1. What’s your goal?

Make sure that when you redesign your website you keep what is important – not the colour or font but the increase in visitors, leads and customers. Focus on the RESULTS you want. So stop worrying about a colour scheme and start thinking up ideas to improve your online marketing.

2. Protect your assets

A website redesign can actually have a negative impact on your marketing results. There will be things about your existing website that your customers will actually like or automatically associate with you.  You need to find out what those assets are: great content, keywords you rank for, inbound links to individual pages, conversion tools? You need to protect these during the redesign, remember that you still have a say and "web design experts" are often just that; experts in design, not marketing.

3. Content that attracts and converts

To quote Seth Godin: "I'm going to go out on a limb and beg you not to create an original design. There are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely there's one that you can start with? ...Your car isn't unique, and your house might not be either."

If you have a tight budget, you’d be better investing in great copy rather than a fancy design. This is what people care about the most; this is how they find out about you and what you do. That doesn’t mean having a blank website; the design should still be good but not necessarily unique and expensive.

4.  Content Building

By putting an ongoing content building strategy in place you will be able to build and build your website and keep it full of fresh content.  A 100-page website is likely to attract more visitors than a 10 page website and therefore growing the business quicker. Obviously don’t throw in 100 pointless pages - make sure these pages are slowly fitted in and the content is interesting and relevant. If you don’t fancy writing thousands of words of content then blogs and news feeds are quick and easy ways to create more content.

5. Don’t forget the basics

Any website built today should always include the basics: a blog, RSS, landing pages, SEO.  They’re inexpensive, and they’re effective.  A blog is a great way to create content on an ongoing basis, RSS allows some content from your website to be automatically pushed out to other websites, landing pages actually get value out of your traffic and SEO gets your new website the attention it deserves.

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…

It gives me great pride to announce that last night, Bryan Adams, Managing Director was awarded Young Entrepreneur of The Year at the DLIB Livercool Awards.   

As I’m sure you’ll agree, this award was greatly deserved by Bryan - a true business leader that has made great waves in the creative industry and grown his vision into the huge success that today, is Ph.Creative. 

Ph.Creative would like to express sincere thanks to everyone who voted, and supported us, and say that we are proud to have established long-term relationships with all of our clients and associates. 

I’d like to express my congratulations to both the Ph.Creative team, and to Bryan – a creative genius, an inspirational leader, and a great friend. 

May our dream continue…

What everyone asks first is, how many visitors did we get to our website? 

No matter how long you’ve had your website, your analytics tool, who you are or what you do! This is always the first question, your natural instinct.  So let’s look at a couple of variations: 

Visits 

Also be known as ‘total visitors’.  Simply put how many people visited your website in a given timeframe.   But, in this metric the same person could visit you website 5 times in a day and it would be counted five times.  This leads me onto... 

Unique Visits 

This is basically home many ‘unique’ people have visited your website in a given timeframe.  So, it doesn’t take into account repeat visit, well it does but it won’t include users who visit your website, say 5 times in a day. 

For example: I visit the BBC website 5 times in a day (to keep on top of the sport of course!). This would show as: 

• Visits:     5
• Unique Visits:    1 

I do this for a week: 

• Visits:    35
• Unique Visits:    1 

Why should you care and what you need to care about? 

They provide the foundation of the activity coming to your website.  I personally consider ‘unique visitors’ as more important of the two, as this in ‘new’ people coming to you shop, business.  How do they react, what actions do they take, how quickly do they leave, and a host other insights can be gained. However loyalty and ‘recency’ are also really important in building relationships and selling more – but we’ll be talking about this in the next week or two. 

So, pretty straightforward but you’d be amazed how people can get confused, so let’s all get on the ‘same page’ and I’ll define some more basics over the next week or so and then we can get down to some real conversion busting tips. 

Google Dave 

PS...Remember post your comments; let me know what you’d like to know.   

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.

After some more great feedback I've decided to release version 3 of our jQuery Scroll to Top plugin.

There have been 2 main updates to this one:

1. Following user comments from v2, I've added the additional option of choosing when the scroll to top link appears. So you can choose for it to appear only after the user has scrolled down further than, say, 700 pixels.

Implementation of the new feature is easy. First of all, if you're new to the plug in, follow the original instructions to help get set up. (Plus you might want to have a look at version 2 for information on the speed and easing options.) Then, you can simply add the new option as follows:

$("#toTop").scrollToTop({
   speed: "fast",
   ease:  "easeOutBounce",
   start: 700
});

Easy!

2. The plugin now includes licensing information, as the script is now released under the open souce MIT License! Good news for all, so remember to comment and let me know if you make any cool updates to the script.

Also, feel free to post a link to your website if you're using the plugin! We'd love to see it.

scroll-to-top-v3.zip (25.74 kb)

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.

When it comes to getting your email to the necessary person, it is no longer the case of contending with the PA. Unfortunately the biggest problem you’re going to have now is that your email will be automatically flagged as spam.

Luckily for you, I’ve come up with ten tips so you can try to make your email bulletproof.

1. If you get no response to your email, how can you ever be sure it was really delivered? Instead of sending a follow-up, which is usually going to get on the recipients’ nerves, ask the recipient in the first email to get back to you with a quick note. Just letting you know that they have received the email indicates that no instant reply to your email is necessary.

2. Always keep the senders name and email the same, if you change it suddenly then you might not be recognised and consequently you will be named as spam. This means you won’t be able to contact them again.

3. Never put a link before the important information, otherwise they’ll be sent to a page and they’ll have no idea why. As soon as they get back to your message they may report you as spam.

4. Follow up your email with a letter to their postal address. In the letter, refer back your email with the date and time it was sent. This will establish contact and hopefully start building a relationship.

5. Always communicate with your recipient personally. Spam-filters will automatically award emails without a name with spam score points (By default, this spam filter flags messages with a score greater than 5 as spam.) So make sure you provide your recipient with an exact name and contact information.

6. Offer subscription to your newsletter and let the recipient know when to expect it. That way they know when your emails are coming and they will know what it is straight way. They will also become accustomed to receiving your emails at that specific time every week.

7. Always insert the current date in the content. When the date isn’t mentioned or it is provided incorrectly, the newsletter will be given spam score points.

8. Make sure you verify your subscribers with signup confirmation. This means that when your user subscribes to your mailing list, they will be sent an automatic email to confirm their subscription. This way you avoid contacting incorrect email addresses, which may lead to being reported as spam.

9. If your newsletter has too many closed tags, too many graphic images or structural tables then it is going to score many spam points. Besides which, many readers use Outlook, which automatically blocks images. If the users don’t understand the mail then they’re most likely to report is as spam. Therefore keep your newsletter simple. Colorful backgrounds, tables, JavaScript’s and web forms shouldn’t be in newsletters.

10. Finally, check out some of tools and services available online to test your spam score. They’ll be able to check through the content of your email and report back with your score. It will take a bit of time but if your email has over 5 points, you can be sure it won’t even reach your recipient’s inbox.

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.