As you can imagine, because of the sheer volume and variety of nightlife here in the capital, these kinds of projects play a major role in London web design. Being in the centre of things here makes us ideally placed to take on these kinds of projects and make a real success of them.

The back-end of the site is where the real work happens and is key to making this kind of website a success. The core CMS principles are still used, but specific features are built in to allow venue owners to add their own flavor to the site. The sections for special events or appearances so it features prominently on the home page.

CMS-based websites aren’t static like standard HTML ones. This is a significant benefit to clients that have fast moving businesses like nightclubs or restaurants. They don’t have to call us to make changes, we show them how to do it themselves, lowering the cost of ownership considerably. The ability to change promotions and add features through the control panel allows the client to be able to make their website reflect any changes immediately.

The site can incorporate other features too like sub-pages, event sections, galleries, guest lists, ticket applications, calendars and other information rich content which benefits their customers.

We all know that a high quality web presence with informative copy, interactive elements and everything a visitor needs to become a customer is a great tool for any business. Nightclubs benefit specifically because it’s a great way to market themselves, show potential customers what’s coming up, allows them to reserve tickets, apply for the guest list, plan their own calendar and follow the club throughout the year. It also allows visitors from further afield to plan visits better.

Having to travel to a venue from afar has an element of risk that can be a barrier between them and the venue. Knowing exactly what’s on through the calendar and what to expect through good description and a gallery takes the unknown out of the equation, removing a barrier between website visitor and paying customer.

CMS also allows for much interactivity. A forum, bulletin board, membership sub-site or other community oriented tool also breeds brand loyalty, which any club can benefit from. Dance clubs use this to great effect, allowing people to sign up for newsletters, event notifications and special offers. This creates a connection between the business and the clientele, which again, breeds brand loyalty.

Using a CMS website for a nightclub makes sense in a lot of ways. The ability to quickly reflect changes and update the site is a significant benefit, as is the ability to interact with visitors before they even visit the club.

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To get the most out of a charity website, it has to have 8 elements.

First, it needs a mission. Every charity has its stated goal, and this needs to be loud and proud on the site. A good sized, readable, attention grabbing tagline that sums it all up.

Next the charity really needs to explain how it spends your money. What does it do with your hard earned cash you donate? Let the visitors know exactly what you do and how you help your chosen cause. a sponsor needs to know their money is going to make a difference.

Next is images. There needs to be plenty of images used on the site. Images of the people they help, the places they help, before and after shots, pictures of volunteers helping or raising the money. Plenty of images to show the charity hard at work making a difference.

A nice big donate button is essential. After all, part of the purpose of the site is to draw in more sponsorship. Make the process as easy as possible, with as few steps as possible. The fewer barriers between the visitor and the charity getting the money the better.

Along with the donate button should be a total donations to date table. Something somewhere that tells the visitor how much the charity has raised, especially if there is a special promotion or event. This is where the power of CMS comes in handy. The easily manageable and updatable interface is ideal for keeping a running total of donations.

Along with running totals should be a goal. “We need to raise £xxxx in order to build a well” or something tangible that can be quantified on the site. Again, with a CMS, administrators can keep visitors up to date with progress and quickly make changes as necessary.

Many charities depend on financial donations to survive. If the given charity has other ways for people to help, then make sure it’s mentioned on the site. Don’t be afraid to suggest ideas of how people can help other than donating money.

Lastly, but by no means least, let people keep in touch. Many sponsors feel they have a vested interest in the charity once they have given to them. Make sure the website has a facility for keeping up to date with developments.

CMS technology is particularly helpful with charity websites. Once they are installed, they are very easy to maintain and to administer, meaning the admin doesn’t have to be technical, and changes can be implemented quickly. This allows the charity to react to need much quicker than using traditional web tools.

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Continuing from this, we move on to conversion rates. This is another important piece of data that helps you target your site in a much more effective way to maximize return on investment.

Even if your site isn’t ecommerce, it’s useful to know the percentage of visitors who convert in one way or another. That might be a sale, a contact, a query or any other kind of action taken by the visitor on your site.

It’s useful to know where in the process they are stopping, abandoning their efforts or otherwise not engaging any further with your site. Some failures are inevitable, from visitors changing their mind, realizing they don’t have money, or other reasons. To put it into perspective, for an ecommerce site, 3% conversion is viewed as a decent rate. Yep, 3%.

Bearing that in mind, study the path most of your visitors take to get to the basket, contact form or whatever and analyse where the majority of them abandon. This should give you an idea of what’s in the way of them completing, and lets you do something about it.

You can also check what visitors do after they convert. If they leave straight away, you could be missing out on highlighting other offers or upselling. Interpreting this data and knowing what to do about it is part of sales and marketing, and is often best learned through trial and error. If you see a potential problem, change it and see how it works for a while. If things improve keep the changes, if they don’t try something else.

Now let’s look at target pages. A target page is a product, services or offer page. For example a blogs target page is its latest post, whereas a businesses is it’s information or services page. If there is traffic on the target pages but far less conversion, it makes sense to follow the trail from the product page to the checkout. Look for anything that gets in the way of the conversion and remove it.

So let’s put it all together in an example.

As you should know by now, we do London web design. Our bounce rate is calculated from visits to our home page that don’t visit the portfolio, testimonial or contact page. Our location data tells us how many visitors are from London, or the UK.

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1. Using Website Analytics

The most well known tool is Google Analytics, which is a webmaster tool available from the Google site. It offers a lot of information about how people use your site, where they concentrate on, and where they ignore. It’s a good way of checking to see if the site encourages the behavior you require or whether things need tweaking a bit.

Let’s have a quick overview of what analytics can tell us, then maybe go into it in a bit more depth. This is such an important subject that it demands at least a little time. If you really want to know how your site works, and why you might not be getting quite as many conversions as you’d like, read on.

The most important thing website analytics can tell you is the bounce rate of the site. This is an extremely important statistic and something every website designer, and owner needs to know. Bounce rate is the count of how many people landed on your website but went no further. This is important because the higher the percentage of bounce, the more work needs to be done on the site.

High bounce rates can be caused by a few things, namely poor navigation, poor design, broken links, errors, poor copy, no calls to action or content that doesn’t grab the attention of the visitor. None of which are issues that are insurmountable, but will definitely need addressing.

Before anyone starts panicking, there is no such thing as a 0% bounce rate. You would expect some people to arrive at your site accidentally, or find that it wasn’t quite what they were looking for, which is fine. Different site types will also have different bounce rates. Blogs and sites that are predominantly served by RSS feeds will have higher bounce rates because visitors will only need to visit a single page.

A corporate site or ecommerce site would expect a lower bounce rate, unless they are using a single page structure. Different site types and structures will present different results. Bear this in mind when checking yours. The lower the bounce rate, the more effective the site, and its copy is. On average, somewhere around 30% is decent enough. Anything over 50% needs some work.

Analytics also tell you where your visitors are from. While this isn’t as important as bounce rate, it is useful for targeting your marketing efforts. For example, if you’re targeting “London web design” as a key phrase and most of your traffic is coming from Russia, you have either been hacked or you need to modify your advertising campaign to target London more. For regional based sites, you want to see most of your visitors coming from around your area, for international sites you want to see visitors from the places you’re targeting.

Bounce rate and location are only two of many pieces of data available through website analytics. Next time we’ll look at conversion rates and target pages.

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1. Using Website Analytics Cont.

Like any Apple product sales will hit the roof, but experts are already warning the strains this will have on already strained carriers such as O2 in the UK and AT&T in the US. Although the iPad works on a Wi-Fi connection, when the user is out of the Wi-Fi area it will then need to use the operator networks.

The iPad can run business software, display web pages in a very impressive manner I might add, this nifty Apple device also displays books, streamline videos, allow users to play on-line games and with utilities and the speed this device works we are sure that every Apple fan will be rushing out to get their hands on one.

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A sleek, sophisticated website design will create a good first impression of the restaurant, but should match the overall brand and identity of the place too. Otherwise you risk putting people off.

A website has to be a polished, attractive reflection of reality and contain visible similarities to the company brand or other visual cue. Like with any other type of business, there needs to be continuity in design between the existing company brand and the website. That can be the logo, a particular font or colour scheme, something to connect the two in the mind of the customer.

With a content management website (CMS) based website, restaurants can take control of their site and make changes quickly. This enables features like Dish of the Day, Catch of the Day and other special, time limited offers to be offered and updated regularly. Changes to menus can be quickly and easily reflected on the site, new dishes can be featured with photographs and descriptions.

The CMS portion also allows you to take enquiries, bookings, allow potential staff to apply for jobs, gather customer information and feedback and generally interact with your readership. It helps to create bonds with your customers, which in turn encourages brand loyalty, which is priceless in any situation.

You could also offer added extras like a feedback forum, blog or even share recipes. For a couple of restaurants in London, web design was a primary concern before the launch. The site had to include an area where the chef could post recipes and describe how to cook the dish, with photographs and/or videos. This entails a lot of work on the part of the chef, but the results are that he has a loyal, strong fan base who also frequent the restaurant.

Using a CMS based website makes sense for any business. It makes extra sense for fast moving, ever changing businesses like restaurants. The ability to keep it up to date, by the minute is a great advantage for seasonal menus, specials and other short term offers.

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1. Nightclub Web Design

Despite being called whitespace, it doesn’t have to be white, it can match the theme of the page, it doesn’t matter.  The name came from the old days of print, so is more a legacy label than a literal one, some designers now refer to it as ‘negative space’

Whitespace is just empty space in a design, somewhere to let the eyes rest, separate page elements and generally make the page appealing and uncluttered.  There is something about whitespace in web design, any design in fact, that makes it look elegant.

The be able to use whitespace, there is a psychological barrier to overcome with the client.  Many clients see white space as wasted space.  Screen and page real estate is a valuable commodity and they don’t want to see it wasted.  That kind of thinking goes back to the days of print, where the page was a finite space and needed to be filled to get the most out of it.  While the same can be said for a web page, whitespace says something else.  Just look at the Apple website to see how whitespace works on a commercial site.

It says the design, the product and the message are important enough to sacrifice the rest of the page for it.  That the concept is too important to compromise by adding other design elements.  That the product or message is so important that nothing else matters.

It also separates paragraphs or blocks of content so they stand out from one another and appear distinct.  When used correctly, whitespace is a great way of separating subjects, paragraphs and sections of copy without using headings or other indicators.  It allows web designers to keep the design simple and sophisticated without having to clutter the page with web standard indicators.  We can produce a page that has the message, a title, navigation and let the rest take care of itself.

Visually is also allows the design, the typography and the copy to speak for itself.  It also adds to usability, there is no cluttered interface or navigation, no confusion over links and content.  No overcrowding of elements, advertising or anything else that detracts from the sole purpose of the page.  To sell, communicate or engage.

There is no hard and fast rule about how much whitespace to use, it’s a judgement call.  The best way of using it differs from project to project.  Unfortunately it’s one of those things that needs experience to be able to gauge properly.  Experimentation is the next best way of deciding the amount to use in any given situation.

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With “Google” meaning search the internet and “Tweet” meaning a short message sent though twitter the micro-blogging site.

With every person using both these tools to broadcast and satisfy curiosity via the Internet and being part of the Information Age.

Some people thought the word “blog?” would win word of the decade, but with people preferring to google than blog and with some thinking the word sounded ugly, google won hands down.

Votes were cast by researchers, editors, lexicographers, historians, grammarians, etymologists, students, linguists and writers all ADS’s members.

ADS is dedicated to the study of the English language in North America and founded in 1889, the organization also studies languages and dialects that are influenced by the English language or indeed the influence.

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It doesn’t take Einstein to know why Yell.com made the decision to bring back the successful campaign back to the small screen, in April the campaign saw some of the biggest moves in brand measures (cut through, disposition of use, awareness), with it being such a big hit on the social networking sites (with YouTube gaining more than 450,000 views and a huge following on facebook, they received an increase of 70 percent in calls compared with pre-level campaigns.

Customers are already using their smartphones or mobiles to get onto Yell.com to answer all their basic directory needs, and with Yell.com winning so many awards for their call centre assistant its no wonder people are happy to pay for the this kind of service as they know they will get a clear exchange of value. So Yell.com have taken all these factors into consideration and changed their adverts subtly, with the first class service credentials showing on the opening frames and the call to action stating to download their mobile app for free, its clear that new media is the future for Yell.com and other directory companies.

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SNS otherwise knows as Social Networking or even social media is everywhere you look even though its not been around for that long its increasingly a popular and relevant form of communication, originally Social networking was used to exchange information, do a bit of chatting and keep up with the latest gossip with your friends, but now its changed into the work place, with the interaction, listening, collaborating and communication all bring applied within business interactions.

With social networking being such a huge media tool everyone is advised to join and be part of the revolution, take part and reap the rewards for your business using SNS. Tweet you soon.

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1. Use new media to revive success