We’ve put together a professional, cost-effective website pack for photographers. Whether you’re an amateur photographer, or a professional photographing weddings, families, kids or products, IN-FOCUS lets you upload and display your photos quickly and easily.

Visit the IN-FOCUS website

This is a post for designers – it’s a primer on what you need to know when you start designing an email invitation or newsletter.

Print vs Email:

Very simply, you can’t approach an email design job in the same way that you approach a print design job. First up, you can’t do it in Illustrator (or Freehand if you still live in 2004) – you need to work up a wireframe and look & feel in Photoshop, and then create an HTML template. From there you can talk to the editor or copywriter and start creating graphics for specific articles.

Read more…

We developed the African Micro Mills site in 2009. The business has undergone a restructure so we’ve shifted the focus on the site to show their updated offering.

Visit the African Micro Mills website.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is vitally important when it comes to building a website. Google drives more traffic through the internet than any other site, so it’s naturally important that a website gets found on Google. But that’s only half the picture.

Very simply, SEO on its own is a waste of effort and money. A site needs to be well optimised for search so that it attracts visitors from Google and other search engines, but it also needs to be well set up for those visitors to find what they need, or to make an enquiry, or the buy a product. Usability is the factor that determines if they can do these things.

SEO is a quick win

SEO gets a lot of attention, especially from website development firms, because it is fairly quantifiable. It has the advantage that by getting a site up in Google’s rankings, the site will enjoy a certain amount more traffic. That is a pretty sure thing.

SEO is anything but a quick win

The flip side is that Google isn’t trying to please the SEO experts, it’s trying to please the people that ask for search results. Factors like the age of the website, incoming links from other websites and blogs and volume and consistency of content play a big part in getting Google to consider a web page as an authority on a subject. Those are factors that can’t be built into a website – they need to be built up through time and effort. To get the pages on your website to feature well in the search results for a broad range of keywords, you need to be creating content on those subjects week in and week out, through News articles, Blog posts and pages on your website. You also need to give it a couple of years of evaluation of the site’s traffic analytics before you can properly measure results.

The Value of a Good User Experience

The majority of traffic to your site will come from places other than Google – most sites that we operate show that less than 40% of traffic comes from people typing a keyword into Google. Because people generally come to the web after they’ve been introduced to a brand or business (through personal contact or advertising), they tend to type in www.yourbusiness.co.za to look for you. If this gives them no joy, they’ll eventually land up on Google, where they’ll type in your company name rather than a keyword related to your company.

No matter how visitors have landed up at your site, the most important thing is to give them good service, which, in the virtual world of the internet equals good usability. If someone has had an easy time getting finding information on your site, they will be more likely to call you or to come back for related information. If someone found you at the top of Google but then had a hard time getting the information they wanted – they’ll never come back, and they’ll never call you.

YouTube is great – its a simple and effective way to store and display dynamic information about your business and services. Barak Obama uses it to chat to America every week. One of our clients uses it to show their work in progress.

Embedding YouTube video

YouTube has a nifty feature which allows you to embed any YouTube video into a blog post or a website. You set the size you want the video, copy the embed code and paste it into your blog post or web page. In a blog editor, you simply place the embed code into the editor. YouTube even has a lady in a nice YouTube T-shirt explaining how its done:

On a website through a CMS it can be a bit trickier:

Embedding video through the CMS

Our CMS has a special editor that allows you to add raw HTML to a page. This is great because you can place code from Google Maps and other 3rd-party online content providers – and you can place YouTube Embed code into this editor. The problem is that the column width of the website isn’t always right for the sizes that YouTube offers, and, because YouTube is Flash based, it sits above the editing controls in the CMS. We’re developing an new CMS editor that sorts this out, allowing you to overwrite the width & height values in the YouTube embed code.

We’re developing a great new site for a client. The design and code are working really well (as always…), but on this project, the copy has really shone through, both in terms of providing users good information, and providing good keywords & structure for search optimisation.

This client has seen the light in terms of copy writing – they employ a copywriter part-time to work on all of their marketing material. This means that when we started collecting content together for the site, there was a large body of good copy already existing, and an easy way to get more copy written, from short intro snippets for the Home page to full blocks of copy for the main landing pages.

Our client is in the security products industry, and, more than just selling top of the range security products, they want to enter into the debate on the security situation for home and business owners here in South Africa. On the website, we’re doing this through a monthly discussion topic and other customer feedback components, and through a series of articles on security in South Africa. In this 1st phase of the site, there are 9 really good articles on topics ranging from Securing your home for the Holidays, to Security in a Complex or Cluster Home development. These articles are providing us with a huge amount of content with which to create a really good linking structure – Google is going to love the site! What this means is that because of the articles, which discuss the broader issues, but relate directly to our client’s products, the hero pages – which promote the products and have buttons that say “BUY NOW” – are really well supported and (hopefully) Google will rank them well.

We have a new project in the pipeline – for a wedding photographer – and we’re going to be using a series of articles on that site to achieve the same end. We discussed setting up a blog with the wedding photographer, but a blog isn’t right for his business, so articles will give him a more formal way of discussing broader topics.

It really does pay to have a copywriter working on a website project, and articles seem to work really hard on a site, providing content and search-friendly structure.

We’ve been looking around the web for Usability Testing software. In South Africa, most web development companies just plain don’t do usability testing – which would be fine except that most web development companies in South Africa aren’t that clued up about basic usability and user-centred design practices either. We’re also guilty – at best we do ad hoc testing using the client, friends and colleagues, backed up by a fairly in-depth understanding of basic usability practices.

The general opinion on Usability Testing in South Africa is that clients aren’t interested in it – that it’s impossible to justify the cost. This past week I’ve met with 3 clients, all of whom have easily understood and recognised that their website must give their business some return – either directly by making sales or indirectly by resulting in enquiries, and that to do that they need to think about their users first. They all understood that they didn’t need a website design – they need an online strategy to engage with their customers. And that means understanding user-centred design and information structures, and doing usability testing.

So we’re looking to do more, and so we’re looking for Usability Testing software.

We found Silverback from Clearleft, which is both not insanely expensive and is fully featured. Only problem is its only available on Mac. Most users in South Africa – and I mean up around 90% -  are sitting with a 19-inch flat screen, set at 1024 x 768 or 800 x 600, running IE 6 or 7. If I place them in front of Safari on a Mac, they’re going to be completely distracted: “Where’s the close button?”. We’ve even considered asking users to bring their own mouse – the most disconcerting thing about a new computer? You are not fluent with your new mouse.

We found Morae from TechSmith, and that costs $2000, which in South Africa today translates to R19000. That’s just way too much, especially for the basic testing that we need – we’re just not doing projects that warrant extensive testing of new ways of interacting with data.

So we looked at TechSmith’s other products and found Camtasia. This is the basic picture-in-picture bundle, without the huge amount of extra features that Morae offers. We’ll see how this goes.

Tom

So: Welcome to the Black Square Blog. Watch us start our website development business:

Office – check (+ air-conditioning)

Phone – check

Computers – 3 out of 4

Desks, chairs, multiplugs etc… – check

Folders for client info – check

Clients – check

Website – www.blacksquare.co.za (in progress – see Logo note below)

Business Cards – no (in progress – see Logo note below)

Logo – no/check (it’s done, but we haven’t put it anywhere yet)

Blog – check

Currently we’re squeezing new websites, fixes on old websites and setting up the business into our schedule. This last bit includes reworking the blog from the standard WordPress template into something fantastic and unique.

Tom