Building the digital

Our creative team recently has been busy working on fantastic branding for industry grands and start-ups and each time facing a creative wall, they’ve been falling back on a host of beautifully crafted and intuitively composed brand books – from such grands like Apple to Foursqure to freelance designer brands. A brand book should encompass your business core values, be easily adaptable to different mediums and help out all departments. Check out this list if you’re looking for inspiration as well.

When building a brand book, have in mind that different people will be using it, implementing brand rules on different media, from print to digital. So making it appealing and intuitive is key – no subtext, no hidden messages or unfinished thoughts. WYSIWYG works well.

Good news (hopefully) for web developers – PHP 7 release. Improved Zend engine, impressive speed, more intuitive error and exception control, stable support for 64-bit systems and many more upgrades for innovative and demanding-on-resource code. PHP 7 has the potential to optimise difficult commercial platforms and speed up websites, so many new projects are now developed using PHP 7 or at least, having it in mind. On the other hand, legacy projects are facing a difficult question – is it worth investing into a full platform re-vamp? PHP, if upgraded to version 7 on a legacy project, could potentially compromise the existing code, so a simple upgrade is out of the questions. However, looking at the pros offered, it is hard to say No. You can find more info on PHP 7 here.

Using PHP 7, the code is executed faster and uses less server resources, while catering to the same amount of users.

We work basing our practices on the principle that collaboration leads to better results – when experts share working space, it’s not just to save on the rent – we’ve noticed that projects developed by different teams working at the same round table are usually more successful and have the goals aligned along many disciplines, achieving a synergy, where everything works together beautifully, to achieve many goals at once. Our insights, yet again, have been confirmed at a webinar by InVision. Although we’re perfectly aware that marketing and design teams usually have very different opinions on what makes a good project good, it is sometimes difficult to pin-point the reason for it. The webinar simply defined it as different perspectives. Both teams are looking at the same goals, but they have different points of view on how these goals should be achieved, so getting them to talk and explain their reasoning to each other usually helps to improve the project.

Clever marketing isn’t always working just because it’s clever, the same way that beautiful design isn’t always effective just because it’s beautiful.

Relevant to those who are renewing their websites or changing website hierarchy: WayFair.com made an accidental discovery regarding 301 redirects. These redirects are most commonly implemented when a new version of a website is released or after renewing page/ product hierarchy (that is, when the URL structure changes). Pages change their position, so search engines are instructed to fetch the page from new location. However, the more times the URL structure changes, the bigger the chances of loosing a percentage of incoming traffic, and by default, loosing SEO value. The advise provided by WayFair.com is to retain the URL structure when renewing the website and avoid URL structure changes altogether (or rather do it, but have the risk in mind).

One of the accidental tests involved large amounts (i.e. tens of thousands) of standard 301 product page redirects. We’ve found out that the incoming traffic was irreversibly diminished by 15% after each new 301 redirect.

Another interesting and intriguing article about digital news and user interaction with digital news format. Google Analytics and/ or different metrics and analytical tools are used in nearly all websites, but is the analytical data used to modify and improve the digital strategy?

The audience is everything, but that isn’t the main aspect. Profits, of course, is the main aspect, but looking at the website traffic, it doesn’t translate directly into profits. One thing is clear – profits is a five level digital chess playing board, involving advertisement, sponsors, content, subscriptions and all other things, that should be aggressively pursued and implemented, ignoring the size of the audience.