Friday 31 August 2012

Customer experience management is the new marketing

A couple of articles that make the case very strongly that the internet (and especially social media) has killed the effectiveness of marketing and advertising. Managing customer experience is becoming central to effective business management.

Content strategy should influence CMS workflow design

If the publishing rules and permissions that dictate what you can do in your web content management system (a.k.a. workflow) really bug you this article probably won't make you feel any better. But it is a great primer for how to go about designing good workflow.

Customer contact moving online

Two thirds of the 600m+ customer contacts received by English local councils each year are now coming in through online and digital channels, according to research conducted by sector IT specialists SocITM.

Does metadata matter?

A quick primer on why you should pay attention to your web pages' meta description tags. For your key pages at least. Why? After all search engines don't give this information much attention when ranking...

Tuesday 28 August 2012

Simplicity trumps complexity

Some inspirational articles and stories about how and why you should strive for simplicity with your website, resisting the urge to add more content and more links. Learn how to steer your managers and committees rather than trying to please everyone all the time.

Sunday 26 August 2012

Why website user journeys are like traffic

A great article in which David Hamill likens a website visitor's experience to that of someone reading signs on a motorway. Includes a corking video of what would happen if marketing departments designed road signs.

Brand guidelines impact usability

A great article that every marketing department should read. How sticking rigidly to brand guidelines on the company website can sometimes damage the brand.

Usability fix tactics

A write up of a UX workshop run by Caroline Jarrett and Francis Rowland on how to get usability problems fixed. This follows on from a survey by Caroline and Steve Krug on why usability issues often go unfixed.