From September 1st, Connected are throwing their doors open to any creative types

What? Yup, we’re opening 1,500 sq ft of cool office space to anyone who wants to use it

We already have quite a few friends and clients who use our office space and we thought, “to hell with, invite everyone In”

Great minds thinks alike, CONNECTED for FREE

We’ve got FREE ultra high-speed Wi-Fi, hot desks, huge LCD screens, sofas, colour printers (A3/A4), usability testing suite, a great library, parking, a massive conference table for 18 people, breakfast bar, all-day cafe (not free, sorry) plus an art gallery to refresh tired creative juices.

You will also have access to some of the best brains in the web marketing world, for FREE

We’re running this experiment until the end of year so why not drop us an email, find us on LinkedIn, visit our Facebook page or just drop in and say hello.

We’re open from 10am every working day. Our coffee pod machine is a Krups Dolce Gusto so bring along a pack of pods, mine’s a Cafe Lungo.

Even if you are not strictly creative in terms of pretty pictures, maybe you are just creative from an entrepreneur point of view, maybe you simply crave the company of bright, link-minded, people.

We’ll let you know the outcome!

Next week is vinyl week, followed by old photo week. Keep an eye out for some of the fun! Any suggestions for the following weeks?

All objectives must be SMART.

SMART stands for:

1. Specific – Objectives should specify what I want to achieve.
2. Measurable – I should be able to measure whether I am meeting the objectives or not.
3. Achievable – Are the objectives I set, achievable?
4. Relevant – Is the objective relevant to the project?
5. Timely – When do I want to achieve the set objectives?

A lot more information can be found here.

There has long been a dynamic tension in ICT between getting a job done, in a commercial context, and getting a job right, from a technician’s viewpoint: the outcome is compromise.
Now, for the first time in 25 years, I’m in a team where quality matters so much and the ambition is so great that the business response is to produce the best in the field. Smart people, thinking-caps on, and the best tools. But, as they say, “Don’t watch the tool, watch the hand that wields it.”

I’ve built and maintain a secure network and the development environment for a talented team to roll out consistently good stuff.
It’s so refreshing where everyone is striving for the top. It’s exciting to question conventional wisdom. It’s challenging, too, to have my entire skill-set audited, updated, improved. But it really is the only way to travel!

Since 1997 Connected have championed the clear commercial benefit of balancing the needs of function and form in the online world. The key driver is to improve the commercial success of a client’s web strategy and help create lean and profitable web strategies that are reliable, sustainable and market-leading. This is an uncommon approach in a world of “me too” agencies and plagiarism-driven organisations. The end result shows dramatically improved online commercial success and real leadership in our clients markets.

Connected focus on the engine of sales and marketing – the heart of most businesses – the machine that creates the wealth for organisations and feeds the sales process. Building and keeping this machine working at its optimum capacity requires a broad and deep set of skills including consulting, web development, strategy planning, testing, UI design, business intelligence and advertising management.

How do we do this?

Take a team of bright Internet savvy people, mix in a large measure of commercial know-how, another dollop of idea generation and a sprinkling of magic dust.

If you are reading this then you will know that most internet communication (web, email, etc.) is poorly-planned, not visitor-centric and shows no real understanding of how the mass/one-to-one market has changed over the last few years. So, Connected start by removing the barriers to trade, improving the calls-to-action, creating a better environment for the visitor to work with and using personalised and dynamic delivery to get the right message to the right visitors at the right time.

Going forward we apply a “kaizen” (Orig: Jap; “Good change”) methodology of continual improvement. We embark on a sustained campaign of bettering the current site. This involves trialling and testing a large number of variations. The compounded effect is dramatic results: dramatic improvements in conversion rates and dramatic jumps in performance. This approach also has the rather useful side-effect of acting as a quality improvement process.

Who do we do this for?

A wide range of UK organisations from small sub-£5m specialist retailers to large £500m international companies. The only real qualifier, if there is such a thing, is that we work with ambitious, focused organisations that have the will to make it online and the vision to see that much of the old-world thinking has already become extinct.

Connected are not a web-design company and therefore keen to avoid the the generic “web design” tag that is too frequently and loosely applied to companies in this field. Connected focus on the engine of sales and marketing and therefore engineer fits in better with our business.

What is digital engineering?

This covers 2 mains areas; functional design and continuous implementation.

Functional design

The creation of mechanical design (a blueprint, or prototype if you will) using the extensive learned skills and experience Connected have. This forms the starting point of the new site and strategy. The new design is designed to meet the current and projected business needs of the organisation with a view to being scalable and flexible across an extended life.

Most of the components come from the tried and tested bucket, the uniqueness for each organisation is how they are glued together. Using tried and tested greatly simplifies the design/build process and largely removes any associated risk of failure.

Continuous implementation

Converting the outline mechanical design into a working web-site using a third-party design company to provide the “look and feel” elements inside the functional constraints of the design plus a healthy dose of good practice. Once live the work doesn’t stop there – the site goes through a constant cycle of improve/test and test again.

This Kaizen cycle of small and continuous improvements is what defines our approach. The true leaders in all fields of information, technology and manufacturing have had a policy of continuing to strive to improve. Put simply, it is not possible to create great solutions and then leave them on the shelf, they need re-working, and re-working, and re-working.