As any of the designers/developers at Adido will tell you, it is important to plan ahead. Knowing what you want is an important part of the web design and development process. But what are the differences between the two and how to they relate to each other? Let’s look at a real world example here at Adido, using Paul, Jamie and Ross.
Paul is a web designer. His job is to tell us how the website will look. He has an eye for detail and brings his artistic talent to bear on any project he works on. After some discussion with the client and a few concept designs, Paul will produce an image that looks like a finished website.
Jamie (that’s me) is a front end web developer. My job is to take Paul’s work and pass it onto the development team in a form that they can work with. Basically I create a website to look like Paul’s design. If it was a building, my end product would be an empty structure with no plumbing, no electric. It looks, however, like a finished product.
Ross is a web developer (in fact he’s the boss of development). Ross’ job is to take my website and make it work. Again, using the building analogy, Ross puts in all the plumbing, wiring and generally makes the building/website functional. Nothing much changes visually, but the website will actually start working as intended.
Every change that one of the three makes can affect the other two. Ross can’t add new pages without making sure Paul has a design for them, just as Paul can’t add pages into the design that haven’t been agreed upon by the development team. Without clear boundaries there are a thousand ways a developer and designer can start treading on each others’ toes.
The most important thing to know before you start creating a website is to know what it will do. Where does this link go? What should this button do? What text boxes should be on this form? If you know all this, then Paul can create a design that incorporates every facet of the finished website. Jamie can build the website with development in mind, and Ross can work efficiently without having pages redesigned to incorporate functionality that wasn’t thought of in advance.
What happens if you do not plan ahead? Designers and developers will trip over each other making changes and progress will slow while every change is run by the client repeatedly. And at the end you might have a website that makes a lot of noise but doesn’t go very far. This blunderbuss of a website will cost a great deal more than it should have.
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
Managing Micro Budget PPC Campaigns
This is the first part of Pay Per Click campaign management blog posts. I will be posting more tips and tricks here that will help you manage your PPC campaign effectively.
As new entrants in the market (or an old player with unoptimised website), small and local businesses need immediate clicks and customers. Achieving higher organic listings in search engines can take time, sometimes over six months.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising can be an effective short term online marketing strategy for managers who are desperate for their websites to be found on search engines quickly. However, small businesses with micro or small budgets often find themselves competing with big rivals, who have more resources and budget to spend online. SMEs have to utilise their resources intelligently and often they do not as they try to cut corners and do things themselves without knowing the tricks of the trade.
Managing a micro PPC budget (typically less than £500 p.m.) is a tough job for marketing managers. However, by following some simple rules given below, they can use their PPC budgets wisely to get the most of the paid clicks.
1. First of all, use your website analytics data to find out some of the keywords people type in to reach your website. If you don’t have analytics code set up on your website, ask your web master to install it - it's a must.
2. Think like a customer. If you were a customer, what phrase would you use to find your services/products. When you've got a list, think again. Check with your colleagues, friends or family members to see you are along the right lines. We've seen that you get the best results if you involve some customers (prospective customers) in this “keywords research”.
3. Create your first keywords list. It is safer to select only those keywords which are relevant to your product or service. Often we see that customers come up with vague words around their business which are not specific to them at all. Don't push yourself to create a "fantastic long list of keywords".
Choosing keywords which have little or no relevancy to your business would only waste your budget. Select only a sensible number of keywords and spend more on phrases which are mostly clicked by users.
4. The next thing to do is to create a list of negative keywords in your campaign. You have a small budget to spend, you can't afford paying for clicks look relevant to your offers but actually they are not. Negative PPC words are those which you DON'T want your adverts to appear for when searching for your services. Often these include the words 'free', 'cheap' or places where you do not want to get clients e.g. Manchester if you are based in Dorset.
For example, while working on a PPC campaign for a client offering “fleet management services”, I found people searching for fleet management software. In that particular case, I added keywords like software, systems, computer etc in negative keywords list of the campaign. This trick saved approximately 35% budget of my client, that otherwise would have gone for wrong clicks.
We will be posting more PPC tips and tricks on here in the coming weeks. If you'd like to share any others, please leave a comment below.
As new entrants in the market (or an old player with unoptimised website), small and local businesses need immediate clicks and customers. Achieving higher organic listings in search engines can take time, sometimes over six months.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising can be an effective short term online marketing strategy for managers who are desperate for their websites to be found on search engines quickly. However, small businesses with micro or small budgets often find themselves competing with big rivals, who have more resources and budget to spend online. SMEs have to utilise their resources intelligently and often they do not as they try to cut corners and do things themselves without knowing the tricks of the trade.
Managing a micro PPC budget (typically less than £500 p.m.) is a tough job for marketing managers. However, by following some simple rules given below, they can use their PPC budgets wisely to get the most of the paid clicks.
1. First of all, use your website analytics data to find out some of the keywords people type in to reach your website. If you don’t have analytics code set up on your website, ask your web master to install it - it's a must.
2. Think like a customer. If you were a customer, what phrase would you use to find your services/products. When you've got a list, think again. Check with your colleagues, friends or family members to see you are along the right lines. We've seen that you get the best results if you involve some customers (prospective customers) in this “keywords research”.
3. Create your first keywords list. It is safer to select only those keywords which are relevant to your product or service. Often we see that customers come up with vague words around their business which are not specific to them at all. Don't push yourself to create a "fantastic long list of keywords".
Choosing keywords which have little or no relevancy to your business would only waste your budget. Select only a sensible number of keywords and spend more on phrases which are mostly clicked by users.
4. The next thing to do is to create a list of negative keywords in your campaign. You have a small budget to spend, you can't afford paying for clicks look relevant to your offers but actually they are not. Negative PPC words are those which you DON'T want your adverts to appear for when searching for your services. Often these include the words 'free', 'cheap' or places where you do not want to get clients e.g. Manchester if you are based in Dorset.
For example, while working on a PPC campaign for a client offering “fleet management services”, I found people searching for fleet management software. In that particular case, I added keywords like software, systems, computer etc in negative keywords list of the campaign. This trick saved approximately 35% budget of my client, that otherwise would have gone for wrong clicks.
We will be posting more PPC tips and tricks on here in the coming weeks. If you'd like to share any others, please leave a comment below.
Friday, 11 July 2008
Our charity bike ride is tomorrow!
Bikes, bikes and more bikes! We just can't get enough of them and our big charity bike ride is now only one day away! So far we have raised just under £2,000 for Julia's House and The Youth Cancer Trust, we need to raise a further £3,000 by the end of the year so please keep donating!
Thank you to all those who have donated, it’s much appreciated!
We would like to say a huge thank you to Primera Bike Shop and The Connaught Hotel in Bournemouth for being our main sponsors, also to several local companies that have helped us out through out these last few months, you know who you are!
Tomorrow at 9am we will be starting our 80 mile cycle ride from our Surrey office, reaching our Bournemouth office around 6pm (hopefully earlier!). I will let you know how it went on Monday!
Thank you to all those who have donated, it’s much appreciated!
We would like to say a huge thank you to Primera Bike Shop and The Connaught Hotel in Bournemouth for being our main sponsors, also to several local companies that have helped us out through out these last few months, you know who you are!
Tomorrow at 9am we will be starting our 80 mile cycle ride from our Surrey office, reaching our Bournemouth office around 6pm (hopefully earlier!). I will let you know how it went on Monday!
Tuesday, 1 July 2008
Happy birthday to us!
Today is our fifth birthday here at Adido. It is very strange to think that what seems like just a few months ago, the original Directors here sat down and signed the relevant bits of paper to make Adido come to life. In the past five years so much has happened that it would take forever to write it all down here (and I'm sure it would bore most people).
Needless to say, we're very happy how the company has developed in that time. There have been some 'tricky times', times when things haven't gone as we've expected and times when we've surprised even ourselves at what we can achieve.
We've grown from four working in a living room to thirteen full time staff spread across offices in Dorset, Hampshire and Surrey. We've been able to make a real difference to loads of msall and large companies, either improving the way they work (and getting many, many thank yous in the process) to helping our clients improve their online sales, normally with dramatic effect. We now have a great team of web experts, each specialised in their own field, and we're all working to improve the way we work to make everyones experience that much better.
So, here's to the next five years everyone! We look forward to working with you...
Are Social Networks Low Value Traffic Sources?
Nothing new in Jakob Nielsen's new article, it is pretty much same what SEO and Analytics community has been advocating for years. Unique visitors are not an effective way to measure traffic, you will most likely wish getting most of the traffic from loyal users and search engines.
However, in his latest article, Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click usability guru Jakob Nielsen definitely undermines the value of social networks. He believes traffic from Digg is of "low value” as diggers are notoriously fickle and leave the site immediately, once they've satisfied their idle curiosity.
I think it is not the case, diggers are witty, they don't waste their time. You must have interesting and relevant content on your website to engage your visitors with website.
Do you believe in Jakob Nielsen? Post your comments here.
However, in his latest article, Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click usability guru Jakob Nielsen definitely undermines the value of social networks. He believes traffic from Digg is of "low value” as diggers are notoriously fickle and leave the site immediately, once they've satisfied their idle curiosity.
I think it is not the case, diggers are witty, they don't waste their time. You must have interesting and relevant content on your website to engage your visitors with website.
Do you believe in Jakob Nielsen? Post your comments here.
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