Often we’re asked “can’t you change it quickly whilst I’m on the phone?” or “It’s only a quick tweak, can you do it straight away?”.
To project manage, we use Basecamp and like most of the big boys in the internet/software development world (including Google Android), our development environments use a host of version control, testing [...]
Technology
Taking time to secure our code bases
Online Booking Systems
One of the fastest growing areas of development in the online world is the explosion in the use of Online Booking Systems. For many organisations managing the contact between customer and employee has been one of the hurdle to the wider adoption of automated booking systems. These hurdles are crumbling and combined with Internet users [...]
Project management…collaboration stylee
We rolled out Basecamp company-wide in January 2008 and now manage around 70 live projects in a wonderfully collaborative manner. It dramatically changed how the organisation worked internally and many of the clients subsequently took up using the application themselves for other projects.
Changing from an ugly and ill-formed email-based system into a simple, fast and cloud-enabled application has reduced costs, increased control and brought a whole host of really important improvements to how we work…
Using journey management as a change tool
Early adopters of visitor journey management have very successfully applied it in a commercial context where organisations have a defined sales cycle and use the methodology to serve the most appropriate message, content and actions to visitors at given stages of the cycle. There are, however, some exciting ideas of how journey management can be used in less commercially-minded organisations or for internal processes…
Testing landing pages
For the commercial world outside of consumer e-commerce, focused landing pages are the fastest and easiest ways to improve all conversion points on the site. They are the heavy lifters of this world. Often the Landing pages, being small and light, means they are easy to work with, easy to optimise and easy to improve and as a result a typical company might change these once every month or so. But how can you tell if you are actually improving the landing page? What happens when you’ve done all the “normal” stuff? What happens when the conversion rate starts to fall again?
Evolution of VITES™
Now on it’s 3rd major release (v2.4), VITES™ started in 2001 as a simple end-to-end visitor tracking system, built when a client was trying to understand where their online marketing spend was going. The original system was just called End-to-End Tracker and worked by stamping the visitors PC with a unique code and their source when they arrived at the site for the first time, and then spewing this information out whenever the visitor sent information to the client.
The results were stunning (for 2001) and showed that 80% of the advertising spend was pretty poor indeed. Not surprisingly our client was over the moon with this new-found transparency and their business exploded when they invested in the right online advertising and had faith in the value of it. It was a real way to measure the actual return on advertising investment….
Why use VITES™ ?
What is wrong with the “Flat Web Society”? Lots really. Everyone gets the same experience and that just doesn’t make sense. When you have to write your copy and your site to a group called “everyone” you then have to compromise on your content, your navigation, your design and your aims for the site.
The dynamic web understands better what the visitor wants and provides a vastly improved experience, an experience that is largely personalised to the visitor and one that better matches the needs of both the web-site owner and his or her visitor…
Personalised content delivery
The “one-size fits all” web is a compromise, a general-purpose attempt to deal with all the potential combinations of types of visitors. By way of example, the benefits of creating creating custom landing pages by simple keyword groups is widely documented as hugely improving online conversion rates. Despite this, even the most savvy organisations don’t carry this any further than the first landing page and certainly look to learn from this when the visitor returns to the site. This represents a huge loss in conversion rates…

