Posted by admin on Nov 21, 2010 in
Digital Marketing,
General Gripes We moved into our new office ‘The Old Schoolhouse’ in Castle Ashby back in June of 2010.
One of the things that was pretty important to us as a digital marketing agency was the speed of the broadband, so we were fairly pleased when we found out that we should be getting approx 3.5mb downstream.
On the allotted day the man came and fixed it up, and after an initial period of 4 days where we had virtually NO bandwidth it duly settled down at 3.5Mb. But here came the problem. every time anyone uploaded a file, however small the downstream died- period. Now I know that ADSL stands for asynchronous and that the upstream is always slower, in this case about 300K, but we’ve had plenty of experience of ADSL elsewhere and never seen this problem.
BT’s response? That’s normal, but if you want an engineer to come and investigate its going to cost. Now, having had problems with lines in other locations and calling engineers out we knew it could soon run into billing of thousands of pounds for them to not solve the problem!
So we persevered, until it became untenable, and then we ordered a second line, just for FTP use internally to alleviate the problem.
Interestingly the BT survey this time told us to only expect 3Mb, so 500k less than before. We didn’t bite, just waited for the installation and then our IT guy set up the line through the same router as the other one, reserving the bandwidth to one machine at first.
We let the line settle for 10 days and then performed some speed tests. Bear in mind that this line comes from the same exchange, no difference.
The results? 7Mb downstream, 512 up! And that’s consistent. this one flies, and there is NO problem when you upload.
What does this tell us? Well either there is a fault on the other line, or there is another operational reason, and this is the one that got us thinking….
At our last place a couple of miles down the road, our unit was getting just over 1Mb, and there was no performance issue when uploading, but next door were getting 6Mb! We got fobbed off by the BT standard response of you are 5Km from the exchange so that is the best you can get. The unit next door was approx 12 feet closer to the exchange!
Putting both lines into the new building has proved that BT’s broadband infrastructure is at best a lottery, at worst an operational nightmare.
And the theory as to why the broadband lines at both locations showed such vast differences in speed? Well it could all be to do with the routing of the lines themselves.
The fast lines would appear to route straight out of the exchange to the locations receiving them, but the ones with poor performance may be ‘routing’ around the village before reaching their end destination therefore increasing the ‘distance’ that the broadband signal has to travel.
Either way, it is a complete lottery, and not even a ‘postcode lottery’ as The Old Schoolhouse proves. Maybe BT would like to respond with something more scientific or credible than ‘It’s the distance from the exchange mate, can’t do ’nuffink about that.’
Just so you know the score;
- Yardley Hastings Exchange to the Old Schoolhouse Castle Ashby (approx 3km)
- BT Business Broadband option 2 (2 lines)
- Line 1 giving download of 3.5mb
- Line 2 giving download of 7Mb
However, none of this explains the performance problems when uploading on line 1. The downstream just drops to nothing. Is this not a fault? Perhaps someone with some real experience might like to post an answer? Thanks!
Nifty little Social Networkling device fior creatives that integrates well with Twitter, Linked In and Facebook.
just need to find the time to actually put our portfolio up there!
We’ve just finished a project with our friends from CIC for the well known Caterham company, manufacturers of quality fireplaces normally, but in this case for their very high quality granite kitchen worktops business.
Basically they needed a nice website to showcase the different types of granite available to their customers, so we provided a CMS solution in Joomla that uses the Yoo Tools plugin with some mods to make for a fluid user experience.
But it didn’t stop there. The client wanted a nifty estimating system for reps on the road and third party distributors to use. For the front end we created a login area where they can go and create full blown estimates. The layout again controlled by a modified Yoo Tools set up, this time with a neat javascript accordian so that each step of the process is clear to follow.
Once the estimate is complete, the user can save, print or email the estimate for the customer. Real easy.
We had to write a full PHP component for this in the Joomla admin section so that Caterham could then manage the quotes, and store them in MySQL. The whole process for an estimate now takes a couple of minutes, and its really user friendly.
Using Joomla for projects like this gives our clients the flexibility and customisation they need without breaking the bank. We find that most business problems can be solved with some custom programming, in many cases providing business transformation for clients.
Well we said we would get into app development. it’s a natural progression for us as digital marketers and web developers.
James Bache, who looks after the Page Flip brand over here at STAR Digital hooked up with Xerox, one of his clients to produce an app for MK Electric, part of the Honeywell group of companies.
The goal, to produce an app that allowed Distributors to search and view tech spec for their quite frankly enormous product range using an iPhone or iPad.
James got under the bonnet of Xcode with the developers and they produced a great looking, smooth functioning app and got it listed on the app store. Whole process start to finish, 3 months. Done.
Since then we’ve started work on quite a few more, and the next one to launch is actually part of a Chinese initiative called ‘The Charitarian’ and we are producing a magazine app for them for the iPhone and iPad that allows them to easily and cost effectively add their quarterly magazine covering Corporate Social Responsibility in China to the app.
That will be luanching soon, and if you want to get into the iPad publishing market give James a shout, he’s really motoring with iPad Magazine Publishing apps now.
You may or may not know Mike Nash, author of the health & wellness book Aggressive Health, but this guy is a bit of a personality in the wellness world, and walks the talk.
We’ve been working with Mike for a few years now helping him with his digital strategy, and his ecommerce. Until recently he was using ePages, which in fairness was a great estore package for its day (3 yrs ago) but since we’ve started working with Magento, we’ve been transferring clients across at the earliest opportunity.
Well anyway, I had a chat with mike and mentioned this Magento thing, and he said ‘OK, sounds interesting’ can you do me a demo? Knowing that Mike likes to ‘get under the bonnet’ I said ‘I’ll go one better, I’ll put you a complete install on one our servers for you to play with’. Well Mike went nuts!!! Get me on this platform now! I need this in my life! So we transferred the product catalogue out of epages into Magento and we set to work to create a pleasing CSS structure for the template.
Mike worked with our lead Magento developer Jake Rudkin-Wilson, and boy did they work, (Jake’s a fitness freak too, so they had a lot in common!) sometimes Mike was mailing me at like 3 in the morning with questions, ‘Can it do this, can it do that?’ and I’d be like ‘Yep, plugin for that, we can code that in, bit of PHP work here and there, couple of tweaks to mySQL, and in no time, and I’m talking 5 weeks end to end we launch the new Aggressive Health Shop web site, and wow! Its doing brisk business with its one page checkout plugin and social bookmarking facilities.
Mike phoned me yesterday and said, ‘I am totally delighted with this Magento store Roj, its completely surpassed my expectations, only problem is I’m working 24/7 to deal with ther uplift in orders!’. I said ‘Nice problem to have!’
Good luck Mike, you are a Magento evangalist and we love it!!!
Check out the Aggressive Health Shop site yourself here, some of the products on here are awesome!
Wow. My last post was in June when we moved the the Old Schoolhouse in Castle Ashby!
I don’t feel like we’ve been able to look up since then as we’ve been working like mad on the redesign and development of the Fellows website. This one was not for the faint hearted, we had from early July until mid October to completely rebuild the site from the ground up in Joomla with direct integration to Microsoft Dynamics NAV and SQL Server.
I think its fair to say that we are hugely impressed with what we’ve achieved, but we are knackered as well!
Big ups go out to Andrew Matthews head of design over here for the stunning CSS and AJAX implementations, and the feedback from users has been awesome.
The guys at Evo Soft looked after the NAV development on the local side, nice guys.
So we aren’t resting on our laurels though, we’ve worked on and launched 6 other projects in the same period, and we’ve got to scope and start on another two Dynamics integrations in the next few weeks. Roll on Christmas!
Posted by admin on Jul 20, 2010 in
STAR Digital News We’ve moved about a mile up the road from our beautiful barn at Parkhill to The Old Schoolhouse in Castle Ashby. We were bursting at the seams and it seemed the time was right.
Below a photo of some of the team, including Banjo the dog! Our 12 week old ‘company dog’.
If you’re in the area come an visit for a cup of tea and a stroll around the gardens. A wonderful place for creative thinking!
Direct mail is dead? I keep hearing this, but I also look at stats from various campaigns and see that a combination of direct mail and email seems to get the best results. In fact with the overall drop in direct mail and the exponential increase in email we could argue that cut through and conversion of well thought out highly personalised direct mail could result in improved conversions in the coming year.
However, as the economic outlook continues to be uncertain for the UK I fear a number of companies will cut back their direct mail in favour of cheaper alternatives such as email and add to their overall woes.
It all comes back to multiple channel marketing. You need a good mix, and swapping your DM for email isn’t likely to cut it.
We’ve met with some very bright companies through 2009 that have cracked the personalisation of direct mail and created turnkey digital print and centralised distribution vehicles, and we’re gobsmacked that so few of the bigger direct marketing brands haven’t taken advantage of them.
Our worry is that generic poorly executed email marketing is going to really struggle to get cut through in 2010, and that it will become over used by both those who understand direct marketing techniques and even worse those that don’t.
In our client base we now only work with clients that supply opt-in lists from their own site subscribers, and even with well though out and relevant content the click through rates are rarely better than 15% with opens rates being in the low 30′s as an average. Deliverability is good, we use a well respected carrier for our delivery, but over the past 12 months we’ve seen a slight decline in opens rates and an uplift in unsubscribes.
Our approach to email marketing for clients has been to work hard on the creative to create standout work that has a clear call to action, either through to an incentivised landing page for e-commerce, often using a coupon to allow for overall tracking not just relying on the email or GA stats. Its the joined up approach that really makes the difference. If someone clicks through you then need to get them to do something, whether the goal is brand awareness, lead generation or an online sale.
In a lot of cases we are now developing not just online creative, but offline as well, utilising advanced digital print solutions for personalisation and pushing the mailer out 3-4 days prior to the email marketing campaigns starting. Make sure you use different coupon codes for the offline and online creative, or for lead gen different landing page urls, (keep ‘em simple) and hone your analytics with a campaign filter to cut out all of the other noise. We also like to keep it simple and try to inject some personality into the campaign creative. Seems to be working well at the moment by providing differentiation.
At the end of the day, its all going to come back to commonsense. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Cut down on the print and postage to non-buying customers and poor prospects and use the money saved to test tracked email marketing creative to see if your customer base responds in the right way. If it doesn’t after several properly executed well timed campaigns you’ll need a real rethink.
The guys at 37 Signals in their new publication ‘rework’ have a great chapter about promotion, if you are working with a small advertising budget you should try their approach of building a following rather than throwing money at marketing tactics you can’t measure.
Oh and if you can’t measure it don’t do it.
Posted by rogerm on Mar 21, 2010 in
Analytics,
Digital Marketing Looks like the privacy argument at Google just runs and runs as the company becomes bigger and bigger.
They are going to release browser plug-ins for users to opt-out of being recorded in analytics in the next few weeks.
We will wait to see details of this, but its likely that it will only apply to specific data such as ISP network location and the like, so for the main user base (SME’s) it shouldn’t be overly problematic.
Could be something and nothing?
Posted by rogerm on Nov 18, 2009 in
Email Marketing,
STAR Digital News There is a newly passed amendment to the UK Companies Act means that any UK company has now, by law, to include the following information in their email footers (this means general email not e-mail marketing although best practice would suggest inclusion):
Your company name
Your registration number and registered address (if registered)*
Your place of registration (e.g. England and Wales)
*it is not sufficient to just include a vaild address, it must be your registered address.
