Welcome to the Escape Blog

Simon turned 40 this week and promptly took the day off to celebrate leaving us all to crack on with projects this week; not before he stuffed us all up on donuts though. Gaz also had a birthday this week. Rob was busy working hard at The Escape Cyprus Office. Needless to say some fun was being had somewhere.

The Gladstones Handbags website went live - looking forward to see how the Boomerang Solution performs for them.

The web guys also started two new projects this week - a feeder website for MPI Group and a new website for our Canadian friends at Advanced Inc. That on top of delivering a couple of Wordpress blogs - including our local project for Basingstoke Business, means the hours are flying in.

The design team are also working hard on Annual Report Pitch work. Some of them were even in before 9 o’clock this week!! They get better as the day goes on and tend to prefer the evenings for the flowing of their creative juices.

Of course, the project managers are always working hard… in fact some of them have only just realised the evenings are getting lighter.

Meanwhile, Lisa has been decorating her bra in readiness for the Moonwalk on Saturday night; Laura screamed with excitement when she read Jordan was coming to basingstoke for a book signing, and ubergeek Adam is in conversation with The Times in LA LA land and USA Today with his personal Showbiz Website!

Outlaw reports on a story about a British judge who stopped a trial this week to ask what a website was. The case is a trial of three men accused of inciting terrorism which could involve evidence about their use of the internet.

Judge Peter Openshaw had to halt questioning to ask for clarification of some common terms:

“The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a website is, I haven’t quite grasped the concepts.”

We had a court case back in 2002, which ended in a similar farce, where the judge didn’t understand the concept of the web and his lack of knowledge cost us a lot of time and a lot of money going backwards and forwards.

I appreciate that technology moves quickly but with more and more legal cases bound to be based around the web, surely it is about time they got people in who knew this stuff so small businesses (especially) don’t end up spending lots of time and resources which could cost them their livelihoods?

Young women are now the most dominant group online in the UK, according to new research from net measurement firm Nielsen/NetRatings - as reported by BBC.

Women in the 18 - 34 age group account for 18% of all online Britons accounting for 27% more of the total UK computer time than their male counterparts.

Of UK males active online, the 50+ age group is the most prevalent.

The BBC comment that this will come as a surprise to many who regard the internet as being largely dominated by young men.

5.7m people in the UK used a mobile device to access the internet during January 2007, according to new figures reported by E-Consultancy.

So, how does your website look?

Try this Mobile Emulator.

I have seen lots of great outdoor advertising recently, none of which I seem to be blogging about.

So, let’s start with this one for Mondo Pasta on a ship in the Hamburg Port.

Return on Investment for your Search Engine Marketing Campaigns is a tricky one. Wil Reynolds cites 11 reasons why it is hard.

The other thing is that it is not quick. My opinion is as follows…

• It used to be a lot easier, because there was not as much competition.
• Client expectations are still way to high versus cost/time/effort applied.
• Search term expectation is still too vague - we all need to get more specific.

The other important point with Search Marketing at the moment is that SEO starts at home. You shouldn’t be concentrating on pay-per-click, social media marketing until you have a website that is worthy of linking to - that’s design, usability, content, etc. all driven from a clear strategy and defined key performance indicators.

E-Consultancy have a good interview with Jakob Nielson.

If only I could get some of his message across to clients in a way where I don’t come across as an angry little boy:

Don’t try and do something new on your website, because you are not important enough. People think they are exceptional, but no website really stands out so much that people are willing to learn different behaviour just for that site.

Web use is about flitting between sites and spending a few minutes on each site. Even in the B2B space, where there are extra-specialist users researching complicated products, they will tend to visit four or five competing sites and compare the products. No one site has a monopoly on people’s attention – it’s not like the physical world.

Is Web 2.0 something new and improved from Web 1.0? In fact, I didn’t know there was a web 1.0 until there was a web 2.o.

For me, it’s all about people - Engaging people, people engaging with each other; one man in his spare room having a voice through a blog and captivating an audience. Not only captivating but cultivating and conversing WITH his audience.

And, the people are rising. As a ’serious’ business you should ignore the social masses at your peril.

Take My Football Club. Get 50,000 people to donate £35 each and then buy and manage football club. Can you imagine the stuffy ‘old school’ Chairmen and Directors scoffing at such an idea.

What if I told you that they already have 22,540 members and a total of £788,900 so far (15/5/07)?

I did a report on a website this morning and I am excited as I know there is a lot we can do with it. One of the biggest problems I found with the website was the way the data was fed into the website from a product database.

Basically, this customer sells lots of products that are registered in their back office solution, which sends the data to the website in catalogue format.

They want to be found in search engines for the specific products they sell - and they are specific. Sounds great in terms of search as long as the pages are tagged correctly and can be indexed.

But, we came across a problem. The back-end database serves product data to the web pages in an okay format (could be better) but, the only way to access the product pages on the website is by doing a product search from a home page feature.

No Links

So, when a search engine spider comes along, trying hard to follow any link it can swallow up… it can’t find any links into the product pages and so can’t index them, unless they are linked to manually externally and even then they don’t link to each other.

Each valuable commodity - the product pages - were like islands. One way in only with restricted access.

Realistically, this isn’t necessarily anything the client should have known about but it does create a big problem in terms of search potential.

Imagine giving out a brochure to a client where the introductory pages are clear but all the product pages (the actual content) are glued together.

Fixing The Problem

A simple plug and socket job into the database pulling out a list of all the products and placing them into a static HTML ‘index’ web page that is linked to from the static parts of the website.

Voilá, linkable pages and lots of quality (meat and potatoes) content.

We have been having a debate in the web team about the speed of website pages loading. One of the issues is that some websites rely on elements loading from other websites, such as data feeds, advertising or web analytics.

This can create a lag as your page loads. This article at New Business suggests that people can be very impatient with web pages and the statistics they quote don’t surprise me.

The poll found that nine out of 10 people would go directly to a company‘s rivals if their site failed to load with over half (52%) only prepared to wait a maximum of 30 seconds.

If you do rely on third party data that may be slowing your site down what should you do?

Well, Keith suggested a way around the problem for a site we were working on today. If it is essential information, create the order of your page and use CSS to load the slower loading data last.

At least then your users will see the important content before the slower (and potentially less important) stuff has finished loading.