Personalised Gift Ideas

Our Blog is moving!

2010-05-29T04:29:00.000-07:00

Hello Wilderness,

A few people have contacted us about all the changes they have noticed going on down at the old PGI HQ. Although we have had a Blog and Twitter for some time now we have not been as active as we perhaps could (or should) have been and hence the changes ...

Our marketing manager (Dawn) will now be taking over the Social Networking aspect of the business as well as many of the other marketing duties previously carried out by the company directors.

We have replaced the website Homepage links (to some of our other smaller retail websites) with our Social Media buttons for Facebook, Twitter, our Blog and our upcoming Affiliate Network.

We have changed our profiles from the friendly (but infrequent) company director to the friendly (and very frequent) company profile which will be managed by Dawn from now on. I shall ensure I have the relevant passwords to sneak in the occasional, "Hello Wilderness ... " post!

We shall be actively recruiting affiliate partners from the 1st of June 2010 and fully expect to launch a strong affiliate program from mid June.

Our PGI (Personalised Gift Ideas) Newsletter will become a regular feature and will feature product discount codes as will our Facebook profile.

This could well be our 2nd last post from blogspot as we will be fully integrating a wordpress blog within our website structure to enable us to build and enhance on our company structure and profile.

So it truly is change at PGI but it's not all going to change because we will always be approachable, contactable and will always take a pride in our products and service.

Adios for now ...

Robert O'Rourke
Company Director
Personalised Gift Ideas Ltd

Engraving Machines and Software!

2010-05-04T08:41:00.000-07:00

Hello Wilderness,

Despite working during part of Bank Holiday Monday our best efforts were foiled somewhat by one of the Engraving Machine Laptops giving up on us - The horrible grinding noises from the Hard Disk suggested it was terminal!

Thankfully we have a few engraving machines so although slowed down somewhat we are back on track after replacing the laptop although it wasn't as easy as you may think as the engraving machines never liked Windows Vista and we therefore have to find Windows XP Laptops which isn't easy these days!

Anyway it just goes to show the potential dangers of not having spare machine capacity as we receive a lot of Next Day "Special Delivery" orders which would have been problematic if we were not geared up for volume.

Until the next time ....

Robert O'Rourke
Personalised Gift Ideas

Marketing Manager Post

2010-04-30T06:49:00.000-07:00

Hello Wilderness, It certainly has been too long since my last post! So what is new? Well having settled into our new Business Unit we are now looking to expand and to that end are now advertising for a new Marketing Manager.

So why does a UK Online company need a Marketing Manager? It seems a reasonable question but unlike most of our competitors we actually carry out a lot of Personalisation "In House". With cutting edge Engraving Machines and also Gold Blocking and Sublimation equipment we are well placed to expand into many other markets.

We have also updated our Website to allow image uploads for some of our photo gifts and also integrated a discount coupon system to start offering promotions so sign up for our newsletter now!

With First Communion and Confirmation Season now upon us our attention is now turning towards our Wedding Gifts category and we have been adding some new products to categories such as Best Man Gifts.

Once we get our Marketing Person onboard we will be sending out more Newsletters and updating our Blog on a more regular basis. But until then it's goodbye from all the staff at Personalised Gift Ideas.

2009-11-06T15:28:00.000-08:00

Hello Wilderness,

Our apologies for the phones ringing out today - BT installed our new lines late yesterday and guess what? .... They were'nt working today! We may have further teething problems with our change of address but keep Emailing us as although we have no phone lines or broadband it gives us a good reason to nip home and use the home office!

We are hoping for a Monday fix but will use our home systems to get up to date with any orders and enquiries so bear with us.

Other News? We are very pleased and excited to announce that we are very very close to launching our new range of Personalised Children's Jigsaws. We have commissioned a top UK Artist to design some really really great images ... watch this space!

All the very best from all at Personalised Gift Ideas.

Robert O'Rourke
Personalised Gift Ideas

We have moved!

2009-11-02T13:14:00.001-08:00

Hello wilderness.

Personalised Gift Ideas has moved. Well when I say "moved" it would probably be more accurate to say we are "moving" and now have one foot in our new door and one in the old!

We will be keeping our same phone numbers which switch to our shiny new premises this Thursday (5th November). Most of our machines have now been moved and I can tell you now - they are NOT light!

A whole weekend of moving machines and stock and we are still only about 70% there ... thank goodness it's just a short haul from the old to the new!

The last few weeks have certainly been a good example of interesting timing - A gifts company moving just before Christmas, Starting a Radio Advertising Campaign just as the Royal Mail escalate industrial action and the hire of a removal van to move premises on the wettest day in recent years!

We will post some photos once we settle in.

All the very best for the month of November from all the staff at Personalised Gift Ideas.

Website Relaunch

2009-10-15T06:52:00.000-07:00

Hello Wilderness,

If you have recently visited the website you may have been excused for thinking it wasn't our site. After three years we have decided it's time for a change! Just about anything that could have been changed has been changed.

There are more changes afoot as well ... From Monday 19th October we will be starting our Radio Advertising campaign and from 1st November 2009 we will have completed our move into an even larger premises that will allow us to expand our range of machinery and stock.

Let us know if you like our new look and for those who think Santa has made too early an appearance then I do agree but it's easier adding him now whilst our web developers are already working on our project.

All the very best from all the team at Personalised Gift Ideas.

Robert O'Rourke
Personalised Gift Ideas

Last Gasp August Update

2009-08-31T12:09:00.000-07:00

Hello Wilderness,

Since it is the last day in August and everyone seems to be enjoying the day off (except here in Scotland) I thought it time for a quick post.

Back to School has been quite a challenge for everyone at "Personalised Gift Ideas" with our Gold Blocking machines working constantly on Personalised Pencils. Since the closure of the Staedtler warehouse in Wales we have been unable to source HB Pencils of the quality our customers expect but worry not ... We have decided to continue using Staedtler for our HB ranges and are now buying direct from Germany!

On the Website upgrades both "Personalised Children's Gifts" and "Personalised Gift Ideas" are now fully upgraded though we are still considering a new Home Page design for "Personalised Gift Ideas".

In terms of new products we have a whole range of new products for our Anniversary, Baby and Christening categories but are currently backlogged on our Photo Studio schedule due to our customer focus on our Back to School ranges.

Another exciting development is the addition of our Photo Jigsaws. We have taken presentation to such a great level with Presentation Boxes Gold Blocked with our very own Jigsaw Logo.

Once again it's been a short update but the next year or so will see more frequent posts and more resources diverted to our Newsletters also.

Keep Well everyone until next time.

Robert O'Rourke
Personalised Gift Ideas.

July Update

2009-07-28T00:11:00.000-07:00

Hello Wilderness,

We have been contacted by a few people who have kindly let us know that we appear to have disappeared from Google!

Not to worry as this is because of major website upgrades that offer many new features - such as the facility to allow our customers to write reviews and post comments without having to Email them to us. As for Google .... Watch this space as we will be back very shortly!

What else is new? We have been expanding some of our ranges, adding new products as well as new categories. We are the company who offer choice so if you are looking for a Wedding Certificate Holder (for example) then you will see we have added a range that offers a choice from five designs rather than just one. We will go into a bit more detail in a later Blog regarding our website updates ... This little "Hello" was just to let everyone know you will soon find us back up and running in Google as well as all the other major search engines!

Keep Well,

Robert O'Rourke
Personalised Gift Ideas

What's new in June?

2009-06-05T14:55:00.000-07:00

Hello again wilderness and my appologies for the lack of contribution so far for 2009. So what is new since the last Personalised Gift Ideas Post? It's been a busy time for the team with many new products added to the website. As professional engravers we have have been asked to work on commisioned projects for companies such as Microsoft, USC, and the BBC but our main focus still remains on our retail sales to our every day customers.

We have been strengthening our team and have some exciting new developments in the pipeline so watch this space and see where it takes us.

Personalised Pencil Promotion

2009-01-18T11:57:00.000-08:00

With a reputation for the fastest UK Delivery of Personalised Pencils we thought we should start advertising and promoting our strengths. We have started with this 10% coupon code which can be used for our Coloured Pencils. Product Code: PGI098 Coupon Code (at checkout) PGIPROMO1 Offer valid until 28th February 2009.

Video Promotion takes about 30 seconds to load.

Merry Christmas from Personalised Gift Ideas

2008-12-24T01:35:00.000-08:00

Hello Wilderness,
Before we reflect on the year let us first of all wish all our customers a very Merry Christmas and a great 2009 to come. Our thanks as always for your custom and many kind comments you have given us over the year.

So what was 2008 like for ourselves? Well if I ignore the "too many hours and no break" routine and reflect on the positives then we have continued to expand both our product options, website portfolio and Personalisation Machinary.

On the website front we have added a "Trade" website as well as a Personalised Fantasy Gifts website - The gaming type of fantasy ... not the other type! Neither of the websites are fully up to speed and the Fantasy Site isn't even live yet but both will progress next year.

On the new machinery front we have added another engraving machine as well as purchasing Sublimation Equipment which will allow us to add mousemats, mugs and a whole lot of other less predictable gifts.

Our flagship website "Personalised Gift Ideas" has seen the introduction of not only a new logo but several modifications aimed at improving both the look and making the site easier to optimise for search engine rankings.

Well that's a far from complete summary of the year but it's Christmas Eve and I'm not convinced I should even be at work today as there isn't even any postal service and I can see the tumbleweeds floating past my desk!

Again our thanks for your continued custom and we look forward to seeing what the new year brings!

Until Next Year!

Robert

So what's the latest from "Personalised Gift Ideas"?

2008-11-01T03:52:00.000-07:00

Hello Wilderness,

So here we are on the 1st day of November writing a Blog on a freezing cold Saturday morning. So what's been happening since the last update on 21st October 2008?

Things started off well with some whirlwind website photography on our Photo Studio followed by some photoshop resizing and web uploads of amongst others a bit of "Bling" in one of our "Gifts for Her" sub categories: Presentation Gift Boxed Engraved Hip Flask Sets. Diamonte and More.

Due to our High Google Rankings for "Personalised Money Boxes" we thought we would add a Silver Plated Camper Van Money Box to our range Childrens Personalised Money Boxes

There have been several other updates with more than 200 more still planned and we will point out a few from time to time just to keep you updated.

Since we resized the website a month or so ago we have been able to add a bit more text to some of our main category descriptions. Why bother? Because the average website visitor doesn't always hang around long enough to appreciate that our prices include free UK delivery and full engraving and other personalisation as standard. Many if not most sites are happy to display attractive purchase prices but hide the additional costs until the customer is at the advanced stage of the checkout.

In the space of a few days we have have had the sad demise of two "much loved" laptops. Engraving Station 1 is currently out of action pending repair. Engraving Station 2 has a new laptop but the loss of saved engraving jobs and other software is a setback. All other stations are working fine.

Did you know .... ? that many laptop suppliers realized a niche in the business market and it's all down to just how bad windows vista is? It's true, My engraving machines just don't work reliably on windows vista and I have totally given up trying. Initially I bought some old xp laptops but they were sooo sooo slow. My latest laptop is a Toshiba that comes with windows vista fully installed but also with a special windows xp professional disc that totally wipes the hard drive and reformats for xp! This is a Toshiba disc as well .. not some 3rd party workaround!

Anyways, time to sign off and go do some work in this cold cold business unit. We have some exciting new products in development so hopefully we will update you all in due course.

A Fly On The Wall look at Personalised Gift Ideas 21/10/08

2008-10-21T04:56:00.000-07:00

Hello Wilderness. I've decided to change the focus of this blog into a "Fly on the Wall" account to the running of my business. So to the occasional tumbleweed floating past my way ... here is an update.

Today Tuesday 21st October is the day Celtic Fc face Manchester United in the champions league and if I'm being honest then I fear the worst for Celtic - If we somehow win then I'll amend this blog.

On the business side of things, I worked quite late last night on engraving software to design a 4" x 2" Brass Plaque for a frame maker which incorporated some fancy text and a logo with nice borders - Looked a treat even if I do say so myself. This has got me thinking that I could add a category to my Trade Website for designing large scale A4 Brass Plaques for businesses, after all our Engraving machines are top of the range. Here is a category from the Trade Website (click homepage to see a fancy plaque being engraved). Baby and Christening Gifts

In terms of Personalised Gift Ideas updates, I have finally added a description to another of my Presentation Gift Products (The Cocktail Shaker) Personalised Boxed Drinks Presentation Gift Sets

Another late night product update was adding the Personalised Newspaper Football Books to our Personalised Birthday Category. I really really like this product as the stories go back over 100 years in most cases and have reports from reporters of the day - not some tampered with "wise after the event" account. Here is the product ... The Essential Personalised History of your Favourite Football Team in Print

Today we will be working on our main website www.personalisedgiftideas.co.uk we will be going into the E Commerce software and looking at the Browser and Meta Description Tags, no small job with dozens of categories and around 1000 products.

For those who are interested, the Browser and Meta Descriptions on a websites are the descriptions a website owner supplies to the search engines about page content. If these are not completed then google will have to try and work it out for you .. usually with drastic results. Remember this if you ever build a website - you have to do a lot of things well to get rankings they don't just happen.

Todays author has been Robert (The Boss) It's like throwing a "message in a bottle" and waiting to see if it's found. (yes we do sell Personalised Messages in bottles as I recall!

Personalised Gift Ideas: Engraving Tips.

2008-10-18T07:04:00.000-07:00

Anyone familiar with our Online Personalised Gift Ideas website will be aware that we have a large variety of Engraved Gifts so our first Blog post is an attempt to give some advice about what you should accept as standard from an engraver and when you should look for something better.

Let's start with set up costs:

Even the best engraving machine will require adjustments before your gift item can be engraved. This is why most High Street engravers will quote you a "Set Up" fee as part of the overall price - after all they are engraving on an item to item basis.
Online Engravers, such as ourselves, also need to adjust our engraving machines but unlike many High Street Engravers we not only have state of the art machines but we also have the benefit of being able to set our machines up for engraving a run of the same gifts - the end result to the customer is that we waive all set up charges.

Cost per letter charges:

In this day of modern computerised engraving machines "cost per letter engraving" should be avoided at all costs. Only outdated engraving machines require manual engraving. You should be able to agree a price based on the complexity of the engraving job alone. A longer engraved message will obviously tie up an engraving machine for a longer time but that doesn't justify a "cost per letter" charge.

Buy your Gift with Engraving included:

If possible avoid purchasing a gift from one supplier and then taking it into an engraver to be engraved. It will almost always be more cost effective to have the gift engraved at source. Another factor to consider is whether it will be engraved on location - many jewellers for example will send your item elsewhere to be engraved and we can all guess who pays for that! More and more Online Gift Sites are offering engraving with a set amount of text included as part of the service.

Don't pay more for laser engraving:

The biggest myth at the moment is that laser engraving is better than rotary engraving. Sure a rotary engraving machine can't engrave a cocktail stick but then the majority of laser engravers can't engrave pewter!

I have been looking for a good reason to buy a laser engraving machine for some time but the simple fact of the matter is that my rotary engraving machines are top of the range and cost as much as a laser engraver and do most of the jobs better!

The cost of the machines should effectively mean you pay less for your engraving rather than more. If I engrave a business card holder then I can use a laser guidance system to measure the borders to ensure top quality engraving - this also saves me time on setting up the machine so why should I charge more? The same applies to laser engraving machines - Don't pay more for laser engraving because you mistakenly believe the end result will be so much better because it wont be any better than a top of the range rotary machine.

I hope this short insight has been helpful in some way.

See some of our Christening Gifts Online for some Engraving Ideas.

Robert O'Rourke
www.personalisedgiftideas.co.uk