Love is in the air…
I find that, sometimes, owners of maturing businesses can overly concern themselves with gross margin, overheads, efficiencies, cash-flow and various other accounting measures. I think most owners would agree that this is not why they started-up in business in the first place. Words like passion, belief, focus and innovation are more usually associated with young [...]
A curated web experience
For some years innovative organisations and software houses have been striving to produce a neater, more contextualised web experience only to find their efforts labelled as “invasive” or “privacy breaching”. As a result terms such as behavioural targeting and personalized web are now tarnished – forever. I am fighting back. From now on I am [...]
Another 2011 prediction blog post
This is the time of year that everyone and their dog seems to take out the crystal ball out and make sweeping predictions for 2011. Jumping on the bandwagon of making sweeping predictions sounds like a bit of fun, if not taken too seriously so here’s my attempt to list some dead certs that I [...]
Choice architecture : Using intelligent defaults
Supposedly, humans are terribly lazy, easy to manipulate and creatures of habit. That’s great news if you can leverage these traits to help your online campaign. Traditional wisdom states that people should be offered lots of choice. This is plain wrong, too much choice creates procrastination. Some say providing choice is a fundamental part of [...]
Landing Zone : Dealing with PPC Traffic
How Landing Pages have transformed PPC traffic Since the original specification for the world-wide web was drawn up in the 90′s by Tim Berners-Lee there is, remarkably, a ghost still haunting the Internet. It’s called the “HOME” page; we’ve all heard of it, we naturally assume that the page we land on when we click [...]
Quickies : Web forms that work
Probably the most frequent question we are asked is “how can I make my call-to-action web form convert better?”. Here’s a quickie, 10 minute read to get you started. There’s not much we don’t know about web forms. We’ve been designing forms on web sites since 1996 and were one of the first companies in [...]
Rework? We don’t need Rework
I’ve just finished reading Rework as it had been mooted as suggested reading. It sounds trite, but we could have written that book 10 years ago. Amazing! It’s exactly how we have been running the company – almost to the letter, and from day one. Makes you feel quite proud. Related articles Rework by Jason [...]
The power of iterative design
I recently began my seventh year at Connected. In that time I’ve worked on more projects I can remember, many of them redesigns of existing websites. I love building a new site from scratch, it allows me to create a structure that makes sense to us and also gives me the chance to flex my [...]
Quickies : A/B testing in the real world
£200 million button Most web marketers know the story of how Amazon changed their check-out process; the wording on the button was changed from “Register” to “Continue” and a simple message was added (“You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To [...]
Content reductionism in the web world
Less really is more Attention span online is really short Keep it simple stupid One fact beats a thousand opinions Useful Information The percentage split of time spent reading/browsing versus doing stuff is dropping as consumers are now comfortable buying, organising and completing transactions online. This means the traditional drive to generate marketing-led content has [...]
