Founded in 2011 by Irish brothers John and Patrick Collison, Stripe helps businesses around the world process online payments. Its whopping $95 billion valuation made the news this month, landing it way ahead of even Elon Musk’s SpaceX . Stripe might have slipped your radar as it offers services to businesses, not consumers, but as a payment gateway mastermind its success reminds us that ecommerce has no intention of slowing down…
We are arriving into a new age where the quantum internet can ensure secure data transmission, suggest recent experiments. Quantum communication relies on the laws of quantum physics, making it not just difficult, but impossible, to intercept.
Remember when Apple delayed the release of the iPhone 12 due to a shortage in computer chips last year? Well, it appears this crisis is coming to its head. And that’s before OVH ordered 30,000 new CPUs for the rebuild of the data centre which burnt down the other week! Expect prices – cars, computers, phones, games – to rise, with industries struggling to get factories up and running after pandemic closures.
NFT technology saw Twitter’s first ever tweet by its founder Jack Dorsey – “just setting up my twttr”- selling for $2.9m online. The Non-Fungible Tokens are used for unique trades, be it for online art, music, domain names, or anything else digitalised. Unlike fungible currencies like Bitcoin, each NFT is one-of-a-kind digital asset. Perhaps you want to take your Pokemon trading online?
Speaking of hacking, this month a Casino was hacked through a smart fish-tank thermometer. So what can we take from this? (Not fish)… Check the security on your Internet of Things devices – that’s your Alexa, smart hoover, security camera, you name it. They’re not always as smart as you might think.
Following on from last month’s Snap Camera add-on to make video calls more exciting, for those less technically minded why not just hire a goat for 5 minutes to join your Zoom call? Cronkshaw Fold Farm lets you hire them for 5 mins. Not a fan of goats? Hilly Ridge Alpacas in Wattisham let you have an alpaca join.
As any regular readers will be aware, the GDPR is an act of the European Parliament which came into force in May 2018. It is designed to give individuals (formally called data subjects) far-reaching control over their personal data with severe penalties for any bodies (formally called data controllers) who cause a data breach that fails to protect that data or act in accordance with the existing agreement with the individual.
Two of the key tenets of the act are the right of access and the right of erasure:
A Data Subject Access Request could be summarised as allowing the individual to ask a data controller what personal information it, and it’s sub-processors, holds about them and to request a copy of this data in addition to being transparent about how this data is processed on their behalf. Typically this takes the form of an email or online form that the individual will complete with their name and minimally identifying information which is sent to the controller who responds with the full data set in the most human-readable form possible within 30 days.
The Right to Erasure, also known as the right to be forgotten, is similarly summarised as allowing individuals to make a request instructing that the information previously provided be deleted in whole or in part, which the controller must comply with by erasing or pseudo-anonymising this data in such a way that it can no longer be linked to the individual.
GDPR is certainly well-meaning and as is so often the case the issue arises in the implementation of these powers by Data Controllers.
In short, attackers have discovered that many companies, in their role as Data Controller, do not validate who made the request before providing or erasing the data.
Let’s take a simple example, our attacker is looking for information to conduct an identity fraud against Mr Bloggs, they contact Company A who receives an email looking like the below:
Stop for a moment and imagine you received this request with your email address in the To: field. Would you process the request and reply to Mr Bloggs with the requested information?
Are you quite sure??
Look carefully at the below screenshot of where your reply would actually be sent to:
The trick here is that the attacker utilised a long-established email header called Reply-to causing the original email to appear to be faked to originate from mrbloggs@gmail.com while the response would be sent back to an entirely different address, attacker@infotex.uk in this example.
If the above response was sent with an attachment containing all the personal information held about Mr Bloggs, then that personal data would now be in the hands of the attacker helping them to conduct whatever identity fraud they had in mind.
By the simple act of sharing this information without Mr Bloggs explicit consent Company A have just unwittingly caused a data breach, for which they could be prosecuted under the very GDPR that they thought they were complying with.
In the case of Right of Erasure requests, in many cases companies who receive such requests simply permanently delete, or anonymise, the customers data and reply confirming that this has been erased. This can be even worse as there is no need to send a reply-to header, simply fake the email address which the request came from and you have just deleted Mr Bloggs data, the first he knows is when he next contacts Company A and finds that they no longer know anything about him, potentially losing any files, order history, product warranties etc held by them on his behalf.
In this instance if requests are blindly processed then even without a reply-to header the data has been destroyed before the actual individual knows anything about it, perhaps the attacker may add a CC so that the company can let them know that the data has been deleted as well!
The first thing is to ensure that you scrutinise any requests received, in particular ensuring that the email address you are replying to is the account you hold on record.
As the act allows up to 30 days to comply with such a request you may also wish to send an email or call Mr Bloggs (ensuring not to reply-to the original email) to confirm & validate the request, this may also give customer service benefits allowing any grievance that has led to a legitimate request to be dealt with more amicably while also allowing a legitimate customer to respond and query the request.
If you have automated systems to process requests, test how they handle reply-to and CC email headers to ensure that they are not allowing data to be handled in unintended ways.
Credit to Hx01 (https://twitter.com/hxzeroone) whose paper inspired this post.
Cliftons are suppliers of Lawn Mowers, Strimmers, Hedge Trimmers, Chain Saws, Ride on Lawn Tractors, Garden Shredders and more.
Their new website was designed to show you the broad range of brands and types of machinery that Cliftons sell, and the services they offer. They provide servicing and repairs for garden mowers and machinery, as well as having a well stocked spare parts store. Established in 1965 by founder Richard Clifton, their aim is to continue their tradition of high quality service, and drive the business forward into the future.
If your current supplier just doesn’t cut it, then you know where to look.
Video killed the radio star? Maybe, but Radio.Garden is an app and website that lets you choose and listen to radio stations from around the globe. It aims to blur borders and connect people and places through the joys of radio.
You probably heard about the Texas Lawyer who went viral after getting stuck with a cat filter during a virtual court case. An easy mistake to make…? Well, the technology that made it happen is nothing sophisticated – it’s decades old.
If you want to light up your meetings with the occasional filter, you can download the Snapchat app, Snap Camera, and integrate its filters with Zoom.
One of our Account Managers, Kris, is particularly good at putting a smile on everyone’s face in our remote company meetings, by turning up with a clever filter or other greenscreen shenanigans. Here he is as our Office Party Quizmaster in December, and a behind the scenes shot of the elaborate setup.
A death in a film can be very upsetting, I’m still not really over The Lion King to be honest. DoesTheDogDie.com prepares you for anything that may surprise you – not just animal death – so obviously it’s a bit of a spoiler-fest but sometimes it’s good to know beforehand.
I’m at my desk, in “the TV room” at home, which I have claimed in a military manoeuvre. It has undergone an upgrade over the weekend from “where I work when at home” to “the office”.
I click the “Google Hangout” popup alert and in a few seconds I am presented with a striking array of familiar faces. We have 22 people working in Infotex. Not all are full time, but today everyone is on the call. I can see a wall of anxiety on my desktop and I am not sure what to say to it. So at first I waffle on about how this is all unprecedented and we must brace ourselves for a commercial shock. But unlike many managers out there, I am able to turn to something more concretely positive: the silver linings at our disposal as an online business able to continue to operate more or less unaffected. How there is an opportunity for us to show leadership and courage, and to advance our online services in new ways, as the internet is now about to come to the fore.
We start to have a general chat. James picks up the theme and adds that it’s as if we just pressed fast forward on the things we have all believed in for years – the remarkable ability of the Internet empowering individuals and organisations to communicate and collaborate in ways that are so much more effective than ever seen before. We observe that the very meeting we are all having now is, well, comfortable and extraordinary in its quality. A reassuring facility in uncertain times.
This concept hits me with a force – that in a world which has suddenly become utterly unpredictable, we need to create some new certainties. The handrails and toe holds of life are about routine and certainty. I tell the team boldly “right we will meet here online every day at 9am for 15 mins for a catchup and general chat about things, then let’s take things one day at a time”. I do this as I sense everyone, me included, is going to need a new structure.
After three days of 9am catch ups, I start to meet resistance. Everyone is facing multiple challenges at the start of each day, with numerous Hangouts, Zooms and Meets, plus lots of production operations to get through. “Let’s try meeting at lunch time from tomorrow onwards”, I suggest on the day 3 catch up. There is then a typical Infotex discussion – friendly but firm, with plenty of opinion and sense of humour – about when lunchtime is. ‘Turns out some go for lunch as early as 12, and some as late as 2. This is not as disorganised as it sounds, it’s all about making sure we have people available all of the time for our clients when they need us. “Right”, I say, determined not to be outmanoeuvred, “we’ll have our catch ups at 11-45 daily – no one can say it’s too early, and no one can say they’re off for lunch”. And so it begins.
Lockdown continues and like thousands of small businesses all over the country we are now experts at working from home. We have had the Company Catchup at 11:45 every working day since March 23rd. The team has worked hard throughout to support our many clients with updates to their websites, as they all adapt to their changed worlds. Some clients have been exceptionally busy, with online sales many times greater than ever seen before. This produces challenges all round – one client, for example, quickly ran out of the small bags they use to sell to consumers, as their flour business was mostly selling to trade in large bags. Another client had to adapt their shops to become pick-and-pack centres and had streams of demand from customers wanting deep freezes and more audio visual equipment. Many of our clients had to shut down and just needed us to update all their messaging to tell customers about their new arrangements.
Like our clients, we are emerging from the mist and thinking about future plans and what will be the new normal. Already we know that we are never going back to the way we were before March. So how do we want to organise ourselves in the future, in a post-Covid world? We decide it’s time we did a survey, so Katie polls the team. She asks them to talk from a personal perspective (what they want for themselves) and from the company’s (what they think is best for the company’s future). The results, perhaps unsurprisingly, reveal how none of us can yet see very clearly into the future… but they do also show a distinct preference for working from home.
Meanwhile we make the office “Covid Secure”, although it remains mostly empty, and we offer our unused space to three small businesses that are struggling their way through the pandemic and are in need of working homes. My grown-up children offer to re-paint it so that it will feel fresh on our return in the Autumn.
When term starts, we reopen the office for a handful of those who want to go in part time, which feels like a reassuring step in the right direction.
With no sign yet of Lockdown 2, we decide to do a proper plan for 2021, which calls for a repeat of our June survey. Same questions, different answers this time. It seems about half the team believe they will work best if they can come and go to the office flexibly when restrictions are lifted. The other half want to keep working at home. There is much less indecision.
| Return to work in office? | Jun | Nov |
| Part time | 1 | 11 |
| Full time | 2 | 0 |
| Undecided | 8 | 2 |
| Never | 12 | 10 |
The Company Catchup has sustained throughout the summer. Even as lockdown eased, with calls to “Eat out to Help Out” and “Get Back to Work”, bolstered by our June survey results, we decided to hang on to our newly formed habit, reluctant to let go of all the benefits we are feeling. The Catch Up has found its own rhyme and reason:
Mondays – we pick up from the weekend. Then our production manager Katie runs us through all of the projects going on across the business, and highlights key events – launches, workshops, client meetings, internal sprint reviews.
Tuesdays – The week is underway and scheduling has been finalised the day before, so Cameron our Support Manager highlights how things are on the front line of support – any major maintenance upgrades, clients facing operational challenges and needing priority support.
Wednesdays – There will have been digital marketing and development meetings in the morning, so things can turn a bit geeky. We hear from Tim our Digital Strategist about cool stuff he is doing with clients to help them improve website performance. And Chris, John, Richard and the developers all chip in with updates on technical stuff they are up to.
Thursday is People Day – we raise admin matters – holiday plans, documentation, etc. And this is when we might have a guest speaker – our shareholders or creative partners for example.
Friday is think about the weekend. I tend to turn to our designers (the art department) to bring some colour and light to the conversation, and remind us of the importance of nurturing the artistic soul in our world of design and technology. We are blessed to have Jonny as our head of design, supported by Alice, they are a winning combination team.
By now we have also been successful in winning new business – engaging with, and selling to our clients online, and now working with them creatively. Out went the old one or two day workshops, involving car and train journeys and fabulously complicated logistics to get the necessary people together for quality time. In replacement we are seeing 2-day workshops achieved in several 2 or 3 hour remote sessions , with all the people we need to be there – Infotex and Clients – always able to attend, and with the luxury for our designers to be able to sit in on tech meetings, and our developers to sit in on design meetings, which so often in the past had been difficult to resource.
So, slowly, we feel, we are finding our sustainable path through this new world.
Lockdown 2 (or is it 3, or 4?) is now well underway. This time round, the whole nation, and nations abroad, seems more subdued. Our intention, stated in September, to re-open the office in January, was abandoned before Christmas, by then we knew it wasn’t going to happen. The Company Catch Ups have become about more than just routine and certainty, they’re about keeping well-being and companionship up too, in a world where human connection is at risk of slipping.
There are no rules. I have heard of all sorts of ways that businesses are helping employees navigate this new landscape. Each company and organisation needs to find what works best for it. As always with the adoption of new technology, it’s important not to let your natural tendency to want things to stay the same hamper your ability to adapt and grasp the positives.
For us, we will re-open our offices at the end of June and everyone will have a place to come to work. But as a company we have seen the benefits of working remotely and we intend to build on these learnings. For example, meetings will continue to be video based by default, so that they are always attended by the right people and the logistics can be frictionless.
The UK now has a road map and we can, at last, plan against a framework that will see an end to the lockdown and the most severe restrictions. All the indications are that there will be no “after Covid”; we are now in a “living with Covid” world. But regardless, and whatever restrictions remain on movement and social contact, we have all been propelled, as James said in our first lockdown meeting, into using the Internet with more imagination than we thought we had, for the improvement of how we run our lives.
Infotex maintains and supports more than 700 websites belonging to over 600 of our clients. We regard keeping these websites secure, stable and fast on our servers as being of equal importance to their original design and build.
So we thought we would share with you some insights to the sort of things we get up to behind the scenes. The bulk of the work is either carried out by, or under the direction of, our infrastructure manager John Harman, aka “Moz”, who has worked in Infotex since its inception 21 years ago(!).
We call this series “keeping the green lights on”, because Moz’s main aim is to avoid any amber or red lights coming on …. And if they do, he likes to be the first to know about it, so he can resolve issues quickly.
All server loads are checked daily along with validating various health metrics such as disk/memory/processor usage and ensuring our backups are all running smoothly.
At least once per week every server is checked to ensure that it has all the latest security updates installed.
In addition to the above updating that is done during routine operating hours we also perform some out-of-hours work to update items which requires taking them offline briefly.
We have recently added new servers to our fleet, this helps our capacity keep up with demand as well as allowing us to make incremental modernisation steps which will soon see us dispense with some old servers that are no longer capable of delivering what we need.
All WordPress sites have been/are in the process of being updated to the latest WordPress version and plugin versions. This is essential in ensuring that our client’s websites remain secure and performant.
For many WordPress clients, we added in some key Infotex baseline functionality for 2 features:
CentOS is a reliable and fast Linux operating system. We are continuing work to upgrade the operating system upon which most of our websites run, to ensure that they are fast, secure and continue to operate smoothly.
Welcome to the ever-changing world of investment! Bentley Reid is an independently-owned wealth management company that looks after the financial affairs of individuals, their families, trusts and charities. Their new website is our latest website to be released using the Video Box theme, following on from the success of Zer0es TV late last year. It is effectively a microsite to their corporate website, and shows Video, Audio, and Written reports on investment news.
We will continue to update the site media on a monthly basis to help Bentley Reid keep their clients up to date with the top investment insights.
Check out the new website at https://www.bentleyreid.tv.
Apprenticeships are a great way to throw yourself into a role and learn on the job. Hear from our Production Assistant, Jasmine, about her experience starting out as a Production Apprentice at Infotex.
The team here at Infotex won’t mind me admitting that on my first day as an apprentice I felt quite scared at first! For someone who is just 18, starting out in a new business surrounded by people who are a lot more experienced than you can be daunting. But not a single person made me feel uncomfortable, and everyone helped me in every way they could. It only took a matter of hours for me to learn that Infotex is a very warm and friendly business, and provides that personal touch of friendship that is so valuable, rather than being just a bunch of colleagues.
My tasks involved in my typical day as a Production Apprentice involved:
On top of these roles, I had to complete coursework which made up about 30% of my work. This was probably the most daunting challenge of my year, and involved pieces on management, minute taking, client relationships, staff relationships, and IT exams. I was overwhelmed at first by the amount I had to do, but with a checklist to help me understand which ones were the highest priority, I was able to get through them without any problems. I believe that what I learned most during my year was to do with time management, and getting things to the right people at the right time. In fact, I found the year really rewarding. Especially when I finally passed the whole course, including the IT exam that came with it. It was soon after that that we had an Infotex Christmas Meal at the Riverside Waterfront, where we had a great time as friends rather than colleagues.
Throughout my year as an apprentice, I was guided by my manager, Katie, who made me feel like a colleague more than an apprentice and taught me everything I know, including everything that is still involved in my job now as her Production Assistant: assisting in meetings, scheduling work plans, projects, loading content into websites, and looking after several clients. Katie has always tried her best to understand what I might be struggling with and take that into her own hands by setting up a meeting to teach me the correct way of doing things. I’m grateful to her for allowing me this position and showing me the right direction with my work as we move into the future, particularly more recently, now that working from home has made solid work-relations and connections all the more important for maintaining sanity in otherwise lonely times!
BrewDog’s newest lager – the first supposed carbon-friendly beer – was gifted out to thousands of people early this January. If you remembered to claim your free four-pack, you will be somewhat familiar with Queue-it, the product that enables websites to keep up with surges in online sales through introducing an online waiting room. BrewDog saw 50,000 people at one time queueing for their free beer. Is this the best solution to high-demand website traffic control?
We were reminded this month of just how volatile usage trends for certain messenger apps can be when WhatsApp’s update announcement, misunderstood by many as a new policy regarding data-sharing to Facebook, resulted in millions of users switching to other encrypted apps such as Telegram and Signal. It comes as little surprise that data security is the most sought-after app feature.
WhatApp’s original implementation deadline for the new services, February 8th, has now been extended until May, to make time to regain the trust of its users and explain the real purpose of the updates, which include the ability to offer features such as shopping and payments. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55573149
With the masses taking to their screens over the last year, it’s funny to think how different our path could have been had we not had sufficient broadband and data availability to cope with the demands. Ofcom’s Connected Nations 2020 Interactive Report demonstrates how well national broadband is coping with the surge in demand from COVID-19, and how 96% of the UK still has access to high speed internet, the same as was recorded in 2020 before the first lockdown.
Weather forecasts aren’t the most accurate of things, but one inventive website harnesses the power of Twitter users to map snowfall in the UK. Twitter users can tweet #uksnow, the first half of their postcode, and a rating out of 10 for intensity of snowfall, for it to appear on a live map, and let the rest of the nation know they’ll be getting out the sledge. Visit uksnowmap.com when it’s snowing to see how the rest of the country’s doing.
And finally, for a satisfying stretch of the imagination, check out the elastic man graphic on the site that brought us Family Guy: https://www.adultswim.com/etcetera/elastic-man/
We have long recommended using Cloudflare to boost our customer’s site speed and enhance its security. While it’s not relevant to everyone, it is a useful tool to have in the arsenal to protect and improve your site’s performance.
Cloudflare have been around since 2009 and provide their services to over 30 million websites. At its most basic, Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) which sits between the server hosting your website and your visitors, providing a robust performance and security layer before visitors (or hackers) reach the server hosting your site – think of it as a bouncer on the door to your site.
It has two main benefits:
Normally, when a user types www.example.com it is translated to an IP address and sent to our server, and the server responds with the components for the page you’ve requested.
For a Cloudflare site, you type a domain name and connect to the closest server in Cloudflare’s network of over 300 cities. They will then validate your request against various rules so as to recognize and reject nefarious hack attempts such as SQL injection, known bad bots, and content spam. Because Cloudflare covers millions of sites across the world, they analyse over 70 million requests per second to detect dodgy activity and common attacks, stopping them before they get to your site. This scale allows them to witness behaviour across their entire network and use technologies such as AI to detect and block attacks, this even extends to blocking unknown (aka Zero-Day) attacks before any patches are available.
Cloudflare’s scale means that defending against attacks is a daily occurrence and in most cases entirely automated as they defended against over 14 million attacks in 2024 alone and the rate of attack is increasing year-on-year.
As well as this, Cloudflare can ‘cache’ your site, creating a copy on their servers that are distributed around the world, and ensuring greater loading speed. For instance, when a new user visits your site from, say, Sydney in eastern Australia, Cloudflare will have it delivered from our server in the UK. However, when a 2nd viewer in Sydney makes the same request soon after, they will see the copy that’s already stored on Cloudflare’s server in Sydney, thus significantly speeding up the page load. It’s even possible for a viewer from Melbourne, western Australia, to hit their local server and also benefit from that first Sydney viewer, due to regional caching.
Cloudflare offers the benefits of having access to servers located within China which, subject to certain conditions, can be used to provide access to the Chinese markets, which are often otherwise restricted by their government’s tight control of internet access.
Other benefits of caching include the ability to deliver automatically optimised versions of web images, and compress dynamic content, further speeding up delivery time. This can be used to keep hosting costs down. It is also especially useful for sites that need to scale up and down with peaks of traffic (such as during newsletter delivery) but are comparatively quiet the rest of the time.
The customisation options for Cloudflare’s use are really almost limitless, as they have access to a range of rules, and, for more complex requirements, we have created code that is implemented at their regional “edge” servers.
Infotex’s technical understanding and experience of working with Cloudflare allows us to utilise their unparalleled capabilities to the full. The following offer some examples of how Cloudflare has helped our clients over recent years.
We have seen and dealt first-hand with our ecommerce customers being sent ransom requests for thousands of pounds with a threat of taking their site offline. When these requests are (rightly) ignored by our client, their sites are subjected to a huge DDoS attack, where thousands of requests are sent every second, which would often overload the server and take the site offline (and any other sites on that server). Our solution to these attacks has been to migrate the site to a new IP address protected by Cloudflare, which has built-in DDoS protection. This way, while the attack continues, Cloudflare’s protection can shrug it off and enable trading to continue as normal.
Cloudflare has protected some of our clients with high levels of attack traffic originating from countries such as China and Russia, which are not countries they manage their websites from, thus allowing admin, or all requests, from these countries to be blocked by Cloudflare, or be subject to more stringent validation; in either case the viewer would be met with a fully branded page explaining why their request was declined without ever risking the request touching, or slowing, the origin server.
One client needed help scaling their WordPress-powered sites to handle their stories going viral worldwide, but that would operate at a low cost in-between high demand. By utilising Cloudflare’s ability to cache full page contents and use tiered regional caches with code running within Cloudflare’s network to standardise the URLs (e.g. strip tracking parameters) we have been able to create a site that updates the latest content in a timely manner, while achieving a 95+% cache rate on the terabytes of data the site drives. By letting Cloudflare do most of the heavy lifting it keeps our client’s hosting costs much lower than having servers that could deal with the peak demand.
For people sending newsletters there are often unique tracking parameters on website links, meaning that traditional caching would not work. In some cases Cloudflare enabled us to develop code that could run in Cloudflare’s servers to identify these separate parameters, and so we were able to increase newsletter viewership from around a 10% cache rate to over 90%, thus massively reducing the traffic spikes these newsletters cause. In less technical language, it made the pages load quicker and improved the customer experience.
If you’re a prospective, or existing Infotex customer, get in touch about how Cloudflare could help protect your online investment.
Amongst so much uncertainty, the world of web development proves an exciting place to watch the future unravel and people adapt. We’ve picked out some of the best rising development trends for you to be aware of as you browse the internet this year – have you noticed them yet?
Artificial Intelligence has long been enhancing our online user-experience, and chatbots are the next thing here to stay. You might have suspected before whether a person you were live messaging was, in fact, actually a robot: perhaps the giveaway was clunky, pre-prepared sounding responses. But smarter, less detectable chatbots are on the rise.
These ‘conversational agents’ are often used for live-chat customer support, but we are discovering that their benefits range far and wide. For example, UNICEF is using a chatbot called U-Report to help marginalised people in developing nations talk about the most urgent issues in their communities. They use the information they receive to fuel policy recommendations.
Hopefully you’re aware by now that most of your devices, if not all, have the ability to hear you. If not, then you better believe it! And that voice-search technology that you’re becoming familiar with – such as Apple’s Siri, or Amazon’s Alexa – is set to be the new go-to. With a likely increase in the number of people relying on voice search in 2021, voice-search optimization is now at the forefront of SEO and development strategies for websites.
Progressive web apps are essentially websites that feel and function like a mobile app. They have recently gained traction (used most notoriously by Twitter) due to the positive impact they have on user-experience: high-speed loading and downloading, offline use, and push notification sending. Essentially, PWAs are websites that encompass all the best things about a native phone app, but on your website browser.
The growth of web-apps is paving the way for an increase in Website Push Notifications. They work in the same way as regular push notifications on your phone (the banner notifications from in-phone apps). By acting on the permission you give to a website to send you notifications, the push notifications can directly access your screen at any time to show new information. This can maintain higher conversion rates for businesses.
Read our article on website push notifications to find out more.
The adoption of Accelerated Mobile Pages for websites is one of the fastest trending development strategies we will see this year. AMPs were originally initiated by Google to ensure desktop websites can offer the same user experience as mobile sites, the main goal being to increase the loading speed of websites for mobile browsing. This was particularly useful for grasping hold of the short window on offer to grab a reader’s attention online (The Guardian was one of the first to start using AMPs in 2016).
Structurally, the AMP is a (lightweight) HTML copy of a site’s web pages, which enables fast-loading and enhances site performance for smartphone users. AMP pages only take around 2 seconds to load, compared to at least 20 times that for non-AMP pages. You might notice that increasingly more sites are being built through integration of AMP technology (amp. instead of www.) to better the smartphone experience.
Single Page Applications are the key to that all-day systematic scrolling you can’t help but fall victim to. SPAs work inside a browser to offer seamless user-experience by dynamically loading as a single page. This way the user does not have to wait for the site to continually reload, and can enjoy uninterrupted scrolling. They can offer better page performance, data protection, and work efficiently if the user has poor internet connection, as the content loads completely at the first sign of communication with the server. You might recognise SPAs as used by sites such as Facebook and Uber.
Much like SPAs, a single-page website is a website without any additional pages. Content, such as that which might otherwise be found under a “Work” or “About” tab, is fully loaded on the initial page, and can be navigated by links within the one page.
These intuitive and well-structured single-page websites increase the likelihood of maintaining the attention of users, and enables control of the order in which information is absorbed. Also, compared to multi-page sites, the site design and development requires less time and money and is more suited to optimisation for mobile devices.
How do the big sites like Netflix and Amazon hold your attention? I’d bet that personalised content has something to do with how they make you feel so at home. Well now smaller websites are picking up the same idea: personalising site content to suit the individual visitor and decrease bounce rates. So, instead of confronting every site visitor with the same homepage, you can show the most relevant content to the individual, based on data such as the user’s location or device, and increase the chance of turning potential customers into leads.
How’s your website looking in 2021? If you need advice or assistance, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
We’ve all been watching the world call predictive analytics to action in the wake of the current pandemic; constant data analysis is driving our predictions of how quickly the virus will spread, how long for, how it will manifest, and so on.
This isn’t the first time predictive analytics have dominated media headlines. As we have seen in recent elections, predictive analytics help election campaigners to determine potential voters – especially the undecided, yet receptive voter – by assembling analysts to interpret large-scale big data. Through this, they target their campaigns on the voters who could potentially be a ‘yes’ vote, as opposed to targeting those who would always be a ‘no’ vote.
As predictive analysis becomes evermore present in our lives, it continues to offer huge potential to drive business in the marketing world. With the growth of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, the use of predictive analytics can help navigate unstable markets, by enabling informed decisions about future marketing and customer trends.
What is Predictive Analytics?
Predictive Analytics is the practice of extracting information from existing data sets in order to predict future outcomes and trends. It is effective in revealing opportunities and solving problems, and is used in cybersecurity, the improvement of operations and services, and in optimising marketing strategies.
In marketing terms, predictive analytics uses customer data to help businesses adapt marketing strategies to future trends, and to attract and retain their most important customers.
How can predictions benefit your marketing strategies?
Predictive analysis is your best tool in prioritising leads and retaining customers. One of our clients, Nectar360, utilises this to remain as the UK’s largest loyalty program; they make sophisticated predictions from customer loyalty cards in order to help some of the UK’s biggest brands, such as Sainsbury’s, to build impactful connections with their customers.
If you want to improve your business sales strategies, you can start with building small testing models with predictive analysis for your digital marketing, such as running a new specific advertising campaign, and examine how the data grows or changes in order to deduce how it is best to adapt your strategy. By consistently collecting and storing data – such as which device is driving the most leads, or which site features are getting the most clicks – you optimise your campaigns for better lead scoring.
You can also use predictive analytics to look at the mix of traffic on your channels, and their respective conversion rates, allowing you to model estimated sales in response to when particular channels are increased or decreased.
For an international client serving multiple markets we have been able to predict sales revenue across multiple markets, using datapoints from the website visitor behaviours to calculate conversions. Being able to see earlier and more accurately how your website is performing as a revenue-generator is invaluable to inform content marketing decisions.
Predictive Advertising
Google Ads and Facebook Ads use Machine Learning to predict which audiences are best to target, and you can set your budget to more/less, depending on how much you want to impact your sales or enquiry levels.
Many of our Google Ads campaigns utilise predictive modelling tools available from Google’s Machine Learning to predict a customer’s chance of purchasing, based on various points including their search terms, their time of day, their previous browsing and buying habits, and much more. These include exploring estimated clicks and sales based on budgets and utilising their data-driven bid strategies to predict how many sales and enquiries you can receive based on the daily budgets you are willing to spend.
Predictions in 2021: more than just guesstimating?
Usually, forecasting the year ahead in terms of sales, visits or enquiries, would be based on prediction from data of previous years and the current trends. As we look to 2021, however, an uncertain 2021 for many, this kind of analysis may not be as reliable as it has been in previous years.
Nevertheless, predictive analysis remains an important way to help businesses adapt to competitive markets, revealing trends within their email systems, advertising data, social media analytics, or website analytics.
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