Monthly Archive for September, 2009

Web Traffic – Slow Build Is Best

Last weekend, we had our best day ever for web traffic by whatever measure we could find – hits, unique visits, downloads, sites. All were up, and if we’re pushed, we don’t really know why. What we do know is that on Monday morning, we had two very solid enquiries about future work.

The web is one of those places where hard and consistent work does bring rewards. It’s not so much a matter of shoving yourself forward all the time. It’s more a case of doing the right things consistently in order to get the results you are looking for.

This blog is one of those things. We hope that our new web site (coming soon!) will better reflect the quality of work which we do for clients like Secerno, Barclays Premier League, Barclays Spaces for Sport, Inflexion, IGP&I, Alcentra, Indicus Advisors, Stock Spirits and others.

Do return here whenever you would like to see more of our current work, or follow us on Twitter.com

Sometimes, only print will do

Standard Bulletin

Standard Bulletin

Our clients at the Standard need to keep in touch with people all around the globe. Their business is marine insurance and the regulations regarding ships and shipping change almost every day.

A judgement in a High Court case could mean that the way shipowners and charterers operate will have to change too. And there can be big penalties if these factors are ignored.

Standard Bulletin is one way that the Standard Club, based in the City of London, can keep in touch with its global industry. Designed by Wild West each month, Standard Bulletin contains a wealth of information that every shipowner and charterer needs in order to make the passage of goods around the world as smooth and as efficient as it can be.

Standard Safety, a complementary publication, deals with safe working practices – everything from working in confined spaces through to navigation issues. Charles Taylor & Co, who manage the Standard Club operation, make significant investments in attempting to ensure safety and increase awareness of best practice, something that continues to save lives around the world.

These two publications are both available on the Standard Club web site – www.standard-club.com – but paper copies have been proved to be essential to keep widely-dispersed individuals up to speed with information and best practice.

The Cobbler’s Children – Time to Refresh our Identity

Things have changed since we founded Wild West Design in 1996. Back then, it was only just becoming important to have a web site, mobile phones were getting to be less like bricks, and web applications were just starting to be talked about seriously. The dotcom boom was still to come, global warming was just an idea and ecommerce was unknown.

In those days, the bulk of our business was display, corporate literature, advertising in print and direct marketing - with hardly an electronic communications tool anywhere.

Fast forward 13 years, and most of our business still comes from important business services companies, but electronic design and communication is something we do every day of the week.

We not only design and build web sites for companies, products, PR campaigns, offers, market research, competitions and sponsorship initiatives, but our clients often expect to use their web site and email to communicate to specific target audiences through data-rooms and private areas which we set up on their behalf.

It’s been a hectic time.

Now though, we’ve had the chance to catch up with our own web presence and identity, and you’ll see the new wild west rolling out over the next few weeks. We’ll tell you more as it happens.

You only do it once a year. The Annual Report

Standard Annual Reports

Standard Annual Reports

Every year, you have the opportunity to put the case for your company, to analyse its trading position and the measures it is taking to ensure continued profitability and growth. There’s no question that the Annual Report is an important document.

It will be of vital importance to shareholders and other investors too, if you have them, but many other groups will study the document, for reassurance or the reverse. Your staff, your customers, analysts and journalists, members of trade bodies, those who supply you with services and products – these are just some of the possible groups who will be interested in what you have to say and how you make your case.

Wild West has worked on annual reports for two of the largest and most successful organisations in marine insurance for some years now. The Standard Clubs of London and Bermuda provide mutual insurance to a large percentage of the world’s shipping, making sure that international trade can continue to thrive.

We’d like to think that our design and presentation input has helped these organisations – and the company that manages them, Charles Taylor & Co – to grow and thrive.

Boost Web Site Traffic. Add a Blog

Blogs like this one aren’t difficult to set up. The difficult thing is to keep them updated regularly with news from your company. If you do manage to do that, though, you should see some tangible results and sooner than you might think too.

The web is an information medium, but it’s a news medium too, one where (for example) experts can provide very succinct nuggets of information (and we’d like to think that this is one of those!) which help to showcase your company’s capabilities and what it is good at.

That’s exactly the kind of content – continually refreshed and updated – that search engines love. Too often, web sites are treated like the annual report. ‘We did that months ago’ – people tell us, without realising that by failing to refresh and update content, they are losing potential visitors and more importantly, the business that comes with an understanding of your special expertise.

Wild West is a team of people – designers, programmers and marketing experts – all of whom can bring to bear particular expertise on issues that regularly face commercial organisations – from identity and branding, through to the creation of documents and web resources that will help the business to grow.

A blog is part of today’s marketing toolkit. Ignore it, and you might just be turning your back on business.

Blogs can focus on a specific aspect of your business, on an area of specialisation or something you are particularly proud of (like a sponsorship deal or a social responsibility programme). In fact, today’s blogging software is often enough to organise and publish all the marketing information that a smaller, specialist company may have the bandwidth to put out. That could mean that it might be able to do without the expense of a web site altogether, at least at the outset. Something to think about there, particularly for start-up companies!

Web Site Statistics – A New Twist

Putting privileged information on your web site, probably in a password-protected area, has advantages beyond treating special clients in a special way. Because each password is linked to a particular person or company, you can track very closely statistics like:

- how often did each one visit the site (if at all)?
- what files did they download? (and so what are the hot topics for that individual?)
- what pages did they visit?

These kind of statistics can be interesting when trying to assess how and why shareholders, investors, journalists and others behave as they do, and can be important for your sales and management processes, as well as providing valuable input to a sales team or marketing campaign.

Building Web Traffic and Business Too

Once upon a time, everyone loved Flash animations, and the thing to have was a big animated sequence on your home page to entice everyone into your site. (We did a wonderful one for Mezzanine Management – a floating and revolving logo on a black background – but it took a long time to load!)

Nowadays, businesses need to know that if someone just visits the home page of your site, there will be something there that tells them very quickly what the company does, who its products or services are designed for, and why someone in their target market might want to read further.

These days, its all about targetting and measurement, and if possible, having your clients and potential clients come back time after time, maybe by giving privileged access to certain information for key individuals.

They won’t do that if your web content is flat and uninteresting; if your news section hasn’t been updated for six months; if your contact information is out of date. Yet all of these things still happen.

A web site should be like a magazine, not an inscription on a stone. The content should change regularly, and be interesting too. Why should I read this page? Should be the first question you ask about your site. Why? Because that’s what every visitor will be asking too. (Inflexion – see the post below – is a great example).

Web Design – Keep Your Options Open

Inflexion Homepage

Wild West is an unashamed fan of open source software, particularly when it comes to web design and to content management. Why? Because it allows the owners of a web site to have the maximum in terms of transparency and portability too.

Once upon a time the whole software industry was based on a ‘lock-in’ factor – choose one technology and you were effectively choosing a technology for a very long time ahead. And that base technology impacted, and sometimes heavily restricted, all your other choices too.

Now, with open source, that doesn’t need to happen. MySQL, PHP and other open source web enabling technologies are often better than proprietary systems, and allow greater interactivity with other systems – something which is often important in this age of web commerce.

Most importantly, open source technologies leave choices open and unlock the opportunity for best fit products improved by competition in the market.

Barclays Home Win

Barclays Home Win is a free-to-enter prize draw which will give 20 lucky soccer fans (wherever in the world they are) to have the Premier League trophy, complete with ribbons, for the day.

What would you do with it? Take it to your kids school. Get you and your friends photographed holding it aloft. Use it as a charity fundraiser.  Go on a celebration tour. It’s up to you! Competition opens soon. We’ll let you know how to enter here.