Our thinking

Every year Webcredible has a Team Day where we all partake in mostly embarrassing team activities for a day.  This year we combined our annual values session, a communications profiling session and to finish off, a nostalgic sports day in Hyde Park.

The values reflect how we all feel about being a Webcredible and enables us to all share a vision and work towards a common goal both internally as a team and with our clients.  These will be updated over the next few days in our History & culture page, check out what we came up with!

The communications profiling session was about establishing our own communication styles and learning to adapt our own styles to suit other people, there are four types of communication styles we talked about:

• Driver – Fast & short tone, directive, ‘I’, Likes Facts, Assertive
• Analytical – Logical, speaks long tone, questions, ‘We’, Likes facts
• Amiable – Mostly ‘we’, open dialogue, question & suggestions, long tone
• Expressive – Animated, ‘I’, informal, dynamic, fast & inflective

It’s great as we have a good mix of different communication styles within the company, and it was no surprise being the office manager that I am a driver : )

After this we hiked to Hyde Park with a nice bottle of Pimms and lots of sports day equipment.  We started gently with some general knowledge questions then got stuck in with egg and spoon races, sack races, bean bag balancing races and plenty more, I think most of us definitely felt the pain the next day!

I must say it was worth all the aches and pain the next day as the winning team got to pie (with a Victoria sponge cake) the two directors of Webcredible!

This is my first of a new monthly update on Webcredible – what’s been happening in the company, changes to the website, what we’ve got coming up… In case you don’t know me, my name’s Trenton Moss and I founded Webcredible in 2003. I still work here, overseeing the day-to-day running of the company.

So June’s been a relatively busy month for us. The weather’s been great the past month in London, although I guess when you’re stuck in an office all day that’s not much help. Open windows have been replaced by air con pumping out as the temperature has soared. On top of the great weather we’ve won quite a few larger user-centered design and web development projects. Whilst we do lots of smaller projects like one-off usability tests or quick web builds, it’s always nice for us to get our teeth sunk into a 3+ month project. You can check out some of our current projects, if you’re interested.

In case you don’t know, we run regular polls on the site, and with 6000+ site visitors each day we get a lot of people responding. Our latest poll asked, ‘What is most likely to persuade you to make a purchase from an online retailer?’ The poll results were quite interesting with Computer Weekly and Web User both picking up on the findings.

Other things to have happened in June include:

• We put live our case study of the new Cambridgeshire.net website – we’re really pleased with the site as we think it looks great, functions well and is very usable.
• We’ve been featured for the 4th year running in the annual Econsultancy User experience buyer’s guide
  
• We published a new article, User experience over usability, explaining why you should focus on the overall user experience and not just usability.

Soon, we’ll be publishing the 2009 version of our annual council report, as well putting live a new upcoming events page on the site. Our head of UX, Elisa will be participating at the IMRG usability and user experience workshop this month so if you’re a member of the IMRG then do come on down!

That’s all for now… If there’s anything you’d like to ask or tell me about Webcredible then please leave a comment and I’ll reply.