Today is Chris’s birthday, and to celebrate his wife has made a delicious cake for all the office to enjoy, thank you, and happy birthday Chris!
Entries from March 2012
Launch of The Medical Specialist Group website
March 14th, 2012 · Edward · No Comments
Guernsey’s specialist medical group now has a new brand identity and website, both created by Betley Whitehorne. The Medical Specialist Group, who recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, required a cleaner and fresher identity moving away from a traditional identity and towards a very successful contemporary one.
No CommentsTags: Branding · Design · News · Web
Increased visits for Lovells Property
March 13th, 2012 · Ric · No Comments
Towards the end of last year we launched a new website for Lovells Property that couple a beautiful design with improved speed and functionality, and it’s been working! Taking a look at some of the stats we collect the unique visitors are up over 27% from last year and page views a whooping 76%! It’s not just the organic search that results that have improved. We’ve worked at optimising their Adword campaign and managed to squeeze an extra 80% of performance from the same budget by carefully balancing CPC bids against the top performing keywords.
No CommentsTags: Clients · Lovells Property · Web
Thousands of WordPress sites compromised
March 7th, 2012 · Ric · No Comments
Over 200,000 web pages have been affected by a rogue anti-virus campaign designed to trick users into installing a Trojan. Most of the targets were WordPress based sites highlighting the potential vulnerability in the popular blogging and CMS software. Sadly, due it’s popularity and the very simple and open plugin architecture it’s a common and easy target. We’ve patched any blogs we have running on WordPress but would advise anyone to think carefully about using it to power their business website. In particular any third party plugins should be thoroughly checked before being installed and your site should be regularly monitored for problems.
No CommentsTags: Web
CinéGuernsey website launched with Microformats
March 7th, 2012 · Ric · No Comments
We are pleased to announce the launch of the new CinéGuernsey website built in HTML5 and making extensive use of Microformats for the event listings.
Microformats allow search engines such as Google as well as other software to understand the the meaning of the content and display them accordingly. For instance Google could now use the data from the website to automatically popular cinema listings in localised and mobile searches increasing relevance and click through rates.
No CommentsTags: Clients · News · Web
Google Analytics — Social network tracking and article reader analysis
March 7th, 2012 · Edward · No Comments
Google recently released an updated version of Google Analytics with an improved user interface. Included in the changes are clearer icons, improved graphing and faster display through caching.
We decided to see what we could do with the new version and came across two additional areas that will be of interest to many clients.
Article Consumption
Many of our clients produce regular content in the form of articles on their websites. These might be in the form of informational articles, news articles or job positions.
Traditionally page views are tracked to give an indication of content consumption but this has always been a bit frustrating as it gives a simplistic metric. We were looking into finding a way of providing a more meaningful metric based on actual page usage. Rather than measure that a person has clicked on a page, we were hoping to discover a way of measuring what they did on that page.
No CommentsTags: News · Social Networking · Web
Announcing our new website reporting and maintenance systems
March 2nd, 2012 · Ric · 2 Comments
Visual analysis and interactivity lets us find and diagnose errors quickly
I think of websites as living, organic entities. They rarely stay the same, a good site should be regularly updated with fresh content, new ideas and there are a lot of external factors than can effect a them.
The browsers we use are constantly changing, every four weeks a new version of Chrome is released, every six Firefox gets updated and Internet Explorer 9 and 10 are a massive overhaul of Microsoft’s offering potentially breaking backwards compatibility. Additionally, more and more people are using mobile phones or on tablets and these new form factors and methods of interaction bring new problems and challenges to deal with. Under-the-hood the server the website runs on gets updated with security patches and new versions of software, or hardware fails and needs to be replaced.
“We record and analyse nearly a million events every day”
All of these factors and many more combine to make websites potentially very unstable so it’s no surprise that from time-to-time errors occur, be they a bug in the website itself, Google updating the way a feature in Chrome works or a change in third party code meaning the site fails to correctly load. So how do we keep track of these potential pitfalls and respond to them?
2 CommentsTags: News · Web
Facebook rolling out timeline pages this month
March 2nd, 2012 · Ric · No Comments
If you log into Facebook you may be prompted to update your profile to the new timeline view. On 30 March all profiles will be upgraded so make sure you check your pages before then. Originally the timeline wasn’t available for business pages but that’s now changed meaning a lot of ‘welcome page’ and ‘like gates’ are about to break — lets hope you’ve not just been sold one by an agency. The new timeline is more visually stunning that the old profile pages making welcome pages less important than they once were. We’ve been updating our charity client’s Facebook pages, such as Volunteer.gg in preparation and you can see some examples below.
No CommentsTags: Charity Work · Clients · Web