Now to the ‘but’.

But Google is a very good search engine. I don’t like the fact that it inflates my rankings if I search whilst logged on to my Google account, but I love the fact that this post will appear on Google almost immediately. I realise that part of that process is due to WordPress and its plugins, but quite simply it suits my needs and my customers’ too.

Sarah Treble’s New Website

Exeter’s Design Credo have recently created a website for Sarah Treble, the renowned wedding dress designer now based in the South West. Whilst Sarah already had a website it wasn’t performing well particularly with search engines,

“I can’t even find myself unless I put my name in.”

Well, we are both extremely pleased with the results. Almost overnight Sarah’s ranking for key search terms improved with key phrases such as “bespoke dresses devon” putting Sarah at position two on the front page of Google. Removing Devon from the search string “bespoke dresses” still delivers a respectable third page Google result.

Somewhat surprisingly (for me anyway) “treble” returns a position two result on the front page of Google.

So how do we know this?

Firstly we make an educated guess about what terms people might use to search. We then reverse search and see how we do.

However Google provides some pretty good free tools help to collect and analyse useful SEO data. These tools not unsurprisingly are known as Webmaster Tools.

What these tools do is to allow us to see what keywords people may be using to search for our site. Sometimes there are some surprises such as ‘treble’. More surprisingly the observant may have noticed that ‘trebble’ appears on the list and searching for ‘trebble’ Google prompts us for a miss-spell.

The webmaster tools goes beyond simple keyword analysis though. It enables us to check the site’s HTML and allows us to see whether the SEO aids such as meta descriptions and page titles are all correctly added.

This is all free, you can do it yourself, but at DesignCredo it is very much all part of the Website Design Package that we offer to our customers

The Finishing Touches are being applied to Sarah Treble’s new website.

Working closely with Sarah Treble, Exeter based DesignCredo have created a clean and minimal website design with space to allow the images of Sarah’s stunning creative work to be enjoyed. The website implements the new brand designed for Sarah by DesignCredo.

The website will develop and change with news, reports and images of beautiful new bespoke bridal and couture wear combining innovative design with impeccable craftsmanship and attention to detail.

Highly Functional and Great SEO Abilities

Based on the WordPress platform the site is nearly finished and almost begun. What we mean by this is that the launch of a site such as this is the starting point for further developments.

As well as looking great the site combines PubSubHubbub technology as well as high levels of SEO to make the website perform well on search engines such as Google. Add to this automatic backups and you have a robust site that performs well all round.

I am a slow speaker, I know I am but once many years ago this was really brought into focus when I was trying to teach a friend how to ride a drop handlebar bicycle. She fell off at the point that I had said “take your hands off the lower part of the handlebars” and never got to hear me say “slowly, one at a time and move them to the top of the bars”. She survived (we didn’t). The point was that the communication clearly failed.

Why Mining

Frequently I hear people say things like “I need a website” or “I need an A4 brochure”. Rather foolishly some might say, I usually engage in a bit of Why-Mining by asking “why?”

To aid communication the emphasis is on the why not the mining. Why-mining is an effective although slightly annoying tool. Quite simply people frequently tend to already hold many of the answers that they seek, they just need someone to stand in front of them and ask them “why?”

“I need a four page A4 brochure”
“Why?”
“Because my competitor has one”
“Why does it need to be A4?”
“Because thats what they always are?
“Why do you need four pages?”
“Dunno”

Eventually you will get to bedrock and even if this bedrock is “I don’t know”, that will be a good place to start.

The bottom line is that what we at DesignCredo are trying to find out is what is the customer’s story, the unique thing that they are trying to communicate to others.

Form Follows Function

Yes there are standards, paper size, press size, envelope size, but surely the function of a piece of print is to communicate a message, some information, your story, whatever that is. The same goes for websites or any other communication aid. Most websites offer an entry point and frequently a contact point. And yes your story may be similar to your competitors but hopefully it will be a bit different and that difference will be your selling point. And your story may fit neatly on one, two, four pages but it might not.

My Daddy Plays With Apples

Ask most children what their parents do and you won’t get much sense from them. When young I thought my father was in a jazz band when he in fact flew in aeroplanes. But then I thought that the man who came round to sell insurance was Lee Kuan Yew the prime-minister of Singapore where we lived when I was five.

The problem is that if one asks many adults what they do one may struggle to get much more in the way of sense from them. This is frequently the first great stumbling block when designing websites. Good people, able people, talented people often struggle to be able to say what they or their businesses actually do.

Initially I found this surprising but now I seem to have become somewhat resigned to it, I expect it to happen, I frequently pre-warn customers,

“You will reach a point where your new website asks questions about what you do”.

In truth there is a lot of trust needed between the client and the designer, quite often searching questions will need to be asked in order to get the website right. The designer really needs to know the ins and outs of your business in order to get the site working well. It is relatively easy to create a website. It is a much more considered piece of work to get the website to communicate the appropriate message.

Don’t Stop Me Now

Further to this websites need to be forward looking. It isn’t good enough to design a website for now, it will date horribly. In order to make your site future-proof you will need to trust your designer enough to share your plans and of course you will need to be able to articulate these.

DesignCredo specialise in WordPress sites. The appeal of these blog-sites is that they put the customer back in control. We offer expertise in setting the site up creating the look and extending the functionality of the site whether it is improving the PubSubHubbub capabilities or improving the SEO setup of the site. We have a lot of experience in making sites work effectively for search engines, we have faith in the WordPress platform. In addition we will probably encourage you to become more active in social networking, particularly Twitter. We expect content to be searchable on Google within seconds and minutes, we will help make your site perform.

However this means that ultimately our customers share the responsibility for making the sites work well. For us this is a good thing. Good businesses are thriving organic things that constantly develop. Why shouldn’t their websites be too?

Are We Human?

It constantly amazes me when I am working with people the amount of apparently technologically adept people who use the Google entry field as the browser address bar. Doh…

Some basics,

• Website names such as www.designcredo.com are called URLs. These are like pointers to the website that you are looking for.
• Search engines are tools to help you find suitable URLs
• Search engines are generally used if you don’t know the URL
• If you do know the URL you may as well type it into the address bar at the top of the browser window.
• Most of the time you won’t need to type in the ‘www’ bit or even the ‘http://’ for that matter

Very occasionally you may be trying to access a page that Google (or another search engine) doesn’t actually know about. If you type this page’s address into Google you won’t find it although it actually exists.

But the bottom line is that we are human, we use things in a way that wasn’t intended and being human lots of people do fundamentally similar human things. This then leads me to the advanced search capabilities of search engines.

“UOK” “Yeah GR8″

Most schools use a Proxy Server to protect our little sweethearts from the evils of the interweb and most of the evil little sweethearts know how to get round the Proxy Servers mainly to access mind-numbingly dull games or to engage in fascinatingly tedious little conversations across a classroom.

I have walked into a class full of angels searching in Russian, and why is this you may ask. Well in Somerset the darlings were protected from the evils of Google Image searches but only the UK Google site was blocked, so the students would “Поиск в Google” by entering the search into Google.ru.

However few of these treasures would really know how to do an advanced search in spite of my interventions and to that extent I failed to engage them further.

The Ever Expanding Pit of Possibilities

Recently both Yahoo and Google have added tools to aid searches. Yahoo has a Search Assist box that appears in near-real-time giving you alternative search suggestions to that which you have entered. You may be forgiven for thinking that far from refining your ability to find something you may be tempted into the ever expanding Pit of Possibilities, who am I to comment?

Google on the other hand offer a range of tools that help you to refine your search. This appears on the left hand of the browser window.

Perhaps the first of these options that we should examine in the UK at least is the UK option. If we are looking for a UK based product or service it may worth filtering out the rest of the world.

What about if I had managed to miss Wimbledon altogether and wanted to find out who won the Men’s finals yesterday. Maybe looking for search results in the last 24hrs would help and that is exactly what Google offers here.

You get the idea I am sure.

What Worries Me Is…

Many years ago as a psychology student a friend designed a blindingly simple memory experiment, asking people to say what was on the back of a 50p piece (the side not represented by royalty). Remarkably few people could say what was there, the theory was that (being human) they had habituated to it and filtered it out.

So for me there is an awkward question to be answered. Are these search tools made for run of the mill humans? Are they understood, are they even seen (or do we habituate to them).

I ride motorbikes, my leathers have knee sliders to help me go round corners better. In my dreams the only time I will ‘get me knee down’ is just before ‘getting knicked but the police.

The reality is that the only time I ‘get me knee down’ is just before I ‘fall off me bike’.

Exeter design company Design Credo is extremely pleased with the initial performance of the WordPress website that they have created on behalf of Topsham’s Nest interiors. The site has well and truly hit the ground running with large numbers of visitors already viewing the site on a daily basis.

The built-in capabilities of this WordPress site enable us to see that within days of going live the site is getting extremely good viewing figures. This is like having hundreds of extra people looking around the shop on a daily basis.

The website is based on the WordPress platform but has been designed to give a strong visual appeal. DesignCredo have undertaken photography for Nest Interiors to strengthen their existing stock of images. The site aims to capture and convey the rich visual appeal of the Nest Interiors shop.

Great SEO results

A great website is of little value unless it can be found. Of course searching on the company’s name puts it top but more relevant search strings such as ‘new + england + style + furniture + devon’ perform extremely well, less than a week from the site being live. Further to this simple search strings such as “Lexington + Devon” provide first page Google results with more detailed searches such as “Lexington + Chesapeake + Cushion” giving a position 1 on a worldwide Google search.

This is extremely important for a company selling quality brand items such as those from Lexington. Putting it simply Nest interiors although based in Topsham near Exeter in the South-West of England are able to create national and international interest.

Add to this the inclusion of PubSubHubbub technology to ensure almost immediate submission of website developments to Google and we have a very search engine friendly site.

However, this is just the start. Design Credo will use various collectable data to monitor where site-traffic comes from and will continue to develop content that will create a good hit with Google searches.

No Flash Here

Well I’ve just been to the Apple shop in Exeter, you know, the place with the impromptu Post Office style queuing area outside? All the more incongruous for it’s lack of waiting people other than the gaggle of previously imprinted pensioners with their paperwork at the ready.

A sudden moment of awkwardness as I attempt to enter the shop, is it invitation only? Oh god, the public shame of not being invited again. From the door, in spite of the “T-shirted One’s” interjection, I could see my quarry, the iPad. There was one free, it was mine to iNvestigate.

First impressions, exactly as I had imagined and it has to be said that this is a great achievement in itself, but first,

A disclaimer: I use macs daily, but I don’t have an iPhone and to be honest, I don’t know if I would, my e71 does a job. I have access to an old iPod but don’t use it either. I do carry my MacBook Pro around a lot and use it.

Back to the iPad, you pick it up and use it, end of…

That maybe needs more consideration but it is the truth and for me this is the beauty of Apple products. Looking around a huge range of people, young and old iPlaying. The man next to me was showing one to his young child in a papoose, the old woman at the end trying to fit her top-up card in one to pay the ‘leccy.

I could see how it could make my life easier and in the brief time that iPlayed with iT, I genuinely could see how it may have a place in a busy life. The Calendar App looks fantastic and the touch screen, interaction is great. The videos looked doable for personal viewing, while I was stood there a woman next to me was in a quandary about whether to buy one or two, this dilemma may be instructive.

No Flash in the Pad

I have recently highlighted Steve Jobs’ feelings about Flash. the iPad is where this issue will bite.

Some time ago I made the call not to go the Flash route with website design.

Another disclaimer: Flash offers some incredibly appealing and rich experiences.

However I am firmly in the camp of those who skip the Flash intro on websites. I also find that once the Flash card has been played it loses its fascination. Ultimately though Flash isn’t terribly accessible on websites and not very search engine friendly. If you have Flash on your website it won’t iPad well, I know, my Design Credo site uses it to display the images. The WP-Cumulus tag cloud on this site doesn’t iPad which is a shame because people love it. Ultimately I suspect the iPad may create more attitude change in the professional web design world than the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) has.

Gentle Saturday morning breakfasts, coffee, croissant and papers have now become coffee, croissants and RSS feeds on the laptop and the iPad will find it’s place nicely here until it gets lost in the pile of papers and accidentally thrown across the reconstituted flooring. I know I shouldn’t say this but as the spectre of Twitter Poo becomes more apparent I suspect the iPood schoolboy joke will become more of a reality.

Which leads me to my lasting impression in the Apple shop, the army of T-shirted ones keeping the screens clean.

I know one of the rules of social networking is to be positive, no-one likes a whinger. However BT have led me to the edge and pulled me over. I rely on BT services, and generally they do the job, but the customer interface is appalling. At the point where the customer attempts to interface with BT it turns into some mythical beast with the power to split into many diverse parts, ‘oh no, that’s broadband not phones’, or ‘that’s a residential issue, not business sir’, or ‘no sir I can’t access that system’. This is the point where days of my life were lost. In the interim I found that,

• None of my email addresses were recognised as email addresses by BT websites
• When I subsequently used ‘Live Chat’ I had been sold another residential problem by Kim
• The nice man from Wales (after Kim) chose to miss spell my name, giving me a great new email address
• The nice man from Wales also chose to miss spell my password locking me out of my account
• The nice man from Scotland who apologised for the nice man from Wales gave me a duff phone number to resolve it
• As a reward for all of this BT charged me £31 for choosing to leave them
• On a further Live Chat the nice man greeted me as Andrew, the name I have grown used to, and bade me a fond farewell as Anthony

So, we get the idea. Firstly I would like to thank Bhavana, she was polite and courteous and has cancelled the ridiculous charges. I would also like to thank the tech support man who helped me resolve a problem with the new router. But I would also like to thank the BT Twitter people, whoever they are. You see, I had sinned, I had vented some of my frustrations on Twitter and something rather strange happened

So, I aired my frustrations and someone offered to help. That’s all we want really isn’t it?

I like to think that I am reasonably adept with technology. I’m not a total natural and for me this is useful, it helps me understand problems that customers may have who are novices. I found the BT website un-navigable, I’m sure the information is there but the bottom line is that their staff time costs them money, my time must seem cheap by comparison.

There is nothing revolutionary about,

Hi, anything I can help with?

but, in this instance the delivery of it was new to me,

I remember with sadness the demise of Macromedia, there were strong products in the collection: Fireworks (always cranky), Dreamweaver, Freehand and of course Flash.

I have been appalled at the behaviour of Dreamweaver CS4 on a Mac but continue to use it. InDesign is a powerful tool, it has been good to give Quark some competition. However I can’t honestly say that CS4 has impressed.

Below are Steve Jobs’ conclusions about Flash from an extensive letter on the Apple site.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Steve Jobs
April, 2010

If nothing else this election is a lesson in the power of media and I am talking about digital media. Here we see Gillian Duffy an ordinary woman making powerful comments to world news with aplomb, at one point she even takes a mobile call while live on TV.

Just in case you have failed to hear Gordon Brown’s comment you can listen to it here.

Clearly social media has seen it’s fair number of Gaffes, David Cameron’s “Too Many Twits Make a Twat” for one and the sacking of Moray candidate Stuart MacLennan after his “coffin dodgers” comment (amongst others). Lets not even venture into Channel 4 Dispatches sting on Hoon et al.

It still hurts 16 years on

Gerald Ratner reveals the pain of becoming a national laughing stock in this Times Online article

Despite the fact that I didn’t kill anybody, I didn’t do anything illegal and I didn’t even say anything that I hadn’t said before, that speech caused me to lose my business, my reputation and my fortune.

It says something about our society that people like to list what I lost in monetary terms: a £650,000 salary, £500m wiped off the valuation of my company, and a billion-pound turnover slashed overnight.

Oliver Sacks made the following observation in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

“The President’s Speech”,[3] about a ward of aphasiacs and agnosiacs listening to a speech given by an unnamed actor-president, “the old Charmer,” presumably Ronald Reagan. Many in the first group were laughing at the speech, and Sacks claims their laughter to be at the president’s facial expressions and tone, which they find “not genuine.”

The point here is that we are all part of these new media and although some of the forms are relatively new our ability to see through them develops with our ability to use it.

This is why I found David Cameron’s running along Exeter Quay video slightly incongruous, where were all the people? Yes I know, busy man, up early, before the rest of us… that’s what we were meant to think. I’m not certain what we were meant to make of a recent shot of Gordon Brown sitting in a kitchen with a yogurt on a dinner plate and a chinese take-away in the background.

There are lessons to me learned here for many and anyone using any form of public media could do to consider the maxim,

Don’t talk unless you can Improve the Silence

Or put it another way:

“If you like, I am a penitent sinner. Sometimes you say things you don’t mean to say, sometimes you say things by mistake and sometimes you say things you want to correct very quickly.”

G Brown

Why am I annoyed? Well, as I see it, a blog needs commitment and constant fresh content, that’s what I tell my customers and that’s what I believe. As the Wall Street Journal says;

Social Networking: Common Mistakes Small Businesses Make

– Bare Profile: Signing up for a Facebook account is the easy part. Before you blast emails to 1,000 of your customers and friends, a business should spend some time thoughtfully building a profile with an attractive photo, background and contact information.

– Too Little Personality: Lighten up. The social-media world is about engaging customers on a more personal level. Your “About Me” shouldn’t just be dry facts about your business. Make sure you add some personal touches. Humor often helps.

– Too Much Hype: Using social media shouldn’t be about blatantly selling a business. It’s about making connections and creating credibility so that people will like you and trust you and eventually want to buy from you. Use it to interact and meet new people – don’t get overly promotional.

– Not Enough Fresh Content: Engaging others through social media needs to be an ongoing, frequent process. You can’t just build a profile and let it sit idle. Preferably you want to be refreshing your content regularly (daily, if possible) so people come back for more.

There it is, number four, hands up. Guilty as charged, and the stats prove it, readership drops off if you don’t keep moving on.

Recently I have been given the same advice by a couple of professionals. Bodie and Doyle? Nope, Accountant and Solicitor. The advice?

Do as I say, not as I do…