As we roll into November there’s not long to go now until the end of the year and we begin our planning for the new year. Before we do that, we’ve got a lot going on this month. We’re as busy as normal, working on the usual array of research and design projects.
October - as usual - had a real ecommerce focus for us, as we exhibited at Ecommerce Expo and published our 4th annual ecommerce usability report. It was great meeting so many of you at the Ecommerce Expo and you can check out some photos of our stand on Flickr, featuring our Webcredibles superheroes! The show was pretty successful for us and we had a number of positive conversations with visitors. Needless to say, if you met us then you’ll likely be getting a phone call from me this week!
I also did a presentation at the show, which seemed to go down OK. Our presentations always focus on trying to educate the audience, showcasing best practices, and I’ve always struggled to understand the point of presentations that are basically sales pitches - surely your knowledge and expertise should sell itself? Or worse still… people that read from the PowerPoint - what on earth is worse than Death by PowerPoint!
Our ecommerce usability report (free download) was published in October, and as usual got a lot of press coverage (including BBC News). The report assesses the websites of 20 leading UK high street retailers against 20 essential guidelines. When we originally did the study, Marks & Spencer did relatively poorly, but then they relaunched their website the day before we published the report. We quickly re-evaluated their site and they shot to the top of the list (alongside WH Smith) - talk about just in the nick-of-time!
We’ve got another report coming out this month, our 3rd annual usability study of the UK energy and water supplier websites. I know that our clients within these sectors take the report findings quite seriously so fingers crossed for them!
Other happenings at Webcredible include Abid’s excellent presentation on mobile usability at the IMRG mobile workshop (watch the presentation online), and an interview I did with Computer Weekly on increasing online sales to drive IT investment. If you’re a marketing manager at a relatively large company then you can also come meet us at this month’s Revolution Winter Forum, which should be a lot of fun.
Finally, we’ve just created 2 new training courses, as part of our plans to add on about 6 more courses over the coming months. Our SEO training and PPC training courses will run in early-February 2010 and then every 2 months after this.
Oh, and we’ve also launched a Flickr stream and YouTube channel so take a look! There’s not too much there at the moment but we’re hoping to build these up over time into really useful resources.
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