Posts written by Trenton Moss

As March rolls around I seem to be spending much of my time sifting through CVs and doing interviews - we’re currently recruiting for both a new marketing manager and head of UX and have had a huge response for both roles. The economic downturn becomes really apparent when we recruit as we end up getting so many responses from some incredibly qualified candidates. We’ve also recently taken on a couple of great new UX consultants so lots of new faces around the office.

Other than recruiting, we’re as busy as usual doing the usual range of usability, accessibility and design projects, as well as lots of training courses. We’ve also got a new advanced web writing training course starting later this month, so are just putting the finishing touches to this. This follows on from the launch of our other 2 new courses, SEO & PPC training this month.

We additionally published our annual ecommerce accessibility report, which as usual picked up plenty of press coverage and got lots of Twitter mentions. This year B&Q topped the charts with a record-high 84% - very impressive and well done to the web team over there. Every year we evaluate the website accessibility of 20 of the major UK high street retailers. Although there were some good improvements from the likes of B&Q,  the overall average slipped slightly which isn’t so encouraging.

Finally we got out and about a bit this month, with our marketing manager Jon presenting at the National Housing Federation Marketing Communications conference on how to engage audiences through social media (watch the video on our YouTube channel). I also presented at an SME ecommerce event at Wembley Stadium on how to increase conversion rates. I have to say, presenting with a view of the entire stadium is certainly impressive. The view - along with the fact that I was presenting with a microphone in my hand - made me rather tempted to break out into song as any rock star wouldn’t. Fortunately for the audience I didn’t.

Webcredible is recruiting! We’re looking for a part-time marketing manager (3 days per week) to join our friendly team on a permanent basis in London, UK. Our marketing strategy has been at the centre of our growth since inception so this position is key to our continued growth and development.

You’ll be fully responsible for the company marketing and PR strategy (online and offline), from conception all the way through to execution. This is a senior role in the company, with you reporting directly to a company director.

Read the full job description for more, send over your CV and you could be working here sooner than you think!

So as we roll in to February we’re starting to ramp up for our busiest period of the year. In the UK, financial year end for many companies is the end of March, so all-of-a-sudden lots of organisations are looking to spend their remaining budget. We’ve got the usual array of research & design projects lined up over the next few months and have recently recruited a couple of new consultants to join our team to help service our clients.

Where our clients allow, we do like to publicise the work we’re doing so our client list is always being updated and we try to announce projects that we’re working on. For example, Utalkmarketing.com, Retail Systems, and Netimperative have all recently reported on some work we’ve been doing with retailer JD Sports.

We’ve also recently expanded the remit of our training courses, running our first ever SEO training and search marketing & PPC training later this week. We’re running the courses in conjunction with search & online marketing experts, Latitude Group, with both courses virtually selling out now. We’ve also got a new advanced web writing training course starting in March, which we’re running with digital copywriting experts, Sticky Content. The course is a great follow-on from our existing web writing course, which we’ve renamed ‘intermediate web writing training’.

We also published the results of our latest poll, about which industry has the most difficult to use websites. You chose between financial services, government, news, retail, travel and utilities and the winner with just over a third of the votes was… government. It wasn’t a huge surprise - at least to us - that government websites are felt to be the hardest to use, but what did surprise us was just how many of you voted this way. I guess given their likely limited budgets and incredibly diverse audiences, it’s always going to be difficult for government websites to be the best.

We’ve also got a couple of speaking spots this month, one at the National Housing Federation national conference on the role of social media and another one on ecommerce usability at a Wembley ecommerce event. Until next month…