Following a very successful 2009 for Allchorn Design and it’s clients, and a productive discussion over the festive break with my London based brother, we have decided to broaden the geographic range of the company.
Effective immediately, we now have a London representative in the form of my extremely talented and very personable brother Warwick Allchorn (his personal website to be launched shortly). Warwick brings immense experience and talent to the company and is able to liaise with UK bound clients more readily than I have been able to in the past.
More details on this to follow shortly, but in the meantime, we have set up a UK email address which you can use to contact Warwick directly.
Most of you are probably on holiday already and it’s coming close to the time that I pack it in for the year. Unfortunately, there is no rest for the wicked busy, and there are still some active developments on the to-do list.
We’ve officially moved out to Waterfall and no longer occupy office space with the SA Web Design crew, but I’m sure we’ll continue to work together on a number of projects we’ve collaborated on over the course of 2008/9. Waterfall is a beautiful place and as you can see in the pic above, my new workspace is really inspiring (for me anyway).
This post is really something to explain whats on the cards for 2010 in a work sense, both for myself and for anyone interested in working with us.
Greater focus on security
This year has taught us some important lessons in web security not only in a local sense. The fact that Twitter got hackedtwice in 2010 tells me that its becoming more and more necessary to employ more stringent security measures across the board.
Considering that we work quite heavily with third party content management systems, there will be a far greater emphasis on locking down any vulnerabilities and employing a more structured update regime.
Seeking relationships
The past 5yrs of business has seen a large number of projects pass through our production line (over 150 projects) and it has become clear that the vast majority of success stories are the clients that we have an on-going relationship with. In this vein, we’ll be looking into bundle service offerings which will run over a number of months. Some services to expect early in 2010:
Web consulting (analysis of your needs, technical requirements, project scoping etc.)
Website analysis & strategy
Design & Redesign of websites
Content creation and management
Online advertising and search engine optimisation
Social media strategy, implementation and monitoring
Each one of those topics has a number of sub-categories but listing them all here would be tedious and a waste of yours and my time. Needless to say, the best thing to do is just pick up the phone and call us or drop us an email and find out if we can help you with your online presence.
Allchorn Rebranding
One of the great things about working predominantly in the online medium, is that its not too much trouble to visually re-invent our brand every couple of years. 2010 will see a new look for Allchorn Design. One which we’re quite excited about and one that is still technically on the drawing board. Above is an early preview mockup of how it might look.
All in all, as usual, a new year approaching is exciting, and I’d like to wish everyone a fantastic Christmas and awesome new year!
Since this website has essentially been flushed of it’s design and now sits as a vanilla flavoured plugin-less blank canvas, I’ve decided that for 2010, allchorn.com is going to receive a complete redesign alongside all our corporate stationery. Starting with the cards.
Over the festive season, I’ll be translating the new look across the board. Our forms, questionnaires, quotes, invoices and this website will all take on a fresh new look. You can subscribe via RSS if you want to know when we go live.
We’ve recently been running very successful lead collection campaigns online which have resulted in some of our clients gathering considerable client data. An invaluable asset to any company; the ability to engage with your clients after having legitimately and ethically collected their contact details to do so. It all starts by collecting the data, and that is what this offering is so strong with.
What is a Viral Competition?
In a nutshell, the Viral Competitions Module is a web component developed by Allchorn Design that allows for effective online customer data collection. It gathers names, email addresses, cellphone numbers, demographic information and allows the participants to invite their friends/family to also give you their information.
What does it do?
A web page called a “landing page” is created on a new or existing domain (eg: www.yourdomain.com) which contains a straight forward web form for the participant to fill out. On submission, the entrant will be opting in to your database and sending a personalised email to their friend(s) to do the same. The system allows for 100% spam free data collection and through the right choice of incentive you can gather a considerable amount of valuable client data.
Who is it for?
The system has been developed for and tested on both large multi-franchise level deployments (eg: coffee shop chains), multi-national supply companies (eg: food manufacturers) and even small, single store level deployments (eg: one branch of a restaurant chain).
The module will be effective for just about any business looking to grow it’s client database.
How does it benefit me?
Having an extensive database of your customers is a valuable asset to any company. Throughout the duration of the competition(s), your name will be spread favourably amongst your target audience by the customers themselves (personalised referrals) and through a well conceived strategy (what prizes you’re offering and how regularly), you could make a considerable profit on the campaigns themselves.
What do I do with all this data?
Once you have a database of your clients and prospects, you can now email or sms them directly without being accused of spam since they will have effectively opted in (something we are very clear about in the entry process). Given that email is one of the highest ROI marketing mediums, you can now send marketing updates to your customers to inform them of specials, promotions, new competitions, and just about anything you deem relevant.
Allchorn Design can also assist in these future broadcasts and deliver quality reporting on the efficacy thereof.
The roadmap
The basic implementation includes:
Setting up of a domain & web hosting on your behalf
Registration and hosting costs charged separately by the hosting provider.
Custom design of the landing page
System implementation & testing
Reports and data supply
Twice on the first campaign, and twice monthly on future/on-going campaigns.
We can also offer any accompanied design / print / web services you might require for your campaign(s) which can be quoted upon subsequent to further discussion.
Please feel free to contact us for a consultation to assess your unique needs and get started.
Dionysus approached us with a brief to realign the website to better leverage the online medium. The site features a full CMS implementation, user registration, search, a blog, events calendar, discussion forum and a photo gallery.
This project for Dionysus went from initial consultation through information architecture, interface design, HTML/CSS coding, CMS implementation (Joomla!), content insertion and training.
The client was an absolute pleasure to work with, and we wish Irene, Seth, Kathy, Angie, QJ, Jeannette and everyone else all the best with their new website.
While we’re rebuilding the theme for allchorn.com, I thought it might be nice to get some opinions from anyone who cares to share what you think of the current design mockups produced so far…
This short video was created for one specific client, but I thought it might be useful to others too, so published it on Vimeo for whoever is interested to watch. It’s a tutorial on how to resize an image with an online photo editing service at Pixlr.
Yes, that title is correct. We don’t design for our clients, and by the same token we certainly don’t design for ourselves! Who we design for is the customer, our client’s clients.
So many designers these days are producing “questionnaires” that ask your favourite colour, do you want a symbol in your logo, what type of font do you like? All of these things -sorry to say- are not up to the company owner. They’re not up to the designer to impart their opinion on either. These factors are established by research.
Researching the the client’s company
Researching the industry
Researching the competition
Researching the end user/customer
This is where you draw your conclusions from. Not from the company owner’s nor the designer’s “opinion”.
Design is about communication
Nothing more, and nothing less. I sometimes get irritated when people say things as obvious as that to me, and while you might agree and get back to your normal way of doing things; take a minute and think about it.
You’re designing to communicate a message “buy this”, “subscribe here”, “register now”, “enquire”, and if your design efforts are not focussed around those objectives, you might as well be putting lipstick on a pig.
“Don’t try to be original. Just try to be good.” Paul Rand – 1914-1996
There are a lot of Paul Rand video clips and tributes going around the design community at the moment, and for sure, he deserves all the credit he can get.
There is one very important message I get from him where I can sense his frustration in trying to get his message across. It’s summed up in that quote above, and what it really comes down to is that people need to first become capable of the basics of communication before they can start innovating. Walk before you can run in other words.
Possibly adding fuel to the fire, but to at least put my opinion on the matter out there… here is my view on the prospect of web developers discontinuing support for Microsoft’s eight year old browser Internet Explorer 6 (released on August 27, 2001).
According to Wikipedia:
“The end-of-life support for Internet Explorer 6 is July 13, 2010″
That alone tells me that it is an actively supported means of people accessing websites for at least another 10 months.
A lot of opinions seem to be around the lack of standards support by the browser and I don’t dispute this fact, but you also can’t look beyond the fact that there are still users out there that are stuck with it. Unfortunate, but true.
Just so you’re clear on my position on the matter; we will support IE6 until there is what I deem to be a sufficiently low enough percentage of visitors using it. There will be exceptions in cases where I know for a fact that the audience of the site/intranet is closed enough and mandated to use a newer or different browser, but by rule of thumb, we will support it.
My clients’ reputations are important to me!
According to w3schools, last month 13.6% of users were still on Internet Explorer 6.
For technology to cause their image to possibly be tarnished to approximately 13% odd of their visitors is simply unacceptable. Especially when those possible problems are avoidable through producing “gracefully degradable” sites where necessary and providing code hacks (a sad reality my geek friends) to have them rendered properly.
Really people… if you’re not in the web design and development industry, and you can’t update your browser, then you probably wouldn’t give a toss about anything besides the fact that you’re inconvenienced by a breaking website! In my eyes, thats not good business.
A good coder should make a site work in all required browsers
The discussion often pops up in forums I frequent, and it’s usually someone having a hard time getting something to render consistently. While I do empathise with them (I have been there too), you need to suck it up, figure it out and make it work… it is your job, do it properly!
Usually someone with a bit more experience will chime in that it’s not that hard when you know how. Those people -in my opinion- are the true professionals. Not the guys whining about it and trying to get everyone to stop supporting it.
Upgrading your browser is necessary
All the above being said, don’t get the impression that I think the www should stagnate and indefinitely be stuck with archaic systems like IE6. There is a world beyond simple browsing, and the likes of the Mozilla Foundation, Google, Opera, Apple and even Microsoft themselves have forged on and created some far more modern, more secure, more user friendly and just better browsers.
We offer a web consulting service which covers web analysis and strategy, creative website design & redesign, CMS implementations, online marketing and content management training.
You can read some more about us here.
