Jude Turner, client services director, Magnitude

As high street sales continue to suffer in the current economic climate and consumer habits fluctuate seemingly by the week, today’s savvy retailers are grasping the online mantle and putting the internet at the heart of their business strategy.

The potential of digital marketing continues to evolve with relentless energy, enabling companies to push the boundaries of their products and marketing activity while rapidly embracing trends and new developments.

Smaller retailers are finding this is a potent weapon to level the playing field. It means they can punch above their weight and give established names a run for every pound.

Retailers can embrace these advances to communicate directly to consumers at home and on the go, empowering the mobile consumer with marketing activity that utilises the abundance of devices and social media available. With the right strategy and tools, consumers are never out of reach, however niche the audience or remote the location.

Digital marketing can, like no other channel, create a genuinely two-way dialogue between companies and brands. By utilising viral marketing and targeted campaigns you can empower consumers and add substantial bottom-line benefit.

Yes, this does pose challenges to the retailer, particularly considering the sheer volume of online activity. Marketing campaigns must be bold and creative, adapting messages to be highly relevant to each audience and tailored to maximise the channels in which they are delivered.

However with the right digital marketing can give your business the edge on the global e-high street. Instantly adaptable and highly targeted – and backed up with highly detailed tracking and analysis data – online activity offers an unrivalled return on investment to businesses of every size.

Soon every consumer will carry with them a number of communications devices – giving you the opportunity to literally be ‘in their pocket’.

Just wanted to inform you all that we have another extremely tasty client to shout from the rooftops about - Daddy Donkey!

We can’t wait to start work on their new site but in the meantime check them out at www.daddydonkey.co.uk and be sure to pop to their stand in Farringdon’s Leather Market for a tasty burrito if you’re in that neck of the woods.

Kick ass!

One of the things we do a lot of here is design and build web form based interfaces. We’ve done a lot of them over the years. In fact we’ve got a box full of half finished ones out the back. Back in the dark ages of the early 2000’s there was not an awful lot you could do with your web form to make it stand out from the crowd. Cross browser compatibility issues with CSS and Javascript put an end to those fun ideas.

How things have changed though; browsers have largely sorted their differences out and we’ve witnessed the birth of some super powerful Javascript libraries (our personal favourite is jQuery).  All this power allows us to spice things up and make our web based interfaces behave a little more like their desktop brothers and sisters.

There are some things we don’t have control over though. Reasons include technical design limitations, security or plain and simple lack of foresight. One cross we’ve had to bear for a long time is that of the file upload form element. We’ve all used them plenty of times (which social site doesn’t encourage you to upload your latest beautiful picture) and I’m sure a lot of us have come to take them from granted. You can imagine our excitement then when we saw the Mozilla 2009 Design Challenge which is to come up with a new way of doing things.

Mozilla describe the current file upload widget problems so well …

“Why does it suck ? Because there’s no drag-and-drop; Flash or server-side hacking is required to provide any kind of progress indication; you can’t upload multiple files; if you know what you want to attach you have to navigate there again with the OS file picker; you can’t even enter a path into the widget because of security issues; and the list goes on.”

So if we could do anything, anything at all and forgetting any security or implementation issues(!) it would be this.

Our file upload widget would

1. Have a progress indicator. This must be accurate and reflect what is actually going on. None of your inaccurate Windows Vista indicator nonsense.
2. Be sensitive to drag and drop. Grab a file from somewhere and drop it straight on there. Once you’ve dropped it, the progress indicator kicks in and you are free to continue with the other form elements. (Similar to how gmail does attachments).
3. Menu driven browsing functionality. When you click ‘upload’ you should be given a small menu with the following options
   • File system access points. Go to a preconfigured point in the file system. Chances are you work from one of a few places, these points should be configurable and easy to get to.
   • File system filters. How about something that lets you only browse preconfigured groups. So images will contain *.jpg, *.gif etc. Documents will contain *.doc, *.pdf. There is also an ‘all’ option.
4. Generate the file to upload. Sometimes you might want to actually produce the file you want to upload as you are uploading it. An example would be grabbing the computers camera, taking a picture or a short video and then uploading. This should all be done seamlessly and effortlessly. A decent solution to this would enable developers to build web apps around this functionality alone. With a fast enough connection the whole process of recording, uploading and viewing AV files creates all kinds of possibilities. I’ll leave this for another post.

So what do you think ? Can you add to this list ?

** warning: these productivity tips have nothing to do with credit crunch but I liked the title better with those words in.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to try and improve my productivity by implementing a  few simple techniques. There is nothing ground breaking here but sometimes its good to focus on the basics and fine tune a couple of things.  Perhaps you, like me, are sick of looking at your watch to find a few hours have passed and you’ve done lots of things, but none of them being what you were supposed to have done.

Avoid interruption
- Here’s a radical idea. Only have your email turned on at preplanned points throughout the day. Email is one of the biggest productivity killers because when you leave it on all day you become a slave to it. If you get a lot of mail it will be coming through in a steady stream all day. In my case most email I get requires some sort of response and it’s really tempting to respond to things as they arrive (we all like a clean inbox - right?). Personal preference will dictate how often you check it: for some three times a day for 30 minutes a pop works a treat.

- Turn off Twitter, instant messaging and anything else that pops up. Mates are great, aren’t they just, as is their every waking thought but there is a time and a place. If you’re busy, turn it off.

- Set aside some ‘procrastination time’, and be strict about how many precious hours you devote to that fine black hole. Sites like Proggit and Hacker News are great for knowledge but if you are not careful you’ve lost two hours in there. You know an awful lot about an algorithm you’ve never heard about before but your real work - you know, that stuff you get paid for - is still untouched.

- Headphones. There is nothing better for shutting everything out in a busy office than sticking on the cans and losing yourself in the soundtrack to your own life. Try as I might not to listen to others around me, my brain can’t shut everything out - especially as most of what’s going on can usually involve or affect me in some way. Shut it out - focus on the task at hand.

Exercise
The benefits of regular exercise are well know but one of the main advantages for me when working 18 hour days (and that’s just on a Sunday!) is that my energy levels are quite high for most of the time.  I never used to be a big fan but once you get past the first month or so of a regular exercise plan you sleep better, feel like eating more healthily and you are much more productive. Take a walk. Run, even. Go on.

This one is very much open to debate - as I am keen to find out the general consensus on the subject of web copy…

I am an ardent believer that less is more and as a web user, personally, always prefer snappy and to-the-point when I am browsing. I tend not to be interested in the long arduous company history blurb and usually care far more about the general aesthetic of a site and its usability than being told what the company ethos is. Read more…