iWeb

iWeb provides the personal touch for unique music site

Nick — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:33:40 +0000

When somebody gives you a painstakingly compiled music mix CD, you know that person really cares about you. It’s a way of saying, “this is who I am and this is what I love” in an effort to get closer. But after taking the time to ensure that the personalised music selection is just right, it’s seems a shame to hand it over with just the running order scrawled in felt tip pen on an inlay card. Wouldn’t it be much better if it looked more professional – like a proper music CD? This is where Mixpixie come in. And with the help of professional web developers iWeb, the Guernsey-based company has established the only website in the world where visitors can create truly personalised CDs. Often the simplest ideas are the most effective. At the new Mixpixie website, customers can choose album artwork from over 500 designs as well add their own message text and photos. And for that all-important music selection, there’s a library of over 8 million tracks to provide inspiration. There are other neat touches too. A unique audio upload feature allows the customer to record up to 20 seconds of their own voice to personalise their Mix CD. Plus customers are taken through the design process of the packaging step by step. At every stage, they can see a realtime preview of how the finished product will look. The role played by iWeb in this original e-commerce web design was to enable the logistics of selecting music and creating the finished product – not to mention allow customers to pay for it. This meant integration with the audio provider so that the music library is available legally to the customer. It also involved full back office integration to facilitate a smooth printing, ordering and delivering process. For the checkout section, iWeb set up Sage Pay to ensure secure transactions. The e-commerce web design project was completed by iWeb to an extremely tight deadline. Our expert team commenced work on 1st December 2011 and the MixPixie site was launched on 1st February 2012. Just in time for all those romantics to declare their love through music on Valentine’s Day.

Bounce Rate Demystified

Hedds — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:37:32 +0000

Hedds — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:00:31 +0000

Linked in is another social network that can be utilised to gain engagement in your website when the target audience is appropriate. Similar to Facebook and Twitter, there is the ability to setup a company or organisation profile, and setup groups to build your brand awareness, and grow your business.

LinkedIn Share Button

The LinkedIn Share button lets users share pages from your site back to their profile on LinkedIn with one single click. This is excellent for increasing your content distribution and building traffic back to your website. developer.linkedin.com/plugins/share-button

Google+

Hedds — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:56:11 +0000

Google+ is a new and expanding social network, with currently limited social media integration options. Although limited, it does offer the “+1 Button” which enables content to be shared and recommended to both friends, and also has a positive effect on search engine ranking. www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

Twitter

Hedds — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:48:22 +0000

Twitter is a real-time information network that connects people to the latest information about what they find interesting. It is now reporting to have over 200 million registered users, that use small text based status posts of up to 140 characters to spread their views, news, and general Simply find the public streams you find most compelling and follow the conversations.

Examples of the popular ‘Tweeters’

Twitter Buttons & Widgets

Similar to other social media platforms, Twitter also offers a number of tools and widgets that encourage social engagement with your users.

1. Tweet Button

The Tweet button lets users share pages from your site back to their Twitter profile page with one single click. This is excellent for increasing your content distribution and building traffic back to websites. “Sites like Quora.com receive roughly 30 clicks for every Tweet that comes from their site using the Tweet Button.” - Twitter, 2011 High Impact Areas Product Detail pages:

www.poised.co.uk

Above or beneath news, blog or other article posts:

www.iwebsolutions.co.uk

2. Follow Button

The Follow Button allows visitors of your website to “Follow” (or subscribe), to your Twitter feed. This can help to build your audience of followers, which the goal of general growth over time. “Leading video sharing sites on the Web have seen 70% increase in Replies, 131% increase in Retweets and 150% increase in Favorites.” – Twitter, 2011 High Impact Areas

In the global header or footer of the website, displayed across all web pages.

3. Twitter Widgets

Twitter offer small customisable widgets that you can embed directly into your website, which allow you to display status messages (or “tweets”) associated with your Twitter account. This can help build social engagement and awareness of your Twitter activities from your existing website userbase.

Profile Widget – Display a feed of the most recent Twitter updates.
Search Widget – Show real time search results for any search term.
Faves Widget – Display favourite tweets from your account.
List Widget – Enables you to display favourite tweets

4. Web Intents

Twitter’s Web Intents make it possible for users to interact with Twitter content directly in the context of your site without leaving the page. Essentially this means that visitors on your website can reply directly to tweeters, re-tweet your posts, favorite and follow directly without having to leave the your website.

5. Custom Twitter Profile

Twitter provide the ability to apply a customised design to your profile page. This enables you to give a professional, but branded feel to your profile, which makes your page more attention grabbing, and can help to build followers. See some examples of branded Twitter profile designs...

Facebook Sponsored Stories

Hedds — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:43:37 +0000

Similar to traditional Facebook ads, Sponsored Stories build upon existing organic interactions that occur between people and your business. People are naturally interested in the things that their friends care about, which makes this advertising feature very highly targeted, and offers the same demographic and budget control flexibility that comes with standard Facebook Ads. Sponsored stories can help you to build more fans, increase brand/app/page engagement, drive traffic and increase your potential leads. How it works

Someone likes your Page, interacts with your application, or checks-in to one of your locations
A story about this activity is generated on their friends' News Feeds, which may or may not be seen.
Sponsored Stories increase visibility of these stories by surfacing them on the right column of Facebook pages

Insights

Return on investment is key to any marketing campaign. Facebook provide an analytics platform named “Insights” which enables you to track your engagement and interaction levels, allowing you to report metrics on your Facebook Pages, Applications, Social Plugins, and Ads. Build user profiles and understand your Facebook fan base using demographics such as age, gender, location and language from your Facebook metrics. Gauge an understanding of your Facebook Page fan growth with metrics such as daily and monthly active users, daily new likes, and total likes over time. Gain an understanding of the amount of users that are being referred via your website, by receiving metrics from integrations of Facebook Social Plugins such as the Like Button, Send Button, Comments box, and organic sharing. Insights for Facebook Applications allows you to get an indication of the number of users on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. This gives you a good idea on whether your users are simply installing the application, or whether it is building good engagement levels. The Facebook Ads analytics provides you with metrics that allow you to assess the success of your ad or sponsored story campaign. Such metrics include clicks, impressions, click-through-rate (CTR), and cost.

Facebook Ads

Hedds — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:33:15 +0000

Facebook offer a powerful advertising platform, named Facebook Ads. Low click through rates, mixed with very flexible targeting options allows for a great opportunity to kick start any Facebook marketing campaign. Target adverts directly to Facebook applications, events, your Facebook Page, or back to your website. This can help to build awareness, drive sales and grow your fan base depending on where you target your ads. Highly targeted based on demographics such as location, language, education, work, age, gender, interests, allowing for accurate targeting directly to your target users. Budget management allows for full control – possible to run on a Cost per click (CPC), or cost per impression (CPM).

BLOG stands for Better Listings On Google

Hedds — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:12:22 +0000

Whilst the spotlight is currently on social networking as the online marketing goldmine, it’s easy to forget that the good old blog still has its uses in e-commerce website design. Here are just a few ways in which more emphasis on blogging can benefit your business:

Better search engine optimisation

Blogs lend themselves to the type of content search engines look for. And when they find it, you get improved rankings. That’s because blogs are all about words – and search engines love words. So they will get crawled by search-engine bots (not as nasty as it sounds) more quickly. Blogs are also natural link builders – as any professional web developers will tell you.

Add a touch of personality

Even the most faceless corporation can project a friendly image by communicating directly with customers. Because even if you just talk about the difficulties of putting your car through its MOT, you’re communicating to people in a way they can relate to. On the other hand, nobody really wants to hear about your projected sales figures for the next quarter. Not even if you read this sort of thing to your kids at night.

Helping to build your brand

If you know your audience (and you really should), you can deliver a targeted message that’s guaranteed to strike a chord. Let’s take the fashion industry: you could spend a whole blog talking about what a celebrity is wearing. To the untrained eye, it may have little to do with your company. But include a few links to your products in the text and your brand becomes identified with high fashion and fame. It’s a slow drip-drip process but be patient – it works in the long run.

Attracting media attention

Journalists – if they can get somebody else to do their job, they will. So many of them scour the blogosphere looking for source material. If your blog gains a reputation for being worth a read on a regular basis, you can bet your audience will include a few writers on the hunt for something juicy. So why not encourage them in and your business may end up receiving priceless press coverage? There’s also the phenomenon known as ‘going viral’ – where a subject seems to proliferate across social media as everybody shares it at once. If that happens to your business, then (providing it’s not too negative) you’ve got it made.

Becoming a ‘Thought Leader’

You may fancy yourself as a respected sage and guru on your chosen subject – whether it’s advertising creativity, professional web design, make-up, cleaning or advanced photocopying. Well, don’t hide your light under a bushel because the more opinionated you are, the better. It demonstrates you know what you are talking about in a niche market – and that leads to confidence in your brand. Become an authoritative, trusted source and it reflects well on your business, which leads to bigger sales and better profits. The beneficial effects of effective blogging in e-commerce website design shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s still one of the most important weapons in the arsenal of any web design company – and that alone should tell you that blogging isn’t yesterday’s news just yet.

Facebook Pages

Hedds — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:28:05 +0000

A Facebook Page is the public home for an organisation or entity on Facebook. Whether this be a brand, company, sports team, or public figure for example, it should be something that someone can “like”.

Examples of huge brands with Facebook Pages

Page Tabs & Apps

Facebook Pages can be tailored to deliver a user experience relevant for your target audience using custom page tabs and applications. This enables you to create an experience for your users that is unique and engaging. Each Page comes bundled with some functionality by default, such as the Wall and Info. There are also hundreds of pre-written applications available on Facebook that can be installed and re-purposed for use on your Facebook Page. Bespoke applications or tabs can also be created to meet your exact requirements when there are no applications available. It is impossible to list all possible uses for a Facebook Page, but the following points give an insight into a few of the popular methods. There are literally thousands of applications that can be added to your Facebook Page, which can be found by using the global search in Facebook directly.

1. Home / Welcome Tab

Each Facebook Page can have it’s own ‘Home’, which is essentially treated as the homepage equivalent of your Facebook Page.

A bespoke landing page design helps increase signups by being attention-grabbing, and also is more recognisable as it is tailored to your own brand.
Facebook landing pages can also have a different state depending on whether a user has “liked” your page or not. This provides the opportunity to entice users to like your page, by restricting access to certain and features, such as coupon codes that are only for Facebook users.

2. Branded Banner

Every Facebook Page is allowed one main profile picture. Most Facebook pages that you see do not take full advantage of this space, and simply upload a small logo. To help maximise potential in this area, a bespoke banner can be designed similar to skyscraper adverts that are common across the Internet. This can help re-enforce your branding, and help to boost promotions currently running in the business.

3. Wall

The Facebook Wall is a platform which enables you to post short status updates, such as news updates. When popular, these updates are fed into your fan’s news feeds, and can often have a viral effect on engaging large amounts of users. Some examples of content used on the Wall...

News updates are automatically posted directly via twitter or blog to increase engagement back to the Twitter account, and the website. Tagging a small question onto the end of a status update is just one way to help entice fans to engage and interact a little more.
Posting links to relevant websites, ideally your own website to build traffic and targeted leads back to your site.
Media posts, such as videos and photos help to catch the eye and attract higher engagement levels, especially when the content has a “wow” factor.
Asking open ended questions which a number of pre-determined multiple choice answers in a poll, is another method to build interest and engagement levels.
The posting of other organisation relevant content, such as new product releases, instore events, virtual events, and conferences offers useful content, and adds more of a purpose to the page.

4. Media sharing

Use YouTube to showcase videos of product demonstrations, product reviews, or keynotes that you may have delivered at conferences. Showcase these by posting to fans through your Facebook wall feed, and store permanently using the Facebook Youtube app.
Use Flickr or other image apps to showcase photos taken at events, conferences, of products, or any other related imagery. Post a few select images and share as updates on the main wall to build engagement.
Publish presentations, such as insights, company statistics, or keynote presentations for your fans to see via the Slideshare Facebook App.

5. RSS / Blog Syndication

Use RSS Graffiti to syndicate any RSS or Atom feed content directly into your Facebook wall. Graffiti RSS periodically checks for changes and feeds new RSS items onto your wall.
Connect your Twitter account directly with Facebook to share your tweets with Facebook Page fans.
Automatically post new blog articles directly to both your Facebook and Twitter accounts, using blogging software such as WordPress.

6. Customer Service & Communication

Use the official Facebook “reviews” app to build customer reviews about your company or products. When one of your fans posts a review, it will be published on their own wall.
Do you continually find yourself answering the same questions to your fans or customers? If the answer is yes, then you can use the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) App to help reduce the load on your customer service department.
Create a forum like community using ‘Facebook Discussions’ to engage fans and create a forum inside of your Facebook Page.
Contact Us – Add a Bing Map, contact form, all social media contacts, address and telephone numbers to your Facebook Page for the ultimate all-in-one contact us section.
Polls & Quizzes – Add polls, quizzes and games to your Facebook Page can be fun, engaging and viral.

7. Promotion, Competition, Freebies

Create bespoke sections to offer free product samples, setup promotional codes specifically for Facebook users, and run competitions.

8. Email Marketing

Install MailChimp or Constant Contact to your Facebook Page to continue to build your email marketing through this social media channel. Both the MailChimp and Constant Contact Facebook Apps allow you to collect email addresses for the purpose of email marketing. Mail Chimp and certain other email marketing providers also allow you to post newsletter campaigns directly to your Facebook Wall and Facebook Page when you send out a campaign, for that added extra bit of engagement.

9. E-commerce (or F-commerce)

It is now possible to sell your products directly through a Facebook Page, via 3rd party applications such as Zibaba. Offer fan-only discounts, create coupons, customisable look-and-feel to meet your branding, and sold through PayPal.

10. Local Businesses

Claim your business page to allow your customers to “check-in” when visiting your premises / business. Also, for added check-in engagement, you can setup your FourSquare PlaceWidget, which enables FourSquare users to check-in to your location.
Have lots of premises? Add your own store-locator to your Facebook Page to enable fans and non-fans to find your local business quicker and easier.

11. Bespoke Applications / Content Pages

Facebook offer an extremely flexible platform for custom applications to be created. In the event that what you are looking for does not exist, then it is likely that it will be possible to achieve. If you have some interesting content

Open Graph – A more enhanced social connection

Hedds — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:18:38 +0000

Facebook’s meta tags, or more commonly known as the Open Graph, offers a way to optimise your website, and leverage your existing data in a way that allows for a more enhanced social connection between you and your users.

Who can it benefit?

The Open Graph is designed for web pages that represent profiles of real world things – such as products, songs, books, films, games; but can also be used for articles such as news items and blog posts. This means that the majority of websites can benefit from the use of the Open Graph, including:

E-commerce websites selling any products – such as books, games, music, movies, etc.
Websites that publish news articles or blog posts.
Business directory or business improvement district websites

Why use the Open Graph?

It offers your users the opportunity to like more of your pages, news articles, blog posts, or products. Each of your web pages that are created as an Open Graph object will appear in the ‘Activities and Interests’ section of a user’s profile when they like your page.
A more enhanced set of data available through the Facebook search results.