Confabulations

In the last post we discussed how videos can be used by internet marketing teams as another tool in the battle for search engine rankings. Following on from this story I have been investigating other ways on which movies and animation can be used in SEO, and have come across a great site called GoAnimate. This website allows you to create characters and cartoons which can then be embedded onto blogs, bookmarked and shared around the web, with the potential to go viral should they get enough views.

In a fun activity that shouldn’t really be called work, I have been playing around with the characters, themes and sounds available on the GoAnimate website, however you can also import your own music and images from around the web or your own computer. Just like my video in the last post, I do not claim to have totally mastered the art of animation just yet, but it does give you a good idea of what can be done.

As a little bit of blatant promotion, my cartoon focuses on the SEO services offered at my workplace, 9xb.

GoAnimate.com: SEO at 9xb by fruitbat

When you get it right, the perfect website should be creative, usable for consumers and structured so that it can be optimised. What is the point of creating a fabulous, show stopping website full of flash and JavaScript, when it is impossible for search engines to crawl, consumers to see, and optimisers to market?  Every client who hires your company to design and optimise them a new website will expect the two teams to work together to create a finished product which does everything they asked in their brief. If the design/development team and the marketing team are not communicating, your site may well end up as a flop, with no traffic, no sales and no success.

This is especially important when it comes to ecommerce sites. People who use the internet to do their shopping have experience with different ecommerce sites, checkouts and navigation. I cannot tell you the number of times I have gone onto a website, put something in my basket, gone to the checkout and got my credit card out, only to abandon the transaction because the payment process was too complex. This problem is simple to remedy. Any SEO will be quick to tell you that a checkout process should be quick, and if it cannot be quick, then the stages should at least be listed so that shoppers can see they are progressing through the purchase.

The checkout is just one area where designers and marketers need to communicate more.  Another area of debate is product images. Product images need to be easily discernible from decorative images so that consumers know they can click on them and it will take them through to a more detailed product page. It is all very well designing a page so that the images float or overlap and look super nice, but if customers cannot use the page because it is all about looks and not about utility; you have not served your purpose of building a profitable site.

If you work for a digital agency, as a web designer, web developer or in SEO, think about how design, crawlability and usability go hand-in-hand. By looking at a website from a user’s perspective, you will be able to design a site that suits their needs as well as incorporating new technologies and special features.

I’m not entirely sure when it became socially acceptable to wear fashionable glasses, but now it seems every designer, ‘artist’ or vaguely well-heeled person owns a pair. Gone are the days when you could choose between one style of NHS specs and you were a source of ridicule for your able-sighted friends. Now you can spend literally hundreds of pounds on designer frames in various shapes and colours. If you’re uber-fashionable you might even want to get a pair of rimless glasses (mainly worn by architects and bald men).

It’s quite astounding that some plastic glasses can set you back £XXX, but that designer label isn’t cheap. From D&G to an independent fashion retailer, each new style represent someones ‘personality’ and is snapped up straight away. Now, the able-sighted are unfashionable and find themselves sat on the doorstep of cool.

Basically, I need one of these. Some fellow called Gopinath Prasana has designed this as the future of the music player. It’s an aluminium bracelet with a trackpad that you touch to flip between songs. There’s some sort of cushioning on the inside so that it fits snugly against your wrist and presumably doesn’t fall off when you’re cleaning the toilet, flushing away some £X00 of hard-earned cash.

It looks like something out of Star Trek which can only be a good thing. In fact, I hope they make it into a phone too so we can all talk into our wrists like on sci-fi.

What the hell? The classic “I love NY” logo, seen on such legends as John Lennon has been ‘updated’ to include a squirrel, a clipart butterfly and the impression of some grass. The cost of this malarkey? A cool $17million. Even at today’s exchange rates that’s a lot of kerblingy to blow on some graphics.

Is is worth it? I’m siding firmly with the “hell no” camp on this one. The original was witty, cool and iconic. The new one looks faddish and redundant. Allegedly this has been done to show that’s more to New York than just the city (it is actually a state that includes mountains, greenery and blah). But seriously, who cares?

New York remains the very definition of ‘city’. It is famed for its urban landscape and – Central Park notwithstanding – is synonomous with exciting grime, low-life glamour and metropolitan buzz. Trust me: no-one visits New York on the off-chance of seeing a squirrel. I can see one of those in Roundhay Park any old day of the fucking week and it won’t cost me a month’s salary for the plane fare either.

Faffing with iconic brands is a dangerous game, but luckily New York remains as cool as hell, regardless of how silly its marketing board are.

We came across the hilarious Photoshop Disasters the other day. It’s astounding what people sign off and then print – missing arms, heads obviously cut and pasted onto bodies, Britney airbrushed to the sort of metallic finish a sportscar would be proud of. We wonder whether it’s not just designers getting their own back on clients!