Category: Web Design

There have been several reports recently regarding the increase of internet usage among women. As we are either just finishing or have just completed several female orientated sites we thought it was about time we blogged about the rise of the lady surfer (kind of like the rise of the Terminator but with lipstick, heels and a funky handbag)!

1) Little Miss Surf

In December 2008, Digital World, Digital Life released results of a study that found 47% of UK housewives spend half of their free time on the Internet. Given the study found they have an average of 5.8 hours free per weekday, that’s approx 3 hours a day online. Though, now that you can buy groceries online, pay bills, deal with the bank and many other house-admin duties, maybe the housewives surveyed are just using the Internet as a tool to ease their work and it’s not leisure surfing at all!

2) Blogging v’s A little bit of the other

Intel commissioned a report in 2008 that showed some pretty startling findings. It found that 46% of women would prefer to give up sex for a fortnight than Internet access! This figure was unsurprisingly down for men to 30%! Interestingly, as women got older they were more inclined to prefer the Internet to ‘mummy-daddy time’! For women aged 18-34 it was 49 percent and for women aged 35-44 it was 52 percent. For men aged 18-34, it was 39 percent.

3) Keeping in touch on the move

A recent report by comScore found that one third (34%) of European mobile social networking users access social media exclusively. Women accounted for 48% of this statistic. A 2007 report  published on Techcrunch found that 64% of Facebook users in the UK were female and this nifty little facebook demographic tool lets you compare male and female users in the UK.

4) All’s fair in love and Warcraft

A report from July 2008 showed that even in the seemingly masculine world of gaming women are holding their own. The Entertainment Software Association(ESA) found that 40% of gamers are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 account for 33% of gamers while boys under the age of 17 account for just 18%. Don’t know about you, but I was quite surprised at this statistic..?

So there you have it, a few facts gleamed for the big wide world of web. Maybe next time you redesign your website or set up a promotion it might be worth considering a little (*ahem) sexism after all! 

Speaking of which, maybe it’s about time PoLR had a lady bear addition to our avatars..!

With more and more people buying and selling products online, it is vital that your business has a strong online presence. Your website should represent your business accurately, be visually appealing and user friendly. You cannot underestimate the value of your website when it comes to attracting and retaining customers. A good website can increase your sales and brand reputation so it is important that you get it right.

If you already have a website for your business, this may be a good time to step back and re-evaluate what works and what doesn’t. Take advantage of free web statistic applications such as Google Analytics to see where users are coming from, what pages they look at and if there are any patterns. If you notice that there is a pattern in when people leave your website – for example, from one particular page – then it may be time to change that page. Think about creating a survey that ask your visitors what they think about your website. Feedback from the users themselves is incredibly valuable and will give you an insight into what they want from your website.

The design should represent your brand as accurately as possible. Think about who your target market is and try to choose colours that will appeal to them. A visually appealing website can play a big role in how your company is perceived. The more professional it appears, the more positive the perception of your company will be. However, ensure that the aesthetics do not overtake the functionality of the website as this should always be the priority. A website which looks great but doesn’t perform its intended function is useless.

Ensure that the information is presented as clearly as possible. Make sure that the content is laid out in a way which is easy to find and is as user friendly as possible. When we say user friendly, we mean in a way that is going to make things as simple for the end user to use as possible.

Once your website has been completed and it meets all of the specifications detailed above, you should notice a significant increase in visitors and sales. Of course, a well designed website is not always enough – you may need to implement an online marketing or SEO campaign in order to make sure that your website can be found by your potential clients. There are many web design and SEO companies who will be happy to consult with you over your needs to create a website that is going to do your business justice.

By combining all of these elements together, you can rest assured that you have created a website which is ready for success.

There are different ways of building and maintaining a website. The more traditional option is a static webpage which requires the code to be updated whenever changes need to be made. This is an option which is being used less and less frequently due to the time it takes to update and the fact that whoever is going to be doing the maintenance has to be proficient (to some level) in HTML code. It is likely that in the next couple of years, this will become almost completely obsolete as people are opting for more dynamic options.

Content Management Systems (CMS) are being used far more often, and they come in various forms. They allow the user to update content themselves and allow various functions and features to be added with no more than a few mouse clicks.

From a web design point of view, the CMS option is the one which is generally going to be encouraged. This is because the website does not necessarily need to be updated by the designer themselves. This reduces maintenance costs/time and allows the client to update the website independently without having to contact the designer any time a change needs to be made. However, to enable this functionality, it can be more time consuming to create a CMS website. It is almost always going to be a far more convenient option in the long run.

How do you choose which Content Management System is right for you? With so many different ones available, it can seem like a daunting choice. Firstly, think about what features are important to you. Do you want the ability to add new plug-ins? Do you need a WYSIWYG editor?

We’ll compare WordPress and CMS Made Simple in the table below. Of course there are many others systems available but these are the main two that we use here at PoLR.

Whichever Content Management System you choose, it will allow for greater flexibility in terms of updating compared to a static webpage. If you have any questions or need any help choosing the right solution for you, just give PoLR a shout. We’ll be happy to discuss the options with you.

We were recently at the American Museum of Natural History and prior to going we’d heard stories of how you need loads of time or umpteen visits to see everything. We had about 3 hours so were keen to make sure we saw everything we could and not miss the good bits – if you’ve every watched Night at the Museum than you’ll know there’s certain exhibits that you just wouldn’t want to miss!

Before we got to the museum we remembered reading something about an app for the museum so we nipped into a Starbucks and downloaded the free AMNH iPhone App to see if it could help us make the most of our visit.

From the iPhone Store:

Chart your own course at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City with AMNH Explorer—a new app that is part custom navigation system, part personal tour guide for the Museum’s world-famous halls.

When you first fire up the app you are given the option of finding specific exhibits, choosing a museum tour, finding the food outlets, locating the restrooms (which in a museum that size comes in very handy indeed!) and finding your way round with maps.

We chose the museum tours first which gave us an easy choice of tours to suit our needs and time constraints. We could have chosen specific ‘Night at the Museum’ tours to Dino tours but in the end we opted for the Highlights Tour as this would give us a taste of the whole museum but still let us see the ‘must see’s’ (Lucy and Dum Dum for example!)

What I really liked about this feature was being able to choose what we had time for without having to research what we wanted to see beforehand. We ended up choosing the Long Tour and it took us all round the museum in around 2 hours.

The other thing I loved about this app was that it gave further information about each exhibit which wasn’t always detailed on the exhibit information itself.

Once an exhibit had been visited we hit the ‘visited’ option and it let us easily keep track of what we’d still to see and where we still had to go. One comment about this feature though, we found that if we visited the exhibitions out of sequence then the preceding ones were sometimes marked as visited when they hadn’t been. Could be a bug, could be us accidentally hitting visited when we shouldn’t have!

The app was also great at helping us find our way, if we got lost (maybe just a few times…) then we just had to click on the ‘directions to here’ button and it told us exactly where to get to from where we were standing meaning we lost minimal time wandering around looking lost.

I really enjoyed using this app and would recommend it to anyone visiting the AMNH to get the most of a visit. At last look I could find very few in the UK that offered an app like this and it’s definitely something I’d be looking for next time I visit a museum.

I’m a workaholic and I freely admit it so when I was on holiday destined for New York and discovered it was Social Media Week I thought ‘oooh, now, I am so going to that‘. I logged on (still in the airport and pre-flight at this point) I found a talk that I liked the look of and signed up. The fact it was hosted in the Google Science and Technology Centre was a bonus too.

The Event:

The Internet & Uprisings in the Arab World: Are We Already In A Post-Social Media World? Hosted by Wired

And the panel consisted of:

Moderator: John C Abell
New York Bureau Chief, Wired.com

Susannah Vila
Director of Content and Outreach for Movements.org

Adam Penenberg
AD of the Business and Economic Program at NYU

Micah Sifry
Co-founder and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum

The Content

The talk dealt mainly with the situation in Egypt just now along with discussing issues of privacy, access and how social media is enabling people to organise these types of events/demonstrations in a faster, further reaching way than before. It threw up some important questions such as:

• Should Social Media platforms do more to protect their users?
• What’s different this time (with Egypt) compared to say the Chinese revolution?
• What part can Social Media can play in enabling demonstrations?

And the most important question that I was interested in:

What are we risking using social media?

Not the ‘I may lose my job if I call my boss a d*ckhead’ kind of worry but the worry over how secure data could be and how, in certain countries this risk could potentially be life threatening. For example, how easily could a users data be turned over to the governmental authorities if they requested it further down the line?

Think of Wikileaks and Twitter…Twitter recently contacted several account holders to let them know that they (Twitter) had been requested to give up account information (read more), Twitter claim it’s their “policy is to notify its users, where possible, of government requests for information” but it has to make you wonder how many other social media platforms may also have been asked and not felt it necessary to inform their users?

The content and questions raised certainly gave me food for thought (along with some ideas for future blogs) and I shall be blogging more once I have had time to mull it all over properly.

Social Media make us happy. Fact.

On a lighter note there was one particular fact that sprung out at me and that came from Adam Penenberg…He, through researching his new book, carried out a test on oxytocin levels (the cuddle hormone) and using Social Media. A blood test was taken before and then after using Social Media He found that oxytocin levels spiked by 13.2% after using Social Media which is on a par with a Groom at a wedding.

Average wedding = £12,000 v’s Twitter = £0…..no contest 😉

In those 10 minutes between blood batches one and two, my oxytocin levels spiked 13.2%. Meanwhile, stress hormones cortisol and ACTH went down 10.8% and 14.9%, respectively.

Read More

To see the chat from the day go to Twitter and use the #smwwired

Another article of interest on this topic is form the BBC

Recently I have been wanting to visit several restaurants or tourist attractions and have looked them up on my smartphone. Maybe I have been unlucky but approximately 50% of these searches have resulted in being unable to progress with either a visit, a booking or me getting my dinner! Why? Because these website have all been built in Flash and this isn’t currently served by my Android phone nor (ever likely to be) on my other half’s iPhone.

Take for instance the following website for a local restaurant that I was looking to book on my way home from work. What resulted was that I was unable to access the site and therefore unable to get their phone number to call and make a reservation which resulted in me having to go elsewhere (athough this did help me discover my new favourite restautant so it wasn’t all bad!) I wonder how many other people have had to do this and how much business they have lost? Are they even be aware it’s an issue? Well, Yes, I know they are because I put it on a comment card but still it’s all Flash so perhaps they just don’t care about the missing custom?

Why you shouldn’t ignore mobile.

According to comScore’s 2010 Feburary report The 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review;

In December 2009, smartphones were owned by 17 percent of the mobile phone subscribers, up nearly 6 percentage points versus year ago…With so many new smartphone models reaching the market in 2009, the next year promises a rapid increase in market penetration of these devices, which likely means a corresponding uptick in mobile web usage.

and also, a report from Quantcast found that:

Worldwide, the share of Internet pageviews originating from mobile devices increased 148% in the year to December ’09

Not figures to be sneezed at and surely figures that would make the most diehard Flash fan have a wee bit of a rethink?

How Flash renders on the Android and iPhone and why I had to go elsewhere.

To illustrate my point, below is a screenshot of the website on my Android, one on the iPhone and one as it should look. Logo has been blurred to protect the inaccessible!

This website could solve part of it’s problem by just having a simple ‘skip intro’ link as the internal part of the site is only partly in Flash and potential customers could at least get to contact details, opening times etc. Such a simple solution that would have allowed us (and potentially others) to make a booking.

We went along to a presentation by Nation1 a few weeks ago and something that was mentioned has made me think about writing this post since then.

The speaker was discussing the pros and cons of a bespoke Content Management System (CMS). Now, in the past using an off the shelf, open source CMS was something that might have tried to be hidden from clients for fear or being asked how we justify costs on ‘free’ software (we never hid it at PoLR I might add!).

Open Source can be seen as cheating by some as the software itself is free but the benefits of using this are what makes it worthwhile and the cheaper option for the client in the long run.

I have even seen a company try to hide their use of Open Source by sticking their name infront of the software name and trying to sell ‘Company Name Joomla’ and ‘Company Name WordPress’ as product.

I don’t see the point of hiding that we use Open Source software. Trying to pass it off as our own as in the case above is a whole other matter of course!

Anyway, the speaker at this event made a great case for both sides so I thought it would be nice  to do a short post on why I see Open Source as the preferred option over bespoke and what we use here at PoLR.

Bespoke CMS

When I started out my career in web design I started by creating a bespoke ASP (Yes, ASP – it was a while ago…) driven CMS that I edited for each client.

Bespoke was thought to equal ‘better’ and a lot of the time there was no question of using anything else (at least with the jobs I was tasked with anyway!) It was a simple system that did the job but looking back there are plenty reasons why it might not have been the best solution at the time. Obviously there are points when ONLY a bespoke system will do but for the purpose of this post I’m referring to Joe Bloggs who just wants to update the odd bit of text and images.

• I wrote it, I owned it and once I left that job to go to another I didn’t maintain it. I was happy for the webdesign company to alter it as they wanted (I had no use for it in my new job) but I personally didn’t want to be doing that on top of starting at a new place.
• There were no fancy plugins that could be integrated and every new request had to be handcoded resulting in high costs for the client.
• You need a new feature? You could wait a long time for quotes and for the developer to look into the CMS and see if it can do what you’re asking.

Open Source CMS

When I started experimenting with an Open Source CMS I opted for Mambo (later Joomla, WordPress etc) and immediately saw the benefits.

• Installs are faster (letting clients see an actual working site quicker usually equals content faster!)
• Plugins are available to remove some of the labour which in turn reduces costs for the client
• The systems are constantly being worked on and therefore updates are released on a frequent basis.
• Anyone can work on it so if you fall out with your developer then your next developer should be able to quickly and easily get to grips with it (even if they don’t currently use your particular CMS there will be enough resources online to help them learn it).

What CMS PoLR Use

Here at PoLR we have looked at many a CMS and finally settled on two versions that we are happy with, one suitable for smaller businesses and one that we prefer for our larger clients: WordPress and CMS Made Simple.

We gave up on Joomla because we found that clients hated the admin area of it and were point blank, refusing to update their site because it was ‘too complicated’.

These two systems are fantastic for our clients and not one of them is worried about using the software. Training is simple, straightforward and because the system handholds the user it sometimes feels unnecessary!

So there you go, we’re proud to say that PoLR will happily give you a product that you can take with you to another web designer, a product that’s easy to use and last but by no means least, a product that can save you money.

I have just completed two websites for two of the most organised customers I have ever had. I don’t quite know what’s happened to make them both come along at once – maybe I’m being more effective or maybe I was just lucky but whatever it is I thought I would compose a wee post with why they were such successful (and by that I mean fast) builds.

1) Feedback, Feedback and Feedback some more

Feedback is by far the most important gift you can give to your web designer. It lets us move forward confident that we are doing what you want. In these two cases, the sheer amount of feedback I received was fantastic, it was regular, timely and always very detailed. It let me react and make changes quickly that I knew were exactly what  they wanted and were not half-guesses.

Tips:

• Live with the design for a few days and ask around for second opinion just don’t ask for too many opinions as it can do more harm than good!
• From the inital design to the finalising of content, I much prefer feedback in an e-mail so I can work through it step-by-step and make sure I have everything covered before going back to you.

2) Content isn’t just king it’s a necessary evil

Content is the most difficult thing to get and often holds up the completion of a build. I have worked on all manner of website and no matter how big or small the site, content always seems to be the most dreaded job for clients. With these two sites the customers were given control of the site from the basic build and happily worked away on the content until it was perfect. It probably helped that the type of organisations they were meant that they  had the majority written down anyway but still, they were amazingly fast and getting the content to me or on the website.

Tips:

• Meet your web designer with a clear idea of what you want on the website and what you want it to say.
• If you are really stuck for words or just hate writing then ask the company if they can provide copywriting services for you.
• If you are having difficulty then let your web company know, they should be able to help or at the very least they will be happy to have been told they can put your project on hold for a little while (and stop calling you for content 😉 )

3) Decisive decision making

Decisive decision making is a God send……

Email confirmations of every meeting and phonecall may be tiresome but they help keep everyone informed and gives everyone something to refer back to at a later date.

Tips:

• While fast decisions are always welcome don’t feel pushed into a decision and end up regretting it later. If you aren’t sure of the design then take time to think it over – it’s the changing of things at a later stage that can cause delays, at the start your designer will just want to make sure it’s perfect for you and shouldn’t mind short delays if it is more effective in the long run.

It never ceases to amaze me sometimes at the sheer lack of thinking outside the box from some people. A lot of the time it isn’t even outside the box, it’s in the box… common sense. I have actually spoken to other business owners, who when I asked whether they had a website, the reply comes: “I’m not really into all this computer stuff” or “I can’t be bothered with all that web stuff, I’m old school”.

I don’t want one…

Every time I reply with “Well it’s not really about you is it? It’s about your customers, perhaps they may use these computer thingy’s and the interthingymijig… and you could be missing out” DING.

The way to a business owners heart is through making them realise that they’re missing an opportunity.

If you ever sign up one of these guys, you’ll find that they gradually become one of the most knowledgable customers you have. I’ve seen it happen, made it happen even. Ignite that touch paper and watch them school themselves silly with jargon and research. And inevitably pick your brain at every opportunity… but this is fine if they’re a paying customer 🙂

It is a good feeling actually, to turn around someones misconception of websitesand their usefullness to businesses. We’re not out to make “I told you so” statements, we simply have a genuine thirst for generating online success for our customers and sometimes it’s just part of the process to educate (trying not to sound like Hitler here) when necessary.

If any of you out there are still on the fence as to whether or not you may need a website, give us a call at the office and we’ll talk you through what’s involved and give you an honest opinion of whether or not it may be the right avenue for your business, which it probably will be!

Every website we build at PoLR follows a certain ‘critical path’ to completion. A Critical Path is terminology that sets out the key milestones and points of a project that must be adhered to, in terms of time and build, in order for all other facets of the project to be able to work and be competed successfully.Now every project can differ, of course. That’s why there is more than one option after starting. However, in every case, a full consultation must be carried out in the first instance. For us to get a feel for the project and run through our tried and tested ‘website questionnaire’ which will tell us about the customers preferences and gives us technical answers to lay questions. For instance we may find that the customer “doesn’t like websites that look really different on other monitors and have separate sections within the same page”, then we know to keep it a fixed width, with no scrolling. This step will always form the ‘Start’ element.

When we’re building a website, we could also be creating the client’s branding from scratch including logo and colour scheme (which would usually form one of the first stages post-start) or they may already have this in place and we skip a step, or go in a different direction on the path. A point worth mentioning here, is that this may indeed not be a ‘critical’ element if the layout and such can be agreed prior to the branding being established, but in general, it doesn’t progress until this is done.

Next up is usually agreeing the layout of the website, which at PoLR we do by using a ‘Gray Box’ model consisting of choices of layout without aesthetics attached to get an idea of where to put pages, sales paths and calls-to-action throughout the website. 2 points here: Firstly, for larger projects the client may already have a detailed specification. We still treat this situation the same if this is this case, but there’s simply less back-and-forth between the client and PoLR to get this stage agreed and signed-off. Secondly, sometimes a client will confuse the ‘Gray Box’ model as our first stab at the design, until we remind them of the reason for sending it!

I mentioned the term ‘Sign-off’. A key point is to have clients agree in writing to each of the stages. This allows for a clear understanding throughout the project regarding what has been understood by both parties as being involved in the build and design. Miscommunication can let a project down badly, even detrimentally. So having the client ‘sign-off’ on the completion of each stage keeps everyone in the loop.

When the ‘Gray Box’ element (i.e. the site layout) has been agreed, then the design of the website commences. The agreed layout is then dressed and redressed (having had a full consultation beforehand regarding preferences and ‘do’s and don’t’s’) until the customer is completely happy with the way it looks throughout, then this stage is also signed off. We can either ‘hit the nail on the head’ first time with the design or there can be numerous back-and-forths between ourselves and the clients. The best laid plans being in place (like the consulatation) can reduce this, but clients are humans (mostly) and humans change their minds! So this stage can vary in timescale from project-to-project, however, we take this into account when providing the initial project timescale.

Now we have a fully agreed layout and design, which at this point is essentially still simply an image of a website. Time to build it now. This stage is quite time consuming and can be tricky if we have some ‘left field’ requests with the functionality, albeit with smaller websites we’re pretty efficient in terms of time. his isn’t to say they get a less professinal product in the end, the usually just have less functionality and tricky bits. More complicated websites can be really complex in the build stage, but this is all forecast from the outset.

This brings us onto the next stage, testing (arguably building and testing are the same stage). We have to test all of the websites we produce to make sure that they actually work the way they are supposed to. So we will actually try to ‘break’ the website once we think we have it working perfectly to iron out any ‘bugs’ that may arise. With larger and more complex websites, ‘bugs’ (glitches in the functionality) can and do occur, even after full testing and the website has gone live. This is because the website will be set up to change dynamically and increases the likelihood of a small glitch happening. All large projects should have a maintenance contract in place for the developers to come back in and fix these bugs after launch. Small to medium websites that have been tested fully should go on to enjoy a happy life.

When the testing has been completed and demonstrated to the customer, the stage is signed off. This seems like we’re right at the end and ready to go live now, doesn’t it? Well on the face of it we are. We have a fully built and designed website with itchy feet ready to take it’s place on the internet, but wait… it doesn’t have the content yet!

The content of the website is basically all of the text throughout the website, for each and every page. And it’s the customer who needs to provide this. Why? Because our customers know their businesses better than we do and in most cases provide full text for every part of the website. We can provide copywriting services as an extra (again we would know this, ideally, from the first stage) which means we just plug it all in and it’s good to go.

Lack of content from a customer is without compare, the main factor in the delay of a website project. Other elements can come close, but you would be surprised how often a fully ready website can sit dormant (and offline) waiting on the client to produce the content.

*ADVICE ALERT* Cusomers: even though the content isn’t due until near the end of the project, get it organised way in advance and save unnecessary delays to your project. Failing that, tell us at the start that you want us to do it.

This stage isn’t technically a critical one as it doesn’t affect the other facets of the build taking place, but it can prevent the last stage in our critical path of web design from happening – Final Signoff of Website and Launch.

This last stage consists of the final signoff of the entire website. That it is built completely to specification and that the customer is happy with it and wants it to go live for everyone to use. They sign it off and then we launch it. Simples.