Blog

Apr 24, 2009

Independent Risk Reporting was a two-part project, firstly to create a simple informational homepage and contact for the client and secondly to create a risk reporting questionnaire system, this brief port covers the brochure website that was created with PHP and the Smarty framework. The site needed a clean and professional design and the homepage was relatively information heavy, including RSS news feeds from Reuters. The contact information page was seen as a key to the success of the site and time was spent making sure information was clearly presented, the contact form worked well and a google map was included.

Mar 2, 2009

Web standards and why I really don”t care Originally published: 2nd March 2009 but before the content gets lost I thought I would republish it here! I really think this view is even more valid now we have HTML5 and CSS3 appearing, not to mention dealing with IE6, 7, 8 and 9! Read why I really don”t care about Web standards

Sep 1, 2008

Here I descibe in detail my approach to taking a working control landing page and turning it into something all together more effective. My landing page optimization process, fully at work. The current “control” page The current landing page has evolved through vigorous AB split testing on PPC. We utilize our highest volume term for this testing, the “Loans” exact match keyword. We have very similar variations of this page for other terms – with the only difference being the header “Search 100s of loans, unrivalled access to 100s of loans, exclusively for homeowners”.

Aug 1, 2008

It is times like this which I had an expert typographer at hand. Instead I have to make do with trial and error and the mixed opinion of my friends and colleagues – which is always a rather ugly and unpleasant business. The question is which fonts work best on the following briefus.com logos? briefus.com is the [creative team workflow system][1] I have been working on, it is for small to medium creative teams and agencies – read more about this project on [briefus.com][1].

Jul 30, 2008

Landing page optimization is the process of honing the pages your visitors land on to achieve a particular objective – this could be buy something, read an article or give you some data. I’ve just completed a fantastic course from Marketing Experiements covering this topic – very good material, well presented and the weather was great out in Florida. They have given me this lovely seal to display on my site.

Jul 25, 2008

I was looking through some old files and stumbled upon an old cartoon I wrote, I can’t imagine anyone finding these interesting apart from those people actually in the cartoons – but you never know. And that’s as far as I got. If anyone can suggest how the story should continue then leave me a comment!

May 14, 2008

Despite the project still being in the early stages of development I managed to get to the final of Schroders sponsored Bright Young Things and received some great advise from my mentor Julian Winser. I’m sure this will all be a great help in the long-term development of this creative agency workflow tool. It even managed to generate some publicity in the local press. So, what is briefus.com [briefus.com][2] is for anyone who has to deliver work against deadlines such as project managers and helpdesks but the emphasis is on creative teams.

Mar 19, 2008

This design hopes to split the sales messages off onto a front page and then concentrate more on support and reassurance messages on subsequent pages. This design went live in Feb 2008 and so far has had mixed results. Click through rates once customers arrive on the app form are very good but the extra drop-off because of the “pre” page seems to be limiting it to similar performance to the current control design.

Mar 6, 2008

We could see that a huge amount of SEO traffic was navigating to the calculator even though the links to the calculator were not emphasised. We added the calculator to try and engage that traffic in order to improve CTE. By giving customers access to the functionality that they want we hoped to keep them on the site longer and expose them to more marketing. Even more traffic reached the calculator but CTE was unaffected.

Feb 4, 2008

This application was the technically most advanced that I built for Central Trust and involved AJAX validation and postcode lookups as well as front-end only Javascript for tooltips and highlight the section you are in.