Welcome to the Escape Blog

If, like us, you often need to come up with colour schemes here is a great tool from Adobe labs. ‘Kuler’ enables users upload their latest colour scheme sets and name them accordingly. They are then there for us all to see and use or be inspired by.

A great feature is that you can do a key word search eg: ‘Winter’ or even ‘Cherry Cheese Cake’ and all the schemes relating to that word are displayed - great stuff i say!!

PS: Thanks for sending me this Charlie

From SEO Book I got pulled into this link from Chartreuse about Niche Websites - interesting read from earlier this year that should make your think.

You can’t create a site about what’s going on in the plastic industry unless you learn how they think. You gotta pick up some trade papers. Talk to some people inside. So that when you do create you will be authentic and loved. So that you get it. You can’t be pedestrian and set up a site and hope they will come. They may visit but they won’t come back. And if they don’t come back you have lost.

Nice Business Card here for a personal trainer. Made from super strength rubber, you need to streeeetch it to read it.

From Brandflakes

Comprehensive data here from Heather Hopkins at Hitwise. Highlights for me:

• www.google.co.uk is the #1 ranked
  website in the UK based on share of UK internet visits. It received
  8.1% of all UK internet visits last week, compared to the #2 ranked
  website, www.ebay.co.uk at 2.99% of all UK internet visits.
• Google powered 78% of UK internet searches in the four weeks to 21st October 2006, up 9% year on year.
• Yahoo! Search’s share of the market has risen 4% in the past six months.

Customer Engagement seems to have big buzz at the moment with the introduction of Web 2.0 (whatever that is?) and businesses seeing the raging success of the likes of MySpace, YouTube and Blogs.

A recent E-Consultancy Report shows what Companies deem the five greatest “barriers” to delivering the best possible customer experience:

1. Lack of resources / time (regarded as a “great barrier” by 66% of company respondents)
2. Disconnected systems & technologies (50%)
3. Lack of skills and training (38%)
4. Lack of finances (37%)
5. Lack of regular processes and / or suitable methodology (36%)

Dare I say, and this is a general observation, it’s as if businesses want something in return up front before committing. I’m not talking about finances (that’s not the deciding factor), but about time and training to create a better customer experience. We are talking about effort and commitment up front to build the ‘experience’ into a website and then build customer loyalty (’build ‘being the important word in the equation).

At the end of the day a website and it’s technology are just that, it doesn’t matter what you think it should do. it’s all about the experience as far as your customers are concerned and that is what you need to deliver. In exactly the same way as dealing with a Company on the phone, or a shop experience.

That may take a complicated Content Managed System, it might be one web page but… if as much effort was put into delivering the experience as it was to the platform, the design, or even "the features that my girlfriend reckons are good", you may end up with a lot more happy (and retained) customers.

Glad I got that off my chest.

According to new figures, the number of ‘spam’ messages has tripled since June and now accounts for as many as nine out of ten emails sent worldwide, reports E-Consultancy.

In Britain spam has risen by 50% in the last two months alone.

Pandora.com was sent to us by one of our Clients (Thanks Debbie) for all those people who like to discover new music, like what we do.

Can you help me discover more music that I’ll like? Those
questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us
their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave
us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started
joking that we were now their personal DJs.

The Account Managers are burning the midnight oil as we have hit ‘tender’ gold, having been sent three separate tenders to apply for from large Housing Companies with Jacs (and her dog) in at the weekend to meet the deadlines.

Rob has also been pitching some ideas to our County Council in Hampshire and Jo has been working closer with a couple of clients as their website projects begin to take shape - looks like the web boys are going to be busy in 2007.

Talking of which, we are currently in talks with a new web programmer to bolster the heaving team.

Simon ’struck lucky’ after a recent trip to Inspire 06, a local Business Conference, when he won a ‘Management Development Toolkit’ (pictured receiving it from Chris Powell, MD of Working Life). He plans to use this to develop the Team Escape as he continues an internal audit of processes throughout our business.

We had a great Company Meeting debating Communication and what it means to us. Gaz was well chuffed when he won a toy bus for his contributions throughout the month.

Dan introduced us to yet another Pantone change of colours - like we need more complication. Apparently Colour Bridge is what was missing from the ‘make my company colour work on print and web’ challenge.

Oh yes, and talking of Dan - he is 31 today and decided to take the day off to avoid buying us all cakes - Happy Birthday Campo!

The Internet has changed UK industry but many firms need to learn more about bringing shoppers online, says the CBI, in a report on the BBC this morning.

A survey of 500 firms, carried out by the CBI and Google, found many were using new forms of online media with companies investing close to £300,000 a year on technology.

• UK firms invested a total of £10.6bn yearly on net-based systems, predicted to top £13bn in 2009.
• 56% of firms considered the internet had had a "substantial" or "revolutionary" impact on their industry
• 60% of consumers believed the internet had given them more power
• 43% of consumers also believed that companies were becoming more accountable as a result of the new technology

The number of US internet users who have experimented with downloading a podcast continues to grow but few remain hooked, reports the BBC.

A survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found 12% of US people online had downloaded a podcast, up from 7% earlier this year, but just 1% of respondents said that they would download a podcast on a typical day.