Tech Culture
Design Practice

Is your website like a leaky bucket?

A lot of companies make money by driving traffic to their sites through marketing or SEO campaigns in the hope that some of their visitors will turn into customers. This makes sense when attention is plentiful and online marketing is cheap. However as marketing costs rise and attention becomes increasingly scarce, companies need to look outside of the traditional marketing funnel. Rather than simply increasing traffic, companies need to start focussing on conversions. After all there's no point spending large sums of money pushing people to your site if they leave when they get there.
Tech Culture

Don't treat your website like a commodity

The traditional approach to product development involves coming up with new idea and then driving as many people towards that product as possible, in the hope that some of them will want it. As such we adopt the language of marketing, and talk about marketing funnels and conversion rates. If our marketing department has done a good job they will have created a campaign that not only generates traffic, but creates a previously unrecognised need. Tired? Need a break? Why not have a KitKat?
Tech Culture

Are Social Media Consultants Harming Social Media?

The logic goes like this. The traditional marketing funnel is broken. You can't just throw a bunch of money at an advertising campaign and have that turn into customers. At least not to the levels you could when there were just three channels or four channels of communication. The web and social media has changed all that. So rather than waiting for customers to come to you, you have to go to them and engage with them in the same way they engage with each other. So that means blogs, that means Twitter streams and than means Facebook applications. Basically that means moving your marketing messages into the social media space . Most companies have little idea how the web works, let alone how people use it, so in order to reach this new generation of consumer, they hire the services of a Social Media Consultant.
Tech Culture

How your online business can survive a global recession

Traditional business is simple. You create a product or service you think customers will want, and then spend money to drive people towards that product or service. If you're lucky, some of those people will want to user your product or service and you'll make money. This can be through direct charges or, in the case of content creation, selling this attention on to other companies.
Tech Culture

Whither W3C?

I've been a strong proponent of web standards since first being introduced to them "back in 2000 by Jefrey Zeldman":http://www.zeldman.com/com0100b.html. I started discussing standards on my "local mailing list":http://www.brightonnewmedia.org/, then on my blog, and finally at conferences and events. I even "wrote a book":http://www.cssmastery.com/ on the subject.
Tech Culture

More Blogging in Government

A few months ago I had the pleasure of being invited to talk to a group of civil servants on the subject of "blogging in government":http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2005/09/blogging_in_government/. The talk was part of a larger event that also covered web accessibility, so myself and "Tom":http://www.plasticbag.org/ were only really able to scratch the surface. The day was really fun, and I was surprised how interested people were in the subject. So much so, I was invited back to give an expanded talk, which I gave yesterday.