What's New

Wickedweb is delighted to announce that we have been appointed by Baker Tilly International - a leading global network of over 150 accountancy and business advisory firms, across 120 countries.  

The brief is to transfer the management of the current website and extranet solutions into Wickedweb’s control and our focus will begin on this transition phase.  The solutions will harness the potential of the existing Umbraco platform.

Once the transition is complete Wickedweb will work to remedy key issues with the current systems and then look to deliver added value to the member firms and customers through enhanced and new functionality.

Wickedweb’s Client Services Director for Baker Tilly International, Neil Narain, comments:  “The key drivers behind this move are service levels, technical expertise and stability of technology which are current concerns for Baker Tilly International.  As their digital partner, Wickedweb will utilise our award winning experience in the business to business sector to enhance these online solutions and further engage the target audiences.  We look forward to creating a solution that is consistent across the brand and one that will elevate ROI for the business”. 

Richard, Simon and I have spent the day with St Johns Ambulance in Caterham, updating our First Aid certification and completing the Emergency First Aid at Work course.  As well as ticking the paperwork boxes for the agency, the day was enjoyed by us all as the course leader delivered an interesting and entertaining day, and the banter was fast and furious, as you can imagine from the photo!

The course was extremely informative with a mix of video, presentation and role play styles used to teach the First Aid basics.  We're now fully equipped to treat minor injuries, manage shock, choking, burns and heart attacks, deal with unconscious patients and carry out CPR.  We fully recommend St Johns Ambulance for the course and feel confident in our ability to cope and help, should we be faced with an accident at work.

Figaro Digital is holding a ‘Design, Build and Usability’ seminar on the 17th November at The Hospital Club. This half day session is for senior digital decision makers from brand organisations who are looking to gain knowledge and broaden their understanding of design & build and user experience.

Wickedweb’s MD Stuart is presenting at this event and will talk brands through the process of a successful design and build project - covering key areas such as brand engagement, usability, creative execution, SEO, CMS platforms and campaign activation.  The aim of our presentation is to share with a brand ways to safeguard digital investment, with Wickedweb best practice tips and agency insights.  Wickedweb work with clients such as wagamama, Ella’s Kitchen, Gear4, Kurt Geiger, Bluefin Solutions, Lifehouse and Cancer Research UK and we can illustrate why these projects excel. 

For more information on the seminar or to book a place visit the Figaro Digital seminar page

As wagamama’s global digital agency, Wickedweb collaborated on the launch of the ‘art and eat’ campaign - an innovative platform to engage wagamama customers with the UK’s up and coming art and design talent.   

wagamama were looking to roll out a national marketing and PR campaign that would achieve a number of key objectives.  At the core, wagamama’s underlying objective was to engage, excite and provide an experience for customers – whilst re-inforcing wagamama as a 'cool’ lifestyle brand among its target markets.

In addition to creating regional brand awareness and building product awareness, robust marketing objectives are in place.  The campaign needed to drive awareness, excite its audience and encourage participation.  

Wickedweb focused on achieving these KPI’s by putting brand engagement at the heart of our digital strategy.  Our strategy around the campaign’s digital execution worked to extend the in-store experiential element by driving diners online to join the ‘art and eat’ debate.  This interactive platform supported brand engagement by providing a focus for dining conversation, and looked to prompt subsequent action from them by way of competition entries and re-tweets.

Our strategy was honed by an appreciation of wagamama’s key target audiences, as this ensured we could recommend solutions for engagement across a range of diners.

Ten national wagamama locations were chosen and one regional ’up and coming’ artist was selected per restaurant to feature their work. Wagamama worked closely with the prolific Moniker projects to source the artists. 

Wickedweb worked hard to unite the campaign messaging with digital technology, in order to evolve traditional marketing methods into an integrated 360 communications mix – positioning digital at the heart. Early results indicate our carefully considered strategy engaged the target audience and demonstrated real cut through.  Wickedweb feel the work showcased is innovative and engaging, supporting the key KPI’s. The wagamama brand has been elevated as a result, and the digital strategy seeks to rejuvenate an offline campaign into the digital sphere to maximise the longevity and awareness of the campaign / brand.

Find out what we did and read the case study here.

Wickedweb are delighted to announce a new relationship with the e-Commerce giant and leading home shopping brand Shop Direct. Shop Direct are behind some of the UK’s best known home shopping brands, including Littlewoods, Very and Woolworths. 

Managing Director of Wickedweb Stuart Wells comments: “We are thrilled to be working with Shop Direct and their creative team on this global website initiative, and we hope it will be the start of a long and exciting partnership.”

More information coming soon.

Wickedweb are delighted to have been appointed to design and build The Lending Well website and also to create The Lending Well’s new brand identity, including the logo, colour palette, typeface and styling. 

The Lending Well will be a unique website offering borrowers the chance to request Payday loans, and lenders to earn a greater interest on their investment than if they were using banks.  It is unique because it will finance the Payday loan mechanic through Peer –To – Peer lending, combining the two models and offering a better interest rate for borrowers than other competitive websites on the market. Work for phase 1 of this project is already well underway.

Felicity Stone, Wickedweb’s Digital Producer comments:

“We’re really excited to work with The Lending Well and deliver a website which will ensure they stand out in what is a really competitive market. The designs we have produced are bold and full of personality. The strong creative and simple user journey will enable users to get the most out of The Lending Well offering, and a phased approach will ensure that key features are delivered early.”

Tim Slesinger, Director of The Lending Well says “We have been thrilled working with Wickedweb as they not only 'got' the concept of The Lending Well from the start but they have also been as excited about bringing it to market as we have.  We love the energy that they have put in to the project and the energy they have created in the site itself”.

Wickedweb are delighted to extend their experience in the financial sector having already worked with StatPro, Neteller, Hawk Finance and Prime CFD's.

We are excited to announce that Rob will be joining the specialist creative panel for The Great Idea Escape: Best Awards 2012.  This will be chaired by Alistair Ross, Head of Ideas, Draftfcb London. Rob will be asked to judge a number of important creative awards across a range of media, along with special awards for innovation, writing, art direction, and discretionary awards for best typography, illustration, photography.

The Best Awards 2012 are seeking a mix of twelve creative experts to demonstrate that the Best Awards really do honour only the Best.  Rob’s inclusion in the panel will ensure the high standards met by previous winners continue to reflect in the quality of work chosen for the Best Awards 2012.  

Rob comments: “I am thrilled to be asked to be on the judging panel, it’s a real honour. We worked with the MAA to produce the Best Awards website and so to continue our involvement with them and the awards to help select the winners is fantastic. I am really looking forward to seeing the nominations, and judging by the quality of last year’s work I think this year is going to be a real challenge singling out the winners“.

All of us at Wickedweb congratulate Rob in accepting this prestigious position – well done!

Wickedweb have recently joined CRUK’s team of suppliers to provide a range of digital services.  We are working on lots of exciting projects to drive donations for this awe-inspiring charity, and look forward to rolling out the activity planned over the coming months.

We have started our relationship with CRUK by working with them on the Shine 2011 campaign.  This inspiring event is a night-time walking marathon through your chosen city, to raise funds for Cancer Research.  This event is in its 2nd year and fundraisers can choose one of 12 cancers they would like to donate their funds to.  Participants are asked to ‘shine’ through their city route with glow sticks and can walk either a half or full marathon.

Wickedweb have created a portfolio of Flash banners for the CRUK website and third party websites. The call to action here is to click through to the Shine microsite and drive entries to the event.  

The Wickedweb team are proud to be entering this event – with more details coming soon.  We are in full support of this incredible cause and would encourage you to enter here.

In addition, Wickedweb has created banners in support of the new TV ad campaign which went live on the 18th July.  The CRUK homepage banner has been updated to raise awareness and support this campaign, with a view to driving uplift in donations.  Look out for these banners and show your support for their life-changing work....

Smart Insights have just published an interesting article for multi-channel marketers. The results of the research suggest that online advertising campaigns are enhanced when the email marketing channel is added.

Read full article here

Wickedweb are the lead digital marketing agency for The Lifehouse spa, and we have had an exciting time working on their website launch and full technical systems integration.   

The Lifehouse case study focuses on an interesting challenge: the marriage of brand positioning, technical consultancy and creative execution.  There were a range of objectives that needed to be considered as part of the brief spanning functional, business and creative requirements.  The solution executed by Wickedweb weaves these together.  In addition, The Lifehouse spa was not visible online. At the start of our work there were no keyword listings and little brand awareness beyond their name. Therefore, an SEO strategy was implemented to turn this around. 

This has been a successful case study and the results showcase the impact of the website and the SEO strategy.  Want to find out more? Read on to discover how we did it…

Stacey Hedges, Marketing Manager at Lifehouse comments:

"Wickedweb have provided us with invaluable support, guidance and creatively in launching the website. The team have been a true extension to the marketing department and play an integral role in the development and evolvement of the site. It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with them and we look forward to continue to drive traffic to the site and future developments"

A few of us here at Wickedweb made a beeline for the Figaro Social Media conference last week. We are glad we did – there was a fantastic line up of speakers and some real insight from brands such as the BBC, You Tube, O2, Kodak and Phones 4 U. Social media is ever-evolving, and Wickedweb were keen to discover how these brands are utilising social media – and more importantly what results are being harvested. 

What was clear from the conference is that social media strategy is driven by what we know about the customer / prospect. It is very CRM dependant, and insight is best gained by what O2 calls ‘the continual conversation’. Regular tweets from a brand are essential and much more effective in building loyalty and confidence than ad-hoc spikes of communication. O2 have a team to manage this continuous conversation with their customers, and find it gives them competitive advantage.

At the core of this is the notion that social media is all about engagement. YouTube makes an interesting point: social media is a fantastic platform for building sparks of excitement for a brand, which ultimately creates and maintains this engagement. Video is ideal for this, especially if the Facebook icon is added to the video so that this excitement can be shared.

However, the question on the audience’s lips of course is how do we actually measure engagement via social media? We came to the conclusion that KPI’s could include areas such as likes, a change in attitudes, mentions on Google, awareness, continued advocates and bloggers etc. Xbox added to this by talking about ‘media stacking’: using various social media channels for better cut through and amplification of your message – and Britmums endorsed this by saying that brands should utilise a good variety of social media channels to satisfy different consumption habits. It is good practice to establish your voice on different channels and be proactive, so that as a brand you are ready when a consumer comes searching for you in their preferred way.

But it’s not all about the number of ‘likes’ a brand has. It is far more effective to look beyond the volume and think about what you actually want to do with them. O2 were keen to impart that it is essential that a brand focuses on exactly what they would like social media to achieve at the outset. Phones 4 U look at the actual cost of a ‘like’ which is interesting and also look to put a value of the ‘like’ to the business.

Brands can only do so much – although there will be more success capitalising on social media if brands can focus and build on social equity. This is about friends looking out for each other and sharing, rather than putting the actual brand first. There is definitely the feeling that a consumer would like their voice to be heard now that they have been given a platform - and brand love is there for the taking if a company can show they will listen.

In conclusion, social media as a platform gives brands an opportunity to reveal and re-iterate different aspects of their personality. O2 suggested that companies “dip their toe in and try”, with an emphasis on managing any consumer issues as quickly as possible. 

For me the sentiment of the day came from Kodak – this brand revealed the key to their social media success is to “engage, educate, excite and evangelise”...

Wickedweb were thrilled to be approached by Law Debenture recently to deliver an initial suite of 6 websites across their UK and overseas offerings. Law Debenture is UK based, but has global offices in the US and Hong Kong and our brief is to redesign the current Law Debenture international website presence and two additional companies in the group.

Law Debenture is over 100 years old and have a growing range of services. These include Service of Process, Corporate Services, Investment Trusts and Asset Backed Solutions. From a branding perspective, Law Debenture is keen to retain their heritage and traditional values. However they wish to refresh and update their website for today’s market and achieve objectives around data capture and lead generation.

The website will be aimed at lawyers, intermediaries and individuals and so the design treatment will look to engage these audiences. Wickedweb will also be looking at an e-commerce facility as part of the brief.

Account Director Neil Narain who is leading this project for Wickedweb comments:

“Our challenge is to consolidate the requirements from the different territories and service lines to provide a cohesive digital strategy for the Law Debenture’s suite of companies. We are currently at the scoping stage and look forward finalising the technical requirements in the near future in order to take the project forward”.

The project will be launched Autumn 2011.

Wickedweb’s SEO team continue to grow – welcome Darryl Kearvell.

SEO is one of our busiest departments here at Wickedweb, and our team is constantly growing. We are delighted to welcome Darryl, who has a strong programming and SEO background. Having worked for one of the largest digital media agencies previously, Darryl has experience with clients such Proctor & Gamble.

With a degree in Computer Science, Darryl has been building websites for 10 years. However he has a specific passion for SEO and pays particular attention to usability and engagement.

Outside of work, Darryl is a massive video games enthusiast and has worked in the industry for the last couple of years. Darryl joined Wickedweb having achieved all he wanted to in the video games industry and was keen to return to SEO.  

We know he will be a hit with our clients....

With our continued expansion, we welcome Chris Reid to the Wickedweb team. Chris brings extensive digital experience to Wickedweb. With both project management and front end development skills, Chris is ideally placed to hit the ground running in our busy studio.

Chris joins our existing talented development team and will work across our varied client portfolio.  As well as creative flair and a meticulous attention to detail, Chris also has a penchant for cycling to work – 30 miles a day with hills no less!  That makes some of us here feel quite...well... lazy.

Welcome to the family.

Wickedweb are pleased to announce we are the agency of choice for Gillingham Football Club, and look forward to delivering a suite of digital services across the Club’s portfolio.

We have recently won the opportunity to deliver a range of websites for the Club, and will begin with the brand identity for Priestfield – the club's conference & banqueting facility. The brand strategy work will roll out into the design and build of the new website for the largest purpose-built venue of its kind in the south-east. 

In addition, Wickedweb will also execute development work on two further websites for charities supported by the Club in order to raise awareness and funds.  More details will follow.

We will also be developing a new approach and image for the Club’s online merchandising site.

Following the website builds, Wickedweb will conceive the digital media strategy to take the websites to the next level, and will begin with traffic driving initiatives via SEO and Social Media.

Murray Evans, Marketing Manager for Gillingham Football Club, said: “We searched for a partner who could deliver a range of innovative ideas and solutions for several very different needs. We have started with our conference and banqueting business, because it is crucial to the company's success off the pitch, and we look forward to working with Wickedweb on this and our other digital projects in the foreseeable future.“ 

Wickedweb adds Gillingham Football Club to our existing sporting credentials which include a global strategy, design and build project for Mitre International, a microsite for the Rugby World Cup in conjunction with The Telegraph and a website for Ben Garner, a top ranked squash player.

Wickedweb have published a new B2B case study today for our client Chaucer.  Chaucer is an independent global management consultancy, providing tailored, hands-on and flexible support to clients in the delivery of strategic business projects and programmes.  

Chaucer approached Wickedweb as they were aware of the limitations of their existing website.  It was clear the site had not been an active marketing tool, and could work much harder at lead generation. With an impressive set of credentials and clients, Chaucer is very well positioned within the market – and Wickedweb were keen to harness this potential and build a solution that would maximize Chaucer’s growth for the future.

At the outset of this project, Chaucer put challenging KPI’s in place with regards to enquiry generation via the website.  Wickedweb were tasked with a complete design and build overhaul of the website.  The need for this was two-fold: to showcase Chaucer’s brand values and personality, and to manage a strategy around content which needed to be engaging and credible to prospects.

Furthermore, there was also a requirement for Wickedweb to implement a Content Management System for Chaucer that met the current brief and was scalable for future needs.  Wickedweb’s proprietary PHP CMS was used, with a suite of modules executed to ensure the functionality was in place.

Overall, underpinning this project was a salient challenge that had to be met: How can Wickedweb convey and implement Chaucer’s approachable and friendly business approach across their website?

See how we did it.

Wickedweb have a lot of clients in the retail sector and so we keep a keen eye on the industry - in particular M-commerce as this is the topic we are being asked about regularly. With Mobile strategies coming to the fore, our focus has been on planning M-commerce initiatives for our clients, and so it was interesting to come across this article published on the Econsultancy website recently.

e-Digital Research has recently undertaken an M-Commerce benchmark study which uses mystery shopper surveys to assess the customer experience for websites viewed on smartphones.  ASOS has come out top, narrowly beating M&S which will no doubt inspire other retailers to look at how effective their M-Commerce actually is.

Although it has been criticised in part, there is a key point to take away from e-Digital’s Research study: it is imperative that retailers are focusing on optimising their website for mobile as this is an area that continues to evolve rapidly.  Wickedweb are advocates in implementing a usability study at the outset of a build for our retail clients, to consider how M-Commerce will be addressed and executed. It is essential that the design rendered on a smartphone is simple, along with the navigation. ASOS have scored highly on the product pages where information including price is clear.  

It’s not good enough now to merely have an M-Commerce presence – the solution has to be carefully thought through and tested in order to provide the best possible user experience for the customer and ultimately the most hard hitting conversion rates for the retailer…

(Source E-consultancy)

We are delighted to welcome Riley Consulting to Wickedweb as a new client -  a leading UK construction and property consultancy with over 100 years experience in the market.

Wickedweb have won the opportunity to focus on the design and build of the Group’s nine websites.  Following delivery, our approach will be to launch Riley Consulting’s digital marketing strategy which we are confident will take the websites to the next level.

Our focus will be to build awareness of Riley Consulting and its affiliated brands within the construction industry.  The key objective will be to build on their excellent position in the market by showcasing the Group’s specialised services to a diverse portfolio of clients.

Account Director Neil Narain comments “We are looking forward to optimising the brand and are driven to deliver a customer centric solution.  It is essential that we engage the individual audiences, and the feature rich content we have planned will look to deliver this”.

Wickedweb have built up a solid reputation for delivering digital projects in the B2B sector, including clients such as EC Harris and our award winning work for Bluefin Solutions.  We are perfectly placed to deliver a large scale web design and build project for Riley Consulting, with a design led approach.  Furthermore, our solid experience across numerous CMS platforms has enabled us to identify moving forward with Umbraco as the CMS of choice.

This project launches in the Autumn 2011.

We are delighted to welcome ITE Exhibitions to Wickedweb.   We were shortlisted and subsequently won the fantastic opportunity to deliver design and website build services for ITE Exhibitions; the organiser of over 180 leading international events a year. 

Stuart Wells, Wickedweb’s MD says “I have no doubt the Wickedweb team will take one of ITE Exhibitions leading brands to an exciting new level.  We will confidently deliver a website that showcases why ITE Exhibitions is deserving of its coveted position in the industry”.

Wickedweb have built up a solid reputation for delivering digital projects in the exhibitions sector, including clients such as Internet World, The Destinations Show, The Vitality Show, London and Southampton Boat Shows and our work with Closer Still Media.  Furthermore, our award winning work in the B2B industry means we are perfectly placed to deliver a hard hitting digital solution for ITE Exhibitions.  

As the project unravels, Wickedweb will be focusing on the key objectives of the new website; to increase visitor registrations, sales leads and overall traffic.  This will be achieved in a number of ways including championing the brand vision, implementing usability studies to determine optimum user journeys and delivering strong message hierarchies.  This site will launch in the Autumn and so watch this space...

The Recommended Agency Register (RAR) was conceived to provide brand owners with a resource to find the right marketing suppliers. This can be a difficult process, and this roster provides a reliable and independent list of agencies and suppliers to enable companies to make an informed choice. Wickedweb are delighted to have made it onto this Register.

How does it work?

Working with Carynx Group, RAR have developed an algorithm to rate suppliers. This is made up of up-to-date market insights which are coupled with comprehensive ratings from clients. This gives a unique picture of the level of satisfaction that each supplier achieves, and does a lot of the due diligence 'ground work'.

Wickedweb would like to say a big thank you to our clients for participating in this process with us, and for the fabulous testimonials!

Our trip to Sitecore's London office provided great insight into their critically acclaimed product. The trip also left our egos fully-bloated, as we departed on Friday being the only qualifying delegates on the entire course. Bragging rights aside, here's what we really thought:

Our first impression was the user interface, and how it resembled nothing we had ever seen before (in a good way). When in full-screen mode the experience was analogous to a remote-desktop session; the interface had in fact been modeled so strongly around Windows that it even had a 'Start' button. At one point I actually found myself trying to shutdown via Sitecore, but then sanity settled in.

We were also very impressed with 'sublayouts': a feature which allows users to add both content and structure into a page. Each sublayout may in-turn have additional sublayouts placed within it, and so on. This concept overcomes a problem present in many other CMSs, whereby developers have to be involved when new layouts are required.

On a more technical note, it's worth mentioning that the application's architecture is highly generic, although probably more so than you'd actually want. Simply put, the core architecture has few known truths: everything is an object, objects sit in a tree, ...and that's about it. There is no strict concept of types or constraints, which sits in contrast to more statically-typed systems like Umbraco. The CMS is in fact so dynamic that most of Sitecore is actually written on Sitecore (think Inception).

Whilst my colleague and I both concurred this is very clever, we also agreed it isn't necessarily smart. You have to ask: How dynamic is too dynamic?  In the realms of enterprise application architecture, we need to make strong assertions about the state of a system to reduce the likelihood of errors. This is difficult with systems which are too dynamic, so it's going to be difficult with Sitecore. The oddity here is that the languages used to interface with Sitecore are statically-typed, but Sitecore's API promotes dynamic-typing: thus leaving us with two conflicting principals. There's almost a contradiction with how Sitecore claims to devote themselves to Microsoft technologies, but avert from embracing the statically-typed nature of their key languages.

However, for all of the following merits I'm willing to overlook this slight complexity, so let us conclude with the pros:

• Frequent upgrades. Sitecore has a fast-paced development team whom appear to concentrate most of their efforts into new functionality; a refreshing change from overly-cautious vendors. That said, we did notice several bugs in Beta, so let’s just hope they have regression testing nailed for RTM.
• Lively community. Despite being a commercial CMS, Sitecore has a sizeable following of users who are willing to share their code for free.
• Outstanding user interface. Because Sitecore's GUI was written on XAML, the interface has an uncanny resemblance to Microsoft Windows. 
• Incredibly flexible layouts. Sitecore allows you to modify pages quite significantly without having to consult a developer. The whole process is very intuitive as changes can be performed in-situ. 
• Support for Windows Azure. Sitecore informed us that considerable time was spent at the Microsoft Campus to integrate with this behemoth; a great example of their strong relationship with the software giant. 
• Loads of generic CMS functionality: most of it useful (e.g. workflow), but with the odd 'peer-pressure' feature thrown in for good measure (e.g. Office integration - don't get me started).

All in all a fantastic CMS which is unparalleled to anything we've ever seen. Here's to innovation.

And there isn't a chocolate chip in sight!

The law is changing on the 26th May - and companies need to be ready for this new European e-Privacy directive.

"Explicit consent" must be sought from a web user who is being tracked via "cookies". Website owners use cookies to track their visitors; for example to target the serving of ads more effectively, or simply to give regular users to a site the ability to navigate more quickly by saving user preferences.

The change in law will require companies to figure out how they are going to get this explicit consent when a user hits their website. However this may take some time to work through, and the demands of the directive may certainly compromise a user journey.

Wickedweb's Technical Director Ian Jepp says "The responsibility ultimately falls on the website owner and so it would be essential to contact your legal department for a full understanding of what is under review in this directive. Best practice is to conform where necessary, and Wickedweb have set an agenda to look at this for all future projects".

Full details from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) can be viewed here.

Wickedweb are very proud to announce our most recent award win today – the IMA Best in Class Award for the Business to Business category.

The Bluefin Solutions website has successfully passed the comprehensive judging process achieving very high marks. In fact we scored 486 out of 500 in their scoring system demonstrating an outstanding win. The website was judged against the following criteria: design, content, feature functionality, usability and standards compliance.

The Best in Class Award is the highest honour bestowed by the Interactive Media Awards and we beat all other 96 entries for this category.  It has a deserved place in our Awards cabinet!

Well done to the fantastic team here at Wickedweb. Special thanks to Neil Narain, Niki Duggan, Lawrence Wagerfield, James Saunders, Rob Hollander, Steve Coventry and Ian Jepp.

Wickedweb decided not to exhibit this year, but a few of us attended the event this week to uncover what's unravelling in the digital world.

Our quest was to uncover more about Mobile, as this is certainly an area that we are continually asked about by clients. And we weren't disappointed, as Mobile was definitely the word on everyone's lips.

There was a plethora of cutting edge Mobile technology suppliers to talk to, and the seminar on Tuesday around sharpening up your mobile strategy to maximise ROI was well received by us Wickedwebber's. It certainly gave us lots of food for thought, which we will be ploughing back into our brainstorming sessions for clients.

If you'd like to hear more about how we can help with your Mobile strategies then give us a call - 0207 183 4999

Google have recently rolled out a new update which they are calling Panda. The update aims to tackle, in Google’s own words, “sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful”.  So what constitutes a low-value site?  Well here are some examples:

• Sites that mass produce content, sometimes even copying text from external sites or using computers to auto generate it (know as content farming – hence the ‘farmer’ update).  These sites offer little in the way of value or authority on a subject and make a profit from small amounts of revenue from a vast array of pages and subjects.  Examples include about.com or mahalo.com.

• Sites that have lots of ads.  Adverts are a natural part of the web but Google is trying to de-value those sites that just bombard you with ads rather than providing a useful and informative browsing experience.

• Sites that users don’t like to visit.  This is a hard one to track but Google doesn’t want to show sites that users just don’t want to spend time on, which points to the fact that the site is low-quality.
So what happens if a site is deemed low-value by Google?  Well any sites ‘caught’ will simply drop down in the search results for the queries it ranked for.  Below is a chart created by Sistrix based on mahalo.com’s rankings before and after the update.

There is a clear shift in rankings from a fairly even spread of rankings across pages 1 – 10 pre Panda, to post Panda where the majority of rankings are on page 7 – 10.

Naturally the next questions you will have are will I be affected and what can I do to avoid being de-valued?  Even though this is a relatively large update, unless you are copying content, spamming users with ads or have thousands of pages with no one visiting them, then you probably won’t be affected.  That said there are stories of legitimate sites loosing rankings as a result of the update so it’s a good idea to take precautions.

Content is King – This one may be slightly obvious, but if Google is de-valuing sites that copy or auto generates content then write unique, useful and valuable content.  Be a source of information about the subject you want to rank for, this has always been a primary SEO tactic and one that Google’s Matt Cutts has always recommended.  Not only will it avoid your site falling in the low-value category but it will help your rankings and attract visits.

Ads Come Second – In line with content is king, make your adverts secondary to the content of the page whether it be the amount of ads, positioning or size.  It is easy to improve ad revenue by making ads bigger, more central or simply by increasing the number of ads on a page but users come to the site for the content not to browse the ads.  Make your content the primary feature of each page, whether is text content, a video or images.

Interaction – Get your visitors interacting with the site; make it easy to use and nice to look at.  Allow for user generated content such as comments on blog posts.  Link up with Facebook and Twitter and interact via social media to get a community feel to your site.  Let Google see that users like to spend time on the site and are willing to interact via comments or Facebook.  Below is a screenshot from an SEOMoz blog post, SEOMoz are excellent at user interaction and building community.

The recurring theme is to simply make your site better.  Give it more value, make it easier to use, be a source of information, a community and an authority within your industry.  These are the qualities Google are looking to reward with premium positions.

Personally I think the update is a step in the right direction for Google, it was becoming too easy for websites that had no real user value to rank competitively.  Sites that where genuinely useful and informative were being out ranked and this update has addressed that issue.  I have no doubt that there will be a new and inventive way to pollute search results but Google will of course complete the cycle by bringing out another update to tackle whatever that might be.

Google’s new ‘+1’ feature is the latest attempt at making search more social.  The basic idea is very similar to the Facebook ‘like’ button – when you like something, in this case a search result; you click the Google +1 button.  This is then visible to all your friends connected to you via your Google account. The benefit comes when you are searching for let’s say a new camera; you go to Google, type ‘digital cameras’ and click search.  As you are scrolling through the results you notice the +1 button next to dpreview.com because, for example, your photographer friend +1’d it previously.

Apart from the obvious benefit of having users +1 your site, if +1 catches on it would be inevitable that Google would include +1 as a ranking factor, however the question is if it catches on.

In essence I think +1 could be a really useful feature, when I am researching a product or looking for information on a particular subject it would be great to see what my friends recommend.  But my friends are not in the mindset for promoting, removing, starring or +1ing results when using Google – they just want to get to where they are going.  This has been the critical flaw in all the Google voting / result editing offerings, people don’t want to edit results, they want Google to do that for them.

Google have a shocking history when it comes to social search, remember Buzz and Wave? No? Well not surprising considering their short and uneventful lives.  We also had SearchWiki which allowed us to promote, comment on and remove results, there was also SideWiki and then stars in search for marking your favourite results – all of which have flopped.

So will Google +1 succeed and become a part of how we search?  In short, I don’t think so.  Google should stick to what it does best, providing unrivalled web search - sharing, bookmarking, voting and social features are best left to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious and the like.

For those of you involved in e-commerce, here is an interesting idea for your Facebook strategy.  Whilst there is no denying that Facebook has its place in engaging users and sharing content, this article comes from a different angle and explains that Facebook needs to be much more hard hitting.

Research shows that it’s all about the deals...read more.

Source – statistics from eConsultancy

Wickedweb's partner network keeps on growing!

We are very excited to become a certified partner of Sitecore, a very impressive .NET Web Content Management System that we can now offer our clients.  Sitecore's offering continues to dominate a leading position in the market and we look forward to building award winning solutions for our clients using this platform.

In Gartner's Magic Quadrant report, Sitecore was identified as a leader in it's field - "The usability of Sitecore's offering continues to be one of the best within the market and is highly acclaimed by the many different user types that work with the solution".

This content-based CMS is a fully integrated platform including additional modules such as the Online Marketing Suite, Email Campaign Manager, SEO, eCommerce, Analytics and Intranets.  Wickedweb's developers are keen  to work their magic with this platform as it gives our clients a creative, cost effective and scalable solution.  It can be implemented in both B2B and B2C, and although smaller companies have reaped the benefits, it is particularly suited to large design and build projects.

Not to mention, clients will find Sitecore a joy to work with due to its unrivalled ‘Best in Class' status for usability.

Call us to find out more about this Sitecore Partner platform – 0207 183 4999.

Not one but two of Wickedweb's clients are nominees in tomorrow night's CIM Marketing Excellence Awards at Grosvenor House.

Bedales School is entered in the Not for Profit category and is in fact "the only school in the country to have been singled out by the judging team of expert theorists and industry professionals as delivering marketing excellence and making an exemplary contribution to the profession."

EC Harris, the global Built Asset Consultancy has been entered into the Professional Services category for its recent Positive Outcomes integrated campaign. Wickedweb worked with EC Harris last year to create a digital variant of the PO#2 publication.  The publication is eye-catching creatively and the challenge was to translate this iconic piece into digital. You can see the final outcome here.

Good luck to Rob Reynolds and Javier Nieto of Bedales and EC Harris respectively. 

The CIM is the leading international professional marketing body, maintaining, developing and setting the marketing industry standard. 

Read more about the CIM awards.

Our clients regularly ask us 'what is the point of social media?', or tell us 'we won't use Twitter we don't see the point.' ...

It's not all about just Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. There's a whole host of conversation taking place across the world which the image below illustrates. The key element is to grasp and understand where you audience is, and what they are saying about a brand and it's products.

Open your mind to the Conversation Prism ...

The Dentistry Show is now in its 2nd year of working with Wickedweb and has just launched their reskined site in the run up towards their 2011 event. The Dentistry Show is a free two-day conference and exhibition for dental professionals, offering over 55 speakers, 5 conference streams and more than 200 suppliers.

The perfect event to visit to gain added knowledge, products and services within the dentistry industry.

I’m sure you have all heard about the big shake up of the NHS in the news these last few weeks. Soon local GP’s will have the ability to source their drugs and equipment privately, rather than the NHS dictating where supplies should come from.

Closer Still Media have jumped on these changes and have launched The Commissioning Show. The show is pioneering, not only giving private medical companies a platform to sell to GPs but also offers support through seminars and workshops etc. to GP’s, PBCs, practice and PCT managers as well as stakeholders and allow visitors to expand their knowledge and engage in new partnerships, sourcing the best suppliers they can get hold of consequently creating a much higher quality healthcare system.