When was the last time you tested every single form on your site to see if it works from a users perspective. Tonight when I was filling in a form on the Eurotunnel site it seems to me that even a big travel firm such as these guys haven’t spared the time to actually used their form. They’re using a really common form control - the JQuery UI date picker for a date of birth field.  On the face of it, that seems like a perfectly reasonable plan - date pickers can make certain that users don’t enter invalid date…

A couple of weeks ago we pushed live a new site for our customers Acadustri. These guys are medical writers, helping large pharmaceutical companies produce all the vital reports and documentation needed to get new drugs approved. Our brief was to produce a bespoke designed responsive website with email marketing and ongoing digital marketing support - a wide brief, but we feel we’ve done a great job. From our initial engagement we undertook detailed research and ideation.  I pitched the concept of a beautifully simple site, where the written word guided the reader and very little use of photography other…

Or planning for when your Development Lead goes under a bus. We’ve been working for the last six months on our biggest project to date which involves the redevelopment of a gym fitness application from a legacy client server app based on Windows Forms & MySql to an Amazon Cloud hosted distributed application with Mobile App, WebApp and WebAPI.   We’re midway through the first gym implementation at the moment, the database is migrated to SQL Server and live on Amazon RDS, the WebApi is live and the MobileApp is with Apple for approval.   Everything is going swimmingly at the moment,…

Last year we worked on an Umbraco project for a FTSE100 pharmaceutical company. The project was to build and implement a personalised training portal, accessible from laptops on their corporate network as well as tablets on the open internet.Unsurprisingly information security was a big issue to them, and part of our brief was to ensure that all user logins were authenticated using their corporate identity provider. After working with their Information Security team and Corporate Head of Technical Standards we designed a system to integrate the Umbraco Membership system with the client's Identity Provider, Ping Federate, using SAML (Security Assertion…

We’ve been working with Sports Leaders UK for many years, and I’ve written about some of the interesting projects we’ve undertaken with them.  Today I want to focus on how we enable Sports Leaders to raise thousands of pounds every month through selling merchandise using TeaCommerce and Umbraco. Sports Leaders UK were looking for an online shop tool that would enable them to advertise their clothing merchandise to existing schools and Learners.  In the shops original incarnation, the site simply showed pictures of available stock with a downloadable PDF to be printed and sent with a cheque.  Delivery costs were…

Last week we put a new site live for our customer Rediweld Mouldings who manufacture injection moulded parts for a number of different uses. They had an online ordering system in use which was based on Classic ASP, was unreliable, difficult to manage and required developer intervention when new inventory was added. The system forms an integral part of a Kanban ordering system for aircraft parts. Kanban ordering can be a very effective way to reduce waste within a productions system, but is reliant on effective systems. When Rediweld’s customer runs low on stock levels, they use the kanban ordering…

This week we put a site live for our new customer All Environmental Health Services. They had been using a self built site, but were unhappy with the performance of the site. They wanted a professional site which delivered leads to the business on a reasonable budget. Our package of responsive Umbraco Sites enable growing business drive more leads online. If you’d like help growing your business through digital marketing then get in contact with us. Read on... New Umbraco Site for All Environmental Health Services.…

For many clients the choice of which content management system to use on a project is a critical factor in the procurement of a new web project.  We have found that Umbraco is a perfect fit for Enterprise clients. For many Enterprise clients the choice of Umbraco has been driven by a number of factors, including existing knowledge, skills and experience of the tools and technologies that form part of the Umbraco ecosystem. We have found that corporate clients presenting with an Umbraco requirement already have a significant investment in Microsoft server technologies.  Such clients will be running Windows Server…

Year one in university psychology courses new undergraduates are taught about the importance of the primacy and recency effect (or Serial Position Effect) in memory recall tasks. For over a century studies have shown that when a subject memorises a list of items, the primacy effect means they are more likely to recall the first items in a list, and the recency effect means they are more likely to recall the last items in the list. Why am I bothering with this?  Well there’s a primacy and recency effect that is well know in menu design and information architecture.  Users…

We work on a retained basis for one of our clients who manufacture and sell furniture. We run an ongoing campaign of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as well as monitoring sales through their site and making ongoing improvements to the site - called Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). As part of this campaign, late last year we recognised that the site had a reasonably high number of abandoned shopping carts, that is people who were adding items to their shopping cart but leaving before purchasing. When one reads around the subject there is much evidence of being able to convert these…