birddog

Top Digital Tips – in plain English

If you’re still struggling to work out digital, here are a few basic tips that should help you along the way.

1. Assess your company’s digital strategy – is it fully integrated into your marketing mix?  If it isn’t, why not?  The opportunities the web presents to you as a business are immense, so you should make sure you’re exploiting all available channels.
2. Are you engaged in any social media activity?  Even if you’re not, chances are other people are talking about you and your brand right now – from your staff, your customers, or independent reviewers, someone will be.  Make sure you’ve got a presence in these channels and get engaged.
3. Do you use your own website?  Poor user experience is the number one gripe people have with businesses online.  Frustrating navigation, unnecessary long user journeys, shopping carts that don’t work.  Today’s programming languages enable websites to do pretty much anything; there aren’t any constraints any more, so there are no excuses for the technology letting down the user experience.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong.
4. When was the last time you updated your website?  Websites generally need at least a design refresh every 12-18 months to ensure they remain looking fresh.
5. Are you thinking about the mobile web?  Whilst ‘web-on-the-go’ has been around for quite a long time, it’s only over the past year or so that it has become more and more mainstream.  With more people accessing the web on their mobile on a regular basis, does your offering sufficiently cater for mobile web users?
6. Are you looking to save money in the recession?  If your website is built in .NET – a Microsoft technology, then chances are you’re paying hefty annual licenses for the server software.  You might want to consider a re-build in an Open-Source language such as PHP.  Open-Source languages have come a long way.  So far in fact that they now serve the platform for some of the highest trafficked sites in the world – such as Facebook, Twitter and Del.icio.us – all built in PHP!
7. Search is still huge.  Despite everyone talking about Social Media all of the time, it’s vital that your organisation has a search strategy in place.  This will cover both paid (PPC) and natural (SEO).  After all, over half of all people online start their journey with a search!

Oliver Budworth

Digital Director

10 tips for effectively planning your agency website

If you work in an agency, one of the hardest projects you’ll ever work on is your own website.  Often, it will take a lot longer to complete the project than any piece of client work you will ever do, due to many factors including (but not limited to):

• The work getting bumped due to pressing client deadlines
• Different people within the agency getting involved at different stages and not agreeing on some aspect of the site
• No-one having any time to create content for the site
• New technologies rapidly emerging that you feel just have to be included in the site, pushing the development time out even further

Sound familiar? We’ve all been there. Here are some tips that I feel should help you in planning and delivering your company website faster.

1. Make sure the project has an owner – a champion. Assigning the project to a group of people will often never work. Everyone has their own agenda and client work will always take precedent. If someone is given ownership responsibility they will ensure the project is pushed through and delivered. Make sure this person is someone who is well connected within the agency and knows how to get their own way when it comes to getting things done.
2. Treat your company as you would any client – give the project a job number and book in agency resource including an Account and/or Project Manager. By doing this, it is more likely that you will get access to the right resource at the times you need it, rather than trying to fit it in during the odd hour here or there.
3. Run a questionnaire with multiple choice answers to gather feedback and information [bit from Scot’s book]
4. Plan who you are going to involve.  If you ask a hundred people a question, you will get one hundred answers.  Run focus groups concentrating on the areas of specialism of the people in those groups. Involve as fewer [more from Scot’s book]
5. Whilst the creative team might all have some input on the new design, try to ensure the same designer/design team work on the design from start to finish. This will help in keeping all of the various aspects of the content consistent, and will also make it easier to adapt the design quickly, should part of it need amending.
6. Look at your competitors. Not because you want to emulate them but to make sure none of them already have a site that looks exactly like the one you’re planning. Sounds obvious but launching a site that looks like the competition never looks good. You’re there to differentiate from the competition right?
7. Plan your copy. Content is one of the hardest challenges in any new site build. Good copy requires time to create, something many agency staff don’t have the luxury of. Create a template people can just type into, and include a wireframe showing them what the page will look like so that they can get a feel for the content. Give them a content brief that shows them the tone of voice for the new site and make sure you set a strict word limit. If what you get back is wrong, don’t be afraid to push it back with some constructive feedback and get them to have a second stab at it.
8. Make sure Social Media courses through the veins of the site. Not only should your site become the example of others to follow, by integrating services such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr as well as having comments enabled on all of your site articles will encourage both staff and external visitors to get involved in contributing a wide range of content, from something as simple as a Tweet, through to detailed responses to one of your blog posts.
9. Don’t forget the right order in which to plan your site. Usability should always come before Design. You new site might look pretty, but if you have to explain to visitors how to use it, if it takes ages to load on a 1mb broadband connection, if it’s style over substance people won’t use it and it will most likely become a talking point for all of the wrong reasons.
10. Plan your SEO. Whilst it could be argued that SEO is gradually becoming less relevant, with more traffic now going to Social Networks as opposed to Search Engines, search engines such as Google still usually deliver the majority of traffic to most sites, so it is important to plan your search strategy from the outset.

There are probably many more points to be added, so feel free to add your own comments below.

Oliver Budworth

Digital Director