The Magic Number: Why data is important three times over in our multichannel world – a #JUMPchallenge post

This guest post by Luke Richards is part of the #JUMPchallenge, a blogging competition designed to raise awareness of how to join up online and offline marketing, launched to support Econsultancy’s JUMP event.

Data and tracking has become more important to web developers and digital marketers as online business has become increasingly competitive.  However, as companies start to look at their performance across multiple channels – i.e. incorporating mobile and social media, as well as search engine optimisation, onsite usability and offline techniques – intriguing developments have been made into collecting data seamlessly across channels and then using this information in the best possible way.

Read more…

Is your job boring? Take inspiration from this guy.

Obviously Go Tripod doesn’t condone this, and it’s certainly fake… But if only everyone was having so much fun during the work day.

Barclaycard kindly sent me a new credit card today. After jumping through hoops to get it activated – I won’t get diverted by that farce but do they really have to try and upsell at every opportunity? – I then went to register with their online banking.

Ok, this doesn’t look too bad to start with. The text is a bit small, and maybe there’s a bit too much, but we’re ok so far. Next up, entering my card details.

I guess they have to be super-sure it’s really me who is registering, but credit limit? Is that bit necessary? Now some contact details.

You’ll notice that email has little blue marks, whereas mobile doesn’t. I didn’t notice this at first and ended up supplying my mobile number just in case, but it turns out that mobile is the only optional field in a form of 16 fields. May as well have just made it required, Barclaycard.

Ok, so far, we’ve only seen minor issues. Now comes the really bad bit, entitled “Security Details”. And these are *really* secure. Super secure. Machiavellian in their security, in fact.

At first glance this doesn’t look too bad. Username, fine. Passcode, well that’s like a password right? Memorable word? Par for the course on banking sites. But…

Noooo! I have to include some random numbers!

Whyyyyyy?! So I have to come up with a totally arbitrary number that can’t be mixed with symbols or letters? So it was like a password, just utterly rubbish.

Grrrrr! My memorable word has some random restrictions on it to make it even harder to find a really good one! And then, as a final “screw you”:

A logic puzzle to work out whether you should or shouldn’t tick the boxes.

I’m not gonna get this time back, Barclaycard! I’ll remember this!

Over the past few weeks, the team have been settling into our shiny new Go Tripod offices in Truro, Cornwall in the UK, and we wanted to take the opportunity to tell you why we’re so excited about our move, what we’re doing in Cornwall, and where we go from here.

The State of the Art

We’ve combined working remotely at opposite ends of the UK, and we’ll continue to do so. But a working environment where we can really put our heads together and crack the important nuts became crucial, and so we’ve taken out some office space in Truro (if you ever visit, come see us. And the Cathedral, it’s beautiful). We’re using the office as a base, but not as a place we’re tied to – forcing a 9-5 isn’t going to get more work done.

Our clients remain our most important asset, and we’re continuing to work very closely with existing customers as well as opening relationships with some exciting new partners (watch this space!). That said, we’re expanding development and promotion of our products like Stubmatic, as well as beginning to push new ideas like InStock – a simple stock control system. This seemingly two-pronged approach made us realise something fundamental about our business.

Products for Everyone

We make Stubmatic and InStock for ourselves. And for our clients, we make software and websites. But actually what we make for most people is products of their own – a system that they sell on to their clients to increase revenue. It’s not Go Tripod products plus client work – it’s Products for Everyone! Our potential clients come to us for a piece of software, and we help them understand how that software can be used and reused in way that’ll make their life easier, and make them money in the process.

Cornwall’s an exciting place to be at the moment, lots of activity in our sector and a growing university in Falmouth means that groups such as The Hub and Cornwall Social Media Cafe are attracting loads of interesting folks.

Myself, Jon, Simon and the rest of the Go Tripod family are really excited to be a part of it!

This is a quick post to all my old subscribers of my personal Clockwork Objects blog. The old Google Feedburner feed from that site has been deleted and redirected to our GoTripod blog. Google will maintain the redirect for 30 days after which point if you would like to continue receiving our exciting content you will need to check/update your subscription feed to unsure it points to http://www.gotripod.com/feed/rss

Thanks, Jon

Investigating Crazy Egg’s heatmap and visitor tracking tool today, I found a nice bit of UI in their plans and signup process. The plans page itself looks sweet:

But the really slick part comes when you click the “Sign Up” button:

The other plans fade out and the signup form slides in – no page refresh, and an quick jump to the next step in the process. Good work Crazy Egg!

I don’t mind telling you that I find this a bit scary.

The figures can be placed into different poses, with the suggestion that the landscapes could inform the position that the sculpture is placed into. For example, as a power line ascends a hill, the pylons could look as if they’re climbing. The figures could also stretch up to gain increased height over longer spans.

“Subtle alterations in the hands and head combined with repositioning of the main body parts in the x, y and z-axis, allow for a rich variety of expressions. The pylon-figures can be placed in pairs, walking in the same direction or opposite directions, glancing at each other as they pass by or kneeling respectively, head bowed at a town,” said the architects.

And at night they lay down their electrical burden to eat your children. Wired has more on these metal monsters.

With so many ideas (like InStock), how do we test the viability of new business opportunities and  see if they stick before we invest the time in developing them? We have a couple of tricks up our sleeves to share with you that saves us both time and money and keeps us focussed on success.

Firstly we make use of two excellent online tools. Google Adwords and an awesome service called unbounce.com which, although designed for A/B testing, makes an excellent platform for soft testing our new business ideas. The main premise for the service is that you can setup a slick designed landing page in about 30 minutes and then use A/B testing to fine tune variations, instantly seeing the results. Then we apply the following 4 simple steps.

1. The Idea

We are always coming up with ideas, in fact we currently have an ideas board with about 20-30 undeveloped ideas awaiting this very process. So, the very first thing we do, is sit on the idea. When we first come up with an idea we are all passionate about it but as time passes sometimes we realise we were caught up in a moment of enthusiasm and actually the idea won’t cut it. Then at random intervals Colin, Simon and I go through the list and prioritise based on market factors and collectively what we are most passionate and excited about. Simple, and effective. There is no point developing something unless all three of us are passionate and believe in the idea and our experience helps us identify what is worth pursuing at this stage.

2. The one-sentence-sell

Once we have selected an idea, we try to come up with the one-sentence-sell for the product. The one-sentence-sell is a concept I picked up from Ryan Carson when I attended his startup seminar at Carsonified a couple of years ago. The idea is that you come up with a short sentence that both summarises and sells you business idea in one. Going through this process gets you thinking about your Unique Selling Points and provides you with all the material you will need to test the idea.

3. Soft testing the idea

Our main testing approach is to use Google Adwords, this allows us to not only test our one sentence sell which can then be refined into the product’s tag line, but also allows us to refine target keywords. Unbounce.com comes in really handy as it not only helps us create a compelling landing page in minutes that can be used to point the Adword Ads at. Unbounce.com also allows us to test variations of the landing page from a business model perspective as well as a design perspective. For example, although we are big advocates of the Getting Real approach of stripping a product down to the bare minimum, Unbounce.com allows us to A/B test different feature ideas, domain names and even pricing. It’s excellent statistics provide you with a break down of visitors, page views and conversions per variation. The key to getting good results out of A/B testing is to only test one variations at a time, but the process really allows us to hone in on not only how best to sell the app or what features to include but also based on the conversion rate gives us a bigger picture on whether to take the idea forward and build it.

4. Finally the added benefits

The great thing with taking this approach is that you can go ahead and build ideas confident in knowing that you already have a number of users from your converted leads wanting to use your service, you have an early online presence for the idea that helps you build traction and pagerank and you can also make use of it to test out ideas that arise during the development process.

The process is simple and cheap. You are in complete control of you Adword budget, though I advise investing a larger amount for a short period than running a long term campaign at a low rate like £1 ($1.60ish) a day. You can stop and start your ad as needed so focus on short and snappy tests. Unbounce.com offers a free plan for up to one domain being tested and has a range of good value premium plans from $25 a month.

We are currently testing http://www.instockapp.com, please feel free to check it out.

Our new InStockApp logo

Paul Colledge, our very clever designer has come up with this fantastic new logo for our new web based stock control system http://www.instockapp.com