Photo by E01

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.

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 hacked twice 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
• Email broadcasting
• Customer data collection campaigns (see our latest viral campaign offering here)
• Analytics and reporting
• Online training

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!

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:

1. Setting up of a domain & web hosting on your behalf
   Registration and hosting costs charged separately by the hosting provider.
2. Custom design of the landing page
3. System implementation & testing
4. 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.

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.

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.

Here is a list of browsers I recommend:

• Mozilla Firefox (my choice)
• Opera
• Apple’s Safari (available for Windows machines too)
• Google Chrome
• Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8

Since we’re doing a lot more online marketing these days with our new offering and a lot of it involves the use of social media (Twitter, Facebook etc.), it’s interesting to note how things are ever changing. Email becoming old fashioned?! Who would ever have thought that hey?

Let me know what you think.

So instead of waxing lyrical about how to do this, and what not to do online, I thought I’d post a clip… so take a few minutes and check it out.

Personally, I found it so funny the way Dave refers to it as “the Twitter”.

You can add to Kevin’s eight hundred thousand followers and increase his swelling noggin by following him here.

Here is our checklist.

1. All links checked
   Are your internal and external links all correct? Think about hardcoded links and dynamic links. If your site is database driven, you can check all internal links with a script.
2. Page title tags consistent & optimal
   Your page title tags are those that appear in the title bar above File, Edit, View etc. It’s important for search engine indexing that the title is clear, concise and depicts what is on the page.
3. Search engine friendly URLs
   If you’re using a CMS you should ideally have some form of URL rewriting feature in place that converts dynamic URLs to search engine friendly ones (example.com?pageid=15 to example.com/product-name)
4. Search functionality
   If you have search functionality on your site, does it work correctly? Is it intuitive and are the search results accurately portraying the information the searcher is seeking?
5. Screen resolution
   Does your website display nicely on screen resolutions your visitors are likely to be using?
6. Content rendering
   Sometimes content can become a bit mangled when copying characters from MS Word or other web pages, and as such a good thorough toothcomb inspection of your content should allow you to rectify any issues.
7. 301 redirects
   If you’re redesigning your site, you want people who have possibly bookmarked your old URLs to automatically come through to the new pages. 301 redirects are the universally recognised “change of address” for web pages and to retain existing traffic and rankings this is gravely important!
8. Custom 404 error pages
   When someone hits a URL on your site that does not exist it will display a 404 error page. These can be customised, and are an effective catchment system for preventing the loss of visitors that hit a generic 404 error page. The page should ideally display with the same/similar aesthetic as your site and offer a clear explanation, navigation and search.
9. Analytics implementation
   If you have a website online, you want to measure it’s efficacy. You can track visitors, bounce rates, conversion rates and a multitude of other interesting and useful information by simply installing analytics software.
10. Favicon implementation
    A small visual feature which can give your site a more “complete” look. Not only will it be an icon used in tabs, but also in bookmarks making it easier for people to find your pages if you make them stand out.
11. Meta tag implementation
    Not as important as they used to be, but still worth doing once you’ve researched your keywords. Don’t stuff your keywords in, but rather keep them relative and to the point.
12. XML Sitemap
    A sitemap is an important feature which tells the search engines what your pages are and how frequently they can expect to be updated. This allows them to index your site at intervals which are in line with your updates.
13. Form to email/database
    If you have forms submitting to email addresses or to a database, make sure they all send correctly, and to the right people/places. Make sure those responsible for responding are aware of their duties as well as any autoresponders are setup correctly and working.
14. User administration settings
    If you have more than one user, you’ll need to make sure they have sufficient (and not too much) authority on the system managing your website.
15. Speed tests
    Is your server performing as it should? Are there scripts/flash/large images causing slow loading times?
16. www and no-www
    If visitors access your website at www.example.com, they should be able to also access it sans-www (http://example.com). It’s a setting your host should enable, and if not perhaps consider another host.
17. Browser compatability
    What browsers are your visitors using? Global statistics can tell you initially, and soon enough you’ll know what your visitors are using from your analytics. At the time of writing, we feel it important for your site to work in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera.

These items are in no particular order and bare in mind that depending on the project, there could be more or less items to consider (eg: spell checking, proof reading, legal requirements etc.)

How many times have you been sitting/standing/lying somewhere and all of a sudden, you have this brilliant idea. Maybe it was something that would enhance your business, or your life… maybe it was something completely new. If you haven’t experienced this before… no need for you to carry on reading. If you have, please continue.

When this moment strikes, I think I’m correct in assuming that it struck at the most inopportune moment and you either promised to remember it or decided straight away to shelve the idea. Perhaps the idea required more than you were willing to invest (either in time, money or effort).

Well, what I’ve learnt in the last 10 years on the web is that if you don’t at least try it, you’ll never know if it could have succeeded and you’ll always have that niggling question in the back of your mind “could it have worked?”. I’ve decided to retain focus on what we do, but to some degree, act on impulse and take the plunge on things I’ve otherwise been hesitant to try.

What I admittedly often do is over-analyse things and sometimes those plans never become more than diagrams on paper, mindmaps on my computer and design mockups in my projects folder. My wife has criticised me over this, and she is right… I need to dive in and say “screw it, let’s do it” and thats what I’m now committing to doing.

To my clients, I’d say you can also benefit from this, and the advice in general. Not every angle needs to be covered before making a start on something and I’ve learnt that the web is an evolutionary medium where if you don’t act soon, the moment will pass and when you’re actually ready, there is something newer, better and all (or some of) your plans will be rendered null and void.

My primary school motto rings true:

From small beginnings, better fortune follows