I could have told you, Vincent
Amsterdam 2012, first time and long overdue. Friendly, interesting, open – and quiet too, except for those 7.30am workman drilling outside the hotel!

Being wowed by what you’ve found is a great starting place to enjoy and remember a site experience – hopefully with the prospect of more.

When you see invention, style and substance come together, that’s time well spent where distinguished offerings are more likely to be rewarded.

What’s in it for me?

A site has to meet or exceed expectations to stay ahead and give its audience – from first time visitors to returning customers – a fix of what they’re likely to be looking for, either in the form they’ll want it straight away or to take away later.

To bottle it, the formula might be something like this –
FRESHNESS + INSPIRATION + REWARD = WOW!
I’ll take the first case!

Put the Wow! in your website

From visual to material, functional to navigational, standout elements have to be in place to convert visitors wanting new sources of information, products or services across today’s range of devices. For ideas to show that you’re not just the same as everyone else, why not give us a call?

Wow! The background image above is the excellent Jungle Fever by Jonathan Purday
(Eystorm Gallery)

Wow! David Bowie “gettin’ it loud!”, 4 of the very best minutes to spend on YouTube

And Wow! It’s strange not writing here in a responsive format (one that resizes to a device’s viewport size) but soon, soon..

Earlier this year I came across the music of Dustin O’Halloran. It might easily have been somewhere like last.fm, where he’d have been sharing the company of contemporaries like Max Richter, Ólafur Arnalds and Peter Broderick whose piano and string compositions bring their instruments up to date with often moving effect. There’s no valedictory moment etched in a mental calendar, just a small sense of reward from discovering an artist whose music brings a measure of genuine pleasure.

Now his 2010 live piano recital Vorleben is playing and I find my thoughts drifting again, just as they do with this year’s bestringed Lumiere and A Winged Victory For the Sullen collaboration with Adam Wiltzie.

Best to just listen. Here’s a lovely piece (that also features on the live disc) with a hint of Erik Satie and, as you’ll see, the most charming animation.

And purely by coincidence I’m sure, the aforementioned Ólafur Arnalds started his Living Room Songs project on Monday, creating and releasing a new song each day for a week that’s recorded and filmed live in his Reykjavík apartment.

Here’s today’s piece, Film Credits, which may well be the best so far. You can follow his progress and download the mp3s for free at http://livingroomsongs.olafurarnalds.com.

On the web, the possibilities are endless

but across platforms and devices it’s propositions that count to show visitors what you do, and then much more importantly – what’s in it for them.

A good starting point is this recent study which reveals that being authentic and up-to-date with their own style is what Gen-Yers now most value from their brands.

A major part of my day is helping to highlight clients’ goods and services as relevant, useful and desirable. And to convert web traffic into actions and ROI rather than just noise, we need compelling online propositions.

What’s yours?

Whether it’s to meet a physical need or scratch an emotional itch, customers want answers – and then any extra benefits that will sway their buying decisions.

Rather than simply highlighting our web design and emarketing services, we’ll offer to turn ideas into results – from traffic, leads and conversions to strategies and efficiencies, all benefits for clients looking for more than just an online existance.

Web design has to tie these strands together and show visitors there’s more available for them than just a feature set. It’s here that your proposition will paint an attractive and convincing picture for them to become paying customers.

It’s easy to think of web design in terms of appearance, but the visual aspects cover a number of elements that underpin a successful site.

For the the design process to deliver, it has to link a site’s offerings with its visitors’ needs by establishing -

Whether they’re worked through by teams or individuals, the answers will be the foundations that support a site’s performance and its contribution to online business growth.

It’s a process that’s central to the current web projects here – from a structural spring clean for a pensions advice company to an upcoming ecommerce based revamp for a local history foundation – where we work closely with our clients to signpost and deliver their different customer types through to their targeted online destinations.

No longer an afterthought or a tricky workaround, web designers now have a greater choice than ever of formats and delivery services to render website text as a consistent, enjoyable reading experience.

System, commercial and free fonts offer different styles and weights for each project where two or three complementary typefaces are usually enough to convey a suitable mood to visitors.

The SEO and styling advantages of rendering extra fonts on screen are balanced by speed and drawing considerations, but the enhanced support of modern browsers makes these now much less of an issue.

For sites to stand out with better balance and depth from typography is yet further progress as our nascent internet allows brands to more easily maintain their own style and freshness.

This shouldn’t be such a surprise, given the recent wider successes of the eurocrime novel. And with the impending return of the show that introduced the genre to BBC4, here’s a quick look at three of the leading shows in their schedules.

Spiral

It picks over the cultures, politics and moralities that grease the cogs (“engrenages”) in a murky world where the protagonists (police, judiciary, lawyers and gangs) are often drawn from a similar skein.

Wallander

Their gritty intelligence and sympathetic landscapes evoke an underlying despair pushing away at human frailties and decencies. The second series with (personal favourite) Krister Henriksson in the title role is due to be repeated this year.

The Killing

These complex and detailed episodes from Denmark weave swathes of ambiguity, maneuvering and interpersonal dynamics into a gripping tale where it’s hard to separate any of the main characters from some aspect of the denouement!

ot everything works first time! Much as it’s down to inspiration, experience and research, you simply won’t see the true indication of a project’s performance potential until it’s been tested in practice.

From site structures to page layouts, mailings to PPC ads, we’d all like to see a noticeable difference in our goals, KPIs and ROI. And if that’s going to be possible, it can only happen by testing and changing influential elements.

Systematic testing pulls in the data to measure which variations generate the best results. This might be an A/B test between two versions of the same piece, or multivariate testing that focuses on particular elements at a time. Then there’s heat mapping to track visitors’ cursor movements and show on-page engagement.

Our first ever A/B test for a mailing headline produced a 52%/48% split in signups from the initial sample size. Hardly a great difference over a few thousand deliveries, but enough to point towards a number of extra white paper downloads for our clients.

Most recently, testing changes to the headline copy and a couple of positioning elements across a series of PPC landing pages gave us wins much more in keeping with expectations – a 15% rise in form completions and 30% increase in video views.

The original PPC headline

Now with newly optimised headline copy

eCommerce sites see the most critical testing, where changes can be measured throughout the promotional and sales processes to base decisions for improving order types, sizes and numbers.

Whether it’s working from analytics and spreadsheets or integrated testing platforms, tests have to run sufficiently to allow for significant results to emerge. And as you’d expect, the larger the elements tested the larger the changes that should result.

Just as testing results check assumptions, feedback also validates them against expectations and intentions for an extra perspective.

After the quick wins have been achieved, essential drivers optimised and results translated globally, the buy-in has to continue wherever there’s scope to improve the conversion process; that’s for clients (with branding, positioning and sales), customers (experience) and non-customers (education and awareness) to all see the gains.

We’re getting so used to websites that it’s easy to take their make-up for granted. After once being full web presences by themselves, most sites now work as part of a wider communications strategy alongside emarketing and social media channels.

Design, Content, Functionality, Traffic, Devices

At its core, a site is the design, content and functionality which serves its traffic on a growing range of devices. We can see this as a space, an island in a sea of world wide webbery, or as a structure that’s purpose built to stand out online.

..and Brand

What brings everything together and conducts the site’s lifeforce is its brand, whether that’s business, personal or communal. Putting all of the individual branding elements together, we have the blocks to build an online identity that look something like this –

More than just a list of buzzwords, these are the factors that make a site worth visiting and returning to. Nobody really wants websites, they want what they offer – which is much more than a sum total of information, goods or services.

With every website we need something to buy into, and there’s nothing better for this than our favourite brand components.