Economists encourage businesses to 'think design'

Published | 13.06, 18th of May 2010, by Chris van Aurich | Business

Leading economists are supporting the call for businesses to use design to transform how they do business and compete as Britain's industries battle to recover from the effects of the recession.

Robin Bew, Chief Economist for the Economist Intelligence Unit said "Not only has the UK recession been deep, but the recovery is likely to be slow and difficult for many businesses. New strategies will be needed to cope, and design thinking is one important technique that firms need to consider when planning for the future."

Vicky Pryce, Joint Head of the Government Economic Service joined the call for businesses to put design at the boardroom table:  "UK industry needs to innovate to compete in current global markets. That means it's more important than ever that we help businesses use design to positively impact growth."

Forward-thinking businesses are using design in its broadest sense to completely transform how they do business. Rather than bringing in design at the end of the process to make products or services look better, they are using it at a strategic level to rethink every aspect of the company.

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Research and findings from the Design Council

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Seductive Design

Published | 13.50, 4th of May 2010, by Chris van Aurich | Design

I came across this video via Smashing Magazine, I thought it gives great insight into the power design can have on the decisions people make and the impressions they leave.

 

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The value of Bounce Rates

Published | 14.09, 27th of April 2010, by Chris van Aurich | SEO

Many people only ever focus on link strategies and keywords when they talk about search engine optimisation. There are so many elements to what makes a full campaign work. Often people only think that the design of the site is the pretty bit at the front. People should not be so quick to judge. Having a site that is engaging and well designed can be as influential as the content, keywords and links it can establish.

Google looks at how people interact with websites and how long they stay. If people leave your site straight away once arriving (this is know as the Bounce Rate) it means they are not happy with the results they have found. Google has its place within the market by delivering relevant, interesting content and results. To sum up, search engines want good search results, they move sites with low bounce rates up and sites with high bounce rates down. Users are far more likely to stay on your site and look around if it looks good. This will then in turn have a positive effect on your search position.

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Google incorporates site speed in search rankings

Published | 13.05, 13th of April 2010, by Chris van Aurich | SEO

Working on search engine optimisation things are always changing, so I thought I would share some information, Google are now using the speed of your site's delivery as a factor in search results and the amount of pages it will index. See the official post below.

Google Says

You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

Summary

The site speed is only one element that will affect your ongoing SEO strategy but key things worth looking at are:

• quality of build
• site architecture
• accessibility
• good web hosting
• duplicated content
• quality inbound links

You can see from the test results of this page (image above), we take all of the above very seriously.

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Free AdWords advertising for non-profit organisations

Published | 16.52, 30th of March 2010, by Chris van Aurich | Random

Google Grants is a unique in-kind donation programme that awards free AdWords advertising to selected charitable organisations. They support organisations that share their philosophy of community service to help the world in areas such as science and technology, education, global public health, the environment, youth advocacy and the arts.

To find out more and apply visit: http://www.google.co.uk/grants/

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