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Brands poor at Search Engine Optimisation
New research reported in today's Revolution shows that the majority of brand advertisers do not have an effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy, negatively impacting on their natural search listings. Essentially, their sites are not search engine friendly, meaning that they rank lower on search engine listings.
Search engine optimisation covers a range of things - from some technical stuff about how your site is built (e.g. sites built entirely in Flash severely restrict Google's ability to 'read' them), how the URLs of pages are set up, to the content and copy on your site, and how your headings show. All tictoc's sites are built with SEO in mind - we covered a bit about SEO in our most recent seminar, and we'll probably cover it again in future events.
By Kate Wooding
Published: 20 August 2008
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Silver lining for etailers
New research shows that the current economic situation may have a silver lining for etailers - although 64% of respondents said that the economic climate would force them to reduce their overall spending, 56% said that they would continue to shop online as much as they are already, while some will even spend more.
The report, by E-consultancy, also looks at the importance of price, user-reviews and recommendations for consumers when online shopping.
Responses show that price comparison sites are becoming more important - the report suggests that retailers should be submitting their product feeds to price comparison engines to take advantage of this - and that user-reviews are also of growing importance, particularly to the younger market (72% of the 25-34 age group said they would be more likely to read online reviews, the figure for over 55s was 53%).
Matthew Tod, one of the authors of the report, commented "We can see from this report that silver surfers are not into social media or comparison engines and are intending to spend more as the downturn does not touch them. But on the other hand a whole group of more financially pressed people now use social media to make decisions and then comparison engines to find the best deal. Complexity rules and simple strategies will fail if online retailers don't understand this."
By Kate Wooding
Published: 15 August 2008
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Are rising prices driving online shopping?
Realised we hadn't mentioned anything about credit crunches or rising fuel prices on the blog (well it's summer, we've got better things to think about like flying ant days and playground games), so thought I would remedy this with a positive little story about how rising prices might actually be driving online sales. Online sales have been rising steadily since forever, and it must be difficult to separate the many factors that contribute to this, but it seems that some clever people think that we might be using online shopping to avoid travel costs (like fuel), or to avoid overspending on shopping trips. Read the full article at e-consultancy here - it also links to a great article by Lorraine Paterson about how to improve eCommerce sites from a usability point of view.
By Kate Wooding
Published: 25 July 2008
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The rise and rise of mobile sites
There's an article in this week's NMA about how 60% of consumers think it's important to be able to access the internet from their mobile, and 65% of those who are planning to buy a phone in the next year will be looking for a good mobile internet experience. Surely the iPhone and Twitter are partly responsible for this rise?? There are a couple of things this means for the digital industry - firstly we'll all need to make sure that the sites we build are easily 'readable' on mobiles and secondly more brands are demanding mobile-specific sites - sites built specifically for mobile access. Will it be restricted to certain sectors? The NMA article suggests that banks, sport, travel, social networking, local amenities/guides and ticket purchasing would all benefit - and having mobile access to Wikipedia would settle a few pub arguments - and make pub quizzes a cinch!
By Kate Wooding
Published: 19 June 2008
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Online winners and losers
It's been a season of weird online trading stories with some of the big players taking substantial hits on the high street and others doing phenomenally well. The one thing that can't be denied is the undoubted success of the web in this story! Below are some snippits of winners and losers in the etail environment.
Sainsbury's has announced 'exceptional' online sales growth over the Christmas period. The company said the improved etail results helped it achieve its overall £2.5bn sales target three months ahead of schedule.
Amazon was the most popular retail site over Christmas accounting for 9% of visits to all retail sites.
Shares in HMV have jumped 15% after the music and books retailer said it had a "highly successful" Christmas period. Like-for-like sales at its HMV stores in the UK and Ireland rose 14.1%, while sales at its Waterstone's bookstore chain rose 4%.
Marks and Spencers was hit by poor Christmas sales with UK like-for-like sales falling 2.2% in the last three months of 2007, however website sales were particularly healthy, up 78%.
Tesco said its online businesses had a "very successful" Christmas, with total sales up 24%, helped by strong demand for MP3 players, digital cameras and laptops.
Webs the future!
By Melanie Russell
Published: 17 January 2008
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Happy, stress-free Christmas Shopping
In an article published in The Sunday Herald recently, it was stated that more than 27 million people are expected to shop online over the festive season turning Britain into the biggest online retail market in Europe.
Total online sales are set to reach £40 billion this year and are predicted to quadruple to £162bn by 2020 when they will account for 40% of all UK Retail sales.
According to uSwitch, UK Consumers could save more than £13bn a year by shopping online! Some of the most popular products bought online are music, films and concert tickets. More than half of online shoppers (53%) by music and films online; 35% buy tickets for events over the internet and about a third purchase books, clothes and sporting goods. Grocery shopping online is also becoming more popular.
Here are links to some of our eCommerce websites:
Guitar
Scotch Whisky Shop
Just Dogs
Royal Mile Residence
Woods of WindsorSource : The Sunday Herald, Naomi Caine
By Melanie Russell
Published: 30 November 2007
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Text-only version of your site?
In the past, sites had no real structure and multimedia elements were used heavily without any thought of alternate content.
When these sites had to be made accessible the knee-jerk reaction was often to create a text-only version of the site. This allowed those unable to access the main site a means of reading the content, but at a cost.
Adding a text-only site in those days effectively doubled the web team's workload as it was a whole other site to maintain. Text-only sites contained content that was incomplete or of lower quality and over time gradually became more and more out of sync with the main site. An often used analogy, is the idea of having a restaurant where quality food is served upstairs and passable food is served on the ground floor in the kitchen. Diners unable to tackle the stairs are forced to have a lower quality experience. The dual-site approach ticked all the boxes for accessibility in theory, but in practice rarely offered value.
To counter these problems, text-only sites became dynamic and shared the databases that powered the live site. The main site would then link off to a 'text only' site (the same site, but using different HTML templates that removed all styling). This was an improvement, but it missed an important point.
Most screen-readers and assistive technologies work by screen scraping; reading all the visible text on the page. This happens regardless of whether the site is text-only or not. Although text-only sites can help users who have visual difficulties, a better approach would be to provide alternative colour schemes or advise and educate the user on how to create and apply user stylesheets.
To make sure that assitive technologies can make sense of your website, it is more important to structure your pages well. The templates supplied with your website will give you a good base structure to work from, but it's important that the copy you add through the CMS maintains the standard.
Good structuring tips include using heading elements rather than simply making text bold (and bigger!) to both clarify what the following section is about and to create a heirarchy (e.g. h3 is considered a sub-section of h2). Additionally, when creating links to other pages it's good practice to ensure that the linking text makes sense when read out of context - try to resist typing 'click here'!
By taking accessibility into account at the start of a project and making it a part of the project instead of a bolt-on as in the past, your site will be more accessible with less effort. With a little care, keeping your site maintained and accessible to all can be a piece of cake. Stop trying to be accessible and start being accessible!
By Andrew Donaldson
Published: 7 November 2007
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Web Trends 2007
Information Architects Japan have released an update to their very interesting Web Trends map of 2007. Based on a representation of the Tokyo Metro map the 200 most successful websites are ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective to create an interesting image.
While the focus is still on English language websites (because that is where it's at), we have added some Japanese sites (a mystery to most of you gaijin), some German sites (yeah, there are some popular ones) and a Chinese line (the second Internet)"
Each trend line follows a theme, e.g. the technology line has the tech sites, the design line the design sites. You can download the map in various formats and even use the interactive version as your browser startpage.
By Tom Beddard
Published: 20 July 2007
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Web Acronyms
DYJHIW people LOL and end up RAOF and you have no idea why?
My suggestion to them is TANSTAAFL and tell them to GBTW
If you know of any others, or want to discuss this ridiculous subject in more detail, give us a call!
By Melanie Russell
Published: 10 July 2007
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