Digital Media Blog

We've Graduated from Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Growth Programme!

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:30:00 GMT

After six months learning....lots or learning, much soul searching and business challenges we've now graduated from the prestigious Goldman Sachs 10,000 small business programme.

What does this mean?

It means that we are now challenged, along with out fellow GS10K colleagues, to grow our businesses and our teams. Through this we can contribute to the growth of the regional and national economies. And while doing this we can realise the growth potential that we all have!

It doesn't end with the course though we'll be supported and tracked over the coming years by Aston University and the Goldman Sachs programme. Only last week we were invited to attend a national event at Goldman Sachs Head Office in London. CEO's from Goldman Sachs, Santander, Cafe Nero, Vue Cinemas and Carphone Warehouse encouraged and challenged us with there own growth stories, insight and expertise. A truely inspiration line of successful leaders and entrepreneurs.

It must be said that we couldn't have done this without the help and support of the great team at Aston University, lead by Professor Mark Hart. They really helped us all learn an awful lot about running a business effectively. If you are interested in taking part they are on the hunt for potential future businesses, you can read more here.

UX - it’s all about showing how much you care

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

UX (User Experience) has been around for a good while now but it is surprising how many folks out there aren’t up to speed on what it is, what it entails and how it can be beneficial for a business.

What is User Experience?

‘Comprehends all aspects of digital products and services that users experience directly—and perceive, learn, and use—including products’ form, behaviour, and content, but also encompassing users’ broader brand experience and the response that experience evokes in them. Key factors contributing to the quality of users’ experience of products are learnability, usability, usefulness, and aesthetic appeal.’—Pabini Gabriel-Petit

Or… to put it simply - User Experience (UX) is a term for a user's overall satisfaction level when using your website. If they liked it, there’s a good chance they’ll come back. If they didn’t, they won’t. And they’ll probably tell their friends. Possibly Google.

We touched on some customer satisfaction stats relating to mobile platforms in our post about ensuring that your digital presence is optimised for multiple screens http://www.webmoco.com/digital-media-blog/the-future-present-is-multi-screened. But it’s important enough to harp on about a little more.

Only 26% of companies have a well-developed strategy in place for improving customer experience. Source: Econsultancy MultiChannel Customer Experience Report
70% of shoppers have stopped buying goods or services from a company after experiencing poor customer service.
64% have made future purchases from a company’s competitors after experiencing poor customer service.
81% are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. Source: Oracle ‘Why Customer Satisfaction is no longer good enough’.

Great user experiences can lead to great results –better products, less risk, avoiding scope creep, big fat juicy consumer insights, better usability which in turn lead to longer dwell time, higher conversion rates, word of mouth recommendations, increased spend.

At Webmoco, we are firm believers in User Centred Design - for a website to work; there is no other way to approach a build.

And, although it may seem like another expensive addition to what might be an already scarily over running project, the beauty of UX is that there is always something that can be done to add value, to improve the user experience regardless of budget. Low budgets might result in a lighter touch whereas bigger budgets might allow for more extensive user research.

We offer the full gamut of UX Tools and techniques from requirements workshops through to wireframes and prototyping for you to be able to pick and choose from depending on the scope of your project so if you’d like to know more about it, or how best to sell the idea onto your clients, get in touch at contact@webmoco.com

Webmoco creates Responsive site for WEVE

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 14:52:00 GMT

We are delighted to have completed the first phase of development for Weve (www.weve.com), a new joint venture between the UK’s three largest mobile network operators – EE, Telefonica UK (O2) and Vodafone UK. Between them, they represent over 80% of UK mobile customers.

The new business-to-business service is primarily aimed at advertisers looking to engage in mobile commerce. Weve is a new focal point for a whole new set of experiences and ideas across the mobile spectrum, everywhere from mobile marketing and advertising to payments and transactions, loyalty programs and coupons.

Partnering with Shoreditch brand agency SomeOne, we have developed a fully content managed, responsive website utilising Orchard 1.5 – the open source, community-focused project aimed at delivering applications and reusable components on the ASP.NET platform.

We chose to use Orchard for this project for strategic reasons. Being .Net based it provides a robust, secure and scalable foundation from which this site can grow and develop. It’s basically an enterprise grade open source solution that can be readily deployed onto Microsoft’s own cloud platform, Azure. Azure allows us to flex and scale the hosting of Weve to suit growing demand.
Being .Net based this solution will also allow Webmoco to develop custom components to suit the client’s needs. All in all this represents an extremely resilient, flexible solution which meets the demands of a growing digital business.

Take a look for yourself at www.weve.com

The (future) present is multi-screened

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 14:06:00 GMT

2012 was a very interesting year for digital. For the first time ever, PC sales stalled and then they fell. Not by masses, but enough to matter.
The reason? One word.
Tablets.

Tablets are now driving ALL growth in the PC market. Retailers reported Christmas 2012 as the "tablet Christmas" and experienced a massive surge in sales of products such as the iPad Mini and Google Nexus 7. Some stores have reported that sales were up 1,000% year on year.

Despite these staggering numbers and despite how many of us are now reserving PC usage for the office and are fawning over our new swanky pants Christmas presents, tablets are not the only usurper to the PC’s internet browsing throne.

Smartphone sales overtook PC sales last year (two years earlier than expected). Smartphone ownership has now hit over the 50% mark and has been steadily growing. It’s not just the young ‘uns anymore either - Smartphones have the highest penetration in the 18-34 age group but the uptake amongst older audiences is rapid – 75% of all new handsets.

Nearly half of owners claim that their smartphone is their most important device for accessing the internet. This too is set to continue with mobile internet usage projected to overtake desktop internet usage by 2014.

All of these lovely stats represent huge opportunities for agencies when it comes to service offerings to clients who are not as up to speed as they could be with their digital touch points.

It may be a retrofit job in terms of optimisation for mobile and tablet before they lose their increasingly savvy and increasingly impatient customers:

71% of mobile browsers expect web pages to load almost as quickly or faster as web pages on their desktop computers.
74% of consumers will wait 5 seconds for a web page to load on their mobile device before abandoning the site.
46% of consumers are unlikely to return to a mobile site if it didn't work properly during their last visit.

Or they might want a smart new app to add a further dimension to their digital portfolio.

Or if it’s time for a complete change, it could be a brand new shiny, leader of the pack Responsive web design project which will future proof them against the myriad of upcoming tablets and devices for a good while to come.

Responsive web design is essentially one website which can work on many different screen sizes by scaling the design instead of having one website for the desktop and one website for mobile/tablets. In other words, the website will automatically respond to the user’s preferences, eliminating the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market. It helps to optimise the customer experience as they won’t need to fiddle, scroll or pinch to see the information they want. AND, it’s great for SEO, essentially pooling the effort you put in to search engine optimisation on one site instead of multiple variants of it - reducing costs and improving the performance of your campaigns.

At Webmoco, we’ve been doing all the above for a wee while now and we like to think that we are pretty good at it. We working more in partnership with advertising, digital and design agencies across projects just like these as well as a whole host of different projects from single page websites to huge hulking eCommerce content managed sites.

Whether you're looking to outsource the development of digital projects, have an in-house team who, at times, can get a bit stretched, or need some help producing hefty tech specs docs, we may well be your men (and women).

Webmoco Case Study - Thomas Cook Money

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:01:00 GMT

The What?

When Thomas Cook Money (www.thomascookmoney.com) wanted to refresh the homepage of their site, Webmoco were only too pleased to help. They wanted to develop a new graphic language that was more aligned with travel and currency, as well as richer transactional tools to maximise the end user experience.

The Why?

Following user testing, it became apparent that the former homepage proved confusing for the end user. Duplicate links through to seemingly similar foreign currency journey made the site slightly confused and this detracted from the site’s primary objective - reserve and collect.
There was also a lot of ancillary content all fighting for user attention - the UI was very cluttered and disjointed, which detracted from ease of use, clarity and purpose of the site. Overall it wasn't very aspirational, didn’t feel like a travel site.

The How

The result was a single page 'application', which behaves more like a software application than a web page which is capable of very detailed, multi variant, multi-source data retrieval in real time. All of this functionality, although complicated behind the curtains, is wrapped in a simple graphic language that is just as much about travel as it is about money, reliability and dependability. With this aspirational feel, a richer user experience and stronger calls to action the user experience is clean, ordered and considered, putting the user in the driving seat with a more personalised dashboard of information about the product/currency they actually want.

The Results

This site has just gone live and we are collating results soon. Update to follow!

About Webmoco:

Webmoco is a software, web and mobile design & development agency based in Leamington Spa, UK. We make the way companies attract, capture and keep customers more effective and efficient. It’s not enough to just have a stunning looking website or a swanky application that works and attracts new customers. It’s not just about having some social media activity. It is not just about having a secure web presence. It is about the entire digital footprint, all connected.
From website design & development, user experience, smartphone apps, CMS and e-commerce to bespoke software development, we deliver digital solutions that are targeted, well-crafted and user-focused. At Webmoco we join up the dots.

For further information, please contact:

E: Matthew.Pearson@webmoco.com / Carl.Berisford-Murray@webmoco.com

T: 01926 311880

Webmoco in Goldman Sachs Business Growth Programme

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 08:45:00 GMT

Webmoco are delighted to announce our participation in the Goldman Sachs Business Growth Programme having been selected from 100s of applicants by a rigorous, qualification and interviewing process.

The program brings together leaders of small businesses from across industry sectors and Webmoco has been recognised as an innovative business with great potential for growth. The program has been designed specifically for this program by world-class international, national and local experts in entrepreneurial learning.

Webmoco develops new website for Harris+Hoole

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 08:57:00 GMT

Harris+Hoole, a new chain of artisan coffee shops backed by Tesco launches this week and we have been working as development partners for the corporate website, www.harrisandhoole.co.uk which is now live.

Partnering with Shoreditch digital agency SomeOneElse and sister brand agency SomeOne, we've developed a fully content managed corporate website utilising Orchard 1.5 – the open source, community-focused project aimed at delivering applications and reusable components on the ASP.NET platform.

The owners of coffee shop chain Taylor Street, Nick, Andrew & Laura Tolley have set up Harris+Hoole, which is being backed by Tesco as a 49 per cent share holder in the business.

Nick Tolley and SomeOne conceived the Harris+Hoole name, which is derived from two coffee-loving characters found in Samuel Pepys’ 17th century diary.

A strategy has been set out which positions Harris+Hoole as ‘a chain of independents,’ according to Nick Tolley, who says he wanted the brand to embrace ‘the consistency and convenience of chains, but with an independent local community feel where the product has integrity.’

The first Harris+Hoole brand opens on 20 August in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, and a second is planned for Uxbridge, before around ten more, while grab-and-go supermarket concessions have also been mooted.

Alongside the corporate website, we developed an executive subsite and as Harris+Hoole becomes more established there are plans for consumer facing, multi-channel, community based digital activity.

Content Management Software, What Doesn’t It Do?

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 14:13:00 GMT

It’s just as important to know what features aren't commonly found out of the box in a CMS. As this will give you a clear picture of what to look for in your system.

With both open source and commercial CMS system we often see a large list of features which include the kitchen sink and more. This is understandable in a highly competitive market and all providers need to match or exceed other competitors offerings.

It’s worth bearing in mind that because one CMS has feature X it doesn’t necessarily make it the better than another CMS, or right for you. What i'm trying to get across in this series of posts is the suitability of a CMS, it's flexibility and 'fit' to your business needs. These are the critical factors.

A CMS isn’t an e-commerce system.

So it won’t have a shopping basket or checkout and all that goes with an e-commerce platform. A CMS can hold product content types and pass these off to an e-commerce system. So there is a place for content management within e-commerce, but don’t expect your CMS out of the box to support these functions. There may be plug-ins to extend it's capabilities, but it's fair to say that e-commerce isn't a core capability of a CMS.

A CMS isn’t a CRM.

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is used to maintain a record of your customers and how you interact with them. Some people mistakingly think that user registration on their website, perhaps for commenting on posts, is the start of customer database. It is the start of a list of people who are interested in what you have to say online and little more. A CRM does much more than this. Firstly it the main system for recording a company's customers and potential customers. It keeps a record of how the company interacts with each client, their preferences, past orders and often key dates for renewals or reminders. It may store a customers email marketing preferences, so it's important to consider how an email marketing campaign can feedback into a CRM. Again, their will be some extensions to CMS systems that may cover the latter, but no CMS can emulate a dedicated CRM.

A CMS isn’t a booking system.

An hotel or spa therapy centre may want a CMS to manage content relating to their a booking process. A CMS is unlikely to give you a booking capability. Like with e-commerce a CMS can manage the content and pass users through into a booking process.

It is very important to note at this point that trying to find a CMS platform that supports booking, for example, is possible. There will be an extension or something that provides this capability. But to find a CMS with a content type that supports your product or service and booking criteria will be much harder.

Ok so that clarifies some of the fundamental assumptions or misconceptions. In the last two posts we've covered what the core capabilities of a CMS are. And what they aren't. In the next article in this series I'll look at extending a CMS using plugins and extensions. So tune in next week for the next installment!

What is Responsive Web Design and how does it help marketing professionals?

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 13:28:00 GMT

People have for many years only thought about having a mobile website after their ‘main’ site was developed. This afterthought process was often referred to as mobilizing.

With the huge change in browsing behaviour brought about by smartphones, the buzz is now about responsive web design. This allows users to access your main website and see a site suited to their screen size. This is great user experience and makes content more accessible to people however they are browsing.

Web developers have been excited about this for some time, but now marketeers are cottoning on to some of the value benefits. Recently I attended the Cambridge Digital Marketing Conference, where almost every speaker touched upon mobile marketing, mobile browsing and mobile everything else. The world has gone multi screen, people don't sit down at a computer to access the internet any more. They now do it in many ways and in many different places. Reading in the Chartered Institute of Marketing e-zine you’ll see articles like ‘Marketing to the multi-screen consumer’. Marketing professionals are enthusing about the power of multi-screen/multi-channel marketing. Enter responsive web design as the champion to help brands and website owners communicate through one website to many different users, accessing it in many different ways.

The Background

Ok, back to basics, i’ll try to avoid any technical jargon.

For the last 17-18 years websites have had been pretty much fixed in width. Back in late nineties the most common monitor was a 15” cathode-ray tube beast. Users would have fired up Netscape Communicator and seen a website through a screen about 800 pixels wide.

A few years later that same user would have had a 17” flat panel screen that they would have used IE6 on. They would have been looking at sites through a screen about 1024 pixels wide.

Over the last 10 years screen resolutions have increased, which is fine for computer users to benefit from. But for marketeers, web site and product owners we have had be cautious in our approach to web development as we had to ensure that everyone could see the website on their screen. So websites pretty much became stuck at about 960-980 pixels wide, to fit the 1024px screens. This is borne out with a many thousands of templates, grids and other web design tools based on these sizes.

The Problem

So websites became stuck in a rut while at the same time monitors exploded from 17” to 20”, 24” 27” and even 30”+ all with ever increasing screen resolutions. (At the same time our TV’s did pretty much the same, going from CRT’s to flat screen then on to HD ).

This wasn’t a problem though. We’d settled on a standard and it worked for all users, even though some may well have had a massive screen. We knew that a 970 pixel wide website was a perfectly viable sales, marketing and communications vehicle.

While all of this was exploding on the desktop, something else was happening, all of a sudden phones got smart, very smart. The iPhone was great, it had apps, games and we were all happy!

But what the iPhone heralded was a massive move from desktop web browsing to mobile and later tablet browsing.

The Problem. All of a sudden screens had shrunk!

So our happy world of 970 pixel-ish websites was flawed. Now users saw those sites scaled to fit their phones. Resulting in impenetrably small type that was unreadable. Fine the clever people who developed the iPhone had made that screen touch-able so users could pinch and zoom into the content. This was all well and good, but it wasn’t an optimal user experience....was it.

The Solution

Luckily, those clever people who evolve, plan and define web standards (w3c, whatwg et al) had stared into a crystal ball and foreseen a world with screens tiny, huge and middling and thought ahead. They had even see into the murky future and seen people rotating screens and phones in their hands, amazing!

What they came up with were nice things called ‘media queries’. Media queries are part of the cascading style sheet specifications and are pretty straight forward. Firstly, a short piece of CSS checks the width of the screen. Based on this test the CSS chooses how the screen should be laid out. What this means is that the user can get a layout that suits their screen.

Ok, so there is one slight fly in the ointment. Your web designers and developers will have to put time in to create a layout for each screen size you want to target (we are currently doing a responsive version of this site, watch this space). This may be a reasonable piece of work, but it does have huge benefits as you will see in the next article in this series which outlined the benefits of responsive web design.

Content Management Software, What does a CMS do?

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 07:52:00 GMT

Many cms software reviews miss out one fundamental point. That is defining what a CMS system does! It is important that you understand the scope of what these systems do so that you can have an informed discussion with your CMS developers about what you need. Which is the purpose of this series of posts.

Some people assume that a CMS does an awful lot, they often can, but they may need tailoring and configuring to do those extra tasks.

CMS Basics

CMS software is created to allow a user or users to administer textual, image and other content. A content management system doesn’t necessarily update a website, it could push information out to printed media, pdf’s, mobile apps and retail shop tills. Our focus here will be on content management tools that push information out to websites, tablet and mobile apps or sites.

Content Types

At the heart of a CMS are content types, these could be of type blog post or perhaps new article. Content types are the building blocks of the content that you push out onto the web (publish). You may need quite bespoke content types to feature your products and services. So it’s worth considering what content information you want to publish.

Publishing Process or Workflow

One of the next important elements of a CMS is the publishing process. A system will provide you with a publishing workflow ( I'll be writing about this in more detail in a forth coming part of this series) to allow you to create a new content item (from one of your content types), add, save and publish content. Within this workflow it is often possible to save part complete work without having to publish it. Logically you can also unpublish content when it is no longer required and delete old content items.

Content Hierarchy - Categorization

The last core element of content management software is some sort of categorization or grouping of content items. These may be categories or some form of navigation. Often some sort of customization of categories within a CMS is required to suit a particular application.

A Blog is a good, well know example of a CMS. Yet it is a very specific implementation of a content management system. It is a type of CMS that allows a user (often a single person) to create Blog Posts. Blog Posts are the standard content type of a Blog. These are saved and published into a list of Blog Posts, the category.

So to be clear a Blog is not a CMS in itself, it is a particular type or implementation of a CMS. A particular blogging tool may be very popular but won’t necessarily be the right CMS for your business. To work out what best suits your business you need to first understand the key elements of a CMS. For this reason I wanted to clarify the core elements Content Types, Workflow and Categorisation up front!

The next article in the series outlines some of the things a CMS does not do. This may seem a little odd, but I often find that people think a CMS is a store, a learning tool etc etc. The next article is a leveller, it sets some boundaries so we have a clear understanding, before we get into the bigger subject of selection criteria.

Choosing the Best Content Management System

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 08:19:00 GMT

Whether your an individual looking for a blog, an SME or larger company trying to find an enterprise content management system to suit your business, you will need to think carefully about how you and your team want to use your content management software and what features to look for. In this series of articles I'll attempt to outline some key elements that should help guide your decision making.

Part 1 - Introduction

I find a lot of people and organizations use quite vague criteria to help them make this important decision. After all a CMS will be a company’s critical tool for showcasing their products, services and opinions online. It will also be the strategic tool use by the Marketing and SEO functions within a business. So it is worth giving a range of options and suppliers some serious consideration before diving in.

When working with businesses on CMS solutions I encounter a range of selection criteria that may not lead to the right CMS software being selected. I often hear the popularity of some tools being used as the main criteria for selection. Or ‘strategic fit’ where we see Microsoft based organizations err towards SharePoint and Oracle users favouring Oracle UCMS. Others are ‘my brother uses it for his blog’, ‘it’s free’, ‘their is a plugin that makes that one do it’.

What we'll cover in this series...

In this article I will discuss some of the questions that should be asked when assessing the top CMS systems for suitability. Of course everyone wants to find the best content management system, but I have found organizations small and large who have selected the wrong one in the past and need a replacement. This is often because some of the right questions were not asked up front, so read on...

I'll be writing this series interactively so I may need to come back and tweak articles as the series evolves, please bear this in mind. This series will be available as a pdf when I've finished writing.

Digital Media Blog

We've Graduated from Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Growth Programme!

After six months learning....lots or learning, much soul searching and business challenges we've now graduated from the prestigious Goldman Sachs 10,000 small business programme.

What does this mean?

UX - it’s all about showing how much you care

UX (User Experience) has been around for a good while now but it is surprising how many folks out there aren’t up to speed on what it is, what it entails and how it can be beneficial for a business.

Webmoco creates Responsive site for WEVE

We are delighted to have completed the first phase of development for Weve (www.weve.com), a new joint venture between the UK’s three largest mobile network operators – EE, Telefonica UK (O2) and Vodafone UK. Between them, they represent over 80% of UK mobile customers.

The (future) present is multi-screened

2012 was a very interesting year for digital. For the first time ever, PC sales stalled and then they fell. Not by masses, but enough to matter.
The reason? One word.
Tablets.

Webmoco Case Study - Thomas Cook Money

The What?

The Why?

The How

The Results

About Webmoco:

For further information, please contact:

Webmoco in Goldman Sachs Business Growth Programme

Webmoco develops new website for Harris+Hoole

Harris+Hoole, a new chain of artisan coffee shops backed by Tesco launches this week and we have been working as development partners for the corporate website, www.harrisandhoole.co.uk which is now live.

Content Management Software, What Doesn’t It Do?

It’s just as important to know what features aren't commonly found out of the box in a CMS. As this will give you a clear picture of what to look for in your system.

A CMS isn’t an e-commerce system.

A CMS isn’t a CRM.

A CMS isn’t a booking system.

Other Articles in the Series

What is Responsive Web Design and how does it help marketing professionals?

The Background

The Problem

The Solution

Content Management Software, What does a CMS do?

CMS Basics

Content Types

Publishing Process or Workflow

Content Hierarchy - Categorization

Other Articles in the Series

Choosing the Best Content Management System

Part 1 - Introduction

What we'll cover in this series...

Other Articles in the Series

Digital Media Blog

We've Graduated from Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Growth Programme!

After six months learning....lots or learning, much soul searching and business challenges we've now graduated from the prestigious Goldman Sachs 10,000 small business programme.

What does this mean?

UX - it’s all about showing how much you care

UX (User Experience) has been around for a good while now but it is surprising how many folks out there aren’t up to speed on what it is, what it entails and how it can be beneficial for a business.

Webmoco creates Responsive site for WEVE

We are delighted to have completed the first phase of development for Weve (www.weve.com), a new joint venture between the UK’s three largest mobile network operators – EE, Telefonica UK (O2) and Vodafone UK. Between them, they represent over 80% of UK mobile customers.

The (future) present is multi-screened

2012 was a very interesting year for digital. For the first time ever, PC sales stalled and then they fell. Not by masses, but enough to matter. The reason? One word.Tablets.

Webmoco Case Study - Thomas Cook Money

The What?

The Why?

The How

The Results

About Webmoco:

For further information, please contact:

Webmoco in Goldman Sachs Business Growth Programme

Webmoco develops new website for Harris+Hoole

Harris+Hoole, a new chain of artisan coffee shops backed by Tesco launches this week and we have been working as development partners for the corporate website, www.harrisandhoole.co.uk which is now live.

Content Management Software, What Doesn’t It Do?

It’s just as important to know what features aren't commonly found out of the box in a CMS. As this will give you a clear picture of what to look for in your system.

A CMS isn’t an e-commerce system.

A CMS isn’t a CRM.

A CMS isn’t a booking system.

Other Articles in the Series

What is Responsive Web Design and how does it help marketing professionals?

The Background

The Problem

The Solution

Content Management Software, What does a CMS do?

CMS Basics

Content Types

Publishing Process or Workflow

Content Hierarchy - Categorization

Other Articles in the Series

Choosing the Best Content Management System

Part 1 - Introduction

What we'll cover in this series...

Other Articles in the Series

2012 was a very interesting year for digital. For the first time ever, PC sales stalled and then they fell. Not by masses, but enough to matter.
The reason? One word.
Tablets.