Communication is the word, yes communication. It all goes horribly wrong sometimes.

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.

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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.

This is a development of the reply that I made the other day about getting a good Google response to your blog.

Search Engine Marketing is a must if you are to going to get people to view any website. Nowadays everyone seems to be an SEO specialist, at least they do in Exeter and Devon, I imagine it is the same throughout he UK.

I am more aware of the abilities of WordPress than other blogging platforms so this is what I will use as my reference point. I have to say that I am totally enamoured with WordPress, I think it is great, but first a bit of general knowledge.

WordPress comes in two distinct flavours

1. .com Most people start with a free WordPress blog which you can start straight away and I would recommend you to go and sign up. If you blog a for a while and chose to migrate to self-hosted this can be easily done.
2. .org If you have access to hosting then self-hosted blogs open up a world of possibilities. You will need hosting with a database which is necessary to store all of the posts, images, comments and information about the site. My hosting supplier now throws one in with even the starter hosting package. You don’t really need to understand about databases (MySQL) but it can be quite interesting looking around, seeing how all of the data and information is organised.

WordPress can be thought of as a modular entity.

1. Core
   The site itself, everything that is needed to make it work. This includes a user friendly interface that will allow you to update the site without knowing about web deign.
2. Themes
   There are a huge number of available themes that make the basic WP blog look different (1 column, 2 column, colours styling etc.)
3. Plugins
   These add to the functionality of the blog, they make it do more things, (display images in galleries, add contact forms, etc. )

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One of the more socially unacceptable things that I have ever done was be interested in stats. I did a degree in psychology and found that I was (unfashionably) reasonably good at the advanced research methods. I liked statistics, the normal distribution still holds a fascination for me. So, I enjoy the understanding that can be gleaned from ‘stats’. I too share Dara_O’Brien’s concern for poorly communicated and reported statistics. However I enjoy looking and trying to understand, even though there may be an uncomfortable truth to be found.

Andrew Butler is a surprisingly common name, there are a lot of us about. In the UK there are a number of Andrew Butlers who are involved in different forms of photography. There is another, called Andrew Butler, who runs is a company of Chartered Surveyors in the Midlands. I know because he has the .co.uk domain, I wanted it. He also has the .com, but not the .net (I have that).
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