Clover Signs Blog

Clover Signs would like to announce that we are no longer making slate house signs. The simple reason is this: Our carved house signs have become so popular that we cannot concentrate on 2 things at once.

Slate and stone is still a great choice for a house sign, so we would like to recommend Rustic Stone. Rustic Stone make all manner of slate house signs and signs on boulders, ideal for setting next to driveways.

However, if you were dead set on getting that beautiful custom painting, and simply had to have it on slate, Your Signs, based on the Isle of Wight is the place to go. From simple house number plates to superb custom painted house plaques, their dedicated team of house sign makers and house sign artists combine traditional arts & crafts  techniques together with contemporary  resin & reflective lettering technologies  to produce elegant, quality, long lasting house signs that will  enhance the look of your home in daytime and also help  make your home address easier to find during hours of darkness.

It doesn’t take a sign maker to tell you that having nice signs outside your hotel, pub or restaurant helps attract customers - but most people would be surprised by how big the difference is.

In July 2007, we were contacted by The Old Thatch Teashop on the Isle of Wight and asked to design some signs for them.  The teashop was very plain, and  didn’t fulfill it’s potential in the busy tourism months.

Here is the Old Thatch just before the signs went up:

And here are the signs in place:

The pictures are not the best, as for some strange reason we decided to travel down and install them during the worst storm of the winter!

Since the signs have gone up, Patricia Whybrow, the owner of the Old Thatch is delighted with the amount of new business she gets.

In the end, having a decent sign could be the cheapest form of advertising, especially in an area like Shanklin where there is lots of competition.  People are wandering around and choosing what to visit purely by whim - so you have to make something distinct in the image you present.

If you want to discuss having a sign for your pub, restaurant or hotel, please feel free to get in touch.  We offer free sign design and beautiful hand carved signs.

We do not make slate signs anymore - we just cannot keep up with the work and the HDU house signs are so popular.

The only thing we will do with slate if someone really wants, is artwork.  We did this for a company we know in Germany called Sannerz Designs.

You take a picture (in this case their logo) and blast away the background.  The background is then gilded with real gold leaf.  It makes a very stunning sign.

If you have a piece of artwork you want done like this, you can simply contact Clover Signs and we will see what we can do.

Clover Signs would like to thank all their customers for thier custom this year. We have officially made 1000 signs so far since January. What more, the sign which made it 1000 was our first hanging sign we sold:

We gave the customer a nice discount as well. We make the brackets ourselves, as we could not find a supplier in the UK who could produce them at the correct quality and price.

If you are interested, you can find a whole page of hanging signs on our website.

It used to be that to get into Google’s index was a process that could take days or months. However, Google now seems to be indexing pages at a blinding speed. You can read Matt Cutt’s report on “Minty Fresh Indexing” here. He writes about one of Skrenta Blogs posts, and about how it got indexed within an hour or so.

Skrenta has a PR6 home page, hence a new blog post can get indexed very fast via a normal RPC blog pinging service.

But what about just a normal static page? How fast can they get indexed?

Clover Signs wrote an article about how to calculate the height of text for signs. When it was published, there was only one link pointing to that page. It came from the index page of the articles. Google does not crawl that page very often, and didn’t crawl it at all the day that day.

10 minutes after it was published, I submitted the article to Digg, as it has interest to any graphic designers. Then an amazing thing happened:

11:50 - Article published

12:00 - Article submitted to Digg

14:00 - Article appears in Google’s index (using google.co.uk) under the term “Traditional Sign Making”.

Traditional Sign Making is not an obscure keyword, people do actually search for it. However, the articles ranks at Number 4.

Here is a screen shot taking at 5:00pm.

The Digg article only got 1 digg and only 4 people actually clicked through to it.

Showing the freshest results must be very important for Google now. Unfortunately, the results are temporary, and you quickly drop back down again. All I can say is well done to the Google Engineers again!

I am publishing this post under the heading “Minty Fresh Indexing”, as when you search Google for that term, you get Matt Cutt’s post about it. It will be very interesting if I manage to rank, even temporarily, above his post! I will let you know.

UPDATE: It’s happend already! 18 minutes after I posted this, it ranked at number 11 for “Minty Fresh Indexing”!

UPDATE: 1 hour and a half later, and I rank second, right under the blog of Mr Cutts.

Here is a short video which shows how we glue together the laminates that make up your house sign:

Even though this looks crude, it does work. Hey, the film is just a joke though…

In case you were wondering, we have just switched from Blogger to WordPress, as it is much better. We have it installed on BlueHost’s servers, a US hosting company. Both WordPress and Blue Host are fantastic.

I look forward to more blogging now!

When we first started making enquiries in the house sign market, no sign makers would tell us how many orders they get. I don’t see the point in hiding this sort of information - on the 18th of May, 2007, we made our 500th sign this year!

Here’s a picture. Carved palladium letters on a black sign with sculpted bee hive and bees. It was a custom sign request.

High Density Urethane Signs are the sign makers dream!

I spent last summer in the USA learning about HDU signs. The work they do there is fantastic. It seems that the UK has a bit to learn about making attractive signs.

The company I was staying with does a lot of 3-D sculptures and gilding work, so the signs really come alive.

Anyway, the upshot is that we now make HDU signs ourselves. The company I learned from mostly makes business signs, but we focus on the house sign market. HDU is perfect for that.

I will be posting examples of our work, techniques for working the HDU, gilding information etc. I doubt I will manage every day, but you never know.

If you want to order a HDU House Sign, go to www.cloversigns.co.uk or call 0800 534 5715.