http://www.57degreesnorth.co.uk/index.php en Copyright 2011 2011-09-08T07:14:19+00:00 http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/user-first-and-pepsi http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/user-first-and-pepsi#When:15:10:00Z Pepsi are a clearly huge brand and have been for decades. They have been know for some very smart marketing campaign and up till recently spent millions if not more on advertising on your mainstream events such as the SuperBowl. In 2011 they tried something different. From user research they noticed that a huge section were interested in the environment and local community projects. The research said that theses questionese would relate strongly to a brand that had those attributes. Pepsi then set about on a marketing campaign in which they put huge amounts of money into projects in which local firms and projects submitting through their website. The difference here is that they are not using the traditional marketing of our product is great buy here buy now. They are going about it in a secondary manner in which they relate to their users need first then Pepsi’s brand is seen through that channel. By allowing these communities and people to vote on their website increases engagement with Pepsi. Not in the sense of selling the drink directly. The engagement part is a big part of the projects success, increased engagement means more affinity to the cause itself not just Pepsi. But as Pepsi was seen as the giver and not taker of the campaign it’s around about way of marketing. It Hugely successful campaign for them with sales steadily rising, Most sales and marketing people always think of the immediate sale but in today’s world where marketing messages are filtered out both offline and online new tactics and strategies need to thinked heavily upon. A Marathon and not a sprint. General, 2012-04-24T15:10:00+00:00 http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/taking-your-seo-to-the-next-level http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/taking-your-seo-to-the-next-level#When:10:36:38Z On page optimisation such as title tag tags, keyword density, internal link structure, alt attributes, meta data etc etc can only take you so far when talking about rising to the top of search engines for your certain keywords. We have done work with clients in the past that that with just on page optimisation techniques alone has truly shot them from nowhere into first page and even multiple top 3 positions. In these situations however this has been with relatively low levels of competition. If you are in a market that his has happened then be thankful that this is the case. It’s probably that you are in area of business thats quite unique or that your competition hasn’t invested properly with an experience SEO team that know on page SEO inside out and have implemented correctly. We do come across multiple businesses in which we have completed only a few days work and within a week the site has catapulted towards the top of their chosen keywords, out clients are over the moon and really see what we have done as magic. There are occasion however in which we have completed our usual highly focussed SEO campaign and there has been little of the way of movement in positions, sure the pages have risen but just nothing like as much as the other examples. With our competition analysis however we did have our doubts of huge ranking rises. The clint was aware of this and it was a case of “We will do the best we can and see what happens”. Being in position 9 on page 1 in the vast majority of niches or businesses is just about as good as being on page 9. The level of traffic on a position 9 term is minimal compared to top 3. Thats a blog post for another day but lets discuss what you can do. SEO is now about producing content, that content may be video, audio, image or text. In most cases its the later, well in fact all all cases it should be the later but as secondary content. Video and audio may be the focal point but backed up with curation for accessibility and search engine purposes. Reinforcing here, but, you need to start producing content if you want to compete in high levels of competition. Unfortunately producing great content is a very expensive business, simply because it takes a lot of time. In multi million pound industries however the businesses that now this, invest in great writers, great script makers, great illustrators and great speakers. It’s a huge investment but a long term goal of producing great content for a number of years but take businesses from a local start up to a globally recognised team experts and brand. In the most cases your not going to achieve this global brand but it has happened and keeps happening. It’s a marathon and not a sprint. Business, 2012-04-21T10:36:38+00:00 http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/the-main-social-networks-have-peaked-and-will-decline-from-now http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/the-main-social-networks-have-peaked-and-will-decline-from-now#When:17:52:29Z Lets face it,( Not intended) most of us are on FaceBook. If theres one name in social media networks that’s it. There have been numerous problems with security over the years and with security concern become more of an issue in peoples digital lives even small scale breaches or bugs with FaceBook will start to have a bigger effect on their brand. The main problem with FaceBook is that its a one solution for all. Everyone sees the same interface and it’s capabilities of personalisation are small. Social networks like these are not going to go away anytime soon but the rise of more personalised mini sites and within more targeted groups are going to become stronger and stronger in the years to come. Just about all people are fascinated with some kind of hobby It may be golf , it may be knitting but theres something that really intrigues us and something we are apart of. Small more targeted social networks are going to become a much bigger opposition to these large social networks. Off course there are many social like sites out there already. Discussion forums show that this targeted focus on a subject works and works wonderfully well. Some people read every thread and post on some forums, you find people uisng FaceBook more because everyone is on there rather than being fascinated by the particular subject of what everyone is doing. Sure that may be interesting to a lot of people but these groups are enthralled by their own personal passion rather than the generic interest of dozens if nothing hundreds of other interests of their global FaceBook profile. The small social network is coming, watch out. Other stuff, 2012-04-05T17:52:29+00:00 http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/personalisation-constructing-personalised-content-for-users http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/personalisation-constructing-personalised-content-for-users#When:17:01:25Z We all know that companies target us gathering as much data as they can. Google and FaceBook for instance do this as every other marketing firm does to make more money. The more they have the more money they can make in their advertising. Why is that? Its because of relevancy, if you are an 65 year old retired Army major that’s main hobby is now gardening then there is little chance you would be interested in spending the pension on a stag weekend in Brighton. However if you were a 32 year old male that has been searching recently for holidays in Ibiza then the stag weekend in Brighton will by the law of averages of a lot more interest and therefore relevant. We are of course talking about huge co-operation in Google and FaceBook but the technology or certainly some technology is viable to be created and used for smaller businesses. By collecting information about users and using API’s from the like of Google, yes them again and Microsoft personalisation is possible without a multimillion pound budget. This kind of information is hugely useful and with it improving the user experience it can increase the bottom line of a business considerably. We have been looking into this ourselves for a client but we made some assumptions that would be good general rules to follow. 1.) Before any personalisation takes place a very strong budget should have been spent on user experience testing. There is no point in spending a lot of money on personalisation is the websites in the first place is providing a bad user experience in the first place. Personalisation can improve user experience greatly but you can’t you cant polish a turd. 2.) Taregeting is useful on all types of sites but is most useful on e-commerce sites where the ROI can be tracked more accurately. This sint to say that it wont work or service based sites, but the multi channel funnel is something that simply is harder to implementable with user personalisation. 3.) If developing any kind of user profiles, data security should be of paramount concern.   General, 2012-03-26T17:01:25+00:00 http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/conversation-rate-optimisation-cro-its-a-number-game-5-tips http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/conversation-rate-optimisation-cro-its-a-number-game-5-tips#When:13:26:15Z Web design success is a numbers game. Whether that is simply to make more sales on an e-commerce site, increase brand awareness or gather more enquiries. Success cant always be measured exactly but in most cases it can. There would be very few instances where CRO would be looked to be decrease. Lets say a site has a conversion rate of 1% on an -e-commerce store. Simply by increasing that to 2% would give twice the amount of sales and increase revenue dramatically. Your product page would only need to be a quarter of a percent better, your headlines would only need to be a quarter of a percent better, your cart would only need to be a quarter of a percent better and your any other of hundreds of things you could change would only need to total up to a quarter of a percent better. Does this sound possible? Do you want to double your sales? Off course its possible. 5 Tips which may very well increase CRO by a single percent by just doing one of them: Increase trust by adding an authoritative approved badge for payment, security or industry badge. Put a huge grabbing title above the fold and make it bold Ask people to use your site that have no experience of the site previously. You may be astonished to see how they use your site, its likely they wont understand things that you thought anyone would understand. Introduce a full money back guarantee in which is very prominent Add a customer testimonial with photography saying how the product help them out solve the problem the buyer is likely to have. Anyone of these 5 tips may improve your shopping cart considerably, these tips are not hard for your web development team to implement. Do them, test, learn, improve and repeat.   Business, 2012-03-16T13:26:15+00:00 http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/whether-to-design-for-internet-explorer-6 http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/whether-to-design-for-internet-explorer-6#When:18:44:00Z Internet Explorer 6 is still around, but how much around is it? The answer from our stats is that isn’t not around that much at all. In 2007 34.65% of users were using IE6, in 2012? 0.08 percent. That’s more than enough for us to say we now don’t support Internet Explorer 6. The problem with version 6 is that is was very buggy and it certainly took extra time to code for. It could be argued that once you came across the bug a few times it became pretty easy to get your layout in a reasonable fashion. With experience IE6 was a problem but it wasn’t a huge one. That is getting the layout into something that worked. Getting an IE6 layout to look like the latest version of Google chrome would certainly be a more strenuous task, but with multiple poly fills an conditional statements it would generally be possible, but possible isn’t pragmatic. What would be a percentage you would support? We would actively support a browser that has anything more than 3% of usage. That’s 1 in every 30 or so people, those kind of figures add up. Just because our and industry stats suggest usage of Internet Explorer is at an very low level that doesn’t mean you should immediately rule it out. We highly recommend setting up an analytics account if there is a previous site in existence and viewing usage for yourself. Even a weeks traffic will give you good indicator whether you need to support internet explorer 6, the answer is likely to be no, but be sure on the project you are working on. Coding, 2012-03-06T18:44:00+00:00 http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/flash-still-very-useful http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/flash-still-very-useful#When:17:38:41Z Flash is dieing, mainly because of Apples reluctance to use on on the ioS devices such as iPad and iPhone. Adobe have pulled their mobile player because of performance and have stated themselves they support the open source html5 framework. That said its still very useful when dealing with video. Putting just html5 video on a site and doing it properly is a time consuming process to say the least. With Flash you can have one video file, full screen options, subtitles and very interactive and easy to use controller. Trying all that with html5 will take you considerably more time. Flash is said to have 99% penetration on desktop devices, thats huge and using people Flash solely for video cannot be blamed. Its just so much easier. With html5 video you can have an ogg file an webm file and a mp4 file. 3 for for the price off one. That alone is a lot more to handle. Building an decent controller which will stop play and pause your video and its likely you will need a javascript plugin for jquery. Again more work and more config. Looking for full screen video, well that isn’t going to work in many browsers either unfortunately. Another polyfill required. Subtitles? Nope, failed again, another polyfill and two different formats to cater for. Flash is dieing without question, still very useful for hugely interactive websites and that little thing called video which can be seen now and again on the interweb thing. General, 2012-03-05T17:38:41+00:00 http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/browser-prefixes-the-dilemma http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/browser-prefixes-the-dilemma#When:14:14:03Z Browser Prefixes However and fortunately browser fixes don’t take the web back to those silly times they are allow for browser manufacturers and producers to push the web further and fastest than ever before. Firefox and Chrome are head to head with number releases throughout the year to take market share from Internet Explorer. There is off course other browsers notably safari and Opera but the 3 main players are now Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet explorer. Browser fixes looking something like .theclassname { -moz-transform: rotate(90deg); -ms-transform: rotate(90deg); -o-transform: rotate(90deg); -webkit-transform: rotate(90deg); } -moz stands for mozilla, in other words FireFox -ms is for Microsoft so Internet Explorer -o is for Opera -webkit is for Webkit which is the engine that powers both Chrome and Safari. The above bit of code would turn the object 90 degrees. Something that only 2 years ago would be unthinkable in terms of producing by pure CSS3 by the majority of web designers not heavily invoiced with the css spec. The problem with the above code and browser prefixes is that they heavily bloat the code and are hard to maintain. Another downside to them is that once the specification is approved then these prefixes would be overridden by something like rotate(90deg). So that would leave lots of code uneeded code there in the years to come. The trade offs however are fine in our opinion. There are sacrifice’s in every part of web design. Used responsibly prefixes push the web further, faster and in a more innovate manner than without them. Coding, 2012-03-03T14:14:03+00:00 http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/tools-tools http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/tools-tools#When:18:02:14Z It’s said that a man is only as good as his tools. We don’t really agree with this but tools can certainly help save time and increase quality in some projects. By this we mean the best tools against some tools. Most web sites are constructed visually in Photoshop and its our graphic tool of choice but many other designers swear by FireWorks which is also made by Adobe. Some other also use Gimp which is completely free. A great designer isn’t defined by which tool he uses, designers much better than us may use Gimp, its the more the skill with the certain tool thats the difference. The project management tool of choice we use is BaseCamp, its a favourite amongst many agencies. Its currently being rebuilt from the ground up the makers 37 Signals but the original version is so easy to use. It may not be the very best looking application in the world but using it is a joy, as its just so simple and intuitive. There are certainly other project management tools out there such as ActiveCollab and Huddle but it would take a lot for us to leave BaseCamp. Another favourite but manually unknown application we use is GrandTotal. Its an accounting package for OSX which through a file storage facility allows us to keep the accounts sync’d across many different devices, others Macs and iPhones. Its a simple yet powerful invoicing and accounting package that is elegant as well as beautiful Another app we use a lot is getmockingbird which allows us to produce wireframes of websites for our record and client scope. Its all online so you need an net connection but in this day and age thats pretty common and always wired is here. The only downside to it is that it doesn’t work on Internet Explorer 7 and 8 which is a fundamental flaw really but we and our clients so far have worked around that problem. 2012-02-13T18:02:14+00:00 http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/helvetica http://www.webdesign-aberdeen.co.uk/journal/helvetica#When:16:25:52Z The famous helvetica font was developed in 1957 in Switzerland by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann. Its still used fanatically even today in 2012. Numerously described as timeless by many famous designers and type gurus. In 2007 there was even a film made about Helvetica, no other types have those credentials. The Helvetica name is derived from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland. It was this fotn that sent Switzerland as a country to the forefront of design and in particular type design. Many font foundries wouldn’t have been formed if it wasn’t for Helvetica. For over 50 years Helvetica has been used in all types of designs from classic, print to innovative print and from signage to hugely popular websites. The experience as designer working and studying with Helvetica can be an up and down affair. When initially using it designers usually fall in love with the hugely balanced and amazing conformity. When gaining experience some designers then realise its over used and ‘boring’ can be used as a stance of independence in the design world. Many designers however return to it when a higher degree of understand has been reached with it. It may very well be over used but that doesn’t make this classic font any less beautiful. Its authority both visually and historically will never die. Design, 2012-01-20T16:25:52+00:00