Another 5 Great Homepages

06/10/2011 By

Back in April last year, we blogged about 5 great homepages – take a look at what we loved back then. With 18 months having passed, we thought it was time we found another 5 great homepages for you.

So, in no particular order, here we go:

Red Bull Racing
http://www.redbullracing.com

Red Bull Racing are the preeminent force in Formula One having won both the drivers & constructors championships in 2010 and are most likely to achieve the same feat by the end of this year (if not this weekend!). A visit to their homepage brings you all you need to know about Red Bull Racing including twitter feeds, latest news, driver and constructor standings & a countdown to the next Formula One race.

Oscars
http://oscar.go.com

The most prestigious and sought after awards in the film industry, the The Academy Awards (or Oscars as they are popularly known) have a homepage to match. Logging on to the homepage takes you to their campaign Oscar Buzz, designed to build interest and conversation about the 84th Academy Awards, taking plac next year. They advertise their own hash tag (#OscarBuzz), invite users to tweet it as well as incorporating a live feed and stats on which actors, actresses and films are being talked about most on Twitter.

White House
http://www.whitehouse.gov

One of the most recogniseable buildings in the world, The White House houses arguably the world’s most powerful man – Barack Obama. It’s no suprise then, that when you visit the White House website’s homepage you are greeted with his image. The homepage is clear and concise, with the important information all appearing above the fold. The American Jobs Act (the key policy of President Obama’s re-election campaign) is also highlighted right at the top of the homepage.

The Times
http://www.thetimes.co.uk

As one of Britain’s largest newspapers, The Times & Sunday Times began charging for access to their websites in June 2010. As a result, the design of the websites changed massively. The homepage of The Times is impressively designed to mirror the style of a print newspaper and it looks great, is instantly recogniseable and is simple to navigate.

The Simpsons
http://www.thesimpsons.com

The Simpsons’ interactive homepage is set in a background of unmistakeable Simpsons yellow and is great fun for both children and adults. It can take a little while to load on slow connections, but once loaded runs smoothly and contains loads of information including character profiles, downloads and clips & full episodes. Different areas of the website are housed in different film sets involving many of the characters from one of the worlds most famous cartoons.

Filed Under: General Marketing, Website Design Tagged With: , ,

The importance of sensible merchandising

21/12/2010 By Leave a Comment

I got reminded today of a very amusing website – it only take about 3 minutes to watch and I heartily recommend it. It shows what could happen if a jumble of products had a bad interaction!

Click here to see

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Filed Under: Merchandising, SEO Marketing, Website Design Tagged With: , , ,

3 Step Domain Audit

03/12/2010 By Leave a Comment

Not the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s vital to the success of your online venture. So taking a couple of hours every now and again to audit your domain portfolio is time well spent.

When we audit a client’s domains (or our own) we go through a series of simple checks:

  1. Create a full list of the all the domains you think you own / you do own
    You’d be surprised how long this sometimes takes! Especially if they’ve been registered by different people, or via different domain manager systems.
  2. Look them all up in the whois directory to check that the correct information is stored there
    Go to DNSStuff (there are many other sites offering the service) and enter the url in the “WHOIS lookup box”
    You should be listed as the registered owner – if you’re not, you need to get that sorted asap because legally you don’t own the domain (for the full horrors of this check out the sex.com story (not as exciting as it sounds))
  3. Check that you are only using one domain for each website
    ie www.yourwebsite.co.uk has an A record pointing at the server the website sits on, and everything else (including yourwebsite.co.uk) is set up as a 301 redirect pointing to www.yourwebsite.co.uk. Saves confusing Google, and risking being penalised for duplicate content.

It’s often a tedious and frustrating tasks, but the dangers of not being in total control of your domains are potentially huge.

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Building a new site? Don’t forget 301 redirects

23/11/2010 By Leave a Comment

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We’re involved in several website redesigns at the moment, as a result of that and a few SEO conversation I’ve been having recently I thought I’d post about the importance of the 301 redirect. [Read more...]

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Get a better 404 page

10/11/2010 By Leave a Comment

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Do you know what a 404 page is? Well, it’s the page you’ll see if you click a link on a website, or to a website that goes to a URL with nothing on it. So, maybe I click on a newspaper website for a shoes page on a site that no long has a shoes page – then I’ll see their 404 error page. A lot of companies use something bland and boring on their 404 page “This page doesn’t exist” Some do a bit better with “This page doesn’t exist, click here to get to our homepage” Jake Hird has just posted a blog at e-consultancy with some fantastically creative ideas for alternatives – so if you want to do something a bit better with yours, this would be a good place to start looking for inspiration (my favourite is the one about the goat!)

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Get a better 404 page

10/09/2009 By Leave a Comment

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Do you know what a 404 page is? Well, it’s the page you’ll see if you click a link on a website, or to a website that goes to a URL with nothing on it. So, maybe I click on a newspaper website for a shoes page on a site that no long has a shoes page – then I’ll see their 404 error page.

A lot of companies use something bland and boring on their 404 page “This page doesn’t exist”

Some do a bit better with “This page doesn’t exist, click here to get to our homepage”

Jake Hird has just posted a blog at e-consultancy with some fantastically creative ideas for alternatives – so if you want to do something a bit better with yours, this would be a good place to start looking for inspiration (my favourite is the one about the goat!)

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Prep for Christmas – Site Development

06/08/2009 By Leave a Comment

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For those of you who haven’t yet got around to preparing you site for the Christmas onslaught… here’s some stats to help guide you in the direction of what developments it’s worth doing.

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Online Trend – Retailer Outlet Sites

08/06/2009 By Leave a Comment

There’s a growing trend amongst UK retailers (mainly in the clothing/department store sector) to launch an “outlet” site to help clear sale / last season’s stock.

This is being implemented differently by different retailers.

  • Debenhams have placed their outlet on their main website, essentially using it as an all year round sale section. This has 2 key benefits (i) it avoids the negative impact on the brand of appearing to be permanently on sale (ii) it builds on the positive feelings consumers have towards the increasingly trendy outlet villages such as Bicester Village.
  • Net-a-porter have taken the designer outlet village idea online with the recently launched theOutnet.com – a must for any high fashion fan. Here they’re separating it entirely from their main site (you’ll be hard pressed to find a link to it), so as not to affect their brand, or full price sales.
  • Warehouse have also gone down the separate site route, but with clear links between it and the main Warehouse website. Interesting they’ve also expanded the outlet idea into a standalone store on Oxford Street. Bringing the outlet concept to the UK’s main high street.
  • Outside the world of fashion Dell are looking to build on their USA success with their UK Outlet store. In the USA Dell claim to have driven over $1m sales through advertising their outlet’s offers on Twitter, and they’re looking to do this in the UK too. In fact a search for “dell uk outlet” on Google already has the UK Twitter page in 4th position.

It’s clearly an action that’s working for those who are doing it – so how can you replicate this on your website?

Well, first of all is it relevant to you? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes” then read on!:

  • Do you have a large amount of stock to clear all year round?
  • Do you worry about the brand impact of having “Sale” advertised on your site all year around?
  • Do you have a lot of returned items that you you would like to refurbish & sell / sell at a reasonable price?

The simplest way to implement is to re-name your Sale pages outside of your key sale seasons. Just be careful it doesn’t have a negative impact on your SEO.

If you’ve got the budget and the time you could invest in a separate site as Warehouse and theOutlet have done.

Alternatively you could take advantage of the traffic volumes of eBay and set up your own shop there.

Filed Under: General Marketing, Merchandising, Website Design Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,