Here is the current list of features we expect to be in the public version:

1. 4 stage booking process
2. Autoresponder email confirming place/date with details and map link (Google Maps) to location.
3. Automated SMS sent 1 day prior to appointment with link back to a client-defined page
4. iCalendar interface for adding bookings, sent via an ordinary email address
5. Standard choice of 3 themes
6. High-quality soft-erroring on all stages
7. Reporting, covering number of people entering/completing each stage
8. Remember function to recall visitor details for repeat bookings
9. FAQ /Helper system
10. EU compliant privacy policy
11. Custom defined contents/fields/text/images

We’re pretty excited about this new application as it will be the first of a new family of standalone VITES applications that can be installed and used by non-technical staffers. It’s going to be a breeze to install and we’re sure you’ll see myBookingWizard generating the highest quality enquiries and bookings possible. Get signed-up now. Or follow the release on Twitter.

I don’t think it needs to be that complex. True, most organisations will have some specific needs but 90% of the needs of most marketers should be simple to provide in an easy-to-digest application as most really only need to know:

# Which traffic streams generate what business and how much does that cost

# What is the conversion rate for each of the traffic streams and calls-to-action

# What’s the availability of the web service like and how does the outside world see it’s performance

# How are my A/B tests going, winners and losers please

# If I am using profiling on the web what are the relative performance metrics for each of the profiles

# Some historical reporting on overall performance

Google does indeed do most of this and if you had the time and inclination you could learn how to use the systems and pick out the 10 or so important metrics. Many marketers don’t. This is further hampered by the self-serving approach of most GA Authorised Consultants, as we all know that the first recommendation a consultant makes it order more consultancy!

This has been bugging us (and our clients) for a while so we’re in the process of developing a simpler web performance tool that focusses on the needs of marketers. We’re not suggesting you dump GA quite yet, merely that you consider a simpler, clearer approach to understanding web performance. KISS.

Most well developed and successful web-sites are built around great processes that are easy to use, slick and give the visitor what they want. Yes, the processes are littered with objects such as buttons, banners, content, headlines and other such items but fundamentally it is the process that makes, say, Amazon or Google great. So why are web-site designers seemingly forced to work in a purely object world? Seems like they work in a straight jacket.

It seems that many web-designers were, until quite recently, designers in the static (old) world of direct mail, point-of-sale, brochures et al so how can we expect them to think about the process? The process underlines the all elements of the design, including the objects so the objects must serve the process and not the other way round. If we keep it that simple it is also much easier to evolve the objects as we can think about the objects would better serve the process (red submit buttons, big text, simple content, sensible layouts etc).

Since the turn of century, I have held onto the belief that good web-design is very rare and usually polluted by brand elements. This is confirmed in the way brand is often delivered online via a series of defined objects and properties including logo position, colour and font. These guidelines are usually set in stone and never take into account the process. It’s refreshing to see new exceptions such as Amazon and Google whilst encouraging to see older brands starting to embrace process driven design.

So, before you start wire-framing your next design how about designing and refining the process first? You could produce a bigger performance improvement with a process change alone than you could ever by changing object design when detached from the process. Maybe it’s time for process designers to start double-teaming with object designers?

With search engines being the usual starting point for a customer’s journey, companies are still, largely, trying to attract site visitors via carefully crafted content or special offers. How different, really, is your home page from your competitors?

This approach has a limited shelf life as the search engines are starting to abstract the information from the marketing fuzz on web-sites. So where does that leave companies that want to promote their brand values?

Embracing user-generated content is a good starting point and every internet-enabled business should be running headlong into social-media, review sites, forums and blogs. There is, however, a largely overlooked approach that shifts the game away from information and towards action. Visitors to your site want to do stuff as well as consume information.

The future is applications

It is easy to incorporate brand values and imagery in applications and this is a much under utilised approach. Picking out one of two key brand strengths and converting them into a useful and branded application can easily put distance between your organisation and your competitors. It is much harder to abstract or re-create the applications elsewhere so it is possible to establish a real “home” for visitors to drop in to. At the same time, if the application is strong enough it will actively discourage your potential customers from visiting your competitor sites and when they do they will, hopefully, dismayed by the absence of this useful application.

Delivering this is easy as gadgets and micro-applications and by definition they are more interactive and compelling as the visitor can find out answers and achieve his or her actions without having to browse through lots of pages. Better still, if the applications are tailored to the visitors stage in the sales process and built with the intention to move them onto the next stage you’re able to mix content, brand and call-to-action in a single application.

Applications need to be learned, even the very simple ones, so you have to make them compelling and easy to use. Better still, make it an application that the visitor will need to use time and time again and the investment the visitor makes learning your application reduces the chance they will be tempted to use another application provided by a competitor. As humans we are just  a little lazy so once we have learned one way to do something we really don’t like trying new stuff; look at the dogged loyalty you see with applications such as Ebay, Amazon and Google.

Where to start

So, if the future lies in creating application then you need to look at all aspects of your sales cycle and see where you could introduce a function or a feature that requires visitor interaction and gives out information. This is easier than you think. For example, if you sell double glazing and part of your sales cycle is a visit from an estimator then you have a tailor made hole to drop an application into. Add a “Online Estimator” button and take the visitor to an application that gathers the raw data required for an estimate (number of windows, size, type, opening, glass type, location etc) and let them fill the information in, add some personal contact details and bingo, the application spits out an “estimate subject to survey, click here to book survey” which in turn takes the visitor to an online booking application (one of the great killer micro-applications online). Job done.

Developing micro-applications

Decisions must be made pretty early on about the technology platform you are going to use as very few technologies work on all platforms (eg Flash). The critical choice here is deciding what percentage and what type (mobile, home, office) of customer you are trying to snare. You will also have a set of much wider considerations surrounding your internal systems, scale and compatibility as it is highly likely you will need this applications to talk to a number of your existing systems. This makes the selection of the application developer less of a marketing choice and more of a capabilities and compatibilities discussion.

You’ll need help at the stage so why not talk to us about the best way to approach it, we’ve been building successful web applications for nearly 15 years.

Here is a brief outline of what you can expect in the next release of the worlds first, commercially available, personalisation and customer journey platform

• Faster core platform, requiring less server computing power and faster serving of content
• In-built AB testing functions, faster, easier testing of content, pages and call-to-actions
• Server load balancing, giving higher system availability, improved fault tolerance and improved performance
• Off the shelf CMS support, de-skilling and speeding up changes to content
• Faster profile management, faster and easier creation of new customer journeys
• Reporting API, simplifying the export of business-critical data giving easier and faster access to real knowledge
• New User Group to support discussions, bug-tracking, feature request and cross-learning between clients

Initially released in 2006, VITES was designed to dramatically improve on and off site conversion rates by providing a scaleable platform that offered proper customer journey management (ala Amazon, Ebay etc) combined with a suite of testing tools that allowed accurate testing of new content, CTAs and traffic streams

Since it’s release, every client using the platform has seen at least a doubling of conversion rates and huge reductions in cost per enquiry/sale

The latest release is a ground-up rethink of what our clients and marketplace needed and part of this was a massive simplification in deployment of changes, testing and profiles

All current clients are on a migration plan to complete the porting to the new version by the end of 2010 and all new clients will automatically get the latest version of the platform

License charges remain unchanged, starting at just £500 per month for the basic 10k users per month version

Contact Liam, Martin or Nick now to find out more about how VITES 3.0 (Rangoon) can supercharge your web strategy.

VITES remains the only commercially available off the shelf journey profile and testing platform

Contact our licensing team (Liam, Martin or Nick) for further information.

System integrators and agencies should contact our CEO (Martin Dower) to discuss how VITES can help your clients

In recent years we’ve seen the size of digital displays increase, whether you’re talking about 32″ iMacs or 50″ widescreen TVs. However, it seems that this trend is now in full reverse with the explosion of micro-screen devices, including the market-dominating iPhone/iPod. 2010 is then set to see the growth of much smaller devices, 9″ net books, iPad and now we see Apple, the leader in this field, rumoured to be producing a smaller screen version of it’s high-end Mac Air shrinking the already small 13″ screen down to less than 12″.

What’s driving this?

Largely the very overdue explosion in mobile Internet linked with the unstoppable growth of cloud applications.

We are starting, thankfully, to see the adoption of far simpler applications and the death of overkill desktop applications from traditional suppliers who spent their huge development budgets on developing more and more complex applications that consumers don’t actually need.

The twin challenges of small screens and mobile Internet is a major challenge for the web in the next few years as developers struggle to adapt to less space and lower bandwidth. It’s kind of strange as we may have to return to some of the thinking that dominated the mid-90s … That of lightweight, fast pages designed to work inside 800 pixel screens. It will certainly be a test of good practice, clear design and brilliant UI. Bring it on.

See our other cloud related posts here:

Time to leave the right click-world

Project management…..collaboration stylee

Mobile browsing has grown fast over the last few years thanks to the wide availability of smartphones and despite most sites work great in mobile browsers, they can still be a usability nightmare. Other options have been made available in the form of CMS plugins allowing you to apply a more app like experience to your site.

Not ones to ignore conventions (where they make sense), we’ve applied our own iPhone friendly skin to our site allowing you to get straight to our content wherever you are.

Let us know what you think!

During December, January and February a new presence was crafted with a new web site, an updated Wikipedia entry to rival the best and a host of other initiatives including Facebook. The culmination of this work was an official launch party and subsequent concert the day after the new site was launched. An innovation in this concert was that conductor Natalia Luis-Bassa spoke at some length to the audience in between items, describing and analysing them quite humorously.

The concert was attended by a posse of 25 Connected teamies who all went along to support the orchestra. A great night was had by all and the concert was a resounding success with some great reviews.

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.