1. Corporate babble – meaningless waffle about “management teams”, “strategic partnerships”, “proactive solutions”. Sometimes “stakeholders” creep in as well. If you hide the company name then these pages would fit any organisation from NASA down to Rotherham Pet Supplies Ltd.

If you are a me-too company with a me-too website then this style will suit well.

2. Heroic personal story in the Victor Kiam genre:

“I made my first Badass Snow-Board from a sheet of titanium I found in a dumpster…”

People love stories and this type of page can be a back-up if the rest of your site is failing to tell the company story with layout, images, and copy.

E-commerce hot-shot Johnnie Boden tells a great story without even mentioning what he sells:

“After five burglaries, one office dog, nine Christmas quizzes, twelve nights spent in the warehouse…”

Every other page on the Boden site is selling the dream – and this page tells us that Johnnie is living the dream as well.

3. The missing about-us page. Amazon don’t have one. Neither do Apple. Zappos? Zilch. All rely on the rest of the site and the power of the brand.  And they want you to get on and buy something – not read empty spiel.

How many real-life shops have a museum of company history? Photos of the directors? Maybe they use the space for better things…

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.

VITES™ 1.0

Born in the middle of 2003, this was the first time page content was linked to data recorded. It was clear that first time visitors to a website needed to be encouraged to return to generate revenue, and that returning visitors to the website needed to be treated differently to first timers. So a simple “tunneling system” was implemented that established where the visitor was in the sales cycle by understanding their previous activity on the website and also by interrogating the offline CRM system.

By doing this, VITES™ dropped people into the most appropriate tunnel and fed them tunnel specific content, imagery and, most importantly, applications.

Conversion rates rocketed. We had stumbled across a killer application for the web. In much the same way as Sergey Brin devised a method at Stanford University to “rank” sites in importance based on inbound links – which then became the basis for Google – we stumbled upon the link between recording and behaviour and predictive purchasing or behavioural targeting was born.

VITES™ 1.5

The original version was a killer. It doubled conversion rates overnight but it was very cumbersome to build sites around it and the clunky tunnels were flawed when it came to bookmarking and search engine maps. This needed addressing so a specification to improve the whole system was hastily put together in 2004 to meet these shortcomings.

This was a simpler beast to operate, more flexible, more powerful but still required hand cutting of the tunnels. We had tunnel vision!

VITES™ 2.x

A huge step in development was identified in late 2005 and the move to visitor profiles is set in stone. The whole system needed to be rewritten and was completed by the middle of 2006. This included a number of innovations including profiles, rules and confidence ratings (how confident the system is that a person fits a profile).

The latest platform is developed was the established LAMP platform and the task of rolling it out to the first handful of clients started.

The tool

Soon after VITES™ 2.x was launched it was realised that customers were coming up with great ways in which to use this tool. It became a very natural and easy tool to customise web content so sites could change at the weekend or overnight or when the call centre was busy or any other internal or external event.

Market leading online advertising companies became exposed to the technology and started sharing their data with VITES™ allowing it to make better decisions. We’ve only just scratched the surface with the VITES™ tool – there are a hundred or even a thousand more uses for it that we are yet to find.

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.