Author: arkhiadmin

14.02.17
Partners

Improving the Industry with a Commitment to Collaboration

At Stead Lane, we believe the commitment to developing open source software is critical to the continuous improvement of the web development industry. The open source community is saturated with motivated and highly experienced software developers who collaborate to create new and improve current software. The collaboration of disciplined and passionate developers within Open Source communities has lead to the creation of extremely popular and successful software.

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Sometimes digital growth is strategically simple—we call it leverage. Let’s start talking.

Reece Alexander, one of our talented developers here at Arkhi, has recently created and shared two Open Source modules for Silverstripe, with every intention of developing more. The first software Reece developed was a module created using Silverstripe software to improve the efficiency of cloudflare. The second was a software for Vision 6 written and developed using Silverstripe + PHP.

At SilverStripe, we don’t believe in working alone. It is better to work in the open, invite feedback and encourage others to contribute. – SilverStripe

The module, designed using Silverstripe software for cloudflare, was built with the intention of making life easier for content creators and managers. Where in the past you would have to wait for the cache to clear to see any updates to a page, this new module clears the cache immediately. It gives you the ability to see changes instantly in the preview window without having to worry about logging into the CloudFlare dashboard and purging the cache yourself.

This development and its intention of improving efficiency has already proven successful with the immediate success and continuity of growth within the Open Source community.

The modules key features include:

  • Dynamic zone ID Detection
  • Intelligent Purging
  • If you modify the title or URL of any page: All cache for the zone will be purged
  • If you modify the contents of any page: only the cache for that page will be purged
  • If you modify any page that has a parent, the page you modified and all of it’s parents will be purged too
  • Manual purging
  • The administration area for this module allows you to either purge all CSS files, all javascript files, all image files

The Email Direct Marketing (EDM) module Reece has developed is designed to eliminate a process when receiving subscribers on a website. Generally, if a visitor to a website goes to subscribe to a mailing list, they will be directed to an external page to complete a registration. This development is a shortcode that can be added into the CMS on any given page, creating a form and eliminating the need for a visitor to leave the page. It is an efficient and practical creation of software, which has already been given very positive feedback in the wider coding community.

At Arkhi, we appreciate and are committed to the collaboration of the Open Source community. As partners of SilverStripe, we strive for improvement and to continue creating more open source modules for Silverstripe.

You can find more of our work on GitHub https://github.com/steadlane

Sound like the type of skills and knowledge you want designing your website? Get in touch with us today.

Interested in more?

06.02.17
SEO

Structured Data: What is it and what is its relevance?

It is on page markup that enables search engines to better understand the information that is coded on your website. Structured data is highly structured and predictable, which is why it is easy for search engines to read and recognise. It is the high level of organisation that makes it easy to determine contact details such as name, address and place, as well as articles, events, products and recipes. 

LET’S TALK

Sometimes digital growth is strategically simple—we call it leverage. Let’s start talking.

Structured data markup is a text-based organisation of text that typically follows the vocabulary of schema.org. Schema.org is an open collaborative community with a mission to create and maintain schemas for structured data on the internet. It is most easily represented using JSON-LD format which stands for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data.

When structured data is implemented, you give that content the opportunity to appear in rich data in two Google results categories.

  • Rich results
  • Knowledge graph cards 

Rich results or rich cards are for structured data of things like recipes, articles and videos. This could appear as an individual item or a list of items. Structuring your data and giving your content the opportunity to appear in these rich cards is beneficial to you from an SEO standpoint because

  • The links that appear in rich cards stand out more from other search results and appear to be more trustworthy- generally because they are.
  • This can be really important in particular, for example, when promoting an event. If someone does a quick search of the event, it will be easy to find a link to purchase tickets or find the venue if the event title is bolded in a rich card.

Knowledge graph cards offer more detail than rich cards. If you’re the authority for content of any kind, Google can treat your content as fact and use it to give definitive answers in the form of knowledge graph cards. For example, if you were to search ‘Members of The Beatles’, Knowledge Graph Cards appear for each member. To take this even further, a search may simply be ‘The Beatles.’ The knowledge graph would then give extensive information including a short bio, band members, popular songs, albums and their social media profiles.

This is all very interesting stuff and the fact Google is able to grab all of this information is really cool. But how is having structured data going to help you?

For retail businesses, structured data is important for products that you are selling. When a product is placed on a website, a description is generally given about the product and their may be options for sizes and colours. These products can be given a rich card and this could lead to a sale from a single Google search.

Structured data is also for finding businesses locations, phone numbers, websites and social media pages. A search of ‘Stead Lane’ for example, displays a knowledge graph card which includes the address, phone number, opening hours, website and reviews.

Structured data is basically making it as easy as possible for search engines to find the important bits of data so they can make it easier for your audience to find.

It then allows the audience to find what it is they are really looking for more efficiently. To be better recognised by Google, implementing structured data is a really smart first move. Structured data is generally implemented using html code so having a web developer implement it is the most efficient way of doing it. Otherwise, with a shopify site, you can purchase a ‘structured data’ add on and all the work is done for you.

Need a hand? Contact us and we can structure everything for you!

Interested in more?

02.02.17
Digital Marketing

5 Tips to achieve your best digital advertising results

Chances are, if you have a business, you have heard of and thought about using digital advertising. Perhaps you’ve even given it a go yourself. By following these 5 steps, you’ll be sure to be a step ahead for your next (or first) digital advertising campaign.

LET’S TALK

Sometimes digital growth is strategically simple—we call it leverage. Let’s start talking.

1. Set a goal

One of the most important things is to know exactly what you want to achieve before creating the ad. This will shape the way you develop and select the content, imagery and audience for you ad. Your goal could be a number of different options including:

  • Receive x number of subscribers on website
  • Sell x amount of products
  • Receive x number of Likes on social page
  • Receive x number of enquiries

2. Call to action

Creating an ad without a call to action is pretty senseless. The ad needs to direct your audience to the content or page where your goal is to be achieved. Directing traffic to the correct page is essential. There is no use in driving users to the home page of your website if your goal is to achieve subscribers and the subscription form is on the contact page.

3. Captivate your audience

With digital advertising now the most popular form of advertising, it’s more than likely your competitors are using it too. Because of this, you need to ensure your campaign stands out from the rest whether it be through imagery or catchy wording. Understand what your audience wants and find a captivating way to appeal to that.

Find a point of difference that your product/service offers and use this to your advantage.

4. Monitor your campaign

Just say you are running a month long campaign with 3 separate ad formats. After a week, you may find that 2 of the 3 ads are performing really well but the third is doing poorly. Instead of continuing to spend money on an ad that isn’t seeing results, you have two options moving forward. 1. Revise the ad and see where you could improve it through better wording or a more appropriate image. Perhaps the format is not suited to the selected audience of the ad. 2. Abort the ad completely and revise the budget to be spent on the remaining 2 ads.

5.  Consider remarketing

Retargeting or remarketing is a method where ads will appear to people who have previously visited your website. According to a study by adroll, retargeting is so effective due to understanding the intent of the user. By the time the ad appears to the user, they have already seen your website which means they have showed interest in your product or service.

Consider all of these steps closely when developing your digital advertising campaigns. Digital advertising is becoming more and more competitive so ensuring your campaign is as effective as possible is more important than ever. If you want your campaign to be the best, we can develop it for you. Contact us today.

Interested in more?

29.06.22

How To Market On Digital Platforms

With social media taking over the marketing space, gaining awareness, retaining attention, and converting people is a competitive space. So how does your business stand out and meet your goals through social media marketing?The key is having an effective digital marketing mix. Each platform is unique in its offering and its audience, requiring different marketing methods and tactics.

26.01.17
Design

What heat maps can tell us about our web design

Heat maps are a conversion optimisation tool that allows marketers and designers to track how people are using a website. A heat map will show how users are navigating on a website and which sections of each page are getting the most action. There are many other tools that allow us to understand the conversion optimisation of a website; so why do we need to use heat maps and what can they tell us that other tools won’t?

LET’S TALK

Sometimes digital growth is strategically simple—we call it leverage. Let’s start talking.

Let’s say you have recently updated your website. Enquiries and conversions had been tracking at a steady rate prior to the update but recently, you have noticed a bit of a decline. You may decide that this is just a bad month and fluctuation in enquiries are a normal part of business. However, this continues for the next month and you begin to worry. After checking analytics you can see that the bounce rate has increased dramatically since the website had been updated. Why could this be, you wonder? The website looks great as far as you’re concerned.

Now, with tools like Crazy Egg or SumoMe, most of the guesswork is taken out of these situations.

What you think is great about your website could potentially be it’s downfall and without being able to see where customers are navigating on your website, this will be difficult to discover.

When you look at the heatmap, you may find that the main page people are clicking on doesn’t actually have a call to action link. Or you may find that people are spending more time reading or watching something on one section of the screen which distracts them from what they have come to the page for. There are many situations where heat maps can give insight into solutions that you may not have considered.

Ok, so in that situation it could be really helpful. But when else would I really need to use a heatmap?

  • People clicking on a word or image that isn’t actually a link
  • Understanding what links are more obvious to users
  • Gaining insight into whether the navigation is easy to use
  • Users not viewing the content you’re most proud of
  • People clicking on a word or image that isn’t actually a link

Having content that distracts users from what you actually want them to view can be a problem that may have been otherwise unidentified. Likewise with people clicking on a word or image and expecting it to be a link to a page. In this situation, the evidence you found would encourage you to create a link from the word or image which people were clicking on. This in itself could see an improvement in conversions.

To gain insight into whether the navigation is easy to use

People tend to have very little tolerance with websites and if links or pages are not responding as they expect, often they will just leave the page entirely. Heatmap tools can be extremely helpful in determining these issues. The way you view your own website, after looking at it hundreds of times and knowing exactly how it works, can be an entirely different view to how users see it. This is why insightful tracking tools can be of such assistance.

Users not viewing the content you’re most proud of

You might have customer testimonials or important details that you think are a great advantage to your website sitting on a section of a page that users are not even looking at. By seeing that users are not making it to that section of the page might encourage you to rearrange these details to a more heavily trafficked location on the website.

So ultimately, the answer is yes. You do need to be using heat maps (if you want better conversion optimisation) and they definitely can offer more insights than some other tools. You could be gaining information about your user navigation that you would have never otherwise known.

If this is all too much, just contact us. We can take care of it all for you.

Interested in more?

09.03.20

Avoiding New Website Blues: Why You Need Website Discovery

Have you ever been involved in a website project where the final deliverable or outcome just didn’t hit the brief of what you wanted or had envisaged? If not, that’s awesome! But if your answer is a resounding ‘yes’, you’re not alone. This, unfortunately, happens a lot with website projects. However, it can easily be avoided if a proper discovery process is followed to truly understand the expectations and objectives for the project.

16.05.17

What makes great UX?

The most important aspect of user experience is putting yourself in the user’s position. Understanding your audience is the first step in most marketing strategies and designing your website is no exception

16.01.17
Design

Website Tip: How to optimise your page speed

A huge problem with many websites is their page speed, or lack thereof. A page that takes a long time to load is unappealing and looks unprofessional. It affects the user experience (UX) in a big way and can be the main reason for having a high bounce rate or low click-through rate. Studies have shown that people expect a website to load in 2 seconds, however the average website takes 7.7 seconds to load.

Now, it’s one thing to understand that your website speed needs improving, but how to improve it, that’s another thing. It’s not a quick and simple issue that can be resolved through one tool and this is why it’s important to get on top of straight away.

In order to ensure you’re doing all you can to optimise your website, here are a few tips and hints to get you up to (page) speed.

LET’S TALK

Sometimes digital growth is strategically simple—we call it leverage. Let’s start talking.

Image size

Too many websites have lots of images that are unnecessarily large. The larger the image, the longer it takes to load and if there are multiple large images, page speed can be dramatically affected. A quick way of reducing image file size is by using an image compression software.  For example,

Minimise HTTP requests

Everything that is on your website needs to be downloaded for your website to load. Therefore the more images, graphs, style sheets and other elements that need loading, the slower it is. Simplifying the overall design of your website will reduce downloads and will help optimise page speed

Web Host

Ensure your web host is practical for the amount of traffic your website has. Capabilities of web hosts differ and benefits can vary depending on the size of your business. We recommend choosing a web host from the country your website is operating from. One of the most effective methods of speeding up server load time is using a CDN service, such as Cloudflare. This allows your website to be distributed to your chosen CDN’s network to load faster globally

Of course in order to know how good (or bad) your page speed is, you need to test it. Here are a few websites that will give you the insights you need:

Still waiting for your website to load? We can make it faster than Usain. Contact us and we’ll get started.

Interested in more?

09.03.20

Avoiding New Website Blues: Why You Need Website Discovery

Have you ever been involved in a website project where the final deliverable or outcome just didn’t hit the brief of what you wanted or had envisaged? If not, that’s awesome! But if your answer is a resounding ‘yes’, you’re not alone. This, unfortunately, happens a lot with website projects. However, it can easily be avoided if a proper discovery process is followed to truly understand the expectations and objectives for the project.

16.05.17

What makes great UX?

The most important aspect of user experience is putting yourself in the user’s position. Understanding your audience is the first step in most marketing strategies and designing your website is no exception

05.01.17
Digital Marketing

How to leverage your Christmas sales for continued success

For most retail businesses, the period leading up to and immediately after Christmas is by far the most successful time of year. People are in a spending frenzy and convincing people they need to purchase your product is much easier than any other time of the year. Instead of expecting and accepting the next couple of months to decrease dramatically, you can use the previous period to your advantage and allow success to continue.

LET’S TALK

Sometimes digital growth is strategically simple—we call it leverage. Let’s start talking.

Through the lead up to Christmas and the craziness of boxing day sales, most online retail businesses will gain new customers. This in itself is fantastic. This is a prime opportunity to develop a relationship with those people who may end up becoming loyal customers to your business. For businesses using Shopify, there is the potential to target customers specifically based on their demographic or products they purchased. Businesses can use this information to develop emails and offers that are personalised for each particular segments. 

Customers can be targeted based on

  • Products purchased
  • Amount spent
  • Location of customer
  • Number of purchases made

Gaining new customers is a perfect opportunity to demonstrate how great your business is and create what could be the start of a loyal customer relationship. 

Particularly in Boxing Day sales, many customers will be thrilled with their purchase if they have scored a great deal. Other customers will be happy with the products they purchased for their children, partners, friends or themselves. 

Now is the time to send an email to customers to encourage reviews of these products. Product reviews have been found to increase ecommerce conversion rate by 14-76% (Internet Retailer). We have said it before and we will say it again, product reviews give a product a trustworthy and honest opinion. It’s easy for a business to say how awesome their product is but when a consumer has gone out of their way to give a review, the opinion is more authentic and believable. 

In fact, 88% of consumers say they trust a review just as much as they would a personal recommendation (Bright Local).

It’s important to add some sort of incentive for customers when attempting to gain reviews on your product. Creating a giveaway for the ‘most helpful review’ or ‘most insightful review’ will help in creating reviews that are of a higher quality and could actually help with the sales of future products.

Another option is to offer a discount code for customers who write a product review. Not only does this help in the growth of product reviews, but it is then likely that customer will re-purchase using their discount code. 

Don’t have reviews set up on your website yet? For shopify websites, there is a product reviews installation in the app store. If not, there are other ways to go about it. The best solution would be to call us and we can take care of your website for you! Contact us and we can have a chat. 

Interested in more?

29.06.22

How To Market On Digital Platforms

With social media taking over the marketing space, gaining awareness, retaining attention, and converting people is a competitive space. So how does your business stand out and meet your goals through social media marketing?The key is having an effective digital marketing mix. Each platform is unique in its offering and its audience, requiring different marketing methods and tactics.