So you want a website, right?

 Written by

This might come as something of a shock, given that I’m a web designer and developer, but the first few questions I ask a prospective new client are designed to determine whether they actually need a website at all. I know, weird, eh?

Anyway, the thing is, there’s a surprising number of businesses out there who feel pressured into particular marketing activities, just because that’s what their competitors are doing. If I must sound like your dad, chiding you for doing the self same thing as one of your daft friends: would you walk off a cliff if they did?

Berryman Glass Recycling — website development and blog

 Written by

After many months of planning, designing and web development, the new Berryman website is live.

Berryman Glass Recycling is Britain’s largest purchaser and recycler of waste glass. Founded almost 90 years ago, they’re now looking forward, and meeting tomorrow’s challenges, both in terms of maintaining a technological lead, as well as carving out a presence for themselves on the new social web.

Berryman are a progressive business, so the potential for expanding their activities (to include video as well as adopting more aspects of social media, for example) is encouraging.

Berryman now have a place on the web around which they can build various other activities, such as using their website as a point of entry for exhibition attendees to follow up a meeting with one of their team, or as a way of publicizing their activities and various recent business successes.

Berryman Glass Recycling

If you’d like to know more about the specifics of the project, take a look at the Berryman Glass Recycling case study, as well as visuals on the portfolio page.

Emily Cagle Communications — website design and blog

 Written by

On the back of the success of my popular ebook, The Beginner’s Guide to Social Media, the Emily Cagle Communications website and blog provides a wonderful case study for using social media marketing for your business.

Emily Cagle is a marketing and communications consultant who enlisted Octane’s services shortly after reading my ebook and then putting some of the things I wrote about into practice. We’ve both worked together to produce a website and blog we can both be very proud of.

As I mention over on the Social Media Marketing Technology blog:

“It must come as little surprise to know that both Emily & I are thrilled with the end result, which you can read more about in my case study on the Emily Cagle Communications website. But this is only the beginning. We’ve both been working on planning a long-term social media strategy, making the most of the key technologies out there, like Facebook and Twitter to help promote her business.”

Emily Cagle Communications

If you’d like to know more about the specifics of the project, and Emily’s thoughts, take a look at the Emily Cagle case study, as well as visuals on the portfolio page.

Octane’s new look website and blog

 Written by

Finally, the new Octane website and blog are live and in the wild. It’s taken plenty of planning, designing, coding and time, but I think the end result has been worth the wait.

So why the major overhaul of the Octane website?

I wanted a totally fresh start. But more importantly, I wanted the Octane website to be the hub of operations for all of the other stuff I’m doing.

Octane is my business, but many more people know me for my popular tech’ opinion blog, Blah, Blah! Technology. And more recently, I’ve enjoyed great success with my free ebook, The Beginner’s Guide to Social Media.

The one thing I don’t lack is content, so the purpose of the Octane website is to pull together those sources of trusted and valued information and knowledge into one place, so people can learn more about the things I offer.

Right now, you’ll find two columns of links in the footer of certain service pages, like social media and internet marketing, the Octane blog and the home page itself. However, over the course on the next month, I’ll be integrating specific articles from the other two blogs directly into service pages.

How much would a website like Octane’s cost?

Good question! A guestimate of cost would be around the £1,300.00 (Net) mark, which would include:

  • Design & Artwork — 8 hours / £360.00
  • Web Design & Development (incl. custom programming) — 12 hours / £540.00
  • WordPress, installation and setup — 8 hours / £360.00
  • Hosting, Email and FTP — one-off £20 account set up and then £30 each year thereafter.

It’s taken me months to complete this re-design, but that’s because I’ve been fitting all of this work in between my client work, which actually pays!

What do you see as the key benefits of having a new website?

First of all, the re-design is a fresh look. Totally new. Secondly, as mentioned previously, I’m turning the Octane website into a hub for all of my other stuff. But there are other benefits, too.

  1. A far cleaner, clearer design and layout means it’s much easier to manage and update the website and the blog.
  2. A better layout also means that articles and pages are easier to read and find.
  3. Having a business blog is a great way to raise awareness, engage with customers and expose people to your brand and your expertise.

Key points

Keeping the pace — the fact is, if I want to attract new clients, I need to demonstrate the strength and depth of my talents, and that’s what this new website does.

Room to grow — sometimes, you just out-grow a website, and fixing what you have simply isn’t practical. The previous design had served its purpose and something new, bigger and better was needed.

Having more to say — you can’t fit a pint of water into a half pint glass, can you? And that’s the problem I faced. So the challenge was making everything easy to find and read.

What’s next for the Octane website and blog?

As you can imagine, there’s a lot of work involved, not least the actual effort in creating the website and blog. Over the long-term, the value rests in keeping the website and the blog up to date. The typical schedule of activities would include:

  • Updates to service pages, with links to new and related blog articles.
  • New blog articles, based on a variety of different themes.
  • Adding new case studies, linking to related blog articles.
  • Adding new images to the portfolio page, also linking to case studies and related blog articles.

Right now, these are the very services I’m offering my clients who’re wanting to embrace and make the most of social media for their businesses.

I’d like to think there’s a good 1-2 years in this new website design, with maybe 2-3 years in the underlying structure, before I’d consider another major overhaul.

In the here & now, the timing of the new design is to coincide with the impending launch of a client website, and planned marketing efforts of my own.

Work has been good for me this year, with no real slow down, which is excellent. But I don’t want to sit back and become complacent! I always want more work.

If you’d like to know more about how Octane can help you business, feel free to contact me right now, or call 0870 755 0004 Monday to Friday 9am-5pm

Adobe versus web usability and common sense

 Written by

Adobe’s website is a good example of bad web usability. I discovered this for myself only last week. If you thought buying software from Adobe would be easy, you might want to think again.

Since buying their main rival Macromedia, Adobe have a huge collection of software for creative businesses like Octane. I represent their target audience, and as a web designer and developer, people like me have very high standards indeed. So we expect very high standards from Adobe.

The most profound genius is that borne of precise observation. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must have been only too aware of this as the attraction for his most famous yet personally disliked character Sherlock Holmes grew.

Sadly for Adobe, their website offers an exceptionally bad experience for people like me. Clearly demonstrating that the simple act of observing how people do things and then anticipating their next actions is neither art, science or practice for Adobe. Instead, they’ve made the purchasing experience as difficult as possible.

As big as Adobe are, I have to wonder how many sales they lose each week because of their appalling sales funnel. Only recently did a story emerge of a “$300 million button”, highlighting the perils of a bad shopping experience. Adobe’s problems are much more than a simple button fix — the entire purchasing experience is broken from the very beginning to the very end.

So you thought buying software from Adobe would be easy, right?

Because I’m from England, I use their .co.uk website, which then re-directs to their .com/uk/ address. Clearly we can see that the Adobe website is aware of where I’m visiting from, yes?

I’m interested in buying Adobe’s Creative Suite. Adobe’s home page seems neat enough, but this is a superficial appearance. The first thing I notice is that there’s no one Creative Suite, there are in fact four variations. So which Creative Suite is right for me?

the Adobe home page

And how do I decide? I clicked the: “Learn more” button, only to discover that there are actually six different Creative Suite collections; Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Web Standard, Production Premium and Master Collection. Rather surprisingly, this page doesn’t really offer any more information than the last.

I’m reminded of my first visit to the US back in 1996. During an eight week college exchange program to Northridge in Los Angeles, we paid a visit to a book store in Santa Monica. Downstairs was a cafe where people could sit and read through some of the books they’re considering buying, or the ones they’d just bought.

I decided to buy a coffee. And, not knowing any better I asked for a coffee. As the words tripped off my tongue, I saw behind the assistant a huge collection of coffee bean bags all sat in neat little square shelf boxes. I’m talking about hundreds of varieties of coffee. Needless to say, the assistant and I laughed.

Adobe, Microsoft: don’t make me think!

I now remember how I felt that day and someone must feel when trying to buy Microsoft Windows and discovering there isn’t just one version of Windows, but seven.

I’m being forced to make a decision about a product I clearly know very little about, and the paucity of information isn’t helping me make that decision. Sometimes, thinking isn’t automatically a good thing.

It’s at this point that I realize I have no idea what I need. Sure, I know what I want, but because of the different choices available to be, I don’t know what I need. Since simply asking (or rather looking) for a copy of Adobe’s Creative Suite is pointless, I click on the: “Suite selector” link, to try my luck elsewhere.

The first thing I see is a huge selection of check boxes. I feel my heart sink. Exactly what is: “cross-media design”? And what’s the difference between: “prepare digital images for print” and: “edit digital images”? Or the difference between: “import and organize images” and: “manage a pro photography workflow”?

choose an Adobe Creative Suite by activity

As my heart sinks, my head begins to spin. I don’t even attempt to choose from the check boxes and click on the second tab, to select by product. All I want is Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash. Alas, there is no Creative Suite that includes those three software packages. Instead, I’d have to choose Photoshop Extended, which forces me to choose the Premium and Master versions. I can see a correlation between Premium / Master and extremely expensive.

choose an Adobe Creative Suite by products

My heart sinks further. This isn’t any kind of choice, certainly not the kind of choice I expected to see from Adobe.

OK, let’s say for the sake of argument I was going to buy Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium. I still don’t know what else is in this collection and I still don’t have a clue how much it’s likely to cost me. So I click the illustration of box .. and I click again, only to realize you can’t actually click on the graphic because it’s not a button. I have to click the: “See our recommendations” button below. Is this intuitive? No, it’s not.

The resulting page offers hardly any more information than the last. To learn more, I have to click again. It appears the Web Premium package looks about right, but I don’t want Fireworks, Acrobat or Dreamweaver. Sadly, I have no choice.

Adobe recommendations for the Creative Suite collection

Now I have three buttons to choose from: “Buy”, “Try” and: “Learn more”. I choose the former, because I still don’t know what this lot is going to cost. I’m taken to the Adobe Store, where I’m now being asked to choose which region I’m from. Why? Adobe already know I’m visiting from England.

the Adobe Store

Frustration creeps in. I click on the: “United Kingdom” option, which is right at the bottom of the page. I’m now taken to the Adobe Store proper. Where’s the Web Premium package? That’s right, the very package I chose to buy is not on the store page. Instead, the Adobe website just dumps me onto their main Adobe Store page.

I’m sure Steve Krug would be just thrilled to see his “Don’t make me think!” mantra being shot to pieces by a company like Adobe who really should know better.

At this point, I’ve totally lost patience with Adobe and decide it would be much easier to call their freephone 0800 number. Well, the idea was excellent, sadly for Adobe, their automated call handling system isn’t. After selecting an option, I’m transferred into the ether and the line goes dead. Thinking this might just be me, I try again. Dead. I call from my mobile phone. Dead.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had problems with Adobe. Back in April 2007, I discovered that Adobe Contribute is broken. Worse still, Adobe don’t care that Contribute is broken.

What was it I said about professionalism again?