This is something that is more straight forward than most other mainstream cinema narratives that each comic book  film rarely drifts away from: There is a main plot of a dysfunctional human being without purpose gaining a positive super human power through something out of their control. An unattainable love interest becomes more interested in them as their power develops and they change into the hero. A sub plot  develops of a over ambitious person (usually a scientist) who nominates himself/herself for the first of human testing for the greater good of science. An experiment takes place with this person and it goes wrong and they develop negative anti social superhuman power, therefore are hero and villain are born. The hero and villain are forced to fight at least twice before the final showdown at the end where there are huge explosions and carefully choreographed action sequences. There is a resolution from good vs evil where good wins and evil experiences a terrible fate, usually a painful death or incarceration. The love interest becomes the lover. The world is restored to its natural balance and the credits roll.

This formula was something that developed slowly throughout the late 1980′s and 1990′s but I had not noticed just how rigid the formula had become until watching ‘X-Men’ in 2000. It was here I realised that although this worked well in the films up until this point such a simple formula will soon become boring to mainstream audiences and a new emergence of films from another medium would begin. Twelve years later with ‘Avengers Assemble’ and ‘The Dark Night’ generating the most revenue to date over any other films, as well as a constant flow of comic book films since 2000 I realise how wrong I was to think that.

‘Avengers Assemble’ has had not just a proffitable reception but also a critical one with the film having an average of 8.7 out of 10 on imdb from 170,000 reviewers. One the main reasons the film has had such a great reception seems to be that fans of several past comic book films including ‘Thor’, ‘Iron Man’, ‘Hulk’ to name a few, are given the change to see a an ultimate collaboration of their favourite superheroes in one film.  However I wonder how the next few years will go for comic book film releases. As this breaks the formula of the comic book movie formula as there is not just one central protagonist but multiple. Now that cinema audiences have now received this standard of superhero’s film I am skeptical that they will be satisfied returning to the traditional formula of one central protagonist in each film, as this now seems quite limiting.  It would prove difficult to to top this latest instalment in the Marvel movie machine and even if they were trying to do this where would they go? what would be next in our cinemas Batman vs Superman?

‘Avengers Assemble is out in cinema’s nation wide now.

Product attributes

Product attributes refers to the various options that a single item is available in and Fashion E-Commerce websites have one of the highest count of options available when compared to many other online shops selling popular items.  At the very least, you would have size and perhaps colour.  However, it isn’t uncommon to find options such as length, fabric and fit in online stores selling bridal dresses or bespoke clothing.

Even if your businesses doesn’t sell fashion wear which warrants multiple product attributes, it still makes sense to ensure that your E-Commerce platform is fully scalable in case you wish to expand your product line in the future.

Cross selling opportunities

This is one area where online shops have a significant advantage over physical stores – the opportunity to cross sell and their conversion rates.  When implemented correctly, cross selling can help you increase your sales by 7-10% (or up to 35% of sales attributed to cross-selling, if you are Amazon!)

To achieve this, each time you add a product to your E-Commerce website, the system should allow you to manually select other related items and them display them alongside the main item. However,  with time, your website platform should be equipped to ‘learn’ the viewing habits of your online users so that the process of populating the ‘similar items’ for cross-selling can be automated thereby saving you time and work.

Zoom

Zoom on images has become a bare minimum for most E-Commerce websites. However, if you are selling clothes, especially on the higher-end,  a good quality zoom and preferably a ‘full screen’ option can help your website visitors take informed online decisions and increase your visitor to customer conversions.

Next has a great zoom feature which provides high-def images without compromising the page-load speed.

Whilst you may not see the zoom ‘plugin’ your Web Development company may use until the website coding has begun, it makes sense to insist on the highest quality of image zoom on your E-Commerce website.

Social Sharing

Although allowing users to share products with their friends should be a feature on every ecommerce website now,  Social sharing is especially effective for websites selling fashion wear.  Generally speaking,  a younger demographic and fashion-savvy consumers are also more likely to be active on the social web resulting in a greater likelihood of your clothes getting greater online exposure with the help of social sharing widgets such as AddThis.

You can use this to your advantage by making sure that your online shop’s Social Sharing function isn’t an afterthought and in fact, occupies a prominent position within the individual product pages. A good example of this is placing the “Share” button alongside the Buy button.

We hope this information helps make the process of getting your Fashion website design a little easier. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Video marketing combines the best of two ever evolving and exciting worlds: television and internet, providing an exciting new avenue for effective online marketing.

• Consumption of online video surpassed 770 billion views across the U.S., U.K., France and Germany in 2011
• By 2015, paid-for online video spending is predicted to reach close to £4bn across the four countries.
• Smartphones sales are projected to surpass 450 million units worldwide for 2011, fuelled mainly by the impact of Android-based handsets.

Improve Search Rankings with Video Marketing

If you are hoping to increase search engine rankings for your website, it is no longer an option not to utilize video marketing. Now that search engines incorporate videos and images into standard search results, businesses have the ability to gain greater visibility by employing standard video SEO formulas.

Here’s a basic guide on optimizing your video content for Search Engines and help your videos gain maximum views

1. Optimize with keywords

As with any type of text-based content, video SEO includes enhancing with targeted keywords — for both user experience as well as search engines. Try using keywords in:

• File name
• Title
• Tags
• URL
• Link text

 2. Distribute videos on multiple video-sharing sites

Besides posting videos on your site, consider taking advantage of video-sharing sites which are valuable tools for expanding your online presence and acquiring more links.

YouTube is the number 1 video sharing website so you at the very least you should create your own channel and post your video here. For example, you can check out our YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/flow20com where we upload all our corporate video production work.

However, don’t forget other to utilize some of the other video sharing websites to help you increase your online presence and maximise your video’s exposure, such as:

• Vimeo
• UStream
• Daily Motion
• Current TV

3. Apply a linking strategy

Your video will be judged by the same linking standards as all forms of digital content. Thus, building both internal and external links is vital for video SEO:

• Cross-link to other videos
• Link to videos from relevant web pages
• Link to videos in blog posts
• Tweet the video
• Link to videos from social media pages

4. Urge users to share your videos

If you would like users to share your videos, create content worth sharing. If your video doesn’t interest, entertain or inform, users won’t share it, let alone watch it:

• Encourage users to comment on your video
• Simplify the way users can share your video on You Tube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

5. Re-use your videos

Much like text content, the more optimized your video, the better. Get creative in order to re-use your videos across the web:

• Insert videos in blog posts
• Create multiple shorter videos out of a longer video
• Post a screen shot of your video  to an image-share site such as Flickr
• Turn other content, like training videos, into digital assets for your website

Simply put, video is a powerful content driver. It is by nature, viral – a quality video can be one of the most effective channels for spreading your message, brand, or product around the world in the blink of an eye.

Thanks in part to the growth of tablet devices such as iPad and Kindle, coupled with constant improvements and browsing capabilities of mobile phones,  consumers are using mobile devices for everything from product research and online shopping to helping make decisions on purchases even while in physical stores. According to a Google shopping study done by Ipsos OTX, 77% of tablet users made use of their device for their 2011 holiday shopping. Not surprisingly, a 2011 Google study shows that tablet owners have a higher likelihood of using the device for online shopping than even smartphone users due to the better browsing experience tablet computers provide.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile advertising is taking a significant share of the overall Internet marketing budget and in 2012, 34% of UK marketers are expected to spend between 6% and 10% of their total online marketing budget on mobile advertising alone.

Mobile Advertising is predicted to sore over the next few years.

• While spending on mobile advertising saw only a slight increase between 2009 and 2010 an unprecedented leap was experienced over the next few years and trend seems to continue.
• Mobile marketing expenditure is expected to explode by 2014, to an unprecedented £285m. The larger percentage of which will likely be spent on mobile advertising just in the UK.

The expanding popularity of smart phones and tablets is creating a surge of savvy consumers willing and eager to use e-commerce mobile sites for their purchases. This trend opens up a vast new frontier for online businesses. By exploring this promising trend sooner rather than later and before your competitors do, you could significantly increase your marketing ROI You would do well to stretch your horizons and budgets to take advantage of this golden opportunity.

How to Optimize for Mobile Marketing

It is vital, in 2012, for businesses to optimize their website for mobile access in order to optimize their mobile site in these key areas:

• Speed
• Image rendering
• Accessibility

An important point to consider is how you would like to allow mobile users to access your page. You have 3 options:

• Generating mobile optimized webpages of your current website without any change to URL
• Using dedicated mobile pages
• Having a separate sub-domain for the mobile version of your website. For example, mobile.companyname.com

A well created mobile website differs to the desktop version in some ways.  If you are considering having a mobile version of your website created, here are some pointers to bear in mind:

• Your website’s mobile version doesn’t necessarily include all content from the desktop version.  Think about the user intent and the information your user will most likely need having searched for and found your mobile website. IMDB is a great example of this – when viewing info about a particular movie, for example, the amount of information shown on the mobile version is significantly less and usually only contains the most important bits from the movie such as cast, year of release and so on.
• Only show the most important information from content categories (ie. Pages). For example, whereas the full version of your website’s Contact page may contain a contact form, your mobile version only needs to show the contact information and opening hours.
• If your website shows ad, you want to avoid showing these on the mobile version

Page Design for Mobile Marketing

Keep in mind; mobile devices have a different screen layout than do desktops.

• Design pages for a screen size of 320 by 240 pixels
• It is difficult for Mobile users to focus on detailed areas of your site’s design
• Clicking on small links is challenging while running for a connecting train or plane
• Add alt-tags for pictures; users tend to block downloading images in their web browsers in order to reduce bandwidth consumption.
• If you have optimized webpages for mobile interface, you can give users a mobile meta-tag such as: mobile optimized. This will alert mobile web browsers that your content does not need to be minimized.

According to Mobile Marketing Association – The extraordinary growth of smart phones in combination with their exceptional user interface will enable people to use conventional websites on their handsets. Direct business-to-consumer apps can be delivered using traditional Web tools as well as Web adaptation tools. As smart phone and tablet saturation permeates online marketing, the mobile user now possesses the technology to access quality content on their mobile devices making this medium quite advantageous for marketers.

For more information on our Website Design Services and how we can help you grow via the mobile web, email create@flow20.com or call 0208 133 0754.

Enjoy!

…….

Dominance of Android – 2011 was a big year for Google’s Android OS.  Google purchased the initial developer of the software, Android Inc. in 2005 and launched the OS in 2007. Since then, its market share had steadily grown. In 2011, Android overtook the Apple OS in terms of market share and currently stands at 50.1% compared to Apple’s 30.2% (as of Feb 2012).Google has often been criticised for its inability to gain commercial success of products outside the online realm such as search and email. However, the success of Android proves Google’s ability to make successful products outside of its core offering.

Dominance of iPad – As with the iPod and most Apple products,  iPad has now become the generic term for tablet computer and leads the way not just in terms of market share but level of desirability as well. iPad’s market share at the end of 2011 was 54% (surprisingly, the last 3 months of 2011 saw its market share drop by 7%). When tablet computers were launched in 2010, it was met with resistance and deemed to be nothing more than a fad. Tablet computers now have become very much mainstream and the industry is expected to grow by a whopping 1000% by 2014.  Check out this blogpost and a very informative infogrpahic.

Growth of the Mobile Internet – Late figures released in 2011 suggest that almost 20% of all Internet traffic in the UK is generated via mobiles. 70% of this mobile traffic is generated by iphone alone!

Growing woes of RIM – The once iconic Blackberry brand continues its decline in every possible way.  Towards the end of 2011, its market share was just 13.4%. There were even talks of a possible acquisition, most prominently by Microsoft but nothing happened (yet!). RIM shares lost approx. 70% of its value in 2011.

Rise of ebooks – In 2011, Amazon stated that its sales of ebooks had overtaken those of paperback books.  2011 has also been a solid year for Amazon’s Kindle and many analyst believe to be contributing factor in the recent drop of ipad’s market share.

Launch of Google + – 2011 saw the launch of Google +, Google’s attempt to rival the Social Media giant Facebook and to a lesser extent, twitter. Whilst the overall growth hasn’t lived up to the hype, 2011 saw registrations count to Google + reach almost 40 million. In recent months, this growth has been accelerated ever since Google announced that Google + can help improve search rankings.

Sale of Lovefilm – Amazon has had a stake in Lovefilm for quite some time. However,  in January 2011, Amazon purchased the remaining stakes est. £200m to completely acquire Lovefilm. The reason behind this is widely believed to have a strong foothold in the growing online movie rental business and to rival Netflix’s worldwide expansion plans.

Growing older twitter – 2011 marked the 5th birthday of the micro-blogging site.  The last 3 years has seen twitters popularity increase exponentially and it currently has 140 million active users.  Here’s an interesting article on how the twitter website looked like when it was launched along with some others that are hugely popular today.

Birth of iCloud – The cloud computing phenomenon continues to grow and 2011 saw the launch of iCloud by Apple.  The iCloud is a set of cloud computing apps which also includes iTunes on the cloud. See official press release.

50m WordPress – WordPress has grown to become the leading blog and Content Management System available on the web and for good reason. Its ease of use for both, users and developers and the myriad of plugins available have no doubt helped fuel its growth. Not to mention, its free! July 2011 saw the 50 millionth WordPress blog go live.  That number now exceeds 70 million! See official stats site.

Habilis is a new business providing Lifestyle Management and Virtual Assistant Services to clients across UK, US and Australia. A part of Amnet Systems Ltd (for whom we manage SEO and the website UX),  Habilis  came to us with the goal of helping the company generate brand awareness and increase its revenue via our SEO and Website Copywriting Services.

The brief

Effectively communicate the company’s value proposition to its online users and increase the websites impact and therefore, conversions by effective website text content.
Increase new member registrations online and the level of targeted traffic to website.

Analysis & Action

In order to ensure maximum conversions, it is important for the text content of the website to clearly explain the benefit of the company’s services and how it can add value to the user. As important is to ensure that the message flows seamlessly from one page to the next so as to enhance the user navigation resulting in a positive user experience.
On the SEO side, we helped devise a complete SEO strategy alongwith identification of the important keywords and optimization within Google.
Finally, we helped install processes to generate user feedback which can often give invaluable insights, especially for new websites.

Results

The campaign results have been overwhelmingly positive and within 6 weeks of campaign start, we noticed the following findings:

• New member registrations increase of over 200% in month 3 of campaign
• Inbound traffic increase of 70% in month 3
• Average monthly traffic increase of 45% from month 4 onwards
• Over 80% positive feedback received from users.

Flow20.com provides Search Engine Optimization Services to help business grow. For more information and to find out how we can help your business grow and reach you goals , give us a call on 0208 133 0754 or email create@flow20.com.

Introduction

Based in Leicester, PC Repair Lab provides mobile computer repair services to consumers across the UK.
They came to us in enquiring about how our website re-design service can help their business grow and what Flow20.com can do to help.
They knew their site was getting traffic since they were using Google AdWords but not getting the expected level of business from their efforts.
__________________________________________________________________________

Analysis

Upon a detailed study of their Google Analytics data we determined that the poor performance of the following metrics may be the cause for their concerns:

• PC Repair Lab’s website was getting a reasonable no. of visitors compared to other business of similar size and industry but the website-to-enquiry conversion rates were less than 0.5%
• The website-to-booking conversion rates were around the same mark
• The website had a Bounce Rate (no. of people who left the website from the landing page, without clicking further on any pages) was high, close to 60%.
• Our initial study was useful and helped us understand that it wasn’t lack of visitors that contributed to the low ROI but rather the design and the user-experience of their website which was limiting the ease of use by which website visitors should be able to perform their Critical Actions on their website such as request a quote, make a booking and make an enquiry.

__________________________________________________________________________

Action  

By analysing the data before we started the work, we were able effectively strategize the
design goals and the end-results the new website should deliver. We set out to create a
new website design for them with the following goals in mind 

• Strategic and consistent placement of the important Call-to-action’s for the website to improve conversions 
• Use relevant graphics and text for the new website visitors to help them instantly identify the website’s value proposition, 
• thereby decreasing Bounce Rates  
• Relevant enquiry forms to encourage those visitors who weren’t ready to buy to increase lead-generation
• Placement of customer testimonials on homepage to inspire new-visitor trust and confidence 

__________________________________________________________________________

Results

Bounce Rate and Average time spent on site

The following graphs taken from PC Repair Lab’s Google Analytics account demonstrates the positive impact that the
website redesign immediately had, upon launch:

As you can see from the above graph, Bounce Rates (orange) reduced by approx. 35% and
Average time on site (blue) increased by almost 80%.

Pages per visit and Pageviews

As you can see from the above graph, Pages per visit (orange) increased by almost  45% and Pageviews (blue) increased by a whopping 80%!

Bounce Rate and Average time spent on site

The following graphs taken from PC Repair Lab’s Google Analytics account demonstrates the positive impact that the website redesign immediately had, upon launch:

As you can see from the above graph, Bounce Rates (orange) reduced by approx. 35% and Average time on site (blue) increased by almost 80%.

Can a website redesign help increase your sales? Why not get in touch by calling 0208 133 0754 or Request a Webdesign Quote.

Whilst trying to check out a location in New York using Google Maps I found two streets, parallel to each other, yet, the time each of the streets were last mapped by Google’s street view car is almost 2 years apart! Doesn’t that seem a little odd to you?

One of the streets has been updated as recently as June 2011 whilst the other was last mapped in April 2009.

I know that certain cities, especially in the US and New York is more often updated than other cities and countries but can’t quite figure out the huge discrepancy in updates for 2 streets next to each other.

2 parallel New York streets mapped 2 years apart!

Any thoughts?

PS. You can check out which cities and countries are currently being mapped by the Street View car at http://maps.google.com/intl/en/help/maps/streetview/learn/where-is-street-view.html.

Innovation can take many forms within film, from film technology to filmic techniques within editing and cinematography, to the story or to the extent of how the story is told. A good example of innovation in narrative is Quinton Tarrentino’s 1994 film ‘Pulp Fiction’ that broke traditional cinema narrative conventions by choosing to tell a story in non linear format ( radical at the time as cinema narrative had always been told in chronological order). Over the last century the huge quantaty of films produced has seen nearly every story that could exist being shown to audiences. Fresh ideas now lie in how a story is told as opposed to the story itself. This applies to advertising also  as audiences are now more interested in how it is presented and using what techniques as opposed to the concept itself. The use of computer generated images (CGI) have become increasingly popular with advertising audiences over the last few years due to the rapid increase in capabilities within CGI technologies.

Fusing humour with special effects technologies is also something the advertising world has seen a lot of in the past five years. Toyota in particular made a splash with their advert last year for the Yaris which saw a mix of contemporary music and style of filmmaking (rap video format). With use of a CGI technology by the name of ‘stop motion’ with an additional application of the use of old fashioned  1980′s styled puppets. This combines in the same frame the origin of a technology and its vast progression to its state in present day…commenting on the brand of the Yaris all with a humorous undertone and an edgy format. With online videos being such a new format I wonder if they will reference their beginning stages in several years similar to how the Toyota Yaris advert has done this with the use of stop motion animation and puppetry.

So, I thought I would share with you, some of the unique features of Wikipedia and just what it is that makes the website so easy to use.

Jump – to / Quick navigation menu

Each Wikipedia  entry page has a vertical sub-menu towards the left of the page, immediately after the introductory paragraphs. The great feature about this is that it not only gives you an instant overview of all the types of information available on that page about the subject but clicking on any item within the sub-menu also makes the page scroll down to that part of the information within the page.  For subjects for which Wikipedia has quite a lot of information, this is especially useful and a great way to save time and quickly find the information you are looking for.

The location of this sub-menu is also quite logical – positioned after the opening paragraphs. I imagine that most users find the information they are looking for within the opening paragraphs and for those who want to delve deeper within the subject, they can use the sub menu to find their way through.

Annotations

Approx. 96% of information within Wikipedia pages is cited with the relevant source of reference via a superscript number in straight brackets which isn’t uncommon. However, clicking on a numbered reference immidiately scrolls the page towards the bottom to that source citation. What’s especially useful is that the source highlights in blue making it immediately clear  which source of reference you clicked on. This is very useful and almost essential in a site like Wikipedia which in many cases cites hundreds of references in a single article.

Images

Finally, every image listed is marked with a little “window in window” sign to indicate that clicking on an image opens it in a new page, within the same browser window. Strictly speaking, I think this signs actually indicates that clicking on the image will open a new page in a new browser window, I suppose this icon is still useful to the group of beginners and intermediate Internet users.