I recently read Justin Harrison’s “return to blogging” post and I felt unusually compelled to do something along the same lines.

If you’ve kept in touch with me over the last year or so you might know that I have teamed up with South Africa’s leading ecommerce software provider, ShopDirect. To the point where I am actually managing the entire production department amongst other things.

The world of ecommerce is an interesting field and one in which, of course, I am learning a great deal about. Not only from a technical and creative standpoint, but also from a view of what works and what doesn’t, what the reasons are for the success and failure of online stores are… and how the latter can be prevented.

Without giving too much away, we’re working on some exciting new projects, both internal and for our many store owners (about 450 at last count). We’re soon going to be able to comfortably accommodate store owners from the small home business through to enterprise level deployments… each with solutions tailor made around their unique requirements and budgets.

An exciting time for us, and an exciting time for the South African ecommerce industry.

You’re welcome to drop me a line if you want to know any more about this.

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!

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.

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.

Click on an option to view larger

How to resize an image online from Ross Allchorn on Vimeo.

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.