friendship between muddy visionaries Garden Euphoria and website copywriting lovelies Tight Jeans and Jelly Shoes at the home of our Yorkshire SEO copywriting services.

Yes you heard it here first! Professional Yorkshire SEO copywriters Tight Jeans and Jelly Shoes (us) today launch the Yorkshire Good Web Copy Guide (hurrah!).

The fun and informative document is designed to help fledgling web copywriters and people working outside of the industry hone their online copywriting technique.

The document is available for download at the home of our Yorkshire web copywriting empire from this afternoon. Tuck in!