A recent study by Deloitte in the US suggested that nearly half of the adult population had surfed t’internet at the same time as watching TV. Ok, no real shock there except that as we see the growth in tablets, ultra-portable lightweight devices with 20hr battery life can we expect to see this becoming the […]
Since Google announced in 2010 it was going to take into account page load speed in it’s search engine algorithm the web world seems to have gone speed-crazy. It’s a good thing, I remember an A/B test we did back in 2006 showing a 50% improvement by using a 30k Landing Page rather than 150k. This […]
Back in 2005 Google acquired a great little analytics company, Urchin and shortly afterwards shook up the web analysis world by offering the previously chargeable product for free. It’s progress over the last 5 years has been one of Google’s great success stories and around half of the respectable commercial sites in the world use […]
Like many I’ve been using Facebook for a number of years. In that time it’s gone through various versions and iterations as most site invariably do and no matter how much I use the site, some things continue to bother me and my mind just won’t let go. For a long time I just put […]
First off, I’d like to start by saying that we are not a design company but have individuals who have undoubted talent in designing stuff. Me, I have not a creative design bone in my body! What prompted this post was a recent encounter with a client’s design company who were “re-designing” some element of […]
We’re now in the full swing of 2011 and the new year is unfortunately still carrying lots of baggage from the last decade. This baggage consists of old ideas, principles and standards which are still hanging around causing headaches for developers and more importantly, costing money to clients. The web is a fast moving industry […]
Measuring how visitors come to your site and convert is a critical part of understanding the factors that drive success. Traditional methods (such as Google Analytics) uses last touch or last visit to measure how a conversion took place but this is only part of the story. It is possible to hack most of the […]
For some time there has been a little browser bookmarklet which goes by the name of Readability, a simple tool which de-clutters web pages by stripping them down to display just the content of the page allowing for distraction-free reading. Early today (UK time) the team at Readability launched the new service which offers a […]
Testing the efficacy of web-forms and landing pages is so ingrained in what we do that frequently we overlook old learnings when new projects along. Recently we were contracted to build a specific landing page/micro-site campaign for a client and the agency usefully provided a number of images (of people) to be included on the […]
You would expect your web search results to be unbiased but are they? Are they completely neutral and without undocumented manipulation? The straight answer is no. As search-engines develop ever-more complex algorithms to drive up relevance and keep out the spammer, we have seen a full-blown fight between SEO organisations and the giants such as […]
Testing small changes can make a huge difference to performance, it’s an approach which rant on about to our clients on a daily basis and they, generally, listen to our ideas and frequently see campaign-changing improvements in conversion rates and corresponding drops in CPA. However, most companies test in secret and don’t reveal the results […]
I find that, sometimes, owners of maturing businesses can overly concern themselves with gross margin, overheads, efficiencies, cash-flow and various other accounting measures. I think most owners would agree that this is not why they started-up in business in the first place. Words like passion, belief, focus and innovation are more usually associated with young […]
You probably know the tech-geek Stephen Fry has over 2 million followers on Twitter. Most of his output surrounds the day-to-day life of an ageing comic, TV presenter, intellect and all-round “nice bloke”, I follow him and he’s one of the better celebs and my chosen twitter vehicle (Flipboard) works really well with his short, […]
For some years innovative organisations and software houses have been striving to produce a neater, more contextualised web experience only to find their efforts labelled as “invasive” or “privacy breaching”. As a result terms such as behavioural targeting and personalized web are now tarnished – forever. I am fighting back. From now on I am […]
This is the time of year that everyone and their dog seems to take out the crystal ball out and make sweeping predictions for 2011. Jumping on the bandwagon of making sweeping predictions sounds like a bit of fun, if not taken too seriously so here’s my attempt to list some dead certs that I […]
Supposedly, humans are terribly lazy, easy to manipulate and creatures of habit. That’s great news if you can leverage these traits to help your online campaign. Traditional wisdom states that people should be offered lots of choice. This is plain wrong, too much choice creates procrastination. Some say providing choice is a fundamental part of […]
Read More… from Choice architecture : Using intelligent defaults
How Landing Pages have transformed PPC traffic Since the original specification for the world-wide web was drawn up in the 90’s by Tim Berners-Lee there is, remarkably, a ghost still haunting the Internet. It’s called the “HOME” page; we’ve all heard of it, we naturally assume that the page we land on when we click […]
Probably the most frequent question we are asked is “how can I make my call-to-action web form convert better?”. Here’s a quickie, 10 minute read to get you started. There’s not much we don’t know about web forms. We’ve been designing forms on web sites since 1996 and were one of the first companies in […]
Since the web came of age in the early noughties really bright-spark and innovative companies such as Amazon, Google, Ebay and Apple have been breaking away from the “one-size fits all” approach and creating personalised web assets. These early adopters ploughed their own development furrow, investing hundred’s of millions of dollars into bespoke-built personalisation/profile/testing platforms. […]
The Connected lads are taking part in Movember. Read all about it and donate to a good cause! […]
