The online farmers’ market Natoora have redesigned and relaunched their website. To mark the occasion they’re giving new customers £50 off, there are conditions, you need to use the code Natoora50 before 15th November and can claim here*.

The new site looks slick and trustworthy. Natoora is already well known to ethical eaters and it seems that the brand is looking to grow into the corporate area with this new look and feel – perhaps targeting SMEs or even blue chips with the idea of sourcing good, fresh food for their employees.

If you’re not familiar with Natoora then it’s a simple walk through. Select from a range of top quality food and have it delivered to you. It’s not a supermarket. It’s a collective of farmers and that’s what makes it special.

It would be wrong to dismiss Natoora because of their strong connections with farmer communities. They mean to get their digital marketing exactly right. For a start they run an affiliate program (which In Pure Spirit is a member of; you’ll see the links in this post) and they’ve done a pretty good job of the SEO on the new site. The 301 redirect from their homepage to /shop/ is a hiccup but we can assume it was necessary. They’ve tried their best with the URLs, they’re short-ish, nod towards keywords but I wish they had hidden the .html elements as they’ll have a migration challenge on their next redesign. There’s the missing robots.txt file with the awkward redirect to the homepage too.

The site’s backlink profile looks healthy due to the foodie blogs who happily link to one another. There’s perhaps just the suggestion of an aggressive past with suspect pages like this one and rather a lot of ice cream pages.

Natoora also run a blog* of their own, have it on the right domain and brand it differently. They’re on Twitter as well and that’s ideal if you want to flirt with foodies, but they’ve not been there long and could do with more followers (tell them @inpurespirit said hi).

In Pure Spirit

What do you think of Natoora’s new site? Do you like it? Do you like it enough to shop there?

Disclaimer: Links marked with a star(*) are revenue links.

Happy Earth Day. Earth Day is an event designed to raise awareness of the myriad of ecological dangers our planet, our home, currently faces. If you wish to join this American charity then you can do so online.

You don’t need to be in America in order to help promote Earth Day or save the planet. Here’s a tip for United Kingdom residents.

You can turn your old phone into cash and in doing so help recycle it in an environmentally friendly way. Two cash for old phone companies to consider are:

• envirofone.com*
• Earth Mobile*

Each of these two programs function in a similar way; the worth of the phone you’re trading in depends on the make and model. Very old phones might be worth only £5 but newer or more expensive models are worth over £100. At the time of posting Earth Mobile is offering £200 to recycle the 16GB 3G iPhone.

In Pure Spirit

What are you doing to help promote Earth Day? Do you think it comes awfully close to the WWF’s Earth Hour which persuaded many cities around the globe to turn their lights off for an hour?

Have you used either of these two sites before? What are your observations? Would you recommend them?

* Caveat : In Pure Spirit makes revenue from marked affiliate links.

This week’s Extinction Sucks episode from WWF’s pioneering web video features Ashleigh Young and Aleisha Caruso raising awareness of the plight of Asiatic Black Bears.

In parts of South East Asia these bears are milked for their bile. The bear bile is believed to be a cure for fever. It is found in everything from tea to toothpaste. Despite how wide spread the practice has been and still seems to be – there’s no proven benefit.

There are synthetic alternatives to the bile. The bear bile milking practice has only just been outlawed in Vietnam.

Bears are taken as cubs from the wild and kept in cages until they’re 1 or 2 years old. The young bears are then milked once or twice a week.

The hero charities of this Extinction Sucks episode are Free the Bears and Traffic.

Free the Bears is a charity which tries to find sanctuaries for rescued bears. These bears can never go back to the wild so need natural enclosures. Free the Bears is run by Mary Hutton who features in this episode.

Ashleigh and Aleisha plan a bear fundraiser so Free the Bears can buy robust toys for the bears to play with and try and redevelop their natural rummaging skills.

Dare-for-a-Bear contest to raise funds which involves Afro-Caribbean dance contest.

They then travel on to Vietnam, speak to Sulma Warne of Traffic, and try to understand the cultural atmosphere which would allow bear bile milking to persist and for bears to be cruelly kept in tiny cages.

In Pure Spirit

If you’d like to find out more about helping bears then you can read about them at WWF’s Panda.org.