Welcome to the Escape Blog

I had a really good chat with Ian today about The Escape brand, passing over my own views on where we’ve been, who we are and where we are going. It was a kind of hand over meeting for him to pick up the mantle of our brand development as Creative Director.

The funny thing is I work with this stuff pretty much every day, advising clients how to best approach their own brand development - it’s second nature. But, closer to home, it seems a little bit harder.

By being SO involved it’s very easy to keep digging, trying to understand every nuance of a business - delving to find the ‘essence’ of The Escape and evolve the brand.
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I was sent a link to a website yesterday (ASP.NET) and asked to write a report on it - design, usability, etc.

It may just be me but the last few ASP.NET sites I have audited (especially those created in India) seem to be a little heavy on features at the expense of user experience.

There is no doubt that the cleverer the web gets, the easier becomes to create web pages and the more options HTML and CSS offer, there will be the temptation to go over the top but I fail to understand the purpose.

Drop down navigation, Flash for Flashes sake, no obvious structure, unnecessary Javascript and poor content simply doesn’t flick my switch and offer me anything.

When marketing or technical teams are devising these features (that additonally slow down the site) I wonder if they think about the user? I also wonder if they think about the repeat visitors who may just want to get in and get out of the site.

In such a competitive environment online, surely it’s time to go back to basics and ONLY add the features if they add value to the experience - for the user.

Great article by Galen DeYoung on SearchEngineLand - B2B Blogging: Using Thought Leadership To Drive Positioning & Sales.

It really pushes home the ground swell of opinion online towards effective business communication and compounds many ideas we try to push at The Escape. Well worth reading:

When done right, blogging can give B2B thought leaders great visibility in the search engine results. That, together with their general reputations, often gets thought leaders considered by potential purchasers very early in the purchase process, often at the beginning.

It’s official, Mars are the first advertisers to sell actual products on Facebook.

The application will launch on Valentine’s Day and is called Celebrate. The service will enable users to buy actual Mars gifts which can be redeemed at participating stores through the use of a scanable, unique mobile voucher ID.

A user on the Celebrate application will be able to select, for example, a virtual box of Maltesers and send it to a friend on Facebook. When this message is opened, the user will be asked to enter his or her mobile number and an SMS barcode will be sent. That user can then go into a participating store, pick up a box of Maltesers, have the mobile code scanned and then leave with the goods.

Sara Miles, a spokeswoman for Mars Snackfood UK said

We are very excited to be involved with this new ground-breaking initiative that gives our consumers a different way of sending confectionery gifts to friends and family.

I am currently creating the “web strategy seminar” presentation and I thought I would try a quick straw poll about how people see their own performance online.

The super quick survey (I just timed myself and it took 20 seconds) is here:

http://www.polldaddy.com/s/3FF8D92BB14477DF/

I will be publish the results on our Blog during March.

Thanks in advance.

Creativity is key to our business. The constant need to improve what we do and the way we think - almost like our very own design lab in Basingstoke.

The key to this is a central figure and that man joined The Escape yesterday.

Ian Mumford has many years experience in the creative world having worked for agencies on a number of design and marketing projects.

The quality and depth of his creative work; his passion and his ideas; drove us to appoint him as The Escape’s first Creative Director.

Welcome on board Ian.

It looks like we could we be memorising fewer of them in the future when using our favourite websites and online services in the future.

Open ID is a foundation formed last year to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community.

Some of the big boys have joined the board - Microsoft, IBM, Google and Yahoo - and the aim is to streamline login systems across the web.

Follow the story here.

Some advice from this E-Consultancy article (two in one day) about getting your navigation right. I think I might start taking this with me into meetings to put people off the dreaded drop down navigation that I so hate:

1. Navigation menus at left or top of the page
2. Short, clear and precise language in menu options
3. Don’t have too many options
4. Consistent navigation
5. Use breadcrumb trails
6. Avoid dropdown menus
7. Make your logo link back to the homepage
8. Clear fonts
9. Have a site map
10. Include a search box

Get more insight: Ten tips for website navigation

Via E-Consultancy comes details from a report from the Direct Marketing Association that asked contributing ESPs (Email Service Providers) what value their clients could allocate to an email address? The average result being £9.11.

This figure obviously isn’t finite and is industry and business dependent. For instance, if your average sale value is £1m then I would guess an e-mail address is worth more than if your average sale value is £30.

What interests me is that we have an average figure to work to and of course there is nothing from stopping you doing your own specific research.

This begs a question that’s worth pondering (and acting on). How much would you spend to aquire a quality e-mail address lead and, more importantly, how much would you invest to keep hold of it?
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iStock changed the rules for royalty free imagery. Perhaps Vector Stock is gonna do the same for basic illustrators and clip-art lovers everywhere… which is a positive thing, I think.