As The Web Bureau continues to evolve and grow, our studio is a hive of activity where there is always lots happening in our design, development and online marketing departments. This article will give you a brief insight into what we’ve been up to lately.

NEW CONTRACTS

The Grand Opera House: After much competition, we were delighted to be appointed to re-design the Grand Opera House website and manage their payment systems integration and online marketing.  The new site is due to go live in September.

Simple Zebra: The Web Bureau designed and developed new directory site www.simplezebra.com, which will help Northern Ireland consumers and businesses source reliable tradesmen locally and provide reviews based on the quality of the service they receive.  Online Marketing and SEO activity will be ongoing to raise awareness and drive traffic to the site. The updated site design will go live later this month.

NEW SITES LAUNCHED

Mac In a Sac: One of our latest e-commerce sites, www.macinasac.com has been launched to boost online sales of this best-selling range of waterproof clothing. Belfast based company, Target Dry who are behind this initiative have been making waterproof clothing since 1987 and now design, manufacture and market their own ranges.  

Bailies Coffee Company: Founded in 1993, Bailies Coffee recognised the growing demand for quality freshly roasted and ethically traded coffee in the UK and Ireland. With our re-design of their informational website, this newly branded e-commerce site, www.bailiescoffee.com will enable Bailies to boost sales and make their award winning coffees available to a much wider consumer base.  The site will also raise awareness of their trade customer services which include sales and maintenance of coffee machines, barista training and ancillary product sales.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS

JP Corry Touchscreen: We recently completed development of a new touchscreen system for the showroom of this leading builder’s merchants. The interactive system enables customers to browse JP Corry’s range of products, their applications and review case studies during their visit. The touchscreen also synchronises with a web based version of the tool. New content added via the Content Management System (CMS) automatically updates the touchscreen, maximising efficiencies. The web version which can be viewed at www.jpcorry.com/touchscreen 

Kingspan Group: We recently completed work on our first Chinese website to promote the products of Portadown based, Kingspan Solar to this target market, which has the largest population per country in the world.

NEW TEAM MEMBERS

The design team are pleased to welcome Mark Kirwan, to the role of Web Designer.  Mark, from the Wirral, England recently moved to Northern Ireland, with his wife Sharon, from Lisburn. He has 5 years experience in web design and was formerly employed by Nottingham based user experience agency, Zabisco.   

Keep up to date with developments at The Web Bureau at www.thewebbureau.com/blog 

“Social networks continue to grow in dominance and for the first time ever, social media has become the single biggest activity online in the UK, overtaking the entertainment category” according to Experian Hitwise’s UK Online Media Round Up, March 2011.

As social media marketing continues to evolve, companies are experiencing substantial financial rewards for their efforts.  One such example is the UK’s largest online fashion and beauty store, ASOS  who have a following of over 500,000 Facebook fans and almost 100,000 twitter  followers.

ASOS reported sales of over £100 million in the three months leading to 31 December 2010, a 59% increase on their second quarter.  This was bolstered by a 269% rise in US sales on a dedicated site launched in October 2010. 

ASOS outlined in their 2010 annual report that they “...continue to drive [their] presence online through social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and [their] own ASOS Life”.  This saw the fashion giant combine e-commerce and social media marketing activity by launching a ‘social commerce’ shop within a new Facebook app in January.  This creates a whole new online shopping experience which allows customers to browse and buy products without leaving Facebook.  This should see sales rise even further for the company this year as they continue their international expansion.

Dominos Pizza is another well known company who experienced a 19.3% increase in sales in 2010, compared with 2009.  They also attributed this success to social media marketing and the launch of their new iPhone application.

For more information on how to grow your business using social media or e-commerce contact us on info@thewebbureau.com

Mobile Applications VS Mobile Websites (Mobile Web Apps)

What does the future hold? Should businesses get mobile apps as this is the big talk or should businesses rather invest their money more wisely and get mobile website or mobile web apps? Plenty of retailers have released mobile apps, and some of them are excellent. My thoughts are if you are even considering mobile apps, the future lies with creating mobile websites rather than simply just a mobile app. 

Does this mean mobile apps are no good? Absolutely not! Apps have their place but when selling online, ‘retailers’ should look at mobile e-commerce sites before they create an app. This approach has been taken by some of the bigger successful site such as M&S and John Lewis. John Lewis took the step as they have already over 100,000 mobile visits every week. M&S success is staggering, over 13,000 orders in just over 4 months.

Some of the reasons why these ideas could have been taken:

They work – people will buy products on their phone with the growing market in most phones having access to the internet, and a large portion of users being able to actively use the internet on their phones. M&S even showed large sales on their mobile e-commerce store (an order for over £3000)

Phones/ Devices – the decision to build an app for a phone means you need to look at the market, does your target audience have an iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Symbian??? Nobody knows but why restrict your site and not just have an e-commerce website that suits all phones and go the web route. Mobile device domination or smartphone domination. Who wins?

Marketability – apps mean users have to actively search for the specific app. Web E-commerce means you can optimise your site through mobile search and your search engine optimisation. This also affects promotion of your application. App stores have thousands of different applications and this is extremely competitive as well as their being over 50 app stores. Web searches and search engine optimisation is dominated by Google thus a fairer playing field for those who are serious enough to think about the online sales boom and e-commerce websites.

Features – why restrict the features you can create on the internet versus for each individual phone and app. Building a mobile website e-commerce system allows you to recreate a lot of the ‘cool’ features of apps although it does restrict a few features apps can provide such as users location and GPS locators. Although some web software is being developed to counter these issues.

Links – mobile web apps can encourage sharing and utilising some of the successful social media marketing or social media websites whereas mobile apps don’t let you link to and from an app.

To finish up, it seems mobile web apps seem to be the way forward. On top of all this they also make viewing and using the mobile websites easier as no approval is needed. So “What does the future hold?”

“Creating one mobile website makes more sense to me, covers all bases and is thus financially a better option to work into the small business budget. On top of this, capture the website user market while some of the bigger retailers create apps for every different device. This being said, the BIG retailers are wising up slowly but surely with their e-commerce web strategies.”