p.s This document makes a small charge of £4.99 so that I am able to continue to work supporting good causes wherever possible.

The internet is so huge you can't begin to imagine it. It's probably bigger than that and yet many companies expect customers to be able to find them, polishing their site like a shiny needle in a million haystacks.

There are, roughly speaking, a hundred sites in the top hundred sites on the internet at last count. These sites get millions of visitors evey day and still only reach a tiny fraction of us internet users. Many of these sites allow you become part of their content for free. Most of the people you meet there won't have heard of you and never would unless you took the time to be where they are. Visiting these big sites is a lot ike handing out leaflets in Coventry - an arduous, innaccurate shot-in-the-dark way to find customers but better than arrogantly expecting customers to find you.

If markets are indeed conversations, they what evidence that anybody is talking to you do you show on your site. The very least your company need to be doing is Being Seen To Be Listening because it's what your customers have come to expect. Not listening isn't an option anymore. 

So, how can you be seen to be listening? There are actually a whole raft of things your site needs such as FAQs, forums and blogs with comments all of which can help but aren't THE answer. Anybody can add a forum to a site and most forums have tumbleweed blowing through them eerily. Lots of companies create fictional Frequently Asked Questions pages and then never update them. This isn't listening and more importantly it doesn't look like listening. It looks like someone looking like they're listening and you know how bad that is.

The real issue is that by taking a Cluetrain or listening-oriented approach to your website people can solve their own problems, people can help each other solve their problems meaning you don't have to. And the by-product of these conversations is usually the golden nuggets of feedback and suggestions.... pure gold.

Open up your listening channels, open more listening channels, introduce your customers to the real you rather than a Contact Us web form. Just because you opened the channels they won't all get used, but if you don't ask you don't get. And if you aren't seen to be asking, well, it looks like you really don't care and your potential customer will simpy wander off to see someone who does.

Simply, one minute of shoot-from-the-hip opinion about your site. Send me the URL and I'll spend a whole minute looking at your site and give you some feedback.

What have you got to lose?

Contact Us

I'm a firm believer that promoting your business is easiest when you offer something of value, something remarkable or something genuinely useful that makes yours or your customers' lives better.

Creating value requires a little creativity but the process can be easily kick-started with things as simple as...

• Being where your customers are when they want you most
• Being transparent enough to be believable
• Been seen to be listening to your customers
• Finding ways to make life easier for your staff
• Learning new skills and ideas
• Telling stories that people naturally want to pass on
• Re-shaping your resources to better fit into your customers work-flow and to encourage use and re-use
• Designing tools and resources that match your customers' profiles
• Using the latest technologies ingeniously to better support your customers' needs and lives

It is the last item in the list above where I can add most value to your business. Because I continually research and trial new technologies (and have for the last 18 years) I can help you navigate the world of new media in a way that is congruent with your business, your staff and customers.

The What Is Everythingability approach is one where we beign lots of campaigns that aim to better understand customers, to be more proactive in finding customers, to better understand the competition and to get more value from your content and brand.

Whether you are a startup needing a web site or blue chip looking to improve conversion rates, I will help you make the changes that will have the most effective results.

Let me give you an example.

• A usability report looking for ways to improve conversion rates that doesn't take into account where the visitor arrived from, be it Facebook link, a Google search or an email newsletter misses a huge opportunity to convert.
• An SEO report that aims to increase traffic without considering the usability implications may be bringing in new customers and immediately pissing them off.

Everythingability is a 50+ collection of tried and tested integrated strategies and processes that will transform your web site. These include making improvements to your site, improvements to your online marketing and outreach efforts and improvements to the technologies and tools that you use.

On Site

• Usability
• Persuasive Design
• Information Architecture
• Search Engine Optimisation ( SEO )
• Creating Value with Innovation

Off Site

• Search Engine Optimisation ( Link-building and advertising )
• Social Media Marketing (Using sites and tools like Facebook, Twitter, Blogging creatively and effectively )

In House

• Research and analysis
• Training and skills
• Better tools and integration

• Corporates: Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, DTI, Keane UK, Lloyds TSB, Atkins Global, Catlin, Nortel
• Brands: Virgin Money, Virgin Books, Delia Smith, Myla, Paul Smith, London Zoo
• SMEs: Eland, Cucina Direct, Abbey Box Office, Virgin Experience Days
• Educational organisations: Brightside Trust, Nuffield Foundation, Script Factory
• Charities and non-profits: Kings Fund, RIBA, Carers.org, Advice Now
• Education: Royal College of Art, IPKO Centre (Kosova), Staffordshire University, ARTEC, Kingston University, University of Westminster

Eland Cables

Site SEO and usability consultancy: When Eland decided it was time to re-design their site so that it could be easily updated with a Content Management System I helped them create a site that outshines their competitors. When I first started working with Eland they only ranked for "eland" searches in Google. Within six months of working with me they had had orders from twelve new countries. 

Now Eland rank for so many industry related keywords it can be hard to keep up so we constantly monitor which keywords are the best for business and plan our content strategy to match. Some of Eland's best results as of Spring 2009 are...

electrical cable (#1)
electrical cables (#1)
yy cable (#1)
nyy cable (#1)
h07rn-f cable (#1)
h07rn-f (#1)
pilot cable (#1)
welding cable (#1)
h07rnf (#1)
pvc cable (#1)
h05vv-f (#1)
h01n2-d (#1)
aluminium cable (#1)
ct125 cable (#1)
6381tq cable (#1)
instrumentation cables (#1)
tri rated cables (#1)
bs6195 (#1)
2491x (#1)
cable supplier (#1)
fire cable (#1)
ct167 (#1)
earthing cables (#1)
6491b (#2)
armoured cables (#2)
steel wire armoured cable (#2)
aluminium cables (#2)
electrical cable specifications (#2)
sy cable (#3)
cable lugs (#3)
cw1308b (#3)
nyy-j (#3)
33kv cable (#3)
cable nyy (#3)

... and the list goes on!

Social Media Marketing: Throughout the process of creating a new site I have helped the marketing team to make the most effective use of all the technologies available to them running regular training and brainstorming sessions.

The Eland marketing team have helped shaped the functionalities of the Engagement Engine using it to make contact with potential customers in forums and blogs.

Jack Daniel's Barbecue Sauces

Development: The challenge with the Jack Daniel's project was the creation of a multi-language Content Management System (CMS) to share PDF recipes that use their sauces.

Nokia

Usability consultancy: The challenge was twofold. Firstly, to make visual recommendations that showed how to improve the usability of UK Nokia site and secondly to create design approaches that artfully enabled marketing campaigns to be integrated into the design of the site without affecting the usability.

We created numerous examples of improvements that could be made, from bare-bones wire-frames to full design mockups.

Delia Smith

Search Engine Optimisation: Contact us to find out how a few very simple changes to the Delia Smith site resulted in 50,000 new visitors to her site, month on month for over 6 months.

Refugee Council

Consultancy: Research about how a non-profit might best create a credible web presence for free (or at very low cost). We evaluated seven online applications and made recommendations based on ease-of-use, essential functionalities, extendability and overall design. Contact Us if you'd like advice on how to create a site "for free" that doesn't suck.

Londinium Coffee

Development / Social Media Consultancy: Reiss is a coffee guru startup making the best coffee I've ever tasted. This project needed the bootstrapping of an Ecommerce site (to begin sellling his fantastic coffee) and Social Media Marketing advice (to begin drumming up orders).

Wall Glamour

Social Media Marketing consultancy: Working with Rick over a number of meetings we designed and planned usability, SEO and marketing strategies that dramatically ramped his traffic and sales.

Marshall Arts

Development / Social Media Consultancy: The Marshall Arts challenge was to create a web gallery that "builds itself" based on their Excel stock spreadsheet. With hundreds of regulary changing images Marshall Arts needed an automatic way to update their gallery.

Lloyds TSB

Persuasion consultancy: Report evaluating competing banks information design strategies and making recommendations on how to make more sales with only small changes to the home page design.

Virgin Money

Persuasion consultancy: This consultancy was to offer ideas on how to improve their Customer Journeys so that more people completed the sign-up process successfully more often. We designed a customer-flow that aimed to always "tick their pyschological boxes" whichever route they took through the information.

Cucina Direct

Usability consultancy: When working on an ecommerce catalogue site that sent out thousands and thouands of product catalogues by mail. In meetings with the owner he let slip that two of the biggest pains in his company were dupes (duplicate people in his customer list) and incorrect data that required cleaning by hand. He boasted that their database developers had made improvements that had “removed 3 clicks” from the cleansing process.

A few changes to the order process and automation of the database update removed dozens of clicks making huge cost savings. Making a number of usability improvements to the registration form in the first place cut even more clicks. Cleaner data made the system easier to use, produced happier customers, less error prone and lead to far fewer dupes lurking in the system.

Kings Fund

Development / Training: When a large Heathcare non-profit came to me looking to create a project reporting system we developed a secure shared blog to share research news. The integrated wiki became a “knowledge repository” for Staff and we used various online diagram tools to create/share and annotate what where their “Customer Journeys” plans. Along the way, once of the lucky benefits for the project was discovering how Delicious tagging made working in a team (and from home) so much easier for them.

Catlins: Virtual Queuing

Usability consultancy: This was a pure usability consultancy project working with a London technology company in which we were asked to design a virtual queuing system for Catlins Underwriters at Lloyds of London (2004).The system had to be easy to use and adaptive because meetings rarely (if ever) run on time. The system used touch screens in the foyer to make appointments, plasma screens and web interface. Lloyds TSB wanted to maximise sales made from their homepage.I produced a detailed

Oracle: Think.com

The Think.com site is one of the largest online communities in the world, open only to kids and teachers. I worked in collaboration with Ultralab staff and the Oracle Education Research development team to create totally new online learning environments.The design of Think.com was based on my Spinalot project, a project which enabled me to work with Apple’s Advanced Technology Group in Cupertino. 

Spinalot

Development / Research: Spinalot (1996) was a tool designed to help create online learning communities. It assumed all members had an identity, could create work and discussions, comment on each others work, share bookmarks and more.

Many community sites were created with this toolset and it became the starting point for the creation of Oracle’s Think.com and lead to me working with Apple’s Advanced Technology Group in Cupertino.

Virgin Books

At the OTHER media I lead the design for Virgin Books and created the strategy of trying to “out Google Amazon”. Amazon are wonderful if you know what you want but terrible if you don’t.

Within 6 months of the relaunch sales were up by 400% based on a simple approach of showing more products, more often and focusing on customers search terms, not on the product titles. 

Royal Institute of British Architects

The Royal Institute of British Architects only had a small budget to redesign their home page. RIBA departments were responsible for over 30 sites, each with a different look and feel, each with different hosting, authors and navigation.Other design companies pitched their designs but I had written simple tools to extract all the data from all their sites, keeping the complex structure intact.

This approach meant that in our pitch we could demonstrate all their sites being available for the first time with a unified look n feel and being edited using the OTHERmedia’s CMS, OTHERobjects.We won the gig and to reorganise the site we must have used 10 packets of Post It notes (the measure of many a fun project). 

Mr Blog: Core Education

In 2005 I spent 6 months in New Zealand working for Core-ed evangelising the use of open-source software and emerging tools of blogs and wikis etc. particularly in education.We kicked off many small experimental projects and gave presentations up and down the country, earning me the affectionate (if inaccurate) nickname Mr. Blog. I also learned to love the ukulele. 

Whilst looking at your site, pretending that you are a busy person and a potential customer and ask yourself three simple questions...

1. Am I in the right place? You have less than 3 seconds to grab a visitors attention, if you sell sofas don't sell lounging solutions. It's very easy to fall into the jargon trap, so take a step back and say everything as simply as you can.
2. Am I convinced by these jokers? It's rare that someone will land on your site and purchase immediately so what are you doing to convince a customer that you are really real? Pictures of factories, real people help. Blogs can help because by their nature take time to build up. And of course there's all the usual stuff such as having a UK telephone number and a credible address, having a support email address etc all contribute to convincing potential customers that you are worth the effort
3. What should I do now? It seems obvious but many sites and stores fail to ask, or even better tell the visitor what to do or what you'd like them to do at least. For example, many companies' really want you to call them and start a conversation and yet they hide their telephone number or give you a tiresome feedback form with too many options to fill out. Make your Call-Outs as clear as you can.

How did your site perform on this simple One-Two-Three? You'd be amazed how, because sites are constantly re-organised and improved how the One-Two-Three, the core purpose of your site gets lost.

Read more Design One Two Three">here.

Most sites and pages have something important that needs to be done, submitting a comment, buying a product etc. I call these Primary Actions. Make sure that these important actions are separated visually from actions of secondary (and even tertiary) importance.

The screen from the Zazzle site is a great example of clearly showing what the Primary Action is, even at this reduced size you can see the main button is "Add to cart".

Go visit your web site and make your eyes go all blurry. Can you still see the one thing that the designers want you to do or click is?

More on Primary Actions">Primary Actions here.

Working on the Information Architecture of lots of sites, I am often dismayed that a huge amount of effort goes into designing the site map compared to designing how items should be linked together. Whilst it's true that we want to help funnel people with our Primary Actions, until the visitor is convinced they are in the right place, keep offering related material.

Go visit your site or store, add things to your basket, generally use your site. Did you ever reach a dead-end? Did you have to use your back button? Are products or pages sensibly related to each other?

More on Always Have Somewhere To Go Next">Always Have Somewhere To Go Next here.

As I said earlier, the jargon trap is so easy to fall in to, this exercise tries to prevent the confusing issues that arise when you invent terminology and use categories. For example, when creating a site many people naturally group similar items together and label those items. The site may have "Accessories", "Peripherals" or "Heavy Duty" items.

Every time we use categories we risk confusing our customers. If I was to offer you a chocolate saying "Would you like a soft of hard centre?", you'd probably want more information. You'd probably want a peek at the actual chocolate names themselves.

A way of avoiding the mystery-chocolate situation is, rather than merely showing category names, like "Hard Centre" or "Soft Centre", include some example contents...

• Hard Centres ( toffee, nougat, plain chocolate ...)
• Soft Centres (orange creme, coffee creme, turkish delight, caramel ...)

Another advantage of showing some of what's inside is that a trigger word, or something that I am really interested in may be included in the contents. I may have arrived at your site uninterested in chocolates hard or soft but be a total sucker for coffee related products. would recommend that the contents contain some of your more popular products.

Go and look at your sites' main navigation. If it uses categories to group things together, can you find a way of adding the actual things into the design.

More on Describe By Contents">Describe By Contents (and chocolates) here.

"We we" sites are those that talk about "we" all time. Does your site have lots of "we-we" language? Working on your Frequently Asked Questions will help you find ways to better express what you are trying to say from a customers perspective. If your FAQs aren't growing daily then you probably haven't found a way to let your customers speak to you as freely as they'd like.

Go work on your FAQs, it's worth it for your Search Engine Optimisation alone.

I like to think of myself as creative, but more often than not the real creativity happens is more to do with facilitation. That's to say, I am more creative when my clients are in the room and often, when shown new ideas and tools, it is the client themselves being creative. Maybe I should really say, I like to take the credit for being creative. I like to be in the room when creativity happens.

• This article is the result of talking with a client about how best to use Social Media to promote their particular business. The strategies are in order of complexity in terms of skills, time and effort. There are however two caveats for any of this to work...

• You have to be able to provide something of real value. The phase I often use here is "be any good". Or to put it another way, if you can't be "any good", your customers will smell a rat.

• You have to be willing to loosen up, be genuine and credible. Being yourself is easier and more effective than putting on a front. You have to be prepared to put the time in. You can't hire someone else to be genuine for you.

So, if you think you are any good and ready to let go of the old way of doing things, then we can begin...

#1. Invade

This is the simplest approach.

All you have to do is start using all the tools and sites available and participate. You can't do all the things listed below overnight, but you will eventually get into the habit of producing as well as consuming online media.

This stage is all about getting out of your company web-site and hanging out with your customers, going native if you like.

Your Tasks:

1. Start a blog
2. Find 50 great blogs and subscribe with an RSS reader
3. Upload some You Tube videos
4. Register for Last FM and listen to some music
5. Find and join in with some email list discussion on Google Groups
6. Twitter about what you are doing
7. Bookmark sites you think are valuable with Delicious
8. Upload 50 photos to Flickr
9. See how many friends and colleagues you can collect on Facebook and Linked In

What you blog about and why is the hardest question. Who would you like your audience to be? What would that audience want to read? I recommend your persona actually is yourself but you may choose to blog incognito.

You can be as creative as you like, in fact that's one of the things to learn about "Invasion"... if it doesn't work, throw it away and start again. The London Zoo team created a blog for one of the penguins. Do you have any penguins lurking in your company?

The Provide and Hope method takes a "because you can" stance on technology. You will probably be aware of all the industry buzz around Web2.0 ideas such as user generated content and mashups where people take a little data from here, data from there and produce something new and wonderful.

A lot of these creations are at times fanciful or even pointless but that would be missing the point of why Provide And Hope is a good strategy. Let me give you an example. Six years ago I spent days trying to convince clients to provide an RSS feed. In general, they weren't interested because the only people that used RSS feeds were geeks like me. Creating an RSS feed, even for the most gnarly of data takes about an hour.

Then slowly, as RSS became widely adopted and used in all sorts of situations that are hugely beneficial to any company wanting to promote themselves. Companies who did provide RSS feeds back then benefited from:

• Kudos. It's still the fact that if you are online and hoping to be a credible company you have to demonstrate some level of technical skill.
• First-mover advantage. If, for example, you provided news in a given sector, your RSS feed would be the one every new RSS user subscribed to.
• Search-engine rankings. All the sites that syndicated news would use your news and pass on linky-love Google benefits.

Those 3 reasons aren't the main reason why every company should have published an RSS feed. The main reason was that by providing an RSS feed you open yourself up to being innovated on/with.

It's all about opportunities and the fact that unless you Provide there is no Hope.

Other examples of Providing and Hoping might be:

1. Creating a forum for your customers.
2. Starting a wiki about your upcoming product lines
3. Creating a community for you and your competitors
4. Create a blog widget that does something funky with your company data
5. Share your log files (or other data you wouldn't normally share).
6. Publish your products in XML or CSV (likewise)
7. Organise a monthly get-together for you and your suppliers (supported with an Upcoming page of course)
8. Throw a party

And of course, the world and his dog will tell you why all of the above won't work. That's not the point, partly becauseyou will not be the one in control of making it work. This is where the Hope part has to kick in.

You have to hope that having provided data, or a platform, or a service, or a meeting place that someone else will surprise you. Undoubtedly, the results will be patchy, some things will work, some won't and some (don't be scared) will blow up in your face, but unless you are doing something, someone else will be doing it better.

#3. Integrate

The Integration method is mainly about changing your work practices to be less company focussed and more web-based. For example, if your web site has a "How to find us" page with a map on it, is it linked to an online map tool such as Google Maps? Often the answer from this question is, "No, but we have a lovely map our designer has lovingly crafted in our corporate colours here".

The problem with the lovely map approach is that it isn't integrated with the wider web world. So if you a provide Google Map link, I can find directions from my house, I can zoom out, I can see the satellite image looking for landmarks like rivers and railway lines, I can find a restaurant or shoe shop nearby. There are so many things that Google Maps can do that the lovely map can't.

The point here is that by taking processes online all sorts of new opportunities become possible. For example...

1. What if your Company People page had the photos hosted on Flickr? What would that mean?
2. What if everyone in your company used Delicious rather than their browser bookmarks?
3. What if you used Ning rather than your behind-the-firewall intranet?
4. What if you used Base Camp rather than Microsoft project?
5. What if your entire company used Slide Share and Edocr rather than your intranet?
6. What if your intranet allowed all your customers in? What would have to change and why?
7. What if you used Subversion rather than Emailing documents around?
8. What if everyone blogged rather than filling out timesheets?

Now of course there are down sides to using web-based tools, sometimes they are slow, sometimes they are in-secure (but then even locked down email systems get fouled up by "reply to all" mistakes) and nobody wants to see that moment when they lost it in an internal meeting on You Tube's pick of the day, but the point here, again, is not to be looking for the negatives but instead see how by doing things a little differently how you can change things massively.

You may have forgotten how web-based email was, at the time, completely can't-be-done radical. That was back when your IT dept. gave you 10MB of space and the ability to read your email only when you were at your desk and not on Tuesdays.

#4. Augment

So by now, if your company is doing all of the above, you will be blogging, creating, participating. You will be experimenting with a collection of online tools, some will be disappointing and other will blow you away. If you are lucky, your Provide and Hope strategy will have turned up new avenues for innovation. In the course of all the above, you will have used tools like Blogger, Wordpress, My Spaceand Facebook.

You may have created a shared aggregator. You will maybe have pulled a few feeds together with Yahoo Pipes. Departments may be sharing images with Flickr groups and items of interest with Delicious tags and status details with Twitter. By this time, as well as using free and low-cost online tools you will probably be tinkering/innovating with open-source tools such as Wordpress because although using online tools can be great hosting your own software typically gives you more flexibility to adapt what's there. With each of these tools, because you are a creative type of person, you will undoubtedly have made tweaks and changes that improve the experience in some way.

You may have created a Blogger theme, or a Facebook app or small piece of software (such as a Word Press plug-in or a Media Wik extension) that does something that other people may benefit from. At this point you have the option to "give back" to the community the fruits of your efforts.

For example, if you have commissioned a designer to create the fluffiest design a blog has ever had, then sharing that design (providing it always attributes you) will only extend your brand awareness. For example, if you are a bank and you create a mortgage widget that really works (precious few do!), then every financial blog is going to want to have that part of you on their site.

So rather than thinking, "In an ideal world the functionality our site would have would be ..." think "What functionality can only we provide that everyone would want on their site!". This approach has a lot in common with the "Provide and Hope" method but needs a bit more technical and creative oomph to be really effective.

#5. Create

This can be the fun part. In a way it builds on the four previous strategies.

It might involve extending an existing service with your data (a mashup), it may involve the creation or support of a community. Undoubtedly it will contain Invasion elements (going to where your customer are to share the news) and often it can only happen once lots of Provide and Hope strategies are lying around begging to be made use of.

The real news here is that creating something genuinely innovative and ground-breaking online can be easier than it looks. You already may be sitting on a potential goldmine and not realise it or you may be not quite be connecting with a huge audience who simply didn't know you were out there. Unless you are getting your hands dirty, Providing & Hoping, Integrating and Augmenting you simply won't know, the next big thing will have happened whilst you were in another meeting about your web site re-design.

The printing press changed everything, removing the need to hire a monastery of monks to publish material. The internet has widened the world of publishing to be more democratic and accessible.You might argue that this democratizing of the ability to share ideas has meant that quality has declined, but if you did I ask for a copy of your argument on a hand-painted illuminated scroll with gold leaf decoration.

Let's instead focus on the positive aspects of technological and social creativity rather than the negative connotations of disruption to the old guard. Blogs and email now mean that your MP has to be Being Seen To Be Listening, and has to be more transparent and so their lives have been disrupted by the introduction of these new technologies.

And about time!

Python

Open Source Software (OSS)

Usability ( or User Centred Design ) is simply designing sites that behave the way your customers expect them to behave. It can be amazing how easy it is to do this badly, to make a site that seems "logical enough" but which annoys or frustrates your customers. You know yourself how small glitches can be enough to make you leave a web site.... forever.

The area of usability overlaps with a number of other disciplines, including...

• Information Architecture
• Information Design
• User Interface Design
• Branding
• Content Strategy

One of the biggest benefits that hiring a usability company brings is the  Fresh Pair of Eyes effect. Simpy being an outsider to your company frees the usability person of jargon blindness. Even the most user-centred of organisations, knowing how easy it is to "get too close" to your subject matter, bring in external help to provide new insights for improvement.

Usability methods has been shown again and again to provide Return on Investment ( ROI) and can be used early in the design process  to prevent creating something unusable or late in the delivery process to catch the glitches. Of course I believe that user centred design principles should be embedded in the whole process but often usabilty companies are used to rescue sites gone bad.

There are a number of ways I can help you make your site more usable:

Expert Review. An expert review will usually be a list of problems, fixes and recommendations to improve your site, often prioritized by the severity of the problem or by how simple the fix would be to implement. This document can be delivered in a presentation or as a document given to your technical team to implement.  You may want me to make recommendations specifically to improve conversion rates or look for issues that are causing your visitors concern.
   
Wireframes. Wireframes are detailed sketches of web page content that show layout and functionality without specifying the look 'n' feel. These are often scribbled and improved on in a meeting.

Activity Flow Diagrams, Scenarios, Customer Journeys. These diagrams show how people will move through your site making sure they can find what they need easily and that there aren't any usability dead-ends.
   
Working Prototypes. It's often not until something is "on screen" and working that it all conceptually comes together. A prototype can save you time and money by highlighting the omissions and suggesting improvements. Because prototypes can be made and tested quickly a site's functionality can be evolved quickly.

Usability Testing. Running real tests with real people is one of the very best ways of finding any issues your site may have. Even very small guerilla tests are valuable in helping you improve the quality and relevance of your site.
   
Personas and Use Cases. Personas and Use Cases provide customer insights essential to designing sites your customers will appreciate. Creating a persona or a fictional "example customer" is an exercise that focusses your user-centred design process.
   
Paper Prototyping. It may sound silly but you can test your software before a line of code is written. Producing working code is expensive. Using just pen and paper you can start planning, testing and improving your site.
   
Card Sorting and Mental Models. These exercises help you be less company-centric and more customer-centric when designing the terminology for your navigation. It is like reverse engineering your customers to create a Site Map that makes sense to them.

Ethnography and Stakeholder Interviews. The tools your team use to create your site are often over-looked as an important usability issue. Shadowing your web team for a day can reveal dozens of small improvements that have a huge impact on your site's usability.

If User Centred Design is designing sites based on the way our mind work, Persuasive Design is based on realising that not everybody's mind responds to the same things.

Usability ensures you can actually do something, Persuasive Design is about convincing people they want to do the thing in the first place.

Are you somebody who likes specific detail or do you respond to clever branding? Are you visual or textual? Are you logical or emotional? The truth is that it is difficult to pigeon hole ourselves but when creating a site, we need to take into account all our facets and design accordingly.

Presenting the facts or figures is never enough. Borrowing ideas from Neuro Linguistic Programming, or Hypnotic Marketing, Persuasive Design looks to speak in ways that convince your sites' visitors that they want to buy your products. This is not about manipulation but about removing all the anxieties or customers your customers may have.

Does your site speak to the different kinds of people your customers inevitably are?

I can provide you with a Persuasive Review of issues and recommendations to help make your design and copy more persuasive to improve how your messages are conveyed and increase conversion rates.

• Simple
• Affordable
• Easy to use
• Ingenius
• Effective

I work with small companies and large corporates and find sustainable ways of creating sites for my clients.

Generally I don't deliver a finished web site, but through a process of training and collaboration we iteratively evolve a site which ensures that the site looks and works the way you want and your team are empowered and up-to-speed with all the skills and knowledge they need to effectively run a web site.

During this process we will cover aspects of Search Engine Optimisation, Usability, Persuasive Design and even some Innovation Consultancy.

I use a variety of open source tools to create sites from Wordpress for a simple Content Management System to Django (python-powered) for a more complex web application (if python is good enough for Google it'll do for me). The choice of tool used is informed by which offers the most ease-of-use for you and your team. Where appropriate I may introduce you to a free or low cost online service that out performs installable software and integrate it's design and functionality with your existing websites.

Whether it's creating a search engine that only finds furniture of certain dimensions or finding Christmas presents for less than a fiver I can help you gather and compile the data you need so that you can integrate it into your workflow.

In terms of the visual effect, I wanted it to be clutter-free, I hate those sites that look like newsagent windows with a thousand postcards stuck in them. I wanted to avoid (where possible) boxes and straight lines not for any other reason than most web design can be about putting things in boxes.

Recently I have been working on my Engagement Engine, the icons of which are clouds. I like clouds and so that has become the theme for this design.

I wanted the "feel" to expansive (using all of the window) and yet pages that are narrower can be easier to read because of the shorter line length. There's a reason for A4. So this design is a compromise between "as wide as possible" and "about as wide as page".

Navigation is boring. I wanted this site to navigation-free if possible meaning I had to try and make sure that the content itself was richly interlinked. Always Having Somewhere To Go Next can be difficult, so I have made the site automatically link to other items.

The site map automatically updates itself.

Many sites are standalone creations but I wanted this to integrate with the rest of web, the rest of MY web... and so when I create a page on this site it automatically shows items I've tagged in Delicious, it automatically finds fresh news, it even finds old blog posts I may have written about.

Each page also finds newsfeeds

To create this site I developed a wiki tool which does all the things above but also does lots of other interesting thing such as creating graphics on-the-fly using python.

He created Everythingability in 2006 and over the last few years he has worked on a wide range of projects, building web sites and online identities for global corporations, ecommerce sites, start-ups and small businesses. As well as making web sites better, he has developed innovative marketing ideas such as i Phone applications and search engines.

Prior to setting up Everythingability, Tom spent six years as Head of Research and Development at OTHER media, an online design agency, making ecommerce sites better. His clients included Paul Smith, Virgin Books, Delia Smith, Lloyds TSB, the English Cricket Board, Myla and King’s Fund.

Tom started out as a researcher at Anglia Ruskin University's Department of Educational Technology Research (ULTRALAB) where he worked in collaboration with Apple, Oracle and Nortel.

He is known affectionately in certain circles as Mr Blog, having travelled the world bringing blogging and social media marketing to businesses, schools, universities and not-for-profits.

He also plays the ukelele.

Of course your products and brand are central to whether or not someone will buy, but I can help you with the technical, design and psychological factors that have been proven to increase someone's willingness to buy your products.

• Usability and Information Architecture, lots of small improvements can make a huge difference
• Persuasive Design, targeting your sales messages at different customer profiles
• Hypnotic Marketing, the tiny difference between How Can I Help You? and How I Can Help You! make all the difference
 

I specialise in, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Social Media Marketing because SEO and SMM both work so well together. Put simply, it's a process that involves customer research, creating value and then Going To Where Your Customer Are.

Why You Should Use Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation put at its simplest is...

• making your web site "search engine friendly" so that you rank highly on Google for your chosen terms
• creating lots of high quality links to your site

Because nobody really knows how Google decides if a page is "friendly" or not, a lot of the SEO consultants work is experience and research-based.

SEO enables you to monitor and evaluate how much value for money you are getting for your advertising budget.

Why You Should Use Social Media Marketing

With Social Media Marketing (using Blogs, Facebook, Wikis and more) you are connecting with your customers and building your brand, solving problems and opening conversations with potential customers. It also contributes to your SEO efforts.

Why You Need To Watch Out For Sharks

Because they will bite you.

Being number one in Google is big business. There are lots of SEO companies that guarantee you a number one listing in Google for a price. Often these companies use thousands of web sites all pointing at your site to increase the number of links to your site. This is called link-farming.

If Google suspect your company of using link farms they remove you from their results. There have been a number of cases where even high profile companies have been found out and blacklisted. Being blacklisted is a risk many companies are willing to take but it is surprising how many companies unknowingly pay handsomely for an SEO company to take that risk with their company and brand.

(If you suspect your competitors of using link farms, we have tools to help "out" them)

I don't want to scare you but it is ironic that one SEO company threatened someone with doing their work for free.

Why You Need To Watch Out For Even More Sharks

They will keep biting you.

Maybe it's because I'm from Yorkshire, but the very idea of paying for Search Engine Marketing, or Google Adwords advertising month on month is slightly galling. Whilst there is a role for Google Adwords (and others) I prefer to focus in what are called the organic results.

Unlike link farms and Google Adwords organic results are results that just keep on giving.

I have worked on numerous corporate and ecommerce sites, from Paul Smith to Delia Smith (and everything in between). I have worked with bespoke ecommerce solutions, off-the-shelf ecommerce services and open source store software, fitting the best tool to my clients' needs.

An Expert Usability Review will contribute to your sites'...

• Ecommerce Usability: Is your shopping cart losing you sales? 
• Information Design: Is your site's content easy to understand?
• Information Architecture: Can your customers find what they are looking for in fewer than three clicks?

I can provide a detail Expert Review that prioritizes the changes you need to make to your site.

I can run usability or eye-tracking usability studies because observing real people using your site finds the gitches even an Expert can't find.

I save you money by work with your development team whilst your site is being created so that you don't build something your customers don't love.

Email: tom@everythingability.com.
Tel: +44(0) 7720 288285
Blog: http://theotherblog.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/everythingabili
Skype: everythingability
AOL: theotherblog
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/everythingability

Terms such a Disruptive Media are used that really just mean "doing things differently" or better. For example, one of the most important aspects of the blogging revolution was not the blog itself but the fact that IT departments and publishing companies who were previously bottlenecks in the process of IT creation were almost instantly removed from the equation.

Blogs, being easy to learn and free to create empowered millions of people to use them for education, marketing, in-house knowlege management, project collaboration and experimentation. But innovation isn't as simple as starting a blog, if only it were. Many a company has tried to participate in the Web2.0 world with a woeful once a quarter blog post from the CEO predicting a successful year.... yawn!

There are however a number of essentially simple things you can do that will help a culture of innovation to flourish in your company:

• Research & Development. What is your company looking to learn and understand? How can what you learn be re-integrated into your business? The internet is forever changing, your plans need to adapt to this change.
• Rapid Prototyping. How many new ideas and approaches have you trialled this month? The startup costs for many websites is so low that they can be envisioned, designed, tested and launched in the time it would normally have taken to organise the meeting to decide whether or not it is a good idea or not. Let me help you put your ideas into practice, now!
• Upskilling and empowering your staff. So often, when working with clients I have to admit that most of great and innovational ideas created aren't mine but are a result of staff being introduced to new tools and approaches. It's all about the people, not the tools.
• Collaboration. Encouraging and supporting participation using these new Web2.0 tools means that collaboration can happen across departments or between companies in ways that just weren't possible ten years ago.
• Connecting the technological dots. Sometimes the most effective changes are not about change at all, they are about letting information flow more easily, making the technology disappear.

Whilst we would usually start with User Centred Design exercises to better understand and stimulate thinking about your customers, we would also begin the process of developing your in-house technology literacies, introducing your staff (or you if you are a small company) to new tools and new ways of doing things.

We will probably work on a mix 'n' match selection from the steps below...

Step 1: The basics

Depending on your business, we would begin by exploring blogging, wikis, RSS and news aggregation, Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Upcoming, Flickr, Delicious and Stumble Upon, Last FM and You Tube, Open Source Software, Slideshare, Analytics, Firefox, Adwords, Yahoo Pipes and Google Docs.

Don't worry if this sounds like a long and varied list, it's funner than it sounds and ever changing. It is my job to continually research and trial the uses of these tools, so I can make them easy to learn and select the tools that will make the biggest contribution to your business.

Step 2: The more ambitious

Whilst learning new tools and putting them to use for your business we will also touch on the more esoteric areas of...

• Mashups. The art of making something from nothing some might say. What unique value can you add (or mash) to an existing service such as Google Maps with your data.
• Crowd Sourcing. How can you put the enormous workforce living on the web to work for you in a way that you both benefit? Large businesses are even crowd-sourcing innovation (
• User Generated Content. How might your customers create content that is as valuable as Amazon's book or DVD reviews.
• Value Mining. In most companies I work with, their crown jewels are sitting in a drawer in a desk in their offices, in at the back. I can help you make the most of the hidden value that is trapped inside your company and get it out there on the internet where it can be working for you.
• Niche-finding and Long Tail Marketing. Personalising your products for a thousand niches (Goths who Knit or Gay HGV drivers) each with millions of members can often reach more potential customers than mass marketing.

Step 3: Getting our hands dirty

How and what we work together on will depend on you and your company. How you begin to change your online presence and your organisation might require a blend of any of the following...

• Hands-on Training. The best way to quickly learn lots of new technologies is a little and often. It makes the learning more digestible and has the benefit of enabling me, in your office, to spot the opportunities and tools you need most. Let me come to you and teach you all I know.
• Workshops and Presentations. My background in educational research means I'm more than happy to stand in front of a crowd and share my ideas but most happy when you are shaping and sharing yours.
• Software Development. Let me make the tools to help you do your job better. From finding the best blogs and forums for your PR and marketing departments with our Engagement Engine to facilitating better internal collaboration with blogs and wikis.
• Technology-oriented brand and PR consulting. Let me advise you on how your organisation can use the internet more effectively.

If you are looking for fresh ideas and approaches, do Contact Us to talk about your needs.

Whilst blogs are normally owned by an individual, most wikis are shared spaces where you and colleagues can easily collaborate to disemminate your company's body of knowledge, to answer customer questions or simply make sense of complicated world.

Because wikis show so much promise and yet often disappoint in practice, I wrote my own, called "The Wonder of Wikis".

The Wonder of Wikis is a wiki that...

• Unlike other wikis (like Wikipedia), it doesn't make you use formatting codes
• Unline other wikis it doesn't dispense with the all-powerful Wiki Word. I love the Wiki Word.
• It lets you add content and automatically links it to other related content in the wiki.
• It automatically discovers news items related to the page you are working on
• It finds blog articles you may have written on the same subject about
• It finds items that you and your team may have tagged on Delicious with that particular wiki word
• It creates graphics based on your content by running image searches and adding text on-the-fly
• And, because it based on Django + Grappelli, it has a great WYSIWYG editor, which means it's nice to use.

The EE can generate regular reports that help you understand...

• Where do you competitors have their best links?
• Which keywords should you focus on?
• Which are the best blogs and forums to engage my potential customers?
• What terms do I rank well for?
• What is my competitors link-building strategy?
• Is my site being plagiarised anywhere?
• How should I approach Page Rank Sculpting for my site?
• Who are my real competitors?
• Are my competitors using reportable Black Hat techniques?
• When my competitors add something new to their site

The Engagement Engine helps you find blogs and forums where people are asking the questions only your company can answer so that you and your marketing or PR department don't spend hours trawling Google hoping to connect with a potential customers.It finds the places that will make your online public relations effective, offering powerful filtering tools that can prioritise sites that have comment forms and pass Google-juice to your site, for example.

In many cases, the very idea of who your competitors are needs further examination so that you don't find yourself competing with an unknown and irrelevant competitor for the wrong reasons.

Looking forensically at your particular competitive landscape may help you to know:

• If your competitors are using dodgy SEOs? You might want to report them to Google.
• What your competitors Link Building strategy is. At very least you want to mirror their better efforts.
• What your competitors are doing badly, or what they are doing well.
• When your competitors make a change to their web site. You need to be the first to know.
• When your competitors participate in online discussions. You should have been there too.
• What keyword are your competitors paying for and why?

With a combination of our specialised research gathering tool, the Engagement Engine and years of experience, we can help you understand what you are competing against and make plans to outperform them.

Over the last fifteen years I have worked closely with dozens of companies, organisations and entrepeneurs to help them to build or transform their businesses online.

Reputation Management is simply engaging with this whole Social Media revolution in a manner that makes it easy for you work effectively. Reputation Management tools, like our Engagement Engine, should enable you to:

• Locate happy customers and find ways to reward their evangelism. A little love goes a long way.
• Research your customers opinions and idea. They are "out there" and happy to share their wants and beliefs, you'd be crazy not be listening
• To Being Seen To Be Listening. Many companies don't listen to their customers. The very least a modern consumer expects is that you can "be seen to be listening". With good reputation management tools, a customer asks a question and no matter where it is, you are there being helpful.
• Finding the customers who didn't know that you were the answers to their questions and needs. Most of world hasn't heard of you but every day thousands of people have an itch you can scratch. They obviously haven't found you yet so you'd better go looking for them.

Reputation Management is all about putting in place tools that support you in finding potential customers more easily. Google can't help you here because it a search engine that ranks results by authority or how important each page seems and not by neediness.

Reputation Management is about Being There and maybe more importantly, Being There First!

I believe creativity, the kind of creatiity you can use to take your business to the next level, isn't some innate ability you either have or don't but a series of simple processes that you can go through. These processes are simply enought and almost guarantee valuable outputs. Processes such as...

• Breaking the inertia that inhibits experimentation and research
• Ensuring the proper feedback loops and collaborations occur
• Making sure information is maleable, shapable, controllable.
• Regular exposure to new ideas and approaches
• Empowering people
• Having some fun and taking risks

All the above exercises can be embedded into doing real work, making your site more usable and attracting more visitors.

If you'd like to begin on a programme of real work with creativity thrown in, Contact Us.

I want you to really engage in using some of these tools but it takes time for you to become comfortable and familiar with new ways of working. The coaching time we spend together puts you in control of all this internet stuff.

I have found that the best way of helping people to learn new tools is not traditional training but regular client-focussed coaching sessions where we work at your pace as you learn how to master the concepts and tools, getting a whole heap of tips and tricks along the way.

We can meet face-to-face or chat online, regularly or when you need it. It's relaxed and self-directed.

Activities that the Information Architect might engage in are

• Creating wireframes and paper prototypes of your site
• Card sorting exercises to helf define which terms your customers would prefer for the navigations
• A content audit to review your site's existing content items

Social Media includes blogging (and commenting), it includes My Space and Facebook and it includes forums and wikis. It also includes Ebaying, Delicious tagging, Stumbling, writing Amazon reviews, You-Tubing and listening to music on Last.fm and Twittering.

And if some of that made no sense at all, don't worry, I will help you make sense of it all.

Another good and difficult question. Anybody can start a blog. Anybody can create a Facebook group for your company. Anybody can start a company Twitter account. And to be honest, everybdy does (and should)...

The art in using these tools for marketing your company is finding meaningful ways of using them. It's about finding a way of using these tools that is both congruent with your brand and with the tools.

Using our Engagement Engine will give you the advantage in finding the best places to engage and participate, but the bottom-line of Social Media Marketing are the mantras of ...

• Go To Where Your Customers Are
• Be Seen To Be Listening
• Go Looking For Problems
• Blogging">Question Oriented Blogging
• Being Authentic
• The Media Is Not The Message
• Not Bad Is The New Great

Although the technology may be strange and ever-changing, we can work together to create a campaign that both gets you noticed and makes a worthwhile contribution to the Social Media world.

Just to get your Social Media juices flowing, here are Five Social Media Marketing Strategies to think about.

The process of Search Engine Optimisation is improving your sites' rankings in Google by making sure your site is technically well-made, that your content is well-written and by creating lots of high quality links that point to your site. These two parts of SEO are often referred to as on-site (changing the words, HTML, or structure of your site) and off-site (generating lots of links that point at your site).

Most SEO techniques are well documented online, such as making sure your URLs and headers and content match what your customers are searching for. But in order to offer any advantage over other SEOs, each has their own collection of tricks and theories about what works best.

The truth is that each industry or company needs it's own approach to SEO. The opportunities available and techniques used for promoting an interior design shop selling to the world are very different to those for promoting a local business.

The Everythingability approach to SEO is one where we take into account your customers, your company and your competitors and innovate in ways that naturally improve your organic Google rankings. Read more about What Is Everythingability here.

So what do have left to work with if we aren't going to dirty our hands with underhand technological trickery of link farms and exploiting people to link-build? Just the things that make a business successful in the first place...

• Creativity
• Excellence
• Adding Value
• Customer Service
• Better research and intelligence
• Finding new niche markets
• Being remarkable

The most effective approach to SEO is one in which you are creative with technology and creative with how you market your products. Making sure the service you provide adds value and is beyond best of breed makes SEO promotion so much easier. Being remarkable, or at very least interesting company is, nowadays, the very least you need to stay in the game.

I honestly don't believe that promoting your business online is something an external party, such as an agency can do. I firmly believe that the only people who can have useful and meaningful conversations with your customers is you and your employees.

Of course it helps if you are using some great tools to support you, such as our tool for Reputation Management  (and more) the Engagement Engine.