How time flies when you’re having fun.  My first day at Pierce seems like a long time ago and as the days and weeks have passed I have found myself settling into my new role very quickly.  Everyone has made me feel very welcome and there is always a great vibe around the office which is great.  My first week at Pierce ended with a team night out and quiz which was a nice way to finish the week.  This seems to be a regular thing here at Pierce and I am looking forward to seeing what future nights have in store.  It was a great way to end the week and I won’t go into detail on how our team did but let’s just say we came 4^th out of 4.  As a Liverpool fan I have forgotten what top 4 feels like so I was delighted with the result even if the rest of the team weren’t.

I have joined the digital department here at Pierce and am really looking forward to working with the guys.  From what I have seen they are a real talented group of developers and in Barry Adams I couldn’t have asked for a more knowledgeable guy when it comes to digital marketing.  His SEO knowledge is second to none and I am looking forward to learning as much as I can from him.  If he’s lucky he might even take over Dennis Bergkamp as my all time favourite Dutchman.  A few drinks along the way will help here Barry.

The rest of the digital team are great guys and have made me feel right at home from day 1.  There is a great focus towards everything that is being done here at Pierce and I look forward to becoming a big part of the team over the coming months (and years hopefully).  It’s also great to be back in the agency environment where no 2 days are guaranteed to be the same.  As a digital marketing executive at Pierce I will be focusing on analytics reports, content strategies, social media strategies and working alongside Barry to achieve great SEO and PPC results for clients.

I suppose I should finish by letting you know a wee bit about me and what I do in my spare time.  I am a keen sportsman and a football fanatic with a love for all things Liverpool (except Jay Spearing!!).  I play football for my local club Castlewellan Town FC and enjoy socialising with friends and family and travelling with my future wife.

I graduated from the University of Ulster in 2008 with a First Class Honours Degree in Marketing and have always had an interest in the digital side of marketing so I was delighted when Barry called me up to offer me the role.  Digital Marketing has always been an area I have been hugely interested in and it’s great to finally join an organisation who shares that interest and then some.  I can’t wait to get stuck in and continue developing my skills with some of the finest digital and creative minds in Northern Ireland.  The digital landscape is constantly evolving and my journey of evolution with it has begun.

I hope you enjoyed reading about me and my first two months here at Pierce and I look forward to giving you many more interesting reads on the Pierce Blog.  Feel free to follow me on Twitter or connect with me on LinkedIn.

A (very) brief history of Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a term coined by Ethan Marcotte for a technique he invented in 2010 that has rightly been hailed as the most important thing to happen to web design for many years.

RWD means that a website will work on many different devices; from a small screen phone to a smart TV, and everything in between, including the printed page, screen readers that read out what is on the monitor for blind and visually impaired people, text-only browsers, and anything else that can be used to access the web.

It does this by building on a solid base, then re-arranging and resizing parts of the page so they fit in any medium and can be viewed on smaller screens without zooming, panning and two-way scrolling.

With RWD there is no iPhone site, no iPad site, no Android site, no Blackberry site and no desktop site — there is one single website that works everywhere.

Ironically the very first website is responsive and works on any modern device. RWD is unbreaking the web built between then and now that doesn’t work well on the technology we have today. RWD is making the web accessible to everyone again, exactly what Tim Berners-Lee intended.

More prosaically, RWD will improve your bottom line in a number of ways.

Cost

A non-responsive website does cost less than a responsive one, there’s no denying that — everything substandard costs less than a premium offering.

To rephrase a well known question:

CFO: What happens if we invest in RWD and people don’t visit on mobile?
CEO: What happens if we don’t and they do?

And they will. Use of traditional desktops and laptops has plummeted since the first iPhone came out, and in some parts of the world mobile internet usage is much higher than desktop and laptop internet usage.

So assuming we have to do something to cater for the huge rise in devices of all sizes, there are several ways RWD is more cost effective than the alternatives.

Separate mobile site

A popular option to cater for small screens is a separate mobile site — something like m.mysite.com or mysite.mobi. There are a number of problems this presents that inevitably have extra costs associated with overcoming them:

• Two separate sites need to be designed, built and tested. Three if the desktop design is not suitable for TV screens, more if the mobile version is only suitable for a subset of mobile devices e.g. iPhones.
• If someone on a small screen clicks a link to a page designed for desktop viewing, there needs to be a mechanism to redirect them to the corresponding page on the mobile site, and vice-versa.
• In order to detect visitors from mobile devices, a database of all available devices has to be purchased on licence and maintained.
• Devices are categorised based on a piece of data called a UA (User Agent) string. Many cheaper devices send a UA-string that disguises them as something completely different.
• There will be two sets of analytics to gather information from and possibly two content management flows to keep the site’s content up to date.

RWD overcomes these problem naturally, without any extra cost. RWD device agnostic, has a unified content management system, every page is at the same address on every device, and there is only one set of analytics data.

A mobile app

Another option many people explore is a mobile app, usually an iPhone app. Apps are costly to develop, and unless it’s ok to exclude 71% of mobile users there will need to be separate apps for iPads, Android phones, Android tablets, Blackberry, and Windows phones.

Once an app is found (they don’t show up on Google search unless people specifically search for apps), installed (two-thirds aren’t), and used more than once (26% aren’t), there may be some value there. But all these problems and costs aren’t associated with websites.

Conversion

If you’re doing it right you have clear, measurable objectives for your website (not just “I need a website”). Whether it’s leads, sales or information dissemination, RWD has been shown to improve a website’s performance in these key areas.

Let’s look at some figures.

O’Neill Clothing saw revenue double on iPhones and iPods, while it increased nearly six-fold — 591.42% — on Android after a responsive redesign. Read the case study.

Skinny Ties saw equally impressive improvements across all metrics after their responsive site was launched, including a 377.6% increase in revenue on iPhones. Read the case study.

Time Magazine went responsive in 2012 and has seen pages per visit, time spent on site, and unique visitors up, while bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who look at one page then leave) dropped by 26% on mobile. Read the case study.

Think Tank Photo‘s responsive site saw mobile transactions increase 96% with page views up by 224%. A PDF case study is at http://www.blastam.com/assets/pdf/blast-thinktankphoto-responsive-casestudy.pdf.

As more case studies are being published it’s becoming apparent that RWD increases the effectiveness of websites in achieving their goals.

Accessibility

As I said in the introduction, RWD makes the web accessible to as many people as possible. RWD means you don’t have to make an effort to cover all bases — your products, services and content are widely available throughout the world on all devices.

Current analytics will probably show that only a few users access your site on Windows Phones and that Android users don’t spend a lot of time and money, so a separate site or app for those users would take a long time (possibly never) to return the investment.

Even if they only make up 1 or 2 percent of turnover, that’s 1 or 2 percent that RWD gives you back at no extra cost. Not only that, RWD means those users will have a better experience on your site and will likely use the site more often and spend more money as a result.

SEO

Google prefers one location for every bit of content and have publicly stated that RWD is how they want websites delivered to mobiles.

With separate mobile sites there are separate URLs. Google then has to decide which one to rank in which scenario, and any link value built up by one may not be associated with the other. What can then happen is content ranks well on desktop search and poorly on mobile search.

RWD gives us one page – one URL – for each piece of content on your site. Google will always know that is the canonical URL and that is the one that needs to rank, no matter if the search is from a phone, a tablet, a laptop, a desktop or a TV.

It’s not an insurmountable problem with separate sites, but again, it costs money to fix.

Conclusion

Responsive Web Design is not a passing fad. It’s in keeping with the spirit of the web and the ideals of the web, therefore is totally in tune with how the web works and is evolving. It is modern web design.

RWD will save you money, it will get your offer to as many people as possible, it will increase the effectiveness of your website, and it will improve your SEO.

Large and small organisations are adopting it and seeing the benefits in terms of revenue and cost effectiveness that none of the alternatives or old methods can provide.

If you don’t already have a responsive site it’s time you did.

Want to know more about our responsive web design services? Get in touch today.

It really doesn’t feel like 2 weeks ago that the whole of the design team were at OFFSET2013 for 24 solid hours of inspiration, dancing and a few drinks. It was great to see so many faces for the Northern Ireland creative industry make the journey down to soak up what was on offer and share ideas. Over 24 of the world’s most creative minds were presenting, chatting and mingling with the common designer for over 3 days in Dublin.

The living legend, Bob Gill was a big favourite with the team. Bob Gill helped redefine both illustration and design throughout the 60s and 70s and shared some great stories about presenting his creative to the Beatles and his artistic differences with George Harrison.

The main speaker on the Saturday night JR was also excellent. An artist and photographer who has had a huge influence on the street art scene for over two decades, JR’s work has hung on street corners and galleries all over the world. We were lucky enough to have dinner with him and get up early on the Saturday to watch him paste the streets of Dublin.

As Friends of Offset we believe this not only should happen, but needs to happen and we are delighted to see it keep going and growing. A big thanks to Richard, Bren & Peter for all their hard work in organising such an inspiring weekend.

We have already started planning for next year.

On Thursday 14th March, Queen’s University Belfast launched the new Institute for Global Food Security at an event at Riddel Hall, attended by guest speaker Philip Clarke, CEO of Tesco.

We were delighted to design the brochures for the new Institute, which included photography of Professor Chris Elliott, Director of the new Institute, surrounded by grain and feed, and Grainne McGovern, a former student at Queen’s, who was a great sport agreeing to be photographed in a field of cows.

The Institute, a cornerstone of Queen’s ambitious Beyond fundraising campaign, aims to improve global food safety and will play a key role in national and global efforts to provide the world’s growing population with a sustainable, safe and secure supply of high quality food.

I love things that make my life easier, make me faster or make me more productive, and I think this file naming tip can potentially save you a tonne of time when trying to find and sort old files on your computer when dates are involved. This tip is Operating System agnostic, easy to roll out as a policy if working in a team, and can really cut your file browsing time down.

So here’s the tip: When folders or files need to reference a date in their title, always use the form YYYYMMDD – no exceptions! And you should also always have this information as the first part of the file or folder name.

Here are some of the reasons you should do this;

• You have a collection of files and folders you can sort alphabetically and get a sensible by date order – something that before you would have to do with metadata and in a non-OS agnostic way.
• You don’t have to think about how to phrase your date searches when doing file searches you know that all 2013 files will say 2013, not ’13 or 13 or 2013, equally you know that all Feb 2013 folders will be named 201302 not 0213, 02-13, 1302…
• You don’t have to think too long about how to correctly name files or folders.
• You can start to write really basic scripts to do things based on these 8 characters, if you are interating through files and folders and come across a name that starts with 8 numbers and the first four numbers are 2012 – you can say with some certainty that this file was probably relevant in 2012

Hopefully you can appreciate that this is pretty powerful, I have been doing this for the better part of two years with some excellent results and hopefully you will get the same good results if you adopt it.

It’s important to remember that the real benefit here is to use convention over configuration. Instead of having to think about how to name a file or folder, and then needing to remember different ways to query these within your system, just use a convention and it will immediately make your life easier. This same thinking can be expanded into many aspects of your digital life.

Facebook has certainly been busy over the past few months with the introduction of graph search and now planned changes to its news feed design and mobile platforms.  These news feed changes have long been in the pipeline as many users have not been happy with the current platform (me included).  Mark Zuckerberg and co announced their planned changes to the world yesterday (7^th March) but the big question is what will these changes mean for you?

When Facebook rolled out its last timeline change it was met with a mixed reaction.  The reaction was a bit like Marmite; you either loved it or hated it.  I fall into the later group although much of this is down to the Facebook mobile app.  The good news for everyone, including me, is that the new Facebook news feed promises to be consistent across all platforms meaning a consistent user experience, which is key.  Facebook recognised the problems with the current news feed design with design director Julie Zhuo admitting that it was “cluttered”.  It’s now a case of “Goodbye Clutter – Hello bright, beautiful stories”.

So what are the main changes in the new news feed design:

• Bigger Images
• Bigger Video Presence
• Multiple Feeds
• Mobile Consistency

Bigger Images:

Mark Zuckerberg explained at the convention that photos now make up 50% of all news feed stories.  This is the main reason behind the increased size of images and as you can see below images will now be a central focus on your desktop, tablet or mobile.  Photos are the best way to engage with users on your page so if you have a business page, using relevant photos could help improve engagement with your fans.  If you aren’t currently sharing photos on your Facebook page, it’s time to make a start!

Bigger Video Presence:

Videos are becoming an ever popular resource on Facebook and although a long way from having the impact of YouTube, their usage and potential is only going to grow in the coming years.  With so many pages now being set up for videos only, Facebook provides the perfect platform to share videos with friends, fans and the world.  For those of you who have been sleeping for the past month, you will have missed the Harlem Shake videos taking over many news feeds.  This is just another example of how video can engage with users on Facebook and highlights the potential of viral marketing in today’s business world.  With the increased video presence on the new news feed design, it is important to start integrating videos into your social media and digital marketing strategies.

Multiple Feeds:

Perhaps one of the biggest planned changes to the news feed is the addition of multiple feeds providing the user with more control.  This allows users to group posts based on close friends, all friends, photos, videos, following (pages / people you follow), games and much more.  Sound familiar?  It appears to be very similar to Google+ circles.  Is this Facebooks way of putting two fingers up to Google in the battle for online supremacy?  It will be interesting to see how users use these groups to sort stories between different friend groups and pages.  It also highlights the potential for photos and videos and this is something you need to start planning for if your business is to engage with your social community.

Mobile Consistency:

Facebook Mobile!!  These 2 words have not gone well together in recent years but could the new news feed design mean big changes to the mobile platform.  Only time will tell but if the early visuals are anything to go by, it will be a vast improvement on their existing mobile apps.  In fact, the whole redesign has been based around user engagement on mobile phones and this isn’t surprising considering Facebook now has over 340 million mobile app users.

Other cool features:

• Side navigation tab across all platforms which is similar to the app navigation
• More prominent space for Facebook Ads
• Music feed makes listening to music on Facebook much easier
• Following feed will gather latest articles on pages you follow

For those of you who use Flipboard, there are certain similarities to the look and feel of the new feed section, but it is clear that Facebook have spent a lot of time considering the user experience before deciding on these latest changes.  Zuckerberg even likened the new news feed to that of a personalised newspaper.  Will Facebook become the place you go to for latest news?  At the minute I don’t think so, as it is still a long way behind Twitter in that respect but it will be interesting to watch how they approach this in the future.

When will you get these changes?

There is no date set for launch as of yet but you can join the waiting list today to try it out and see how you can benefit from the new look.

These changes highlight the importance of social media in today’s society and shows that users love to share content and particularly photos with their friends.  Is your social strategy ready for these Facebook changes?  If you do not currently have a social media strategy in place, it’s time to start thinking about one and considering the role Facebook can have in engaging with your customers.

Yesterday, in a Pierce first, the design team were all silent! The reason for this momentous occasion was that all their mouths were full of delicious donuts that were hand delivered by our hosting provider Big Wet Fish.

Stephen Kinkaid, who is the Director of Big Wet Fish decided that yesterday he would drive around Belfast handing out Donuts to as many local agencies as possible, and of course the local web hosts couldn’t hand out any old donuts to local agencies, they handed out local donuts made fresh that morning by Moe’s Donuts.

The digital team had great fun following Stephen’s antics on Twitter throughout the day, hoping that they would swing by Dargan Crescent and sure enough just in time for lunch they did!

This is a great example of thinking outside the box and how being creative doesn’t necessarily mean making something look different, it means thinking about what can be done to delight your customers and executing on it, and yesterday Big Wet Fish delighted us as they did most of Belfast.

You can read more about why and how Big Wet Fish pulled off this stunt by reading their official blog post on it, and it goes without saying that we want to thank Big Wet Fish for keeping the studio quiet for a change!

Last week Pierce Communications sent a small delegation to the inaugural TechXplore conference in Belfast.

Organised by the NI Chamber of Commerce in association with a number of sponsors, the half-day TechXplore conference was aimed at enabling and developing digital technology among businesses, the public sector and entrepreneur’s right across Northern Ireland.

Featuring four different sessions in three time slots, the topics ranged from digital entrepreneurship and social media, to cloud computing and journalism in the digital age.

The speakers were exceptional, talking about their various endeavours with passion and conviction. For us the stand-out talks were from David Levin, Lisa Clancy, William Crawley, and Jim Gamble.

David Levin, a writer who tweets professionally for some of the UK’s biggest twitter accounts, spoke about how to use social media as a business and used a number of highly amusing and sometimes cringe-worthy examples to show what to do, and what not to do, as a business embarking on your social media journey. His rules for corporate use of social media resonated well with us and align with what we’ve been educating our clients on:

• Define your tone of voice
• Focus on delivering your tweets, posts, and replies consistently in that tone
• Enter topical conversations and put your own spin on it
• Come up with creative ways to use the platform
• Have conversations that fans and followers get excited about

Another great talk was courtesy of Lisa Clancy, communications director at the GAA, who spoke about how the GAA has adopted technology, and social media especially, to facilitate its internal and external communications. Lisa showed how embracing these modern technologies has helped the GAA spread its message and connect with fans and communities throughout the country.

We were also very impressed by William Crawley‘s talk. As a BBC broadcaster and accomplished orator, William didn’t require a slide deck and delivered a strong talk about the state of journalism in the digital age. We managed to tweet some of his core quotes:

“We have a crisis of authoritive dissemination of information.” @williamcrawley #techx13
— PierceCommunications (@PierceComms) February 28, 2013

“When the dust settles people will want more accurate filters of truth and knowledge.” @williamcrawley #techx13
— PierceCommunications (@PierceComms) February 28, 2013

“Journalism involves context, analysis, truth seeking and truth confirmation.” @williamcrawley #techx13
— PierceCommunications (@PierceComms) February 28, 2013

The last talk we saw was from Jim Gamble, a man who doesn’t shy away from controversy. He peppered his talk with anecdotes from his colourful past as an anti-terrorist intelligence agent, a member of the Serious Organised Crime Agency’s child protection unit, and the National Crime Intelligence Service, and gave an impassioned speech about the importance of educating children on appropriate use of digital media.

We found this inaugural TechXplore to be a superb conference, well-organised and with a superb level of talks. When the next one comes along, we’ll definitely be there!