Momentary Lapse of Reason: A Quick Warning

The proliferation and ease of publishing content in the public domain throughout the web should also be considered too – a momentary lapse of tweeting can lead to some serious offence, such as Jimmy Carrs recent lack of judgement in making “car crash jokes” around the same time as a tragic event on the M5 near Taunton. The result of your own lack of judgement could be potential loss of business or even something more serious events such as investigation from the police as two seventeen year old boys found out recently when they added racially charged comments to their Twitter feed and were subject to legal action.

The examples given are fairly extreme but with the power of the web, and ease of access to it in the western world, comes responsibility to ensure that what you publish is in line with your own strict [or conciously liberal] policies on what is appropriate within the law and within your public image.

An Example: Simcoemedia Design Consultancy

Over the last 10 years Simcoemedia has built up a solid reputation and brand as a creative multimedia agency which both reinforces company values to existing clients and attracts new work. Much of the work in establishing this has been built up online through the use of the following media:

Portfolio or bloging websites

Simcoemedia runs several independent websites containing design portfolio items, design articles, audio-soundtracks and film reviews. The content on these sites are all original and generated by Peter Simcoe as part of ongoing creative output in one form or another. They are particularly valuable in that the direction, management and contribution to Simcoemedia branding are completely unique – there are no other companies with vested interests in sharing any revenue or search listings. On the downside, they take time to establish, optimise for SEO and populate with appropriate content and links before they are noticed by search engines as having any importance. Here is a list of these sites:

• Simcoemedia Design Consultancy – design portfolio items
• Design-Design – design articles for business and academia
• Audio-Echo – audio porfolio with shopping cart and film reviews
• Simcoe-Shop – photographic portfolio with shopping cart

Stock Websites

For creative people, uploading audio, video and images to stock websites to sell to the public [they may be other designers, video producers or publishers] provides another channel of exposure for your work. Being part of a large online shop in one form or another does group you with the rest of the creatives and community so it is harder to stand out amongst the crowd but with larger numbers of people involved comes larger budgets and more investment in advertising with a greater reach. iStockphoto has a worldwide reputation with creative networks such as The Envato Network gaining ground in popularity. As a contributing artist to these global network websites I am able to have a profile page with links to my other portfolios that provide SEO value through the ability to add a profile page and link to pages with a good page rank [and even if theres a no-follow tag disallowing 'link juice'*, external links are still important], increase in my digital footprint and provide reassurance to potential buyers by the fact that I have passed the rigorous standards of websites such as iStockphoto.com.

* Link Juice, in simple terms, is the value search engines place upon the recommendation or linking of an external site to another – eg if Microsoft or Apple were to directly link to my website without the addition of a ‘no follow’ tag, then search engines would think that I must be an important site because I ve been linked to by a very important site and will increase my Page Rank [importance on the web] and therefore my search engine rankings.

• Simcoemedia on iStockphoto.com
• Simcoemedia on AudioJungle.net
• Simcoemedia on Photodune.net

Social Media and Other sites

As we get closer to social media in our discussion regarding digital footprint, the lines between professional and non-professional activity can more easily be crossed and therefore more caution is urged. Just because something is freely available and can publish any thoughts you may have on any subject does not mean it should be used. I have a pretty strict policy on social media use – ie do not allow anything to be published that you would not be happy for your clients to read or view. The list of social media below is in order of priority and preference I place on it along with a brief summary of its use:

• Simcoemedia YouTube Channel – video portfolio
• Simcoemedia Twitter Account – design related tweets
• LinkedIn – online resume and updated business related news
• Simcoemedia Google + Page – interesting photos and basic company updates
• Simcoemedia Facebook Account – linked to twitter with less formal design commentary

Digital Footprint Diagram

Below is a diagram of Simcoemedia’s digital footprint – you can also download the Simcoemedia Digital Footprint Diagram in PDF format. Larger circles indicate priority in time and content whereas smaller circles are considered to be of lower priority. Twitter is linked to many of the sites and can be seen on the footer of Simcoemedia, Design-Design, Audio-Echo as well as being fed into Facebook, Linked In and other sites – you can see Twitter’s main stream as a dotted line connecting many of the sites together. RSS feeds are broadcast from WordPress based websites and are fed into sites such as Linked In – titles also appear in the footers of all Simcoemedia WordPress based sites.

Simcoemedia uses many different sites for different purposes and goals. Some sites require updates and effort put into creating content more than others – others remain static for longer. Design-Design, the blog you are reading is updated once each month at least and new articles require detailed attention and significant time to produce. Simcoemedia Design Consultancy website is updated when certain projects are completed that add to the overall portfolio breadth and depth – not all projects make it to the porfolio as some skills, design styles or methods are already covered.

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Existing Example

For the benefit of providing a good example for this article, we will take the example of a client of mine – Torse Ltd – as they have a particularly tricky dilemma in the way they present information to their current and potential future customers. Torse Ltd is an energy broker based in Nottingham in the East Midlands of England. Their ongoing struggle is with 4 aspects of providing information for their customers:

• Dealing with the tarnished reputation that energy brokers and similar services have across the UK. Torse Ltd happen to be an honest, straightforward, straight talking company with a loyal customer base. However, when dealing with potential customers they must wrestle with the generally corrupt and devious reputation these type of services have acquired.
• Providing a detailed and customised individual response to the energy requirements and recommendations for each client, ensuring that the right energy contracts are provided for them. This means that it is very difficult to create an online energy assessment form where ‘one size fits all’ – a contract is assessed and finalised using human judgement and experience. The problem here is that on initial impressions Torse are then at a disadvantage because they cannot offer an immediate web based answer to the question “how much can I save with Torse?”.
• Generating high quality and useful output from the media channels available to the company. The energy market is a notoriously fluctuating beast with sensitivity to changes in world affairs and economics. Keeping up with all of this and generating good quality content is a difficult task.
• Producing content that is relevant to business owners with varying degrees of knowledge and understanding is a skill that requires a deep understanding of the activities, motivators and range of knowledge that your audience will have and providing a medium level of depth for the majority whilst catering for those who need to know more about specific aspects of the subject to make an informed decision by providing access to these. The browsers and HTML were designed for this purpose amongst others.

Opportunities

Website static content

Generating web content describing your aims, services, products or even terms is usually at the very least a time consuming task, but is also usually a very difficult task in that taking the principle of not wasting potential clients time – you want to provide the least complexity that provides maximum results. Almost every product or service we use has a level of complexity beyond our desire or need to know and so we pick and choose the elements we read to ensure we know the most in the shortest time. This is where it becomes tricky – where do people begin to switch off and either lose interest or experience information overload?

News items and dynamic content

Quality news items for the purpose of blog pages on a website, or even in a PDF newsletter, are tough to write – no matter which sector you work in. Why? Because a really good news item delves into a subject that is either brand new or provides a different perspective for consideration whilst reaching directly to the audience. If you are writing bland, generic, self congratulatory news items for the sake of writing then you are doing more harm than good both in terms of your time and effort and the reputation you are trying to establish – provide news items clearly targeted for your audiences needs, aspirations and expectations and provide a unique style or perspective to ensure that they begin to pick you out from the wealth of web pages clambering for attention. Essentially, do alot of in depth research and ensure you can be bold, daring and get your facts right all at the same time!

Short messages and pointers

I am really talking about the power of Twitter here – limited and overrated as it is, it does have a place. It is the marketing answer to a quick heads up about the latest goings on in a company and if written intelligently, can provide the public and followers with an insight into completed projects, upgrades, new offices, news items worthy of attention – communication that your audience wants to hear that could impact upon or benefit them or communication that relays your honesty and commitment to a specific product or service.

Other websites recommending your services

Carefully selected partnerships or lists of ‘friends’ can really be an advantage in sharing good quality sites – the visitors of one site are recommended to the other sites of a similar or ‘of interest’ nature. These are often found in a footer or sidebar of a website and almost act as mini-ads for the partners / friends. Facebook has not been mentioned here yet and for many in business to business based services it is not an appropriate or particularly productive channel in my opinion.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing on the web has the potential for increasing traffic and sales from your website via groups of people online who are given the task of selling your products via blogs, adverts, links and other methods familiar to those browsing the web. However, I personally think that in certain circumstances this can lead to the web being populated with biased reviews and misleading or exaggerated information. Why? Well, if you are paid to review a product or can make money from people buying a product or service you are more likely to write a dishonest or misleading review unless you have the ability to only sell those products or services that you rate the highest. Affiliate marketing is a method that works but there is no doubt it is open to abuse and tends to populate the web with exaggeration or misinformation.

Other media types

If there are other methods for communicating your message then these may be attractive to returning viewers. Creating episodes of video content, a series of exhibition or a podcast can ensure that returning readers find something of benefit to them each time therefore increasing the real value of the site.

Measuring Success or Failure

The key to keeping customers interested in coming back to the example site, www.torse.co.uk, is to make it of value to the reader. How do we measure what is of value to customers? There are various tools and techniques that could be employed to establish where customer value could be attributed:

Web Statistics

There are many ways of obtaining webstats including the use of Google Analytics and most web hosting companies will have their own statistics generators from log files on your site. How are these useful? Well, you can establish where people are spending most of their time and which pages tend to get overlooked. Then it is a case of analysing whether it is because the information is buried or simply not of interest. Once these trends have been analysed it is down to the analyst to provide insight as to recommending change, removal or redesign of a page.

Voting via Google +1, Digg, Stumble Upon [or other]

Allowing your readers to easily “like”, “+1″ or “digg” a news item, page, gallery or portfolio could generate a whole raft of interest from other sites designed to highlight or promote popular news items, useful websites and those pages that are of particular interest to internet groups. The traditional “like” system on Facebook is currently facing a small but growing challenge from Google’s +1 and with Google having such dominance over the web, it is important to take note of this development.

Direct feedback via survey email or phone

This has to be handled fairly delicately in many ways so as not to annoy your existing / potential clients or even use data you have access to in the form of email addresses, phone numbers or addresses in an illegal or inappropriate manner. Sending simple customer surveys through phone, email or even postal channels can provide an insight into what aspects of your content were useful to them and what they as readers or customers would like to see on the site in the form of articles or frequently asked questions. In many instances a guide to content can be found by assessing the enquiries made via web forms or phone and looking at how these can be covered on the website to answer these questions.

Increase in sales

Another indicator of success can be an increase in sales. However, attributing this to web content can be a difficult task though using tools such as Google Analytics, iMapt and other similar tracking tools can provide an insight into the popularity of your content and consequential activity. Paid for tools such as iMapt do provide additional insight into activity on your site and in some cases provide live warnings when someone enters the site.

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• The ability to promote your group or network across the globe and encourage people from beyond your physical community to become involved
• To create interactive experiences where members can login and share information such as video, images and relevant articles
• To use online calendars and planning tools to organise events and meetings with the ability to present media from the events
• To allow online payment via Paypal or other web technologies for products and services related to your network
• To allow members to post information about themselves, their motives and interests, enabling others to establish effective links or connections with people and their projects or activities
• Deliver news and information to your group immediately
• Provide an internal communication system separate from the users own personal email system should it be beneficial to keep more personal details private or distinct from professional details

Success or Failure

Should you choose to start your own community you will need to consider a variety of issues from your available time to the quality of information flowing through the online space for your users. The success of a community or network is significantly influenced by the following factors:

• Your reach to the relevant groups or people who may wish to become involved. Do you have access to people on the web such as bulletin boards, forums or even a large and keen Twitter following, or in the physical world such as printed adverts, noticeboards where your information can be posted and taken notice of? If the answer is no, how will your message be read or even found? Word of mouth? Email? Getting enthusiastic responses via blog posts, responses, retweets or recommendations is the key to kickstarting your community.
• Do you have a reputation that encourages people to act upon your recommendation? Or do you know someone who has a good reputation in your activity area who would be willing to put their name to your endeavours? If you want people to join a community, this can be a significant pull towards establishing the group. A reputation is not vital but does provide support in your message to the world.
• Once you have overcome the first hurdle of establishing the interest of a few, or even many interested parties, have you or other contributors the time, inspiration and resources to consistently create quality interesting content for your network? Do you have a policy related to the regularity and style of your contributions whether it is through video, written blog items or even audio?
• Are you, or others in your community able to monitor the quality of the information put onto the site. How will you deal with the inevitable abuse of the system and spamming?
• Can your website sustain a reliable, effective service should there be a sudden explosion in readers or contributions? Consult your ISP or your IT service to work out the capacity of your webserver and assess how much data and bandwidth you have available.

 Example – Drawing Research Network

As part of my work for the Open University, in 2003 I set up a website for the drawing community – The Drawing Research Network otherwise known as the DRN. The most recent version of the site was upgraded from static HTML to WordPress back in 2009 with social network plugins such as Mingle as with the traditional blogging features allowing users to create their own visible profiles and Twitter style timelines as well as upload articles with images to the site for viewing by other members. During July 2011 management responsibility of the website was given Loughborough School of the Arts who have funded an administrator [Pete Simcoe] to ensure the quality of the articles is high both in content and formatting and the content is as useful as possible to a worldwide community of academics, artists, designers and other people with a passion and interest in this subject.

As of August 2011 there are around 210 listed members with many others reading and referring to the site. Below is a summary of some of the functionality of the site in video format, designed to demonstrate some of the capability to new users. Some of the functionality has been slightly altered, in that you now need an invite similar to Google Plus to become part of the group with reasons given below the video:

Benefits of WordPress

The main benefits of using the WordPress system on the Drawing Research Network are the fact that WordPress is designed for this sort of group activity – a series of bloggers can contribute to a continual stream of online discussion. It is also an online software system that is free and has a worldwide support network as well as many custom designed templates. The template for the DRN can be seen at Themeforest.net where for $35 much of the programming and layout is complete – it is down to the administrator or IT support unit to customise and style the blog as required.

As previously mentioned, a variety of plugins provide additional functionality for the blog including the ability to pull photos from the Drawing Research’s Flickr account.

Spamming Hazards

The main problem with most blogs is that unless steps are taken to prevent abuse, they are open to spamming, abusive comments and other unpleasantness. The Drawing Research Network is no exception. However, an effort has been made to reduce the number of spam comments and timewasters by using the following:

• Askimet  Anti-Spam system available to WordPress users which reduces comment spam
• SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam plugin creating a barrier to spam-bots by using keyboard input
• Secure Invites plugin meaning registration can only occur via an invite from another user

It has been an uphill struggle to resolve the spamming issue on this and other sites and whilst Invite Only websites have their limitations, the individual users of the DRN now have the ability to invite up to 10 other users which does create a kind of vetting process with shared responsibility in only allowing people with a genuine interest in drawing and drawing research onto the site.

Real Names and Photos

Recently there was outrage at Google’s decision to remove users on their new Google+ account that had not used their real names and one thing the DRN team have tried to encourage is the creation of realistic profiles. By this I am referring to the input of full names and legitimate email addresses along with a photo or example of artwork – the theory being that this firstly enables the detection of spam-bots or fake users more easily and secondly encourages responsibility and accountability on the site. If people are not happy putting their details online then they still have access to the main articles, the gallery and any downloads associated with these. It is also useful to note that the members list cannot be accessed by anyone other than the registered members themselves which provides additional security for users.

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Firstly, it is worth pointing out that, unlike a mathematical problem, the design problem is one that cannot necessarily be resolved to perfection but must be resolved perfectly for the circumstances under which it exists. As I often mention to my clients, if you throw enough money at a solution – you can have any solution you like. The designer’s challenge is to fulfill the needs and desires of the client within parameters that will range from budget to client needs / desires to media type.

Ensuring Client Satisfaction

In addition to a quality piece of design work, a client must be completely satisfied with the job and feel that the financial sacrifice they have made has been rewarded with a product, advert, website or DVD that will work for them as a company, educational establishment, photographer or restaurant to further their cause or increase income.

There are several ways to do this but the one that works for me the most is to clearly analyse the design process with the client prior to the job commencing. From the point at which a fee is being negotiated to the conclusion of a project, the process should be explained at appropriate points to a client in easy-to-understand bite sizes. At what point should this discussion take place? The most common guides to this discussion are the points at which a piece of design work will be assessed by the client – the test phases if you like. The emphasis is upon the designer to advise the client as to when a discussion will be necessary and so as not to annoy or take up too much time – anticpating the required information and evaluation periods is paramount.

Design Brief

In my experience a design brief can arrive in the in-tray or inbox in a variety of formats:

1. The client contacts the designer by telephone for a brief discussion. During this conversation the client is looking for signs that the designer will respond intelligently to a given brief and so the designer must be prepared to react quickly and appropriately to statements made by the client whilst making notes regarding the requirements. These notes form the basis of the brief.

2. A client or client representative requests a meeting and gives a little information about what the project may be. This can be more vague than the telephone conversation as there is little or no time for questions – the designer must respond to questions at a meeting.

3. A client sends a brief out to tender. This means the designer has the opportunity to outline how they would approach the project and some initial designs may be required here. This leads onto the subject of speculative working which will be covered in another article, another time – in the meantime, check out these two links related to spec. design:

Why Speculative Design is Wrong
What is Speculative Design Work? – the video is worth listening to after the first 30 seconds

Types of Brief

The most common types of design brief are OPEN and CLOSED. An open brief is where the designer is allowed to experiment and develop a solution to a design problem with no initial guidance on what the end solution might be. A closed brief is where the solution is given [eg a device that performs task x and fits into box y] but is unclear how the design will look.

There are often grey areas in these design briefs – a typical example being that a designer has freedom to design a solution but must follow the corporate colours or must use a logo or identifying mark on the product, website or advert.

A designer should use his or her experience to make suggestions as to the benefits of changing the design brief where appropriate. This may result in the reduction of financial expenditure [for example, where a designer sees that part of the brief may require more creative freedom to allow other parts of the brief to flow and conclude more effectively]. If a client is completely opposed to making changes to the brief then the designer must carefully consider how the process will work within these constraints and take appropriate action.

Next time

In part 2 we will look at the design process and a live project example.

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The traditional view of surfing the web is that a user looks at different Unique Resource Locations [URL]s or, to put it simply, visits different websites on the Internet to find out the latest information, updates and news from that site. This can take many hours of your week as you find the news page, maybe login or even refresh the current pages seeking the latest and greatest in your field of interest.

Automatic

Now reverse that idea and consider RSS feeds. RSS feeds transmit changes to content such as latest company news, latest world news from the BBC, latest images on Flickr and other relevant information to the feed you subscribe to. This will save you many hours of trawling through your favourite sources of information only to find that there was, essentially, nothing of interest or new.

Technical

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication [and can occasionally be know as Rich Site Summary]. It relies on the website in question having a suitable ‘Feed’ or file containing the information a Feed Reader can understand. The data in one of these Feed Files is usually in a special .XML format and contains a news title, summary and sometimes a thumbnail image to give the reader a suitable overview of the information they will be directed to. This is useful because a Feed Reader can easily compile a series of news titles into a very short amount of space for selection rather than the user trawling through page after page of old or irrelevant news.

If you are looking at a site that is compatible with a Feed Reader or Aggregator then you will see a link with this logo next to it [with the word 'subscribe'] or you will see the same logo in the URL bar at the top of the browser. Clicking on either will present you with the subscription window. If you really want to find out more technical details then Wikipedia’s RSS article gives a fairly accurate and useful summary.

Subscribing

If all this is sounding a little too complex – here is a suggestion: GIVE IT A TRY. Its easy to establish an RSS feed link especially if you are using Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer 8. It is recommended that you take the following steps to set up your Feeds:

1. Find yourself and easy-to-use aggregator. Google Reader does a good job of storing your feeds in one easy to manage area within your Google Account. To create an account [and a Google Account if you don t already have one] then go to the Google Reader Sign Up page. This will guide you through the process.

2. You will need to find yourself a website that has an RSS feed. This website has an RSS feed you can subscribe to and keep up with the latest news. To do this either click on this site’s feed link [or copy and paste www.design-design.co.uk/feed/ into your Google Reader account] and follow the instructions to save the feed to your browser window or Google Reader.

3. Login to your GOOGLE ACCOUNT > MY ACCOUNT > READER to see what feeds you have subscribed to and see the latest news.

4. If you know the address of the feed from other sites you can copy and paste this into Google Reader. If you want to try this – open a new TAB or browsing WINDOW and type in www.bbc.co.uk. You will then see the RSS orange feed link. Click on this and add it to your Reader account or a link in your browser favourites which will then update each time you open a browser window. One more useful tip is to organise your Feeds so that they appear on the main browser window by going to BOOKMARKS > ORGANISE BOOKMARKS > drop feed into BOOKMARKS TOOLBAR [Mozilla Firefox]

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