Posts tagged with 'Webcredible news'

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.