Window swap, for a change of scene
Window Swap let’s you open a new window anywhere in the world, and let’s you leave your working home environment and see from another point of view… anyone can use it! Maybe you want to hear live harpsichord music coming from the street outside Andrea’s window in Italy, or look out over Moscow city from Vladimir’s top-floor window in Russia.
Keeping up with the social media
Both Twitter and LinkedIn have made a leap toward more casual communications by introducing story features: “Fleets” and “LinkedIn Stories”, respectively. These imitations of Instagram’s story feature, which allows people and businesses to post temporary content that disappears after 24hrs, are paving the way for an even faster-paced media buzz. It’s hard to keep up with so many fleeting thoughts, though – there have been reports of Twitter itself struggling under the load.
It’s still all about data
Inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has set to work building a new internet – a startup whose mission is to help people keep control of their data. Inrupt, and its main offering is Solid, lets you store your personal data the way you want to.
Salesforce acquires Slack
You may have seen in the headlines that the messaging app Slack has been acquired by Salesforce. As an avid user of Slack, the Infotex team is already a little concerned about being dragged into the Salesforce net, so we are going to take a closer look at Mattermost in the New Year, with a review to switching over to something more, well, comfortable in our environment.
Premier Equestrian is a family owned and run business that started trading over 10 years ago as a small mobile shop, attending local equestrian shows in North Yorkshire, and also doing yard visits and special shopping days at local riding schools. They now provide a full range of equine & pet supplies, and equipment for both horse and rider.
They needed a new and updated website to make the most of their wonderful products, so we really got the bit between our teeth on this. With over 1,600 products ease of site maintenance was essential, so we created a brand new Shopify site. Shopify will provide the site with a stable home, and the new responsive design includes live search and support for multiple payment gateways.
Search Engine Optimisation is the process through which we can improve search engine traffic to your website, and find the most relevant consumers to increase conversion rates.
Each keyword encapsulates a business opportunity at the exact point the user shows intent. Making sure these keywords represent your business goals is the key to a successful SEO strategy. We target attainable low competition niches and track our positions continuously to give you the best search engine performance.
Our arsenal of industry leading tools allows us to understand your key competitor’s SEO stature. This sets a realistic benchmark and often reveals exciting opportunities that we feed back into your strategy. A universal strategy for every client doesn’t cut it, every industry has different SEO requirements, that’s why we conduct thorough audits in your space before we start our optimisations.
SEO never sits still. Search engines are always looking for the next best way to serve you the highest quality results for your search. We pick up on these changes in Google’s algorithm and adapt our client’s strategy to give them the greatest benefit. If you rest on your laurels you could easily see yourself dropping off the results page, what worked in 2012 would fail in 2017. Having a team with their ears to the ground, looking for these changes, is the insurance you need for your search performance security.
It doesn’t matter if we’re optimising or building – we make sure your site is set up to be Google friendly. Having a solid SEO infrastructure provides a strong foundation to build all future search engine optimisations. Combining the knowledge of our SEOs with our technically gifted development team, positions us perfectly to set you off on the right foot.
Google looks to the rest of the internet to assess the importance of your website. More specifically, they look at other websites links that mention you. This has been a crucial ranking factor since Google’s inception – and things don’t look like changing. We want the quality of your website to resonate across the web and we thrive in discovering creative ways to do so.
Infotex are excited to announce the website launch of DID Card, a local Woodbridge business that issues a National Disabled Identification Card for people to carry instead of their paperwork. The DID card is particularly aimed at individuals with disabilities that are not immediately obvious, and saves them having to carry their paperwork in order to prove they were entitled to some form of disability benefit and obtain a concessionary rate.
DID Card originally approached Infotex to build them a new website and help them with Facebook marketing and email automation. Despite some delays due to lockdown restrictions, their new FlexiPress website is now up and running. It provides all the information a client may need about the brand and service on offer, and directs traffic to their original card application site. We also worked with DID Card to create a database of Facebook ads for their independent use, and automated their renewal email process using Campaign Monitor.
To learn more about this wonderful company, visit the new website at
www.did-card.co.uk.
Adapting to changing markets is arguably most difficult for small businesses. Some, however, have managed to turn months of uncertainty into positive drives for their businesses, using online expertise to make the most of their services. Here are two examples of businesses we’ve worked with over the COVID period who turned hardship into survival stories so far.
Adapting to a new target market
London Gases sell gas for beer as a massive part of their business, so they took a hit when the pubs and hospitality sector closed in March.
But after upping their Pay-Per-Click spend to hit the Calor gas home consumer market, their PPC sales were up over 300%, and during the summer went up by around 600%. This meant that they were able to keep some of their delivery drivers on the road and in work over the last few months. We’ve kept their Google Shopping campaigns concentrated on those consumer-friendly gas sizes and products, and carefully managed budgets as demand increased.
If you can, write!
Stephens Scown’s website success increased when they posted articles relating to the furlough scheme in March. Organic traffic went up by 236% between February and March, a further 78% in April.
We worked with them to concentrate our search engine optimisation on coronavirus articles. Articles were continually adapted based on keywords that were gaining traction; for example, focusing more on the phrase ‘coronavirus’ than ‘covid’ (‘coronavirus’ was the more searched term at the time, though this is no longer the case).
They also updated their site so that we could update stories with changes to information that would then reflect in the article (and show: article updated on…), so that they could keep the information fresh and current. The types and themes of the articles that were being produced were tracked and categorised, so that each story could have a series of posts relating to it. For example, one particular item would have firstly an initial article, followed by ‘what we know so far’, a ‘key questions answered’ article a few days later, and then a piece around how it relates to a specific sector.
Due to the many legal questions that people needed answering during the height of the pandemic (furloughing, unfurlouging, child care arrangements for separated couples, divorce during covid, landlord and tenant issues, to name a few), Stephens Scown were in a good position to use their expertise to reach people who needed help understanding so many uncertainties, and create leads to their website.
Despite a second lockdown taking hold, there is still room for optimism. When properly thought through, online markets can be navigated to help you and your business adapt to a changing world.
If you have an e-commerce website, or utilize content marketing, Web Push Notifications could be the next step for you to keep re-engaging with your website visitors, allowing you to reach them on any device, without them needing to hand over any personal data.
We’re all familiar with regular push notifications: the banner notifications that come from the apps on your phone, such as a missed call, unread text notification, BBC news update, new match on Tinder. If you have enabled notifications for any app, that app is able to use the phones operating system to send you messages. Everyone with a smartphone knows how engaging these notifications are, grabbing your attention in real-time, with direct access to your screen no matter what you’re doing.
It is commonly believed that this type of customer-engagement marketing is limited to those who have a ‘native app’ (that is, an app that customers have to download onto their phone from the app store in order to access it’s features). However, with the efforts being made by Google and Apple to explore and move towards ‘progessive web apps’ (apps that you don’t need to download from a store, more like a website), more and more of the features of smartphone operating systems are available to improve and enhance your website or online marketing… without needing to develop a native app.
In the same way that when you install a native app on your smartphone your app asks the user for permission to access notifications features, your website can ask new visitors for approval to send them website push notifications. Once this ‘visitor’ has become a ‘subscriber’, you can then send them notifications from the website in the form of customised text, URL links, and images.
Web push notifications instantly offer some big improvements from other forms of notification marketing and native app notifications (e.g. newsletters, SMS).
You might now be wondering how to use push notifications in your marketing strategy. While the technology is not that new any more given it’s been used on every smartphone over the past 10 years, it’s introduction into a new medium (website) does mean that we can be a lot much more creative.
These are just a few of the more obvious ways to implement push notifications. But with the wealth of creative minds in our industry it is likely to be used in new and exciting ways. We have already created a push notification for a green lobbyist client, that allows them to send push notifications on their articles, but also send out real time smog warnings for affected cities or other urgent messages.
If you would like to talk more about push notifications and now it could improve your website marketing, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
The Right Hand Side is a consultancy firm that works with individuals, teams and organisations to help them be at their best and achieve lasting exceptional performance. They work with successful clients from a wide variety of backgrounds and walks of life, who are looking for certain aspects to change – individually for themselves or their relationships, or collectively for their team or organisation. They offer individual coaching, team coaching, or executive and organisational development.
Having worked with them since August, Infotex has developed and launched a website to showcase what their brand offers. In alignment with The Right Hand Side’s sentiment that exceptionalism is dependent on cooperation, clarity, determination and imagination, we worked together on this to create a website that showcases the very best of Flexipress website design.
To take a look visit www.therighthandside.com.
Anyone who watched Netflix’s The Social Dilemma this month might have found themselves checking their average daily screen time, and they’d be right to. You better check yours now.
The conversation around the disruptive social potential of technology and social media is not a new one, with data-collection scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, statistics on mental health, and misinformation / fake news (to name a few) all daring us to confront social media with a critical eye. But this documentary – led by Silicon Valley minds such as former design ethicist at Google Tristan Harris, and co-creator of the Facebook “like” button, Justin Rosenstein – confirms that such technology companies are actively chasing our physiological tendency to addiction, in order to profit, and exposes social media’s potential to disrupt our democratic rights.
This is the first time that the seemingly obvious points – technology as dystopia, media and brainwashing – have been fed to the masses in a convincing documentary, and is now a forerunner of mainstream conversation about tech. The documentary has taken viewers to a new level of panic, asking people to delete their social media accounts on the premise “how can you wake up from the Matrix, when you don’t know you’re in the Matrix?”
It is more than somewhat ironic that the documentary is aired on Netflix, the online streaming platform which achieves its success through manipulation of the Attention Economy. And while it might work for a while, as people determinedly delete their social media accounts, I can’t see this bringing platforms to a steady halt. More likely, people will be re-downloading their apps as soon as they need to reconnect with someone, introduce a new market, or sell a product. In the same way, The Social Dilemma is not all doom and gloom: it sees a technological future and calls for a new approach to the conversation around technology, one that demands humanity and ethical responsibility.
Which brings us to our social dilemma: what does this global conversation mean for digital marketing strategies? Businesses nowadays cannot denounce their social media presence entirely without risk of losing out to their market competitors. As the runaway train hurtles down the track, the livelihoods of many of our businesses depend upon jumping on it, or else getting left behind.
Instead, then, it might be an idea to re-examine the pros and cons of the social media sites that you or your business uses. Is it necessary to be on six platforms? Could you limit it to only the relevant ones? Is that Twitter and Linked In, or Facebook and Instagram? Social media companies work by ensuring that you are the product (as the saying goes, if you’re not paying for a product, you’re the product). So, if you want to be making the most of social media marketing, chances are you’ll need to give it a budget – make sure this is necessary and worthwhile. It is also probably worth thinking about how strategies used by social media giants might be affecting your own employees. They are at the mercy of this too, might they be scrolling against their will, wasting time? In short, which platforms are worth paying for, and how can you make sure you navigate them ethically and efficiently?
If you’re anything like me, you will think that the conversation around social media doesn’t apply to you, that you’re under control and not giving any unwanted attention to platforms, and that your business isn’t affected. But next time you find yourself checking your Gmail account for no particular reason, or getting an unnecessary notification and opening it, think again. In this world, we are all affected by social media, directly or indirectly, no matter how connected we are. The internet is a force for good, and can remain so if we channel it correctly. We just need to be more mindful of how we use it (and how it uses us).
What your digital agency wants to know is: how can we make your website work for you? A solid website brief can give you the best chance of reaching your goals in the most cost-effective way, by helping us understand what you want to get out of your site.
A successful project requires many different people from across different teams to work on your project – from strategists and developers, to designers and creatives. So, no matter how professional your web design agency, a well structured, informative brief can’t go amiss in helping everyone on the project maintain a clear vision for your website and achieve the best results.
Before you begin your brief, don’t hesitate to utilise the support on offer from your agency if you already have one. They should be your partner in this process, and guide you through it. The best results occur when we meet with clients before asking for a website brief, so we can help them map out their objectives.
What to include in your brief to begin with:
An idea of what your objectives are will help digital agencies like us understand the overall picture. Outline your main goals: are you trying to generate leads, or to showcase quality? Then outline your primary call to action, that is, what you want people to do when they reach your website (fill in a contact form? purchase a product? pick up the phone?).
This is important because ultimately, like you, your web designer answers to the needs of your target market. Who are you aiming your website at? How would you describe your average customer?
If you have an existing website that you’re looking to replace, then there will be specific things about it that aren’t working for you. Singling these out and deciding what needs improvement will help to inform your needs for the new website.
What websites have you seen that you do/don’t like? They don’t need to be in your industry, but may help our designers to understand your vision for your new website. Take into consideration the layout, the way the site feels, how easy/hard it is to use, and find what you need to help us understand your vision. Perhaps include the web addresses of 3 – 4 websites, and specify what you do or don’t like about them.
Who are your main competitors? What can we learn from them? Do you want to follow in their footsteps or break the mould? You know more than your digital agency when it comes to your market, and knowledge of your competitors is one of the ways you can share that knowledge with us.
Have you considered your content and site structure? We will help guide you on this, working with your knowledge of your industry to ensure the website meets its objectives. You might need the copy transferred from your existing website, or perhaps you want to produce new content entirely – we may need to consider resources such as copywriting and photography, unless you are able to do these in-house.
Do you have brand guidelines for us to follow? Are you able to provide us with the assets? If you don’t, we can work with you to give you an online presence that works for you, even without the full branding exercise.
What’s your deadline for the website to launch? Do you have a trade show or marketing piece that dictates your deadline, or are you flexible? We will always do our best to meet your expectations or find a way to ensure that you have a great online presence in place, even if all the bells and whistles aren’t quite ready!
It helps us to know your long term business plan for once the website is launched, if you have one. How will you market the new website and drive traffic to it? Have you considered areas such as Google Ads or search engine optimisation (SEO), or perhaps Facebook advertising? Our team can advise on the best approach specific to your business needs and put together a tailored package of on-going support to suit your budget.
Remember that your brief is not the done deal – think of it as a foundation to build upon. As your plan develops, a good web design agency will have lots of ideas and questions to help you realise your objectives.
If you have any questions or want further advice, feel free to get in touch with us at Infotex.
There are over 365 million domain names registered across the globe, so in such a crowded space how do you find the right domain for you?
The domain name is what you type into the address bar to visit a website. Domains are unique and registered against central lists to prevent duplicates.
In the background, computers are using IP addresses, a string of numbers, to identify sites, but these are translated to the much easier to remember domains.
There are two parts that make up a domain name, the identification string (aka the first bit), for example, “infotex” and the ‘extension’ which is usually the part after the first dot, in our case “.uk”.
There is a massive range of domain extensions available with the most common and familiar being .com and .net. The majority of countries will also have geographically specific extensions (also known as country code top-level domains – ccTLDs) like .uk, .fr, and .de.
Extensions such as .info and .biz are part of the mix, and in 2011 ICANN launched the ‘new generic top-level domain’ (new-gtld) program which added thousands of extensions such as .yoga or .app, and continues to be added to.
Google was supposed to be Googol – a misspelling by a graduate student while checking domain availability was to blame
What’s a domain worth?
It’s often said that the value of any product is only what someone is willing to pay for it, however, the rights to some domains, especially short ones are coveted.
oa.com sold earlier this year for $600,000 however even this is eclipsed by the rental of vegas.com that could net its owner $90 million. Some companies even go so far as to value and insure their domain, cars.com was recently valued at $872 million.
With sought after domains on popular extensions fetching many thousands people have looked to other extensions to launch their brand online.
As there are only a finite amount of .com or .co.uk domain names it is becoming harder and harder for new companies trying to find a suitable domain name. However, to address this, more and more extensions are being created.
The aim of these new extensions is to more accurately describe your business (though we’re not sure how this works with .ninja…) and vastly grow the range of domains available.
Also consider whether your preferred choice of domain has any legal requirements – .eu domains require the operator to be within the European Union and as such from 1st Jan 2021 most UK businesses will no longer be eligible to hold a .eu domain.
Why not have your own extension?
In 2011 ICANN announced that they would allow brands to register their own top level extension, they received over 2,000 applications although many were subsequently declined, often due to the significant costs involved in running a domain extension. However some companies make use of this, such as Toyota’s global.toyota.
It still remains to be seen how popular many of these domain extensions will prove to be, and those which are not could be retired in the same way that .orientexpress lasted just a year [www.iana.org/domains/root/db/orientexpress.html].
With over 19 million domains, the most popular country-code extension is .tk – the small South Pacific island of Tokelau. The .tk is so popular due to their business model giving many domains for free.
.uk domains
All .uk domains are overseen by a government-supported body called Nominet. Infotex is proud to be Nominet members & tag holders meaning that we can directly register and manage .uk domains on behalf of our customers.
For most businesses based in, and primarily trading within, the UK, the most logical domain extensions are .uk or .co.uk although it’s possible to also register .ltd.uk, .me.uk and various other UK specific extensions.
Public awareness still favours the .co.uk domain types, however, .uk is becoming far better recognised.
For brand protection purposes we would recommend that most businesses possess their choice of name in both .uk & .co.uk extension. Infotex, for example, chose to switch to the shorter infotex.uk but still retain ownership of infotex.co.uk and it just redirects to the main site. [Edit: 2020: We have since done this!]
Any domain owner is legally responsible for their use of that domain, to this end, the need for domains to be registered to the correct individual or business has been a pressing concern for law enforcement for some time.
Starting from 2014, ICANN introduced a process requiring domain owners to validate their contact details via the email address held against their domain. When a domain name is registered, transferred or due to renew domain owners will receive an email asking you to validate the email address. Failure to do so within 15 days will mean the suspension of the domain name and any associated website/email, until it has been validated. Validation is simply clicking a link, you should not be asked to enter a username and password or any other details.
A similar Domain Quality process exists on .uk domains where company registrations and the electoral roll are used to verify that a domain owner is an actual legal entity.
The first domain registered was symbolics.com in 1985, for the now-defunct Symbolics Computer Corporation
If you’d like to check the availability of any domain name then please get in touch.
Websites are constantly evolving; like all modern technology, they don’t sit still for very long. While some evolutions are more subtle, as through sophisticated CRO campaigns designed to increase page conversions rates, some are more monumental, sparked by a shift in devices or the way we use the internet.
These larger changes to web design tend to follow a cultural shift which changes the way in which business can communicate with consumers. The most obvious example of one of these changes was the introduction of the ‘smartphone’ and the shift to mobile ‘responsive’ website designs.
The next big cultural shift that will impact web design is no doubt the one we are living through now; the impact of COVID 19 on the world has seen a change in the way in which many of us work and interact with our computers. The results of working from home have been surprising, revealing even to the most old school companies that often employees can thrive and be more efficient if given a longer leash. This has in all likelihood accelerated the timeline, with the expectation that a lot of will have adopted flexible working patterns within the next 12-18 months, like the anticipated two-day in office, three-day remote, working week. With this kind of large scale change to the way in which we work, we should expect our computers and other products to pick on all of the new ‘pain points’ of flexible working and make modifications.
The need for laptops to be more productive on-the-go, away from the traditional ‘work station’, has already led to a visible shift in the world of laptops and computers, with the design of higher end 2020 models from Dell and Apple being made more proactive for ‘work’ rather than ‘play’. The most notable trend is the change in screen dimensions; the ‘envelope’, ideal for movies and photographs, is being steadily replaced by a ‘squarer’ design that allows for programs like Word and Excel to make better use of the screen. Dell’s new range of XPS laptops have adopted a taller 16:10 ratio rather than the traditional 16:9. Apple seems to be following suit, and for a few years now they have been very much pushing their iPad devices as realistic alternatives to high end laptops, boasting the more productive 4:3 ratio screens. And with rumours of a bezel-less design refresh coming to their entire iMac and Macbook 2020/2021 range, we should expect them to follow suit.
A new screen ratio is potentially an exciting evolution for website designs, particularly for companies operating in the B2B markets and other industries that see the majority of their traffic come via ‘desktop’ devices. The prospect of a taller, squarer website will allow for a much more marketing real estate on customers screens. We could see the end of cinematic designs that use fill screen imagery and minimum text, or we might see a step back to old school website designs trends that fight to get as many key messages ‘above the fold’ to ensure users see them on first landing.
Regardless of the trends we might see, this change in screen ratio illustrates the ever changing nature of marketing online and that clever thinking is needed to use the tools available at our disposal. At Infotex, when talking to clients who rely on desktop traffic, we always make sure that we take a closer look to the exact screen dimensions from the previous website’s stats. It has resulted in many successful websites that are designed with the clients marketing objectives and their specific customers’ user experience in mind.
When our team were given a tour of the ACC Art Books offices, we knew we were in for a great project, becoming more and more excited by the prospect of working with beautiful imagery and artistic content.
ACC are one of the world’s leading publishers and distributors of books on the arts and visual culture. Over the past 50 years they have collaborated with some of the world’s most famous artists, fashion designers, architects and photographers, distributing their books world wide. Just sitting in their meeting room we were surrounded by beautiful ‘coffee table’ books that were works of art in themselves.
The existing website was over a decade old and in need of a refresh, but we needed to keep the site clean and simple to really let the books do the talking. To push their global reach and tailor content to specific audiences, we designed and built four websites: UK and US versions for both the ACC Art website and its sister company, Images Publishing. We worked closely with their publishing software partner to ensure that all four websites can be updated quickly and easily by their teams around the world.
Almost 18 months in the making, it has been an exciting journey and one we hope to continue as we work with them to support their team long term.
Visit www.accartbooks.com to browse their exciting and extensive list of publications.
Discover how our team can help you on your journey.
Talk to us today