So, you’ve set up a Facebook public profile for you, your brand and your company, now what?

I thought I’d share a few interesting ways for you to tweak your profile for maximum impact:

1. Create the perfect profile picture

Facebook recommends that profile pictures should be 200px wide, while the height can vary. What is less documented is how the thumbnail that Facebook uses across the system is generated from your profile picture. You’ll find that the system will crop your image when generating a thumbnail which means you lose the information around the edge.

After some testing, we can tell you that when you create your profile image that’s 200px wide, if you leave a 12 pixel border around your crucial information (brand name or logo) you will avoid being automatically cropped out.

Don’t forget that regardless of the shape of your profile image, Facebook thumbnails are square (with rounded corners) so if you design a rectangular profile picture, make sure you keep your desired thumbnail imagery within a square boundary.

2. Optimise your website’s Share Preview

One of Facebook’s key strengths is the ability to spread your shared links into the news feed using the Links application, which is now built into your Publisher box at the top of your wall.

Your link can be accompanied by a relevant thumbnail image, however if your site is mainly Flash-based or has no suitable graphic components for a thumbnail, you should define a custom Share Preview image. Facebook can provide you with specific information on how to do this here.

Again, no guidance is given as to the perfect size for a Share Preview, but we’ve found that a 100 pixel square preview is optimal and it will require no resizing by Facebook.

Remember that you can also add a Facebook Share button to your site to encourage your visitors to share it.

3. Display different content for non-Fans

For the Non-Fan landing area, you can display a “Become a Fan” incentive in an FBML box or Tab. Here’s a quick way for to create your own FBML box which will display different information to different users depending on their Fan status:

- Create a 1 cell borderless table, with a fixed height and width; for example, 100px

- Create and define a background image for that cell to the same dimensions, which contains the information you want NON-fans to see

- Create a same-sized image that contains the information you want Fans to see and insert that into the cell

- Use the following FBML tag to surround the cell contents – <fb:visible-to-connection><img src=”insert your image URL”></fb:visible-to-connection>

This FBML Tag only displays content to Fans who are logged in. So what we’re doing here is creating a table with a background image, and then covering it up with another one IF you’re a Fan.

Here’s some example code for you to try:

<table width="xx" height="yy" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr>
<td background="http://www.yourdomain.com/linkto/nonfans.jpg">
<fb:visible-to-connection>
<img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/linkto/fans.jpg" height="xx" width="yy" />
</fb:visible-to-connection>
</td></tr></table>

4. Vanity URL, or Custom Domain?

Vanity URLs are available to all brands whose pages have at least 100 fans. However, you can still make use of your own domain by pointing it to your Facebook Page using a domain redirect. If you do own your own domain then you can set up http://facebook.mydomain.com so that it points to your profile.

5. Define a publishing schedule for your content

You should try and get into the practice of scheduling your updates so that they remain steady and consistent rather than being either too persistent or too few. By setting up a calendar for yourself, you’ll be able to stay on top of things and decide how much time you need to allow your fans to read comment. Try and mix up your posts with status updates, Links, Notes, Videos and Photos. 

The only time I had previously come across the word, ‘bespoke,’ was when I was flicking through pages of designer dresses in an issue of Vogue. Before now, bespoke always meant an absolutely beautiful, one-off, custom-made dress… absolute glamour.

So when I heard bespoke and web development being used all together, I’ll admit I wondered what my dream dress had to do with web development. In my quest for answers, very journalistic of me, I found a few bits of usual information I though you might like to know…

- Bespoke web development is a consideration of striking, intuitive designs and commercial elements so that your website can be developed for the right reasons

- There are plenty of existing websites that are developing for the wrong reasons – they may be pretty but they’re definitely not clever

- Bespoke web development is effective in taking you ahead of the market place competition

So, instead of that custom-made dress I was imagining, think of it like a custom-made website with functions that often stretch far beyond the imagination. 

Here at Ph. we have our very own in-house content management system, Ph.Use, which means we can make anything possible - from online redeemable vouchers to innovative scraping technology.

The main thing about bespoke web development is to make sure you always have your client’s commercial goals in mind, navigated with Search Engine importance.

If you can offer something completely new, well that’s just showing off really…

Usability Guidelines

This week in the Ph.Creative design studio we've come across the weird & wonderful of web design. In this weeks’ design blog, we've picked out the good, the bad and the down right ugly of websites.

We've come across loads of great looking sites this week but the one that stands out for us is the events.carsonified.com. As if Carsonified weren't cool enough as an agency, the events site continues to push the creativity and userbility. It not only looks great but is packed with tonnes of videos of seminars from all areas of the industry. The bold colourful typography and the use of different illustration styles in the mast and the footer is really refreshing and a nice change from the standard free vector graphics that are flooding the sites nowadays!  For us it’s the attention to detail that makes the sites stand out, the old 'less is more' theory. This is a great site. Nice & simple yet very informative! 5 out of 5!  
 

The site we've chosen for this wins hands down. If there was a room 101, this site would be first in the queue! www.genicap.com. The designers of this site, for us, broke every rule in web design. From the homepage, the user has no idea of what they do and its just doesn't engage the user at any stage. In fact, it’s so boring that the web designers couldn't even be bothered laying out some of the text so just dropped in dodgy jpgs of the copy! Poor work guys. We've come across lots of bad sites but this one is right up there.

This is almost tongue in cheek. We actually wanted to email these guys and ask if its a joke? At least on this site we know what they do, they're a driving school but how bad is it!
http://www.drivingskills.on.ca/ has more clipart on a site than we’ve ever seen. The nasty background, lack of understanding of colour and typography has to make this the ugliest site on the web.

So that’s it for this we, our small collection of really bad sites. If you’ve seen any howlers out there that deserve to be in our blog, please feel free to send them in to us.

The National Legal Trade Exhibition came to the BT Convention Centre last week, and Ph.Creative were of course one of the top local businesses to join the action.

This was a great opportunity to showcase our distinctive brand, the expertise of our ingenious creative team, and get out there and network with the people!

 

Always one for challenging the norm, and in true Ph-style, never being partial to a table-clothed trestle table, a few leaflets and branded biros, I donned my creative cap and got to thinking outside the box.  Over a coffee-fuelled brainstorm with the team, we pondered over a concept for our exhibition that would really make us stand out from the crowd.

 

As a surprisingly enthusiastic response was drawn from the childlike cartoon sketch of my exhibition stand vision…  

 

 

 

Ph.Creative Surgery was born...

Free IT Health Checks for those sick and tired of ineffective SEO and suffering aches and pains with online marketing strategies.

As the exhibition visitors filtered in, Ph.Creative Surgery was in full flow, consulting and advising on website effectiveness and prescribing remedies for the ailments of unsuccessful online marketing tools to the masses.

Bryan Adams presented yet another outstanding seminar on Online Marketing Tactics, which further prompted some technophobic patients to bob along for a check-up.  And if one mastermind lecture wasn’t enough, the medical team took a mid-afternoon respite to attend Sales Guru - Andy Bounds’ enlightening seminar, which was nothing short of inspirational team-building.

Diagnosis: Another great day at the office!

Having made a memorable impact (be that positive or negative!? You decide) Ph.Fever was certainly in the air!

If you missed out on your check-up this time, fear not... it won’t be long before the Doctor is back in town! (Or in case of an epidemic, give us a call!)

Twenty of our favourite high street stores have gone under the microscope of Webcredible in order to find out how good their usability is. The sample was taken for the first time last year and it found that webcredibly many of the sites really weren’t taking advantage of the potential revenue in the run up to Christmas.

This year they looked at the same 20 high street stores, judged them on 20 different criteria and gave them an overall mark out of 100.

With the results just out, in first place, drum roll please …

With 83/100 points … WHSmith and M&S

This is the second year at the top spot for WHSmith, no points gained but no points lost. On the other hand, M&S snatched an extra 15 points this year to zoom them up into joint first.

M&S re-launched their brand new site just before the report was made and it seems they paid attention to improving their user experience. Well at least someone did! Unfortunately the average score across the sample only increased by 5.5%, the top score isn’t any higher and the lowest score was still 56.

The sites are judged on search results, browsing, product pages, basket and checkout; all things you would expect of an ecommerce site. For simple things like ensuring there is a link to the basket and checkout on every page – all sites should be scoring 5/5, but they weren’t.

Debenhams was the only website out of 20 that changed the colour of the link once you have visited it. Nothing is more annoying than trying to remember what you have already seen. Tut tut to the other nineteen stores who don’t know what their customers want.

How about the guidelines- you know when you click on, for example, women’s department, clothes, tops, evening tops and then when you don’t like the one you clicked on, you go all the way back to the start of the process. How about just taking us back to the evening tops? This is a long term guideline and it is not particularly hard to implement. If not implemented, then it won’t be long before customers start visiting their competitor’s site.

You would also think ‘Proceed to Checkout’ would be a major priority for all the sites but guess what; it was the only guideline with a lower score than last year. Site designers should carefully consider where to place and how to design this button to ensure that customers don’t get lost and drop off at the most crucial stage.

Any website scoring in the 50’s and 60’s, such as Topshop would you believe, really need to up their game. A good ecommerce site is now just as important as the shop itself. If you’re not taking advantage of the online market then your not taking advantage of big money and ultimately you’ll be losing customers to competing stores who know where to put their ‘Buy it Now’ button.

Making your webpage easy and enjoyable for your visitors is the key to usability success. There are plenty of tricks and tips to try out…

1. Making Faces

Whether you’re walking around town or visiting a bar, you can’t help but take a look at the faces around you. Subconsciously you are absorbing much more than you realise. You can take advantage of this fact by featuring people’s faces on your webpage, sounds simple you think? Well hold on, there’s a bit more to it than that. Studies have found that we actually look in the direction of the face we see on screen, so if you want to share some specific information make sure your friendly face is looking straight at that information.

2. Quality Counts

As shameful as it is to admit, we humans really do have a tendency to judge a book by its cover. Therefore the quality of your webpage is key. Visitors are going to believe that your product or service will be as good as your webpage looks, so make sure you invest in making it perfect.

Once the user has checked out how you look, they will then be judging you on personality. It’s one tough crowd out there! So they will be looking at the actual quality of your website, the amount of errors, how often information is updated and its ease of use. If you tick all the boxes, then you’ll be more than likely to guarantee a second date.

3. Keep Scrolling, Scrolling, Scrolling

Once upon a time only around three-quarters of all visitors to your website would not have bothered to scroll. Those who panicked at hearing this information made the dire mistake of attempting to cram all their information into the top half of the site. Unfortunately no one lived happily ever after.

Flash forward a few years and it appears we are now the generation who love to scroll. People are much happier to have content well spaced out with plenty of white spaces as it makes it clearer and easier to read. People are now so keen to scroll that they will even make it right down to the bottom of the page, so make the most of every inch.

4. Blue is the Colour

As important as it is that your site stands out from the crowd, it seems people still love their home comforts. When people visit new websites they look for something familiar, this is called usage patterns. People expect certain things to be the same, such as the location of the website’s logo and the behavior of tabbed navigation. People know what they know and in this case, they know that links are blue. Google sticks to this time-honoured tradition and so should you.

5. How wide is your Search Box?

Time for some specifics - the ideal search box is 27 characters wide. A fact that is clearly not known by many, as the average search box is just 18 characters wide. So take note and remember that by giving the user more space allows them to review, verify and submit their enquiry quickly. Sounds simple enough but yet so many people still choose to ignore this, make sure you’re not one of them.

In today’s world with everyone & everything eco-friendly what else can save the planet?

Well, it’s the simple font. The font, overlooked by many but used by everyone is now doing its bit for the planet.  The Ecofont, designed by dutch designers, SPRANQ, is surely the next generation in fonts. Ecofont has been designed to not only increase environmental awareness but to save you money.  The font has been designed by cutting out the maximum amount of black area from the font whilst still remaining legibility. The result is a ‘holey’ font that uses up to 20% less ink thus giving printer cartridges a longer life.

The image above illustrates how the Ecofont works. You’ll see it has been created by cutting out parts of the letter. At 60 point it’s not that appealing however at a more useable point size of 10 or 11pt, it looks great. The Ecofont is based on the Vera Sans, an Open Source letter, and is available for Windows and Mac OSX.  By introducing the Ecofont into your font library is going some way to help save the environment.

Other cost effective ways are;

• Print only when necessary
• Use a modern, efficient printer and use unbleached paper
• Paper choice, take the environment into account. Look at recycled materials
• Invest in environment-conscious innovations 

The Ecofont is based on an Open Source font and is FREE to use. You can download your FREE version by visiting:- http://www.ecofont.eu/downloads_en.html

So goodbye comic sans, hello Ecofont Sans. Enjoy and use responsibly!! 

We’ve noticed recently the amount of offer based emails we’ve been receiving and how some companies need to think a bit more about the end goal or the offer and how others companies simply don’t think at all! The amount of daily emails received that get deleted straight away because they’re either too text heavy, written poorly, too confusing or just designed badly with no call to action is actually quite scary and just wastes everyone’s time.

So, here are a few tips to for email templates…

Keep the Design Simple - Too many emails try too hard. The most effective templates are the simple ones. A nice mast image that reflects the brand is sufficient. Keep it clean. Keep it simple. But most of all, keep it clear.

Strong Call to Action – The   main reason for sending the email should be obvious as soon as the email is opened. Don’t hide the offer, shout about it. Make sure the recipient can see it. If you’re using a button to link to a landing page, ensure the button stands out enough and makes you want to click it.

The Incentive – Its all very well having a strong call to action but the recipient does need the incentive. Make sure its inviting enough to action. Would you want it? Everyone loves a bargain or even better a freebie. Make it worth their while!

The Landing Page – Now that you’ve got the recipient to the landing page, don’t bog them down with too much information. You’ve got them interested, you don’t want them frustrated because they can’t find out what to do next. Use the principles that you’ve learnt in the email template. Present the information is a clear and informative way with a clear set of instructions on the next step.

This is all fairly obvious but surprisingly overlooked by lots of companies. If you can follow these principles next time you’re designing an email, you’ll probably find your email has a bit more sticking power than others!