Posts written by Trenton Moss

Another month goes by and we head into the final third of the year and - as usual in September - thoughts begin to turn to Christmas (at least in my household!). There are a whole 4 months to go but the gift ideas and general planning - as well as the Christmas store front displays - are likely to begin very soon.

Because of this we decided to re-run the same poll we did 2 years ago, where it turned out that 1/3 of you weren’t such great planners and did your Xmas shopping at the last minute on the high street! Our latest poll is asking when you’ll do your Christmas shopping between now and December and whether you’ll do it online or on the high street. Over the years we’ve run about 20 polls, with all the results available on the site - they certainly make for interesting reading.

Other than watching the poll votes pile up, we’ve been busy as usual in the office… or at least those us left in the office have been. With holiday season in full swing the office is as usual at its quietest this month. And given the weather in London during August you couldn’t really choose a better month to get away.

Another thing that happened this month is that our training courses seem to be selling even more than usual, which is great news for us! Our search engine rankings for the courses have increased quite a lot in the past month, which is one of the reasons for this.

Our web pages always rank well in Google as there’s so much good content on the site and the pages use very efficient code. We realised however that the training pages didn’t feature the training name enough so did a bit of work increasing the keyword density (i.e. inserting the name of the course a few more times on the page) and hey-presto! For example, our social media training course has increased from 52 to 9 in the Google rankings.

Another month goes by here at Webcredible, and it seems to have flown by in record time. Summer is supposed to be a quiet period where we finally get round to doing those non-urgent tasks that we’ve been putting off for 6 months. Not so this year though. We’ve been unbelievably busy the past month, working on a number of large projects that are finishing off (with some new ones starting almost straightaway afterwards).

We’ve also been super-busy liaising with existing clients about upcoming projects and winning quite a bit of new business. Much of this time has been frantically spent trying to fit our schedules in with our clients’ needs. We have a hugely complex and pernickety internal resourcing system (called the ‘Team Planner’) that precisely shows what we’re all (supposed to be) doing. Trying to fit all our work into this has been majorly challenging to say the least!

When not fiddling around with our resourcing system I’ve been working hard on bringing in new business (as I always do) and we’ve won some really interesting projects, which we’ll be kicking off shortly. Our favourite projects are always ones which combine both research and design, as it means we can create interfaces based on actual user and business requirements. Quite a few of our projects are research-only, which whilst they’re always interesting can be a little disappointing when - despite our best endeavour - our recommendations aren’t always implemented in the way we envisaged.

The company seems to have had quite a government-focus in July, with the following happening:

• We published our 4th annual council report, evaluating the top 20 Socitm council websites against 20 best practice usability guidelines. The average usability score went slightly down, which was a bit disappointing. With the massive government cuts coming the way of all the councils, they’ve got to sort their websites out if they’re to truly make some cost savings.
• We exhibited at the Building Perfect Council Websites ‘10 conference (for the first time), which was a lot of fun. We caught up with some clients and met a whole bunch of new people, many of whom seemed to enjoy our sweets!
• Our Head of UX, Pete Broadbent, hosted a roundtable discussion on usability at the conference. It was a really interesting discussion which seemed to get great feedback from those participating. Read Pete’s blog post for more on what they spoke about.

We also had our CSR day at Webcredible in July. We have at least one away day each year and this year we took part in the Community Games Project, part of Give & Gain Day. The day was all about mobilising local children in London to take part in all sorts of different sports, to show them how sport could have a positive impact in their lives. We all put on our sports shoes and ran around with the kids having lots of fun! Afterwards, in a state of exhaustion we went off to do some cocktail making and then ended up in the London Icebar.

Another new development happened in July with regards to our training courses, in that they’ve gone regional. We’re running our usability & accessibility training stream courses in Bristol, Cardiff and Birmingham later on this year (as well as London) and will likely follow this up with some more locations.

As we’re roll into July I’m looking out from the Webcredible offices into the beautiful sunshine. It’s been a pretty consistent view weather-wise this past month as we’ve had a lot of sunny days, and apparently the driest 6 months in 80 years.

Aside from looking at the sunshine, I seem to have spent a lot of my time this past month watching the World Cup. With so many games on during work hours it’s been fantastic that both the BBC and ITV have been streaming the games live on their websites (or maybe not, given England’s dire performances and early exit from the competition).

It seems to have been an equally miserable World Cup for ITV for a number of reasons:

• They showed an advert in the middle of the England vs. USA game during which time England scored
• They’ve had technical problems with the ITV player meaning some people missed the opening game
• The ITV Player usability has received quite a bit of criticism, including its usage and findability

ITV also came last in our recent World Cup usability report, a dismal 20% behind the next lowest score. The report evaluated the websites of FIFA and 4 major broadcasters - the BBC, Sky, ITV and Eurosport - against 10 best practice usability guidelines. It’s free to download so have a read as it describes lots of general usability principles to which any website should adhere.

We had another report come out this month, that of our travel usability report. British Airways managed to hold on to their top position, which is something for them to smile about given the cabin crew strikes and volcanic ash cloud that have impacted them this year. They scored a whopping 78%, up from their table-topping 71% last year.

We also launched a 5 new training courses this month, including:

• Affiliate marketing training
• Google Analytics training
• jQuery training
• SEO training - advanced
• Social media training

This takes our total number of training courses to 15, which is very exicting for us as we look to grow this part of the business.

July is looking to be a government-focused month, with us publishing our annual council usability report and attending the Building Perfect Council Websites. We do a reasonable amount of work within the public sector, but fortunately not too much as the impending government cuts are likely to massively affect spending. I fear that any company relying on revenue from the public sector is going to be in for a torrid time over the next year or 2.

On a brighter note, we’ve got a lot more going on in July. We’ll be busy interviewing for a UX consultant - we’ve been so busy this year, with no sign of respite that it’s time for us to grow the team. Based on our current projections, we’ll likely be recruiting quite a few new people over the next year or so.

Finally, and as usual please take a few seconds to vote in our latest poll: When starting university what would be the most useful online activity? As usual, we’ll share the results on the website once we get about 1000 responses.

As we swing into June summer is most definitely here in London. For me, summer arrives when the air con starts going on every day in the office and we no longer rely on opening windows, and this has most definitely been happening recently. The customary differences in opinion (usually between the men and women) as to the air con temperature have also begun surfacing in earnest.

Summer this year brings a great deal of uncertainty into the UK, with our new government promising massive cuts especially with public sector spending. At Webcredible we’ve been extremely busy this year working on some large and very interesting projects, with no apparent sign of this waning. We’ve still got decent briefs coming in from both the public and private sector so it will be interesting to see how this pans out.

So, other than the General Election and the iPad launching in the UK in May, it was an eventful month for us. We’ve finally hired our new Head of User Experience, Pete Broadbent, after a lengthy selection process. Pete has a huge amount of experience within the UX and digital space and we’re really excited to have him in the company. He’s worked for a very large consultancy for the past few years so has built up varied experiences over the past 10 years or so.

Talking of new hires, we’ll also be hiring a new office manager this month as our current one is sadly leaving us. I’ve got a number of interviews lined up for what is actually a hugely important role within the company - the Office Manager is probably the person that interacts the most with everyone internally and ensures people’s day-to-day happiness.

We noticed quite a bit of activity over on Twitter too, with people tweeting about the results from our latest poll. Our poll asked why you’d abandon an order when shopping online, with the most commonly cited answers (accounting for 2/3 of the votes) being:

• Hidden charges at the checkout
• Having to register before buying

We weren’t too surprised that these came out on top as we see consumers complaining about these all the time in research. We were however surprised at the number of people that chose these 2 options. Ecommerce managers, you have been warned!

We’ve got a couple of reports coming out this summer too, namely our annual flight booking and council usability reports. I really like our reports - they always rank 20 of the leading providers against 20 key usability guidelines that we’ve developed through our own research (we run a lot of projects in the travel and local government sectors). The reports always make for an interesting read as they:

• Have a full league table showing who are the best and worst
• Explain the guidelines in detail meaning everyone can learn best practices

So do look out for our reports! We’ll of course blog and Tweet about them when they come out. Do also keep an eye out for our new training courses. We’ve got 5 new courses launching this week (taking the total number up to 15), and are splitting them up into 5 separate training streams. Our training courses our great (although I’m a bit biased)… small class sizes, highly interactive and taught by experts - what more could you want!

Until next month…