WordPress has released 3.9 under beta and it’s looks pretty interesting with a host of new features, some useful and some not. Direct posting from MS-Word. GOOD. Yeah, big one. Got used to watching clients break their blog sections by copying and pasting from Word. Drag and drop images. OKAY. Not that useful to directly […]
The current iteration of our web-site has gone through a number of small revisions since it was launched. Today, however, we launch the biggest iteration change since January 2013. Based on 15 months of learning, endless testing and visitor feedback. […]
Connected are running a fab little email offer (free marketing review). It’s targeted at a segment of our qualified database (around 3,000 companies) and to support the campaign we’ve tested two side-campaigns to support it’s reach and engagement. One with Twitter and one with Facebook, both designed to both increase the natural reach and also […]
Read More… from Using Facebook & Twitter to support email campaigns
In the information age, desks are terrible and expensive throwbacks to the industrial world of mass production and division of labour. Desks were very places to produce, or process work – but a post-industrial world relies on the development and sharing of ideas, not the production of goods. Having your own allocated slot in the […]
Connected was founded way back at the start of the Internet, in 1996 to be exact. I was reflecting today, after approving the re-registration of our domain name, that when the new period expires, Connected will be nearly 30 years old. To give this some context: When we founded, the most popular search engine was […]
Read More… from 17 years a digital agency. How do we prosper?
We know it’s a multi-device world and we know it’s driven by a “mobile-first” attitude, but the reality for those organisations still not delivering digital content using a responsive framework such as WordPress is looking pretty grim. That major digital brands are blind when it comes to mobile devices defies belief and recent stats, albeit […]
Read More… from 2/3rds of people use more than one device every day
WordPress might be the world’s most popular web development platform, and used by more web agencies than all the other CMS platforms combined but that does have drawbacks. It’s popularity draws the evil in people, it’s almost universal use means attacks can spread very quickly indeed. Vulnerabilities in WordPress They do appear, and quite frequently. […]
Read More… from Keeping WordPress up to date, staying secure
Monday sees the start of the release of nearly a thousand new domain names that will add to the confusion that is a URL. In the UK you had a .co.uk or a .com domain, with a few notable exceptions. We’ve also had odd domains such as .TV (actually designed to represent Tuvalu, a small […]
Read More… from .guru – really? New domains could be a nightmare
Data from February show that our 32 servers had an average uptime of 99.96%. As you imagine, hosting that many WordPress sites and keeping them all available 24×7 is no mean feat and this is where we rely heavily on the cloud. All our clients use the cloud to host their digital services and it […]
Read More… from 99.96% uptime and 600ms response time – the cloud really rocks (and so does mobile)
That is really a fib. WordPress support is not the sexy side of what we do, it’s the trudge in the rain to the tube station, or the cross country commute in the Yorkshire dales. It’s often seen as a necessary evil, and frequently gets staffed by the lowest grade folks with a resulting poor […]
The next generation of digital marketers are different, they’re demanding a more hands-on approach to digital operations, they’re collaborative and highly agile. They understand the mantra of “deliver quickly and respond to opportunities” and this means disrupting the old-school web development approach and replacing it with a far more agile process. What used to take […]
It’s well documented that offering fewer digital choices increases the number of choices made. We think this is because there is some magical quotient of choice. It isn’t. Consumer choices are driven by a combination of irrational and complex feelings around loss and an innate western mantra that goes “freedom is good, freedom is the […]
It takes time to see a return on investment when it comes to your social media strategy, and the benefits are not always obvious. Using social media can have a huge impact on the traffic driving towards your website. But this involves more than just holding a presence on social media platforms, engagement and involvement […]
Read More… from New traffic generation methods you may not have considered
In days of old you would have simply created a big list in Outlook ’98 and bashed out your promotional emails willy nilly. Usefully, the world has moved on and for good reason and it’s a good deal simpler to manage. I should point out, sending bulk email from scraped or bought-in lists to unwitting […]
It’s widely thought that email really is evil Consuming up to one fifth of the working day. But is it a necessary evil? […]
If you work in the digital space you’ve not fallen foul of the the evil that is Getty Images, you are lucky … and a rare beast indeed. So here is a really good tip for finding images that won’t (shouldn’t) come back to haunt you in the night, or the courts. Finding a source […]
Read More… from Useful tip: How to find free images on the web
Most of us will use Google explicitly for search and maybe email – but it’s not a 2 trick pony, underlying their search and email offering is Google Apps and it’s universal login system. It’s not overstating to say that this element really is the future of Google. Since its launch in 2006, Google Apps […]
Most agencies can no longer keep up with the constant change hurtling at them – except now it’s new kind of change. Oh the irony, even change is changing! […]
When the iPod became the iPhone in 2007, the writing was firmly on the wall. In Q4 2013, Apple shipped over 50m iPhones whilst just 6m iPods went out the door. Though the iPod was released in 2001, its high price and Mac-only compatibility meant sales were slow until 2004, when the iPod took centre […]
