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.

At a recent meeting filled with execs I asked them to give me a very recent example of good design and I got some very interesting answers. The best answer came from a CEO who listed the “1 hr to the front of the queue” markers that they have at Disney World as the best piece of design he had seen. To many traditional marketers this is not design, the reality of it is that people see the world like this – ignoring the exceptional design work of, say, Scaglietti designing Ferrari cars which almost transcends design into beauty. The most far reaching examples of good design are almost all simple and focussed on the needs to the beholder. And now to corrupt one of my favourite quotes: Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away – Antoine de Saint Exupéry