We worked intensively with the in-house team at Roman to provide a website which both delivered a great experience for Mobile users, but also kept the existing desktop site intact and functional.   David Osborne, Managing Director at Roman, stated: “The introduction of our new mobile website encourages further use of our website on the go as it is now extremely easy and convenient for the user.”

Find out more about why Mobile is important for your business – and get in touch with us to discuss what we can do to help increase business via Mobile for your website.

http://www.nbsl.org.uk/business-bullets/marketing/88-the-five-biggest-e-commerce-mistakes

Roomserve is a highly optimised bespoke e-commerce website for our client based in Hexham, Northumberland.  The client’s brief was to create an easy-to-use e-commerce website that would convert visitors to users, and enable the client to move away from the restrictions and fee-heavy structure of Ebay.  Top of the list was the the site be optimised for mobiles, be fully responsive and integrate with the client’s order management system – Linnworks.    The client manages all their products and orders quickly and easily through Harris CMS, freeing the client up to spend more time growing the business.

It’s always a pleasure to work with a local business – and Hotspur Residential took advantage of our skills in the Estate Agency sector to create a new dynamic website for their business.  All their properties are managed with the CMS and displayed on the site with tools for search such as Postcode search, Property Display, EPC and Google mapping integration.  The system also seamlessly sends property updates to Rightmove and Zoopla, drawing on our years of experience working with technologies such as the Rightmove/Vebra API.  This allows to client to spend less time updating property listings and more time taking enquiries and renting out houses.

Newcastle-based hairdressers Zazu approached our company having become aware of the lack of value their bog-standard yell.com website page was giving to them.  They required a website which matched their customer-focus, innovative approach to providing hair and beauty services and we enabled their business to cross promote on multiple web, email and social media platforms by tapping into our website design experience.

Finally St Paul’s School in Alnwick came to us with a unique challenge.  Their school has three interlinking areas – their first school, middle school and the St Paul’s federation – which required both managing from a single CMS login but still sharing information.  This was something our CMS had no problem handling and we provided the school and their staff simple tools to update their core information, keeping pupils, staff and parents up to date with the school’s activities.  Of particular note was the additional of an immediate news ticker – due to the remote location of some pupils, it was important to give site visitors immediate information such as school closures or adverse weather conditions.

By Colin Harris

We love working on outsourcing projects.  We love the relationships gained with other organisations, their input and their ideas.  It’s a win-win: we grow as we get asked to work on more and varied projects and our clients grow too as they can continue to offer high quality websites.

Pros of outsourcing:

• Increasing your sales – if you can offer more to your potential clients, then you can increase the amount of sales you gain.
• Client retention – if a client cannot get what they want from your company because you don’t do it, they may decide to go elsewhere.  Ditto if their site is broke and you can’t fix it.
• No HR costs of employment, equipment and recruitment.
• Bouncing ideas – outsourcing partners have experience in areas which you can then pass onto your clients.
• Potential for Partnerships – if you excel in a field your outsourcing partner needs, then there is every chance the relationship can become mutual.

What do I mean by outsourcing?

Outsourcing is simply engaging someone from outside of your company to do work on your behalf.  In our field of expertise this usually involves one of the following:

• Finding a partner to take given website designs or guidelines and convert them to a working website
• Employing an outsource company to maintain or extend current websites
• Filling a specific skill gap in your company – usually around technology i.e. different programming languages, system integrations or software packages such as Drupal, WordPress and CodeIgniter
• Fire fighting – providing solutions due to an immediate short term issue, usually due to staffing issues or a security breach with a system

Am I suitable?

The first question any account manager or project leader should ask is if the company works in a way which will co-operate well with an outsourcing partner.  The structure of your company and project management processes should be flexible enough to work with someone not in your office and allow them to work to their own methods and standards.    If your company has strict guidelines and set ways of working or has a very protective approach to intellectual property and confidentiality, outsourcing may not be for you.

Don’t forget: you are outsourcing to help your business grow and provide additional services to your clients.  Outsourcing is a very common practice in helping agencies grow, especially as web technologies flourish and diverge.  Even the biggest companies outsource their work – we know because that’s how we too have grown.

Finally, Outsourcers don’t tend to work from your office – Contractors do.

What to look for in a partner

How do you find the correct partner to work with?  These are the factors I would suggest are taken into account when looking for the right people to work with:

• What is the budget you have to work with – and matching that with the correct type of partner.  If you wish to spend £10 per hour, it is unlikely you will get a founder member of the Drupal team
• Your contact requirements – do you need someone to work with you and your client face to face or in meeting scenarios?  Are you are happy to work via email, phone and Skype?
• The level of management you wish to have with your partner.  If you wish to pass a project on wholesale to a partner, then they will need to have the right level of self-management skills
• Confidence – are you sure they can deliver?  Have you seen their past work?  Testimonials? References?

Working well with your chosen partner

The most common reason that outsourcing goes wrong is that projects are not delivered on time or to spec.  As the partner is usually off site, the amount of contact can be limited.  It is easy for a partner to ‘go missing’ and let down both yourselves and your client.

In order to avoid this, I suggest the following patterns to follow:

• Choose a partner you want to work with – someone that gives off the right vibes and fits in with your company ethos.  If you’ve had a bad experience with an internal or external coder, don’t pass that bad feeling to your new partner.  Some of us are nice people you know!
• Ensure that you have a timescale agreed and a contract signed before you start.
• Make confidentiality your first priority – NDAs are great for this.
• Agree payment terms that suit both parties – staged payments are the way to go in most cases, triggered by delivery milestones.
• If your partner is acting on your behalf, maybe set them up with a company email account or even business cards so you are prepared if they have to interact with your client directly.
• Ensure all delivery is either white label or in your house style.  No links or credits to them.
• Lay out your expectations, and don’t assume anything.   Every company has different standards and requirements, and there are no right or wrong answers.
• Set your contact expectations out before you start.  Insist that all calls are returned and emails answered.  If they work out of hours then ensure you can contact them in emergencies or have some protocol in place.
• Make sure you do your part of the project right.  If you are a week late delivering designs to your partner, do not chastise who you outsource to for late delivery.
• Insist on seeing work in progress at all times.  Don’t take their word for it –phrases like “it’s all back end and there’s nothing to see” are red flags.
• Spot issues early.   If your partner goes quiet, or starts delaying progress due to misleading or unintelligible gobbledygook, take control ASAP.  Make them tell you in terms you understand what the issues are, and if they can’t be prepared to pull out.
• Where possible, have a common shared area where development takes place.  Then you can gain access to the demo site if you need to and have a safety net in case things go wrong.

If you would like to talk more about the benefits of outsourcing website development work – please get in touch.

By Colin Harris.

What they would do is to pipe the new recording through the crummiest piece of equipment they could – transistor radio I’d expect – and then listen to the song from 10 metres away.  Not through gorgeous monitor speakers in the cab, but outside through a tiny tinny mono speaker. And why?  The Gibbs realised that in order to sell records they needed to make them appeal to the listener, on equipment they were most likely to here the songs on fresh.  So in the 1970’s that was low-fidelity in-car radio, piped music in shops and on public transport.  As well as getting the mix right for “Hi-Fi” listening such as stereo systems, they also made sure the songs worked where their potential customers would most likely be exposed to their new music first. So what has this to do with websites?  Well when viewing or reviewing websites, make sure that you are thinking of all variations of your likely user base.  Or put it another way – is your website user likely to be using a 24 inch iMac or a 17 inch retina display laptop?  Or is there every chance that they could be using an older iPad or a small-screen laptop?  Laptops are particularly pertinent as the screen sizes tend to be wide enough, but not very tall – sometimes as little as 600px available in height for website browsers. So you use the smallest screen device your customers are likely to use or reduce your browser window to around 1024x768px and check that the website works.  Your 800px high introduction slider may look great on Apple’s finest, but it may just confuse the daylights out of the typical user you are targeting and result in an immediate exit of your site.    Now that would be a “Tragedy”.

Today sees the launch of a new service from Colin Harris Website Development – a series of Video Blogs by the owner on a variety of Internet-related topics.   Vlogs will be added weekly to the company youtube channel and also listed on a special Video Blog page.

Drawing on 20 years of experience working with the Internet, Colin gives his thoughts and advice on a range of topics from website design, e-commerce, social media and search engine optimisation.  Forthright and honest, the Video Blogs will be of interest to anyone wanting to make the most of their online presence.

Suggestions for future Vlog topics are more than welcome and can be sent to [email protected]

By Colin Harris

The assistance, from a European funding source, has a very wide remit of criteria and can range from 40% to 100% of funding, dependent on the location and nature of your business.  Preference is given to businesses with a mainly business-to-business turnover, but the funders have latitude for companies which meet their main objectives.

If your business is:

• Located in the North East
• Has less then 250 employees
• Has not received funding since March 2013
• Has commenced trading

…then funding may be available to you.   We have delivered many projects already so we know how effective and straightforward this funding is to obtain. Please get in touch for an informal chat and to find out more.

By Colin Harris

• 58% of all consumers already own a smartphone.
• Over 1.2 billion people access the web from their mobile devices.
• Global mobile traffic now accounts for 15% of all Internet traffic.
• No one screen size has more than 20% of the market share.
• 61% of people have a better opinion of brands when they offer a good mobile experience.
• 60% of mobile shoppers use their smartphones while in a store, and another 50% while on their way to a store.
• 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal, whether that’s on smartphones, PCs, tablets or TV.
• Almost half a billion tablets will ship in 2013 and 2014 alone.
• Tablet users spend 50% more than PC users.
• 25.85% of all emails are opened on mobile phones, and 10.16% are opened on tablets.
• Mobile-based searches make up one quarter of all searches.
• 95% of smartphone users have searched for local info.
• Every 100ms increase in load time decreases sales by 1%.

 
Makes you think…

I woke up this morning and like most of us do, checked my phones.  The icons on my wonderful Galaxy S4 (knocks an iPhone into next year – sorry geeks) were all lined up like ducks.  I’d been Emailed, Texted, Facebooked, Tweeted, What’s App’d, Linked In’d, Songpoped and even my little friendly Pou needed feeding.  Oh dear where do I start?  So in front of my Weetabix® I got rid of the ducks one by one, ready for my little commute to work.

My car and phone enjoy each others company, so when I start up my car, my S4 (the finest phone I’ve owned since my 3310) switches into Driver Mode – and reads out any texts and emails I get.  So because I run a website company and have almost half a social life, the thing literally chats to me all the way to work.  Bless it.  You are never alone when you have a phone.  And so the day goes, blips and bleeps and vibrates coming from all sort of sources of Digital Chatter whether you be in the office, a meeting or at home watching your favourite football team playing someone unpronounceable in European competitions.

My story is not unusual, in fact I’d suggest it’s a hallmark of 21st century life.  I had a chat with a lady I’d not seen for a while in the barbers and we talked about technology.  She soon declared that she couldn’t live without her iPhone and she feels orphaned when she doesn’t have it or it has lost it charge, which is about every 5 hours.  And she wasn’t some business high flyer or geek like me, just a normal person from Bedlington with a normal job.

Now thanks to my friend Ali I now realise that it is a double edged sword, and sometimes a down right bad thing.  Our devices do not have ‘importance’ filters on them – it doesn’t know if that email or text is “SERVER DOWN!!!” or just a spam email from 1&1 trying to convince you to build your own website – so when it beeps we have to look don’t we?  Or else how do we know?  So we look, take in the information and start to process it, regardless of the context.  As responsible business owners who want the best for our businesses, of course our brain starts to process the email or text even if it isn’t urgent.

And this is the negative, and it’s a big one.  We need some time to relax, chill, take stock and enjoy a bit of down time.  It’s a classic case of diminishing returns – the more time we spend in active/stressed business mode, the less effective we become at handling issues and making decisions.  I don’t buy into all the BS about 12 hour days and working harder than your competition which mean working longer.  It’s better to work smarter.  Do a really good productive 8 hour day, than a narky stressed 8 hour day because you’ve spent last night at home responding to or processing your Digital Chatter for 4 hours and didn’t get a proper nights sleep.

What can you do about it?  Well here’s 9 suggestions for reducing your Digital Chatter:

1. Apps. Do you really need all the social media apps on your phone?  Can you live without some of them and if so remove them.  Have your work accounts on your work devices (i.e. laptop or work phone) and your personal accounts on your personal devices i.e. your phone or tablet.
2. Be quiet! Most phones have a blocking or quiet mode that you can set.  This stops the phone from making any sounds either at set times, or manually.  You can usually filter them so important things i.e. calls still sound.  Instructions: iPhone, Samsung, Blackberry.
3. Bleeps and bings. Some phones allow you to set different notification tones for individual contacts, so you can know what is important and what is 1&1 spam without having to look.
4. Flight mode.  Give yourself some “me time” and put your phone into flight mode for a while at the evening.  The world can wait. That’s what voicemail was invented for.
5. Multiple devices.  When you get a tweet does your house sound like R2D2 telling C3PO off for being too camp?   Do you really need the same Facebook and Twitter accounts to be set up on your phone, tablet, mp3 player, laptop, Xbox, fridge, watch, toaster….?
6. Scheduled Posts.  If you have to post to social media accounts or blogs out of hours because that is when you perceive your customers make buying decisions, then use tools and technology to do it for you and set them up during the day.  Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are two pieces of software which does this for Free, blog posts can be set to future post.
7. Single Tasking.  Answer all your emails, then your Twitter, then Facebook, anything else work-related, then back to emails and so on.  It’s far more efficient and stress-free than dancing between all your accounts. You get distracted, forget what you were originally doing and people rarely expect an immediate reply anyway.
8. Bedtime routine.  Think about your routine – is the last thing you do before bedtime check your phone?  What do you check?  Maybe check it, put it in quiet mode and then finish your routine.
9. Quality time.  If you are spending quality time with friends or loved ones, enjoy it.  On your phone turn data off (so you only get calls and texts), put it on silent/quiet mode, or leave it in the car or tell your important contacts where you will be in case of emergency.  Having an hour off from the rat race will do you more good than knowing that your rival has just tweeted to say they are better than you*.

*They aren’t.  You are enjoying a glass of wine with your friends whilst they are up till God knows when tweeting trying to get business.  See point 6 and be smart.

By Colin Harris

If you would like to know more about having a great looking website designed and developed for your business, please get in touch.  Funding for up to 40% of the total costs of each web project is available for certain types of business – please ask for more details.

Firstly is our new brochure website for an exciting new Indian restaurant, recently opened in Amble, Northumberland.  The website has been carefully designed to offer customers a potential slice of what is fast becoming one of the most iconic restaurants in Northumberland, serving traditional Indian and Bangladeshi cuisine.  As well as a good-looking website, we also extended the site to tie in with the MailChimp email marketing software, so the client could most effectively capture the email addresses and details of potential customers and keep them up to date with news and special offers.  http://www.tajmahalamble.co.uk/

Next is Dial a Driver, a unique website passed onto ourselves for completion building on the start of a great idea.  The client’s business is to help supply takeaway businesses with drivers on a sort or long term basis, and use the website to help match up takeaways with a database of drivers.  Rolling out to the North East this month and nationally in 2014, the business is showing every promise of the next great internet success in the field after Just Eat and Hungry House.  http://www.dial-a-driver.co.uk/

Coast and Castles (formerly Town and City) in Alnwick approached our business after hearing about our experience and expertise in building website solutions for Estate Agents.  They required a web-based extranet system which allows their employees both locally and nationally to amange via a web browser, to allow them to add property details, set up appointments and manage buyers and sellers alike.  The system also needed to seamlessly update their listings on Estate Agent portals such as Rightmove and Zoopla.   It has been so well received that we are already expanding the system to include Case Management and further website Integration.

Finally we have made some major extensions to the functionality of market leading Men’s Tie e-commerce website Oliver Bainbridge.  As well as a re-skin, we have added several new features including reviews, blogging, recategorisation, social media integration and enhanced CMS features.  For example the system will remind new customers to leave a review in exchange for a discount off their next purchase – vital to both increasing sales and assisting with repeat business.  The system has also had an intense SEO makeover, with every element of the system optimised.  http://www.oliverbainbridge.co.uk/

By Colin Harris