The Technology Studio

We are delighted that the website we’ve been involved in developing for the past 5 years GoLearnTo.com continues to go from strength to strength and this year has been nominated for no less than 3 British Travel Awards.

The categories are:

1) Online tour operator of the year

2) Best specialist singles tour operator

3) Small tour operator of the year

GoLearnTo.com are learning holiday specialists and sell a wide array of inspired holiday courses where you can learn anything from yoga, photography, painting and cooking to surfing, horse riding, languages and even gladiator fighting.
It’s great to hear that a website we have been involved with developing for 5 years now has made it into such prestige award categories and we wish them every success.

Winning relies on votes from the public and if you like the website we would love any support you can offer. In addition, if you register to vote you’ll automatically be added to the prize draw to win some amazing holiday prizes.

To vote for GoLearnTo.com (and we really hope you will!), please follow the steps below…

1. Click here to open the British Travel Awards website

2. Fill in your details

3. Our categories are the FIRST and THIRD boxes you see so please click on them to expand the sub-categories…

i) WHO ARE THE BEST TOUR OPERATORS FOR SPECIALIST HOLIDAYS

Under here you’ll find a sub-section for ‘BEST SPECIALIST SINGLES HOLIDAY TOUR OPERATOR” (its the last one in the list)
Please vote for GoLearnTo here…

ii)  The third box down says ‘WHO ARE THE BEST OVERALL TOUR OPERATORS (OF THE YEAR AWARDS)’

Expand this box and the first one you see is ‘SMALL TOUR OPERATOR OF THE YEAR’
Please vote for GoLearnTo here…

The third box you see is ‘ONLINE TOUR OPERATOR OF THE YEAR’
Please vote for GoLearnTo here…

4. You can either skip the rest and scroll down to the bottom to click submit for your chance to win or if you have some time, feel free to run through other categories and fill in your favourites…

Thank you for voting!

Thanks to Richard Sharp at Gadgets and Gizmos who wrote a great blog article about us being at The Gadget Show Live.

He wrote …

“Neil from Earthware admitted that the ‘Eye’ is really just a party piece and not what the puffersphere was built for. It’s actually a high end advertising ‘orb’ used at tradeshows and events. Neil showed us another interesting use for the Puffersphere, a complete video of the earthquakes leading up until the fateful one that caused the Tsunami and beyond. Although watching the events on the sphere was a little eerie it does show the power this type of tech could bring to research and development and educational institutions.”

I hope Richard’s prediction of the future uses of the PufferSphere hold true – the future is bright, the future is spherical!

Neil

You will need:

• 1 x PC (which I assume you already have)
• 1 x Microsoft Kinect (about £120)
• 1 x Puffersphere (worth quite a lot, but you can hire them from Pufferfish)

Total cost: more than a few week’s pocket money…

There was a lot of excitement in the Technology Studio this week when a nice man with a van dropped off three large flight cases containing something rather special: a spherical display system called a Puffersphere. Pufferfish, the company which invented them, has been kind enough to lend us one for a week.

Things got even better when the man from Pufferfish turned up the following day, helped us put it together and took me through a slightly mind bending set of information about how to use the thing. He brought us some donuts though, so that made it a lot easier to deal with.

Although the brief I was given was to come up with something we could use as part of our upcoming appearance at the 2011 Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry Annual Conference, the inner geek took over and we quickly decided the first project would be a massive eyeball.

To get an image onto the Puffersphere you start off with a panoramic image and use a polar distortion to get it into a form that the projector’s super-special Super Umami lens can then display onto the inside of the sphere. Before and after look like this:

I’ll post some more technical detail on this later – but the short version is that the top of the origin rectangle ends up as the centre point of the circle, and the bottom of the rectangle ends up as the outside of the circle.

Once you have the image it’s a simple matter to get it into a full screen WPF app, which can then be displayed on the sphere. The centre of the image ends up as the top of the sphere, and the edges converge on the bottom. This means that to get the image on the sphere rotating in the horizontal plane is as easy as applying a WPF rotate transform to the image.

For the next step, the Kinect. The process for getting this up and running on the PC, using OpenNI is well documented elsewhere, so I won’t repeat it. The OpenNI framework includes a user generator that uses the feed from the Kinect’s depth camera to detect individuals within the scene. Once that’s all in place, you can effectively convert the real-world co-ordinates of the user (given in cartesian co-ordinates) into polar coordinates, and use the angle to rotate the eye correctly.

As has been pointed out – not the most ground breaking use of a Kinect ever, but it does show how putting two pieces of technology can be combined to create something new, interesting and – although not immediately apparent – with genuine commercial applications.

For the interested, I’m keeping the code I write for this in the Earthware Github account. You can run this without having a Puffersphere, but you will need a Kinect. I’ll be putting up some more posts in the next few weeks about this and other cool and useful things we do with the sphere and Kinect.

We also took some video of the eye in action:

After we posted the video, we were very happy to see that it was picked up by Engadget. Many of the comments echoed something the more geeky among us had been thinking from the start: “we want the eye of Sauron”. And we’re nothing if not responsive to our customer’s requirements:

@jon_george1

We were recently approached by Bizspace to completely redesign (in their words!) their old, tired and basic website!

Their previous site was falling well below par on all three of the most important things that a website needs to get right…

SEO (Search engine optimisation)

Unfortunately the site was built with minimal search engine optimisation consideration in mind. There were very few pages with a serious lack of detailed, relevant content, as well as some other more serious issues such as using images for text headers. Without spending the required time and effort on SEO you are negating much else of what you do on a website – because nobody will ever find it!

Website Usabillity

Clarity is the name of the game here – not making people have to think! Unfortunately the navigation through the site was not clear and neither were the most important calls to action on each page. Always remember to keep things simple and clear and ensure the things you want people to do on each page are easy to see and understand.

Website design

Aesthetically the design was below average. I say it all the time but people will make up their mind within seconds of visiting your site on who you are, what you stand for and whether they trust you. A clear professional design is extremely important to instantly reassure their subconscious that you are worthy of their trust.

But, it’s all of them working together that’s the key!

Getting one or even a couple of these things right is a good start, but it’s the combination of all three together that we here at The Technology Studio believe is the real goal. It’s not good enough to have a fantastic looking site if nobody knows how to use it. There’s no point having  a site with search engine optimisation tuned perfectly if it looks unprofessional and shabby as people will go elsewhere. You see where I’m going here!

With our help the new Bizspace website has released to much praise in each of the areas above. The proof as always is in the pudding however! Their previous site achieved half of the visitors that the new site achieves, but it’s the site goals that are really interesting. Previously the old Bizspace site achieved an average of just 4 contact forms per week. It is now achieving an average of 40. That’s a ten fold increase!

Our solution to a common problem for Web Developers

At The Technology Studio we have lost count of the number of times we’ve been approached by potential clients with a brief that consists of nothing more than “we need a website – how much will it cost”! Even the better briefs we receive are often no more than a Word document listing the content the client could put on the site.

In our view this is like asking a builder to quote on an extension without telling them how may floors, rooms, bathrooms, windows or doors you need. Of course in the building trade this is used by some of the less scrupulous builders to their advantage as each additional feature that the client asks for is met with a rub of the chin, a sharp intake of breath and the response  “that’s going to cost you – you didn’t mention that when I quoted”. Whilst this might work for cowboy builders we prefer our clients to want to work with us again! For this reason we only ever provide  a quote once we have built (or been given) a full website schematic.

Of course often the client simply doesn’t know exactly what they want and extracting this information from a busy person with many other priorities can be a tricky process.

I read a good article in Smashing Magazine late last year that reviewed a number of approaches taken by web developers to extract the right info from clients  – well worth a read if you are compiling your own questionnaire. This gave me the inspiration to review the questions we ask our clients – the results of which are below:

1. What business objectives do you have for your new website? 2. How will you measure the success of your website? 3. Who are the target audience for your website? 4. What actions would you like your target audience to take on your site?

5. What other marketing activities will be supporting your website?

6. What information do you want to provide your target audience and in what format?

7. Have you got any plans for attracting your target audience to your site?

8. Who are your main competitors and what are their website addresses?

9. Are there any websites in your field that you like and specifically what do you like about them?

10. Are there any websites in your field that you dislike and specifically what do you dislike about them?

11. What content do you have that can be used on your website?

12. Have you done any keyword research?

13. Do you have any other digital presence?

In future we will add this to The Technology Studio website for any enquirers to fill in. If you would like a copy of our questionnaire contact us at info@thetechnologystudio.co.uk.

As we have previously mentioned (throughout our site) is that we know a bit about commercial property in the UK.  With NovaLoca being one of our websites and having grown from being nothing to the second biggest commercial property search engine in the UK with nearly 100,000 visitors a month in three and a half years.  We have also recently developed the NovaLoca iphone app and have other apps and projects in the pipeline.

We also like using cool new technology and so rather than “Death by Powerpoint” we decided to put a credentials presentation together using something we were recommended (Thanks Nick Merryfield) called Prezi (www.prezi.com).  While it takes significantly longer to put together the content we really like the impact when we use it.  I then noticed we might be able to embed it in our blog and so I thought I would have a go (I am not a techie at all).

See the results of our commercial property technology and website credentials in the Prezi presentation below.

If you would like to chat through any of our client stories and see if we might be able to help drive your commercial property business through technology then please get in touch.

Neil

We love sharing the success stories of our clients who partner with us to create fantastic solutions that are recognized throughout their industry. In the case of travel website GoLearnTo.com, the accolades just keep on coming with no less than four awards and nominations in the past month which include…

Now you’re talking…

The International Association of Language Centres (IALC) have voted GoLearnTo.com agency of the month recognising them as a leading language travel agency with a range of courses where you can learn Spanish in Spain or learn French in France and over 14 more languages worldwide.

 
The public have spoken…

For the 2^nd year running, GoLearnTo.com has been nominated for a British Travel award in the category ‘Best Holiday Experience Provider’ proving that the trend for learning holidays continues to get the public’s vote.

School’s have their say…

Language Travel Magazine readers which include language schools from over 30 countries worldwide have nominated GoLearnTo.com for ‘Best New Agency’. GoLearnTo.com have found a niche with language travel and are inspiring more of us to learn a language by combining languages with a unique range of fun activities such as cookery holidays in Italy, yoga holidays or even surfing and much more.

Guiding the way…

Last but not least, GoLearnTo.com has received a nomination for The Good Web Guide’s Website of the Year Award recognising websites that not only function well but inspire.

This proves once again how an aesthetically pleasing, functionally rich and easy to use website designed and developed by The Technology Studio with maps by Earthware can do for you.

At The Technology Studio we don’t believe the work of creating a successful website that makes the most of digital marketing opportunities finishes when you sign off the delivered specification – that’s just the beginning.  We also don’t believe that you can outsource SEO to the next muppet who SPAM emails you with the email title “Guaranteed to get you to #1 in the Google search rankings” (if you ever get one of these use the delete key immediately – nobody can do this).

The Technology Studio believes that the best Search Engine Optimisation is a team effort between a client and their web developer or technology partner.  Many clients struggle to understand (or frankly get excited) about SEO and would dearly love to delegate (or more accurately abdicate) the hard work of getting to the top of Google Rankings to anyone other than themselves.  SEO and PPC (Pay per Click) are not exactly the sexy side of offline or online marketing!

At The Technology Studio we believe there are a lot of things a good web developer can do for SEO but that clients also have to take responsibility for a very important part of this – content.  Why?  Because it is very difficult for anyone outside the business to understand the business well enough to write a lot of compelling content (and frankly it is very expensive to outsource this to a PR/copy writer).  In addition, the client may write good copy for a human being to read but forgets that each page has two audiences – human beings (potential clients) and search engines (the way potential clients find the relevant page in the first place).

At the Technology Studio, we are always looking for ways to help our clients make the most of their websites.  We were recently approached by a new client who was struggling to write 110 pages of compelling content, including good key words and key phrases, about their properties dotted around the UK.  They asked us to help so we dumped everything they had into a file and created our own Keyword Density Tool.  The client was so delighted (it saved them days of work) that we decided to create a generic version and give it away (at least for a while anyway).

Click the ‘Keyword Density Tool’ link below to download our Keyword Density Tool and feel free to use it to write great keyword rich web copy for your website.  We only ask that if you are ever looking to find your next technology partner then you consider The Technology Studio. You can also see how we used the tool to write this blog article by downloading the ‘Keyword Density Tool with example’ from the link below to help you get started.

If you have any comments of questions or just want to let us know how you got on using the Keyword Density Tool then please do get in touch with us on 0845 642 9880 or email info@thetechnologystudio.co.uk.

(Part 1/5)

If you are a commercial property agent, have you asked yourself the following questions?

1.  Am I falling behind in the fight for the digital space?

We strongly suspect you may not even know how you stack up. We certainly couldn’t find a good analysis of who the winners and losers in the online UK commercial property space are.

2.  Who is winning and what are they doing right?

Hopefully this article will help you to understand who is winning a lot better. We have looked at a number of data sources to come up with a list.

3.  What are my opportunities to win online?

Now that’s the hard question. Albert Einstein once said “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” Winning online is usually a combination of client passion, an excellent technology partner, and the appropriate business resources (both money and human).

At The Technology Studio we believe that websites are only really about two things:

1. Getting as many of the right people to visit your site as you can
2. Making it as easy as possible for those people to find what they are looking for

The first is all about Search Engine Optimisation or SEO and this is what this article focuses on. The second is all about usability. For example, you can have a site with a great Google page rank and great SEO but is hated by users and is very poor at converting visitors to leads. That site will still rank highly on the lists below as there are many more objective metrics for SEO (e.g. visitors, page rank, back links) than for usability.

Anyway, onto the analysis.

The Analysis

Methodology

This is normally the long boring part that you had to write in science reports at school. To make it easy for the reader, we will put a lot more detail in the final blog article in the series (for any insomniacs) but suffice it to say that we used a number of sources to get a representative list of more than 100 significant players in the commercial property marketing sector in the UK and then ran a lot of data queries over a period of a week to identify the top 100 and their key data and statistics.

Marketing Effectiveness

We didn’t want to just do some analysis on who got the most traffic (though we have that later in this series of articles) but wanted to give you a view on the marketing effectiveness of the websites. We looked around for an independent assessor and decided to use Websitegrader.com. In essence, WebsiteGrader looks across many of the parameters that Google uses to assess the value of your website and analyses how effectively it implements technology and content. It then turns this into a score out of 100 to rank a website vs. the 2m+ other sites it has already analysed. These are the top 22 from the list of UK commercial property websites we analysed.

Some surprises? We think so. It is worth noting a few on the list.

NovaLoca – this site didn’t exist 30 months ago yet has risen to 3rd on this list in that time. We are biased (The Technology Studio built NovaLoca) but it is a triumph that this is possible despite lower traffic levels, a lower number of back links and a UK only presence unlike many of the top 20. From our point of view this is directly due to the tenacity and innovation in the team and frankly a lot of hard work but we are pleased it is paying off.

Land Securities – this is a great success story and we commend everyone working on this site as it scores 97/100 (and a Google page rank of 6/10) and this despite it only being ranked 51^st in the list for UK traffic. We also like the layout and usability of the site – a really good all round success story and one others should aspire to and could learn from.

EGPropertyLink – being careful to be fair, 30 out of the 100 sites have a score of 90 or more putting them in the top 10% of sites in the world according to WebsiteGrader. However, whilst EGPropertyLink is the dominant UK portal with the most properties, it only comes in 23^rd on this list.

Read ‘Who leads the pack for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 2: Google Page Rank’

Twitter is still a relatively new marketing tool for most businesses and one which in many cases (from our experience) many business owners and marketers are yet to realise the potential of. One reason for this could be the fact that historically it has been difficult to see the value of it for you business.

Things have now moved on with a number of Twitter statistics and analytics tools being developed which all work to give you an idea of how Twitter can/is promoting your company and driving business online. This article gives a list of these websites and applications as well as a few tips on using Twitter for business. These tools could really help you evaluate the effectiveness of Twitter to ensure you are using the latest online communication tools to build your business.

For further information on using Twitter and other online marketing tools to drive business contact The Technology Studio on 0845 642 9885 or email info@thetechnologystudio.co.uk