To help facilitate a new generation of programmers, Raspberry Pi, a Cambridge based UK company, has started manufacture of their $25 computer. The computer is credit-card sized and can be attached to an HDTV, making computers more accessible to a mainstream audience—as well as making it an I-want-one-of-those gadget for the tech-geeks among us. The Raspberry Pi computer will be many people’s first taste of using a Linux based operating system for everyday tasks, such as browsing and document publishing. Low-cost computers are going to allow children a kick-start in their career development in lucrative games and media industries; the UK exports many Games developers but is not good in retaining the knowledge within the UK market. Low-cost computers may become thin-clients (computer using another computers processor) to powerful cloud based computers; phones are starting to follow this pattern.

The arts/science divide is slowly closing and could be the key for a long term economic growth strategy in the UK. Freshleaf will be following Raspberry Pi’s progress closely.

I have been working with one of our (b2b) clients this week to help them establish a strapline for their business… and being honest, coming up with the right strapline for the job isn’t as easy as you might think. Good headline/strapline writing is a real skill – but the information you need to come up with the right strapline already exists within your business, so with the right information and the right process, it is possible to nail it.

A process of brainstorming is a good place to start – creating a list of words and phrases that describe your business, what your existing customers value about your business, and why new customers should pick you. And remember – the right strapline isn’t about how you see your business, it’s about how you want customers to see you.

Strapline considerations

As you work through, keep in mind the following considerations:

1. A natural sounding strapline is more useful than a contorted ‘clever’ one.

2. Simplicity is vital – a strapline shouldn’t be a fully fledged marketing message, it should be very easy to grasp and ideally easy to remember.

3. It should tell customers something about either your services, or your ethos, as plainly as possible. It can be tempting to get try to get clever with straplines, using phrases that sound good, but don’t mean anything when you think about them – but to be effective your strapline needs to be simple and hard-hitting.

4. Some people advise avoiding specific promises – such as ‘always on time’, as that can come back to bite you, no matter how good you are. My personal feeling, however, is that it tells customers that your standards are high, and it gives you something to live up to.

5. Think about what your customers value most in your services. For example Duracell’s “lasts longer” drives right to the heart of what people want from their batteries. Similarly Pickfords “the careful movers” – careful is exactly what you want from your removal guys. If you can get to the heart of what your customers value about you, you’ve got your strapline. Clever or conceptual straplines are for B2C brands (Persil’s ‘dirt is good’ is a bold move, but wouldn’t work for a B2B company) – for B2B stick to what it is your customers want from you.

6. Rhymes or alliteration make a strapline trip off the tongue more easily, and make it more memorable, but don’t use that at the expense of the points above.

7. Make sure that it’s actually adding something to proceedings, not just a strapline for the sake of a strapline.

Strapline Checklist

Once you have a list of possible straplines, you can rate them based on the following criteria – which is really just a checklist of the considerations above:

Simplicity - Is it straightforward, honest, short? (Discard all the wordy options based on this criteria, and look for ways to say the same thing using less words. Also discard anything that tries to be too clever)

Clarity – Is it easy to grasp? Is it really clear what you’re trying to say, without me having to think too hard about it? Does it tell me something? (Discard all muddy phrases which are open to interpretation, based on this criteria.)

Essense – Is it going to the heart of what your customers want from your business/product/service? Is it an absolute distillation of the key reason customers should pick you. (Discard anything that sounds good but isn’t really what you’re about… or which mentions aspects that aren’t absolutely key)

Usability/Memorability – Can you say the phrase easily? Can you remember it easily? If you select this strapline and walk away from it for a day, will you still remember it?

But the copy on your website is important. It should be laboured over, drafted and re-drafted, and honed into a thing of perfection. But then I would say that, because I love words. But there’s evidence that not paying sufficient attention to the basics can end up hitting your bottom line, something that every business should take seriously. The BBC news website today carries a story about ‘online entreprenuer’ (what is he when he’s offline?) Charles Duncombe, who contends that a single error in the spelling or grammar used on a website can halve its revenue.

Photo credit: CookieDuster, Flickr

Mr Duncombe, who runs a number of e-commerce websites selling everything from mobile phones to clothes and travel, measured the performance of one of his sites before and after a simple spelling error was corrected. The results, he claims, are shocking – the revenue per customer doubled once the error was corrected. Mr Duncombe doesn’t share with us his methodology nor his exact figures, but the implications are obvious.

While older generations bemoaning the quality of written English in school and university leavers is seriously old news, the figures speak for themselves – and it makes perfect sense. Whether you’re selling online or communicating your core business competencies and values, how can you expect anyone to want to do business with you if you haven’t taken the time and trouble to write well structured, interesting and above all grammatically correct copy?

Note to the eagle-eyed and the pedantic - any spelling or grammatical errors in this post are entirely intentional, and were included for the sake of irony. Any errors in the remainder of the website can be notified here.

Because most of our client relationships are long-standing ones, managing websites from first steps through mergers and acquisitions is something we’ve become very familiar with at Freshleaf.   We’ve done our fair share of integrating branding, products, content and messaging from one website into another – and it can be a challenging process.

First steps – the start-up

When a new technology start-up first comes out of stealth mode, the website requirements are usually fairly minimal. It starts with an information-only site… a drip-feed of information intended mainly for the technology community. In those early stages, it’s a delicate balance between not having too much to say on the website (or not yet being at liberty to say too much), but not wanting to be written off as yet-another-startup-that-won’t-last-five-minutes.

Later, as the company finds its feet, changes to the website are required to keep up. The messaging shifts; there’s more to say about products and technologies, and the audience broadens to include not just those in the industry, but press, potential customers and potential investors.  Management of press releases and job vacancies becomes important, and the building blocks are put in place for the evolution into a much larger corporate site.

Mergers and acquisitions – eat or be eaten

Established corporate websites, of course, are much more stable entities. Changes are normally iterative, with major redesigns or restructuring coming around less often. Each website evolves its own logical hierarchy of information, its own user journeys, key landing pages and so on, which are (or should be) the result of careful consideration, and based on the way that the audience will interact with the site (rather than being based on internal divisions and structures).

So what happens when two tech companies need to integrate their whole offering into one comprehensive website? Well, therein lies the challenge. Nobody wants to end up with an ill-conceived mash up of the two companies’ offerings – but that’s exactly what can happen if there’s not sufficient skills and resources dedicated to managing the web presence through the changes.

How the integration works depends a little on the nature of the merge – but the ways we support the change management process are similar in most cases.  Often the first step is either to find a way to integrate the brand values of the two companies without compromising either – or to help create a unified identity drawing from the strengths of both brands. Of course, branding decisions are made within the company, but it often falls to us as a design agency to provide actual solutions to the problem of how to respectfully join the two brands.

Website Merger Roadmap

The next step is to provide a roadmap to integrate content from both websites into the remaining site. This is similar to the process we use to structure a site initially, but is made inherently more complex by the need to map extensive new content – with its own internal structures – onto an existing structure in a way which is still logical, intuitive and usable. This applies across the site, but product ranges are usually a particularly thorny example, and finding a way to align new but established products with an existing offering can be tricky. In creating a new structure we need to consider aspects such as the audience and engagement patterns (for example, adding a consumer product to an existing B2B range), user journey, the presentation of key landing pages, and cross–linking of products.

The aim, of course, is to complete the process with an integrated website which is better than the sum of its parts – its offering is broader but its structure is logical, its messaging clear and coherent and its goals are aligned to the goals of the business. And, with sufficient expertise and a bit of hard work, it can be achieved.

Search Engine Optimisation – a strategic approach

All too often, the stated goals of SEO go along the lines of “to get better listings in Google” – and it’s tempting to believe that it’s that simple. Better listings = more traffic = more sales, right? But really, SEO is only beneficial if it’s part of a strategic approach, with focussed goals. As with all aspects of your communications, it’s not just about getting noticed, it’s about getting noticed by the right people to achieve a business goal. It’s not about getting to number one on Google for the keywords you choose, it’s about considering what search terms your target audience will likely use, and optimising the site to get in front of those people – both so that they find the site in search engines, but also so that they do what you want them to do once they arrive.

The first step with SEO has to be not ‘let’s optimise our site’ but ‘who is the audience of our site, and what do we want to put in front of them, and why?’. Once that much is clearly defined you can look at generating keyword/keyphrase lists, bearing in mind the target audience, and then you can optimise the site accordingly, not just to get noticed by the search engines but critically so that you’re providing the right content for the people as well (they come down to one and the same thing, ultimately).

Social Media – choose your weapon

As with SEO, social media engagement also requires a well thought out strategy in order to be effective. Whether it’s trying Twitter or figuring out Facebook, before starting with social media activity, it’s important to first establish what you want to achieve, what value there is in it for you, who you want to engage with, what platforms will be appropriate, and how it will be managed. There’s a lot of – for want of a better word – bandwaggon jumping going on in this arena, but it’s only a value-add if it’s well thought out, and if you understand what it is you stand to get from it.

A blog, for example, is a great social media tool. Showcasing your expertise whilst establishing an authoritative voice in your market, providing plenty of informal content and encouraging engagement, it ticks all the boxes. But a blog is unlikely to directly increase your sales. It might encourage more traffic to your site, but since all you’re doing on the blog is sharing thoughts and ideas, many of those visitors will leave after reading a post without ever engaging further. Blogs, like other social media platforms, are not traditional PR channels, and a strategy (or lack of strategy) which just involves ‘pushing’ your usual message will not be well received, and will not benefit you.

And getting the style of communication wrong is just one way to fail with social media marketing. Failure to allocate resource to generating content and monitoring response, inability to provide engaging audience-appropriate content, and lack of commitment to engaging in a new and different way are other barriers to succesful use of something which was never intended as a marketing channel.

Summary

As much as we like to avoid marketing-speak, ‘joined up thinking’ is essentially what we’re talking about – it’s all part of the same picture. Too often, both social media marketing and search engine marketing become separated from the goals of the business, and both are undertaken almost as a bolt-on, without much clarity of purpose. All of your marketing activities – be it advertising, website, PR, social media or search engine marketing – are ultimately about communicating with people (the right people), not about blindly pushing out content. And all of your marketing activities should start from the underlying decisions about your business, its target audience and its goals, and should continue to be driven by them.

Of course, as the old saying goes “good design is invisible”, so it makes sense that in compiling this list we found it easier to remember sites that got it horribly wrong than ones that got it right, but that’s a post for another day.

One sub-set of websites which really are getting it right is app websites. Okay, so they have it easy – when you’ve only got one product to talk about, and you’re only driving users towards one point, there are less concerns than if you’re trying to make a huge corporate website aesthetically pleasing and usable. But still. Here’s our list of sites we like and admire (this week, at least):

www.cisco.com For a vast company with a massive scope, a well organised menu system enables users to find what they’re looking for in a way that’s actually well-thought out and intuitive. It’s tabbed mega-menus are almost small web-pages in themselves, and could be a nightmare to navigate, but good attention to the usability side of things makes them just right. A vast amount of information presented in a pleasingly simple way – that’s great website design. (Also despite being a vast corporate, Cisco has allowed its website to have just a little bit of character and flair – and that goes a long way too)

www.i-escape.com – Spending a lot of time online, you get very fed up with same-old-same-old. Holiday sites are often guilty of providing some inspirational pictures and a search function, and maybe a list of places going cheap this week – and leaving you to figure out the rest for yourself. I-escape is a really nice break from that, putting a new spin on the standard holiday search, and offering inspiration by holiday types, and really giving the feeling that someone somewhere has really thought this through.

www.envato.com – This clean, bright, one-page scrolling design is an inspiration. From an Aussie team with lots of big online ideas; getting the design side of things right is just one reason why Envato are doing so well.

www.dribbble.com – What are you working on? Okay, so show and tell for designers might not fascinate anyone who’s not….well, a designer; but dribbble is a great idea, well realised.

www.realmacsoftware.com – Remember those app websites we mentioned? Well, Realmac Software have done a lovely job with a suite of three apps on one website – each of which is fabulous in its simplicity, presenting each app in a clear, engaging way, with great use of colour, fonts and icons.

But SEO isn’t magic. There isn’t a secret formula. It’s really just about common sense, best practice, and legwork. That’s it.

Consider your business goals

A lot of businesses approach SEO as ‘something we ought to do’, without really giving enough thought to exactly what business objectives the work is intended to meet. To make SEO worthwhile, and to have any idea of whether the time and/or money you spend on it is effective, it has to be tied to an objective. And those objectives have to well thought out. The aim of SEO is not ‘to get to the top of Google’, or even ‘to get more traffic’ – those are too wide and generic aims. Why do you want to be at the top of Google?  Are you looking to increase sales? To improve brand recognition? What kind of people are you looking to attract? In what market? And for what keywords?  SEO has to start from a realistic and achievable business goal.

Think from the outside in

When helping businesses with SEO, one thing we consistently see is difficulty in generating appropriate keyword lists. The problem is that people inside a business are so familiar with the business, its internal structure, its language and terminology, that they can’t see it from a customer’s point of view. But that’s exactly what you need to do in order to drive relevant traffic to your website. You might refer to your product as your automotive audio platform, but to your customers it’s just a car stereo.

Best practice always wins

Quite frankly, there’s a lot of rubbish talked about SEO, but the main thing to remember is this: in general, Google is trying to provide the best search results for real people. Therefore it follows that your best  (only) bet for being ranked well is market your website to people, not to search engine bots, and to provide content that is relevant to real people, for whatever search term you’re targeting.  This means that you can assess any SEO tactic by testing its relevance to people.

Q. Have I stuffed too many keywords into that copy?
A. Does it read badly because of it?

Q. Should I try to get a link from that site to my site?
A. Would you expect visitors to that site to find your site relevant and interesting?

Q. Should I put a list of keywords on the homepage?
A. Is that useful to your website visitors in any way?

The test in all cases is: is it useful, relevant, valid to people? If it’s not, then it’s spammy, and it won’t help you a great deal in the long run.

The bigger picture

The other thing to remember about SEO is that there are a lot of factors at play, some of which are completely out of your hands.  The amount and quality of competition,  the age of your domain, and changes to Google’s algorithm all impact on how well your site performs in Google’s rankings, and there’s nothing you can do about them. You have to see SEO in context – it’s not the be-all and end-all, it’s just another tool you can use in marketing your product or services to the world.

Meanwhile there are other factors which impact on the effectiveness of your SEO campaign, but which are beyond the scope of the campaign itself.  SEO goals which include increasing revenue  rely on the website converting traffic into either enquiries or sales.  It’s no good  your SEO campaign driving huge volumes of traffic to your website if visitors can’t find what they need when they get there, or can’t figure out how to get in touch.

No substitute for hard work

Lastly, whether you engage an agency to take care of your SEO or run your campaign in-house, remember that there’s no substitute for legwork. Whether it’s grinding through the site optimising it, number-crunching the performance of your site and your competitors’,  or hunting round the web trying to build relevant in-bound links, it takes time and effort – and there’s no way round that.

A smooth running project, with good communication between the agency and the client is a wonderful thing. Great things can be accomplished, and everyone takes a sense of satisfaction from it. On the other hand, projects fraught with misunderstandings and disagreements are horrible for all concerned, and almost invariable result in sub-standard products.

So at Freshleaf we’ve been giving some thought to what we can do to help to make projects run more smoothly for everyone.

Educate and inform

One thing that can help prevent problems down the line is providing plenty of information on the website design process up front. After all, we do this every day, whereas even experienced marketing execs probably only oversee a handful of website rebuilds in their careers – and as an agency it’s our job to set and manage expectations of how the process will run. For example, most people underestimate the amount of involvement we’ll need from them, as a client. Whatever the project, we can’t just take it away and bring it back completed. It’s a collaborative process, and from consultation, through approval loops, content creation and more consultation, it takes a lot of input from both agency and client to bring a successful corporate website together.

Build trust

There’s also an element of trust inherent in a successful project. For our existing clients, of course, that’s exactly what we have. They trust that we advise and make recommendations based on experience and best practice, and that if we advise against something, it’s for good reason. With new clients, it’s a process of building trust. We hope that when companies come to us looking for a new corporate website, it’s because they are already convinced of our expertise – but we know we’re also asking them to make a leap, putting some of what are essentially business decisions in our hands; and that’s not all that easy to do.

We do our best work when we’re treated as an extension of the existing team, bringing new skills and experience, and hopefully a fresh perspective, but essentially pulling in the same direction as everyone who’s operating within the business – and that’s what we’re aiming for.

Keep on talking

Finally, strong two-way communication is absolutely critical to the success of any collaborative project. As an agency, we need to spend time getting to know each client’s business, and more importantly, where the website fits into their business. There are business goals to be achieved, and we can’t deliver if we haven’t understood the full picture. And that sometimes means asking difficult questions to get beyond what it seems a client is asking for, to what they really need, so we can make informed recommendations.

We can also keep projects on track by providing regular updates, whether we’ve got much to report or not. If we’re building things behind the scenes and have nothing to show a client, the temptation is to keep our heads down and get on with it…. but a quick phone call or email to say “There’s nothing to see but your CMS has been installed this week” prevents concerns about progress arising.

Ideally, a website redesign project should be the start of an ongoing relationship between us and our client; but in order for that to be the case both client and agency need to come to an understanding, and find a level of trust and communication which brings the best out of both parties.

But it seems that Adobe had a plan waiting crouched in the development underbrush, waiting to leap out and tackle the issue head-on.

Yesterday the software developer made public their ‘development preview’ (early beta to you and me) of Wallaby, which in their own words is “…the codename for an experimental technology that converts the artwork and animation contained in FLA files into HTML. This allows you to reuse and extend the reach of your content to devices that do not support the Flash runtimes…” In other words, Flash goes in one end, HTML5 comes out of the other, and your iPad or iPhone is none the wiser.

It almost seems too good to be true, so we thought we’d download it and see how it shapes up…

The first thing that becomes apparent is that this is still a very early preview, one step beyond a proof of concept more than anything else. The converter only works with files saved from Flash CS5, and the list of elements it doesn’t support is longer than those it does. ActionScript is totally unsupported (even timeline commands like “stop”), so this is purely for animated eye-candy at this stage, and the resulting file only really plays nice in Webkit-based browsers like Chrome and Safari.

Those limitations aside – and lets be fair, this is a very early preview – Wallaby has a surprisingly competent crack at converting an animated Flash sequence to HTML5. The banner animation we threw at it was complex to say the least, and while some of the subtler aspects (image fading, masks etc) didn’t make the cut, the motion sequence was spot on. And the rendering and playback speed was impressively slick and smooth.

After output, Wallaby presents you with a folder full of bits and bobs. Any bitmaps in your original FLA are saved as PNGs, and vector shapes and fonts are converted to SVG files. The HTML page produced is loaded to the gills with DIVs – in practice probably best tucked out of site in a lightboxed window – and there is a fun-packed CSS file, pushing -webkit-transform to the limit. Two JavaScript files are also produced – one with the functions to run the sequence, and one for the jQuery framework that handles the heavy lifting. The resulting bundle of assets for our test file was rather hefty – over twice the size of the equivalent SWF. But much of this could be compressed and, as we said above, the test banner we fed it was a bit of a beast.

Overall though the result was impressive, especially for such an early-stage preview. Sure, timeline commands aren’t supported at the moment, but this is surely just a matter of time. And basic clickable hotspots look like they should be reasonably straightforward to integrate, which means we might not be abandoning Flash for interactive eye-candy just yet.

Adobe have got too much invested in their Flash product line for Wallaby not to grow and develop, and we’ll be keeping an eye on their labs with interest!

Well… in fairness it isn’t like they’ve just decided to get all culpable on us… rather this is part of a neatly viral campaign to get people switched on to IE9 by targeting web designers and developers. Presumably they thought having four variants of their browser kicking about in the wild could lead to confusion. Nevertheless the tone of the campaign is endearingly disarming, with the company even going as far as issuing tongue-in-cheek apologies at developer conferences.

The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown site claims it is “dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide”. So is that something a campaign like this can realistically achieve? Or is it just an attempt to win back some goodwill in the web community?

At first glance the stats displayed on the site all seem very compelling. The UK, the rest of Europe, Australia, NZ and the US all seem to be within arm’s reach of the goal, which means the end of IE6 is surely on the horizon. Except of course for those orange and yellow-tagged countries. Those orange and yellow-tagged countries that according to the worldwide share figures account for… er…  well over half of the current IE6 users out there. Which means that Microsoft’s campaign is basically preaching to the converted. Specifically, the western, predominantly English-speaking converted.

In fact, if our rather wonky maths is correct (and given that we’re web developers and not statisticians there may be some scope for error!), and assuming the rate of usage decline is consistent with previous years, it seems that the IE6Countdown site will need to be going for at least the next three years before Microsoft even get close to that goal, thanks to the weighting from the Eastern regions.

So why does IE6 remain so active in these areas?

The industry many of our clients are in means that our sites receive a lot of traffic from Asia, and a quick look at the analytics of some of the busier websites makes for quite enlightening reading, specifically when it comes to language preferences. In China for example, our stats show that around 75% of all visitors have their operating systems set to “zh-cn” (i.e PRC Chinese). Similar stats can be seen in Japan, South Korea and India. Which of course is exactly as it should be… people use computers in their primary language. English may be “the language of business”, but it would be ridiculous to assume it would also be “the language of computers”.

What that  means though is that users in non-English (or more broadly non-Latin languages) are being largely disregarded by campaigns such as this. Would you be inclined to a promotional banner at the top of the page, or an advert block on the right of a blog, when you were already reading the main contents in a second language – however fluent? No, of course not. Why would you? You’ve got better things to be getting on with. And as a result the IE6 campaign as it stands at the moment is destined to be targeted purely at an audience already well-versed in the issues. For Microsoft to really get to grips with the problem they need to do adopt a more localised approach, with targetted, language- and culture-specific campaigns, and find out the real reasons why computer users in such tech-industry-leading countries are so reluctant to upgrade their browsing experience.

So Microsoft may be jokingly washing their hands of IE6, but it is still their problem, and one that no amount of light-hearted IE9 promotion will fix. Until they’ve solved that problem, those of us involved in the design and construction of corporate websites with a global audience must continue to ensure that IE6 users are given the best possible user experience the ten-year-old software will allow.