Romany-Granite

As always with our new websites, Romany Granite’s site is optimised for search engines, W3C tested and meets standard government levels for accessibility. And the site is covered by our standard programming guarantee that we offer to all clients. Check it out for yourselves: www.romanygranite.co.uk

GRACE-poster

Click here to see the Yorke Dance Project GRACE leaflet

The programme itself was a much more complicated set up, with a lot of information to be included in as little space as possible to keep print costs down. The final product ran to 10 A4 spreads – printed double sided A4, stapled in the middle. The programme was printed on silk paper that looked and felt stylish and up to date. The company are about to forge ahead with 2010’s rehearsals so look out for a new look to their site.

The Yorke Dance Project is an existing American company, new to the UK. Obviously, after relaunching themselves here, they needed a website and some branding work and came to us via a recommendation (we love those) as a company they could rely on to launch them into the UK dance scene in the right way.

They wanted a flexible, content managed website, a stylish look (who doesn’t want that?) and lively, which would allow for expansion and development as the company grew.

Yorke Dance Project

Starting with a user-focused viewpoint, we mapped out the key areas that needed to be on the site and easily accessible, and then developed the site architecture. Once we had this in place, we started the design cycle, developing  some design choices for the Artistic Director, Yolande Yorke-Edgell, to choose from. We were provided with a wide range of imagery from the dance company’s current and past repertoire, and created a set of ‘identity assets’ (logo, colour scheme, font etc.) for them to use throughout their business.

We included a range of galleries containing video and still images, a subscribers’ mailing list, as well as lots of pages for the productions and biographies. The site currently runs to 47 pages and counting. The front page has a live news feed, making the site look and feel appropriately current. The site uses John Kilroy’s specially developed word press theme called ‘Artsblog’, so that the dance company can manage the site themselves.

The entire redesign was a response to a very practical brief: create more new business from the website. To do this we set about a fairly comprehensive web marketing programme that covered search engine placement, link networking, creating really high quality content written by professional writers, special attention to the interface design, and running ongoing promotions and web offers.

The pretty regular emails we get from Alan at London Locksmiths show that he continues to be more than happy with the results. I’m not going to tell you his figures but I will say that his enquiries and new business are significantly up (as is his search engine placement [page one]) and he, along with most of our other web marketing clients, has subsequently and completely stopped his Yellow Pages advertising. For him this was a major step and one he didn’t take lightly; like many businesses targeting domestic customers, Yellow Pages has always been the major source of new business, but today when most people look first to the Internet for suppliers and tradespeople, the old directories are failing to bring in the business and to give good value for money. Everyone seems to know deep down that web marketing is the future for small businesses, as indeed does Yell (Yellow Pages’ online wing) – who hasn’t been called by them recently explaining exactly that fact?

If you need a Locksmith in London why not call London Locksmiths on 0207 978 2233, or visit their website www.londonlocksmiths.com

Based on the Wordpress system, this site has all the usual great content editing features and an Events Scheduler – you can also subscribe to the Griffin’s new mailing list for news about upcoming events and general chit chat from Charlie, the Griffin’s Manager.

Though based in Frome, Somerset for the past five years the Mark Bruce Company is nationally recognised for their dramatic and provocative style of dance theatre. Performing to sell-out crowds at the Frome Merlin Theatre this summer, the company is now on break til the autumn before embarking on a UK tour.

Kilroy James started out in the early 90s creating websites for arts organisations and dance companies in particular. These days our remit and clients are usually more commercially oriented so it is a real pleasure to get back to basics and work on an interesting and non-commercial project again.

Like all our new Wordpress based web sites, this site gives the Mark Bruce Company complete control over their content. They don’t have to wait on our schedule to get their updates done – they take care of it themselves. With the addition of an archive section to record details of older work, photographic galleries, news and a current productions area to give both the public and venues information about the current repertoire, the site is a huge visual and practical improvement over the previous incarnation.

It is good to know where your web site visitors come from and what they do after they arrive.
This and other information is available, using special software, from your web site’s access logs.
It can be a good idea to outsource this type of work for reasons of economy
(doing it properly requires investment on several fronts) expertise and impartiality.
If you do then you should expect human analysis as well as tables and charts, and you
should get reports that actually help with the planning, running and assessment of your
web site and marketing campaigns.

Web analysis is how you discover who comes to your web site and what they do there.

It is one of the most important, flexible and useful of all web marketing activities and can help you optimise the design, development and marketing of your website – both in general and in great detail. It is also the quality-control tool par excellence, and provides insights into:

• your web site’s large and small-scale development opportunities and priorities;
• design flaws in certain pages, or across your whole site, that reduce the number of leads or purchases you should get;
• how effective your marketing is;
• your customers’ ‘demographics’, overall performance data and lots of other information that helps you build up a picture of who is using your site, when they are using it, where they are coming from and how they are using it.

A web analyst relies fundamentally on your web site’s access logs. These log files come in various formats; some formats are better than others for web analysis, but all hold raw data that can be broken down into an impressive range of useful information. While data mining programs are used to extract the data from the log files, it is the web analyst who decides what to extract and how to interpret that data. The log analysis software can also generate automatic reports, useful for gathering data according to time and date ranges, ‘hits’, the volume of data, geography, etc.

Despite the obvious advantages web analysis gives to a site manager, it is still one of the most under-utilised marketing activities, particularly among smaller businesses who ironically have the most to gain from it. I believe that’s because:

• they don’t understand how useful it is;
• they don’t have a marketing or development strategy for their web site;
• none of their acquaintances do it, so they don’t either (sheep mentality);
• it’s not an ‘active’ activity (a bit like financial reporting);

If you are the kind of person who likes to run your business in a haphazard sort of way, ruled by guesswork and hunch, then you probably don’t need web analysis and probably will never see the benefit of it. Yet, for the right kind of business, analysis provides the ‘intelligence’ to help you make good decisions and be a good manager. It is the only available source of website performance data, and people who believe they can manage a business-critical website without it are, in my experience, little shy of deluded.

So what is the right kind of business? Well, if any of the following ring any bells then you should be doing web analysis as a matter of course:

• your business relies on your web site, and/or getting people to it;
• you are an ecommerce business;
• your web site is an integral part of your company and has a development budget;

Web analysis has had some bad press though, and many people have the impression that it’s limited to providing large round numbers of general and semi-useful (except for bragging purposes) information. And unfortunately, they are often right, which is the fault of unscrupulous, if not downright dishonest, web companies who peddle such services. But that is to proper web analysis what Bernard Mathews is to healthy eating.

Web analysis can answer subtle questions like:

• how much of my advertising actually leads to sales or enquiries;
• which campaigns are the most successful (and which are failing);
• do my visitors come back – if not, why not;
• what are my visitors interested in;
• are my products well-placed, is my shopping cart designed well, what about my enquiry form;
• does my web site have any structural problems that prevent people reaching places I’d like them to reach;
• which parts of my web site might be most worth expanding?

You can hypothesise use-case scenarios and story-board notional users all you like, but in the end that’s all just a dress-rehearsal. You can live on hunches and guesswork too if you like gambling. But you don’t have to settle for either option because, ultimately, analysis will tell you how good your web site and marketing strategy really are.

Specialising in French and Italian red wine, and champagne, marc1wines has a growing reputation for quality wine from rare and small (sometimes boutique) producers. This is an excellent site for anyone who buys wine online, and features some lovely photos of wine.

The owner Marc Medland runs a successful wine merchants in Aldeburgh. The marc1wines.co.uk website is a new venture for him and he has been keen to do it well from the start, getting in designer Chris Keeble (of Keeble and Hall) to produce some photography and a conceptual design. Marc chose to base the website on the Actinic ecommerce system, which is a good choice as it boasts class-leading features, security and power. We’re very pleased with this site and think it’s a great base for marc1wines to grow from.

Aside from these visible changes, there are more subtle evolutions taking place in cyberspace. This is exemplified in particular by the growth of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr et al. These sites have millions of children and adults alike salivating at the potential to get themselves Out There, keep up with friends and ‘meet’ others with similar interests. I read recently in the Guardian newspaper that this is not, strictly, using the web to communicate (as one might by using a newsgroup, web blog or forum), so much as to ‘build relationships’, which made me wonder, considering all the stories you hear, quite who was doing the building and what sort of relationship were they after? This strange language being used by the social networking sector is actually familiar to me from my days with a brand development agency. We used to talk about ‘building relationships’ between brands and consumers – and actually, if you use any of the social networking sites, you will see immediately that all this is actually to do with the advertising. It is the advertisers who want to build relationships with the sites’ users, and the incredible monetary value of these sites is testament to how badly they want to do this and that it works, extremely well.

Marketing and advertising are both leading growth areas on the web, and as ever at the centre of the action, the latest US figures show that for the first time ever US companies spent more money advertising online than they did on print advertising. Considering how young this industry is (although in my thirties I feel a bit like a granddad sometimes) this is a strong indication of where business marketing will be focused over the coming decade. I see this already everyday. For example, small businesses seem to be deserting Yellow pages en masse, in favour of cheaper, more profitable marketing activities on the web. It makes sense for them not just because it is cheaper but because the web is now where most people look when they want to find a supplier, service or business. Indeed I don’t even know where my yellow pages directory is; and, I’m faintly surprised to discover (via a small informal poll I’ve just conducted), neither do any of my friends!

Fosse Way magazine’s “Ask the Expert” column, June 08.