Why your web site must be a good experience

Visitors to your web site need to have a good experience. Firstly the pages must provide what they were looking for. Then you need good navigation so they can easily find their way around. And you need a search facility so they can look up specific items without having to …

Read More

Technology isn’t as clever as we like to think

The more that neuroscientists learn about the brain, the less they know. Hardly a day goes by without some piece of research leading us to question how our brain works, just when we thought we were coming to an answer. For several years now, psychologists have remained somewhat dumbfounded by …

Read More

Internet marketing can be swayed by pseudo-science

Go to any business meeting these days and you are sure to find at least one of the speakers suggesting some kind of psychological backing for their claims. For instance, you may often hear that 55% of our communication is “body language”; it’s an oft-repeated claim in business circles. The …

Read More

What journeys do your customers make?

Your customers are unlikely to arrive at your web site without having been somewhere else first; even if they are time travellers, like Dr Who, and they suddenly port themselves from outer space to your web pages, they will have been somewhere else first. Understanding how people got to your …

Read More

The net effect of Wimbledon

Today sees the start of the Wimbledon tennis championships in South London and millions of fans will be glued to TV sets and the radio over the coming two weeks – weather permitting of course. The official Wimbledon web site will also doubtless get tons of support as will the …

Read More

Social networks are really boring

Women are natural social networkers; indeed the stereotype of “chatty” women (false as it is) suggests that the world of social networking is a natural place for women to go online. And you wouldn’t be wrong. A new analysis of more than 50 million social networking members shows that women …

Read More

Could you run your business without the Internet?

The UK supermarket, Sainsbury’s, is rather red-faced at the moment. For the past 24 hours it has been unable to operate it’s online store, costing it around £1m in lost revenue. That’s bad enough, but the company has also had to face several media stories about its failure, such as …

Read More

More nonsense from the UK Government about the Internet

Everton fan Andy Burnham is “in charge” of the media in the UK since he is the Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport. However, rumours reach me that he is considering setting up the equivalent of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) for the Internet. The PCC is an …

Read More

blank

How to get your emails opened

Getting your emails opened can be a real problem. We are being drowned in a sea of email messages, texts, RSS feeds, Twitters and all sorts of instant messages. Is it any wonder that people fail to open emails? I was in a client’s office the other day and she …

Read More

blank

Unique content is vital on your web site

Marketing experts are constantly banging on about our “USP” – our unique selling proposition; for anyone to be interested in us we need to be different. Online, uniqueness is even more important. There are just too many place to go, sites to visit and people to contact who all do …

Read More

Assumption is your enemy when it comes to online business

People often assume things about the Internet, yet frequently those assumptions turn out to be incorrect. For instance, many business owners I meet assume, it seems, that email marketing is dead. Yet, despite the problems caused by spam, email marketing is still the most successful method of selling online. Another …

Read More

Your web site will love you – literally

Researchers in six of Europe’s top academic establishments have recently started work on a multimillion Euro project designed to help computers understand our emotions. Called The Semaine Project, the work has already produced some results – for instance in the area of non verbal communication. The studies are not as …

Read More