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Vauxhall
We created the world's first fully indexable Flash site, cutting overall development time by a third. -
Client Background
The Vauxhall Collective is a group of creatives who excel in fields such as fashion, photography, interior design and film. Vauxhall sponsor the chosen individuals to produce innovative projects inspired by the Great British Road Trip.
Setting
Vauxhall tasked VI with creating a Flash microsite, filled with animation, to represent the work of the Collective in an imaginative form, providing information about its members and the projects being worked on.
There was one catch – they wanted a Flash site that finally overcame the hurdles of being indexed by search engines.The Limitations of Flash
There was a unique challenge to this project: how do you make this content as searchable as a page made in HTML? Flash, whilst an incredible tool for creating stunning user interfaces online, has had a bad rap for creating websites that actually show up in search results.
Traditionally, website creators would have to create both a Flash and HTML site in tandem; the former being the showpiece and the latter loaded with the content that could be picked up by Google and others.Normally, when Flash content is published, the hierarchy of layers, images and animations is converted into an SWF file that the Flash Player plugin can read. However, much of this structural data is invisible to search engine spiders.
Available Solutions Were Inefficient and Ineffective
Google and Adobe tried to remedy this by unlocking the textual data stored in SWF files. However, without the context of tags found in HTML and other mark-up languages, and with jumbled phrasing for animations, there is little use to the data.
Google also doesn’t execute external Javascript calls, which many Flash-based sites rely on to launch their SWFs – meaning the crawlers might not even notice there is a Flash site to be searched.
When using standard techniques from Adobe, the user is not able to set meta data, so if Google does find the SWF, there is no description of the file to indicate what it is. Therefore when the SWF lists in the Google listings there is no description about what the file is.
Solutions
Using a unique combination of HTML, CSS, Javascript, ActionScript 3, AMF PHP and Drupal (and essentially any CMS), we created a way to make a Flash site as indexable as any other non-Flash site.
User Experience Enhanced
To the user, this means that individual pages can be bookmarked and the browsers back and forward buttons function with the site's navigation – including animation tweens between these pages – allowing for a seamless user experience on any site designed this way.
Site Administrators Have Full Control
To an administrator, content is editable inline, inside the SWF file, allowing for a Flash CMS that permits page additions, edits and deletions. Individual page's analytics can be tracked, too, for better measurement.
Google Loves It
And to the search engine, our Flash sites have as much to offer a crawler as any other site.
Due to the universal nature of the Flash plugin, development time has been reduced by up to 20%, as we do not have to optimise for Internet Explorer versions 5.5-7 and other browsers. Add to this proprietary libraries, a re-written SWFAddress on the ActionScript and optimisation for fast-loading and our solution provides for a Flash-based solution that does not compromise search rankings and user experience.
Results
VI was shortlisted for an Econsultancy Innovation Award and press coverage in Web Designer Magazine, Contagious Magazine and New Media Age led to the technology we pioneered to become widely adopted by the industry.
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Glimpse Online
Glimpse Online is an online marketplace connecting artists and designers with trade and private buyers under one multi-brand umbrella. Playing host to a wide range of high end artisan products, Glimpse Online offers a one-stop-shop for buyers looking to invest in affordable exclusivity. -
Client Background
Glimpse Online is an online marketplace connecting artists and designers with trade and private buyers under one multi-brand umbrella. Playing host to a wide range of high end artisan products, Glimpse Online offers a one-stop-shop for buyers looking to invest in affordable exclusivity.
Setting
As it stood
Glimpse’s major issues boiled down to a lack of conversion and exposure. Through a combination of technical faults and a loosely defined brand, sales had suffered. Up against headline-grabbling competitors and catering for a higher end of the market, its brand had not shone through as much as was necessary.
Good Theory vs. Best Practice
In trying to forge a community of designers and design enthusiasts, a forum and two-way messaging system had been built. Unfortunately, it was being used to circumvent the Glimpse platform, with designers and buyers arranging private sales outside the site. This fragmentation of the brand was also reflected by sellers uploading photographs that did not adhere to a site-wide style guide.
Negative effects
Usability across the site was hindered by unintuitive functionality and bugs that disrupted the smooth journey of the user. Poor categorisation had affected the findability of designers and their products. A multitude of technical problems resulted in a high drop out rate, with errors like repeated prompts for login during checkout being the main culprit.
An overwrought checkout process made up of at least five separate pages resulted in high cart abandonment, with a technical glitch depleting designers’ stocklists when an order hadn’t even been completed. Catering for worldwide commercial transactions had also presented some complication, with even further steps added to the process.
Solutions
VI gave Glimpse Online a new brand identity and a sleek site redesign, on top of a newly optimised ecommerce platform with new tools to aid in their expansion as a business.
Affiliate Ecommerce
Perhaps our greatest innovation for Glimpse Online is the introduction of an affiliate scheme, run through an embeddable widget, for both designer profile pages and their individual products. This greatly extends Glimpse's reach, potentially allowing for direct links to checkout from any page on the web. Given that many of the designers already had their own online presence, these affiliate buttons allow for visitors of their sites to purchase products directly through Glimpse.
Extending the Backend
We decided to build upon the existing backend infrastructure as the various stakeholders already had some familiarity with it and we believed that with the right improvements, it would result in a superior product.
Coherent Branding
A new logo and a uniform style guide reaffirms Glimpse's standing with consumers as a high-end designer community marketplace. Registered merchants now have photography tutorials to abide by in order to maintain the site's aesthetic coherence and therefore its credibility as a design-led resource.
Monitored Communication
Building a lasting community is one of Glimpse's long-term goals for ensuring a secure and professional marketplace that has the confidence of its customers. To do this, we've removed a poorly-engaged and distracting forum and implemented monitoring on the one-on-one messaging system. Interactions between customers and designers now automatically block contact details so that all commercial activity runs through the Glimpse platform.
Effective Functionality
To improve usability and findability across the site, sellers are now able to categorise with expanded attributes, which in turn, allows products to be more easily searchable on the user end. Navigation across the site has been significantly improved through drop-downs and refined search options alongside results from any category that allow for deeper searching than before.
Search Engine Optimisation
We cleaned up the URL addresses of the pages across the site to make them both more user friendly and better for indexing by search engines. Merchants can also set their own keywords to their profile pages, increasing the reach of the Glimpse brand online through natural search.
Streamlined Checkout
One of the most muddied features on the previous site was the checkout process. We have simplified this from five pages down to one using Ajax and Javascript. This page makes a number of assumptions about billing and shipping addresses from a user's account information, and easily caters for users to enter voucher codes and additional comments on their orders. We've also fixed bugs such as the depletion of stock before shipping confirmation and prompts for multiple logins. Worldwide payment has also been streamlined - options are intelligently selected and presented depending on where both the customer and designer are based.
The impact
Glimpse Online has already witnessed higher conversions through its site, with positive feedback from merchants and buyers alike.
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Latitude
The world's largest PPC company tasked us with rebuilding their entire online presence. -
Client Background
Latitude is one of the world’s largest search marketing agencies, and the largest Pay Per Click Company. Since 2001, they have provided specialist search engine services to companies like Tesco, The Independent and Fitness First.
Setting
Making the transition
Latitude came to VI to help them transition from a niche SEO services company to a full services digital agency that could take serious claims in online display, social media, affiliate marketing and analytics consultancy.
We were commissioned to completely redevelop their site, based on our design capabilities, technical skill level and transparent, competitive pricing.
Site Issues
The Latitude website was significantly underperforming in terms of conversion. It had a high bounce rate of over 55%, severe usability issues, poor content management and serious problems with their own area of expertise, SEO.
Out of date branding that lacked the confidence the company had gained offline was severely damaging to a reputation that needed building online.
Mostly, though, their management of content was a complete mess. Any updates had to go through an external contractor at high cost, which was hindering the quick evolution of the company as it expanded into new markets and territories. With no internal search, it was near impossible to easily locate content as an administrator and a user.
Case studies, their strongest tool for conversion on high value clients, were buried four levels deep in a confusing navigational structure that in itself did not “force” a sales funnel. USPs were not being properly communicated and the thought leadership Latitude could otherwise project was cut short by the lack of an effective blog strategy.
Solutions
Bending WordPress to our will
The one edict from Latitude was that we had to use WordPress to build their new site, which was really three rolled into one - a branded premium service, a "light" one and a blog. Each had their own set of master templates, presenting unique challenges to the traditional one-off WordPress installation.
Contextually Relevant Content
We drew up a highly cross-referenced information architecture to make sense of and use a huge amount of old and foreseen new content in an automated fashion. So when a new blog post is tagged, it automatically pulls up related posts, pages and sections around the main content. What's more, this complex structure had to import large amounts of data from their old Expression Engine powered site in a seamless manner.
SEO
In order to maintain Latitude's long-held position on the first page of the major search engines, we customised the WordPress backend with a number of bespoke and ready-made plugins for the best SEO possible.
Results
In the first six weeks, Latitude saw significant improvements on all KPIs - most notably, a 300% increase in business leads on the site. In the same time period, the bounce rate had descreased by 30% and over 50 careers applications had come through specialist forms and dedicated email accounts.
In the following six months, the conversion rate had improved by 75%, there was a 60% increase in returning visits, with "no bounce" visitors to the site staying on average over a minute longer than they had done in the past.
Latitude's Online Marketing Executive Thibaut Pfeiffer said, "as a leading digital marketing agency, our website has to reflect our ability in SEO and online marketing. We really challenged VI but they had a solution for everything we asked them to do. They delivered on time and within budget and everyone at Latitude is really pleased with the result."
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Bantr
Bantr is your online companion, blocking ads and serving real time opinions that matter. -
Setting
People hate ads. Especially online. Advertising as most people know it – biased and mainstream – is increasingly ineffective. The emergence of a “reputation economy” is backed by global surveys which show that recommendations from personal acquaintances and opinions posted by unfamiliar consumers online are now the most trusted form of advertising.
In order for users to make informed decisions, they must navigate away to dedicated destination sites. They are then forced to wade through purchased opinions and promotional testimonials in their search for some impartiality.
Solutions
Bantr started out as an idea that simply blocked ads on every page. Many other ad blockers had come before, but we quickly realised the potential to do more with the real estate left over on pages.
It replaces the largest visible ad module with a Twitter client that displays content relevant to the page, and allows users to engage with the conversations happening around it. If the ad space does not exist, Bantr becomes a sidebar in the browser. Using keyword analysis of a page's headers, emphasized text and metatags, Bantr is able to find relevant Tweets.
With no attempt at curation or filtering, Bantr is able to present balanced views from multiple sources, however critical. In fact, the more critical, the more a user is likely to trust the positive opinions that shine through.
In private beta, we were struck by the limitations of ad modules and sidebars that jutted out when none were present for Bantr to fit into. As we release this version for public use, we have already begun to move the concept to an overlay system that will allow for an entirely new way of interacting with individual page content across the internet.
The Future
Bantr's basic success is that it compiles and presents information already in the public sphere in a relevant, organic fashion. Building upon this, we intend to make the technology available on other popular browsers like Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer, ensuring Bantr's future as an indispensable online companion on as many platforms as possible.
We will also incorporate feeds from Facebook, LinkedIn and other social and bookmarking networks to extend the reach of Bantr to wherever opinions and reviews are posted in realtime.
In addition to keyword analysis, we intend to match content more precisely by building our own clustering algorithm. That is, an equation which over time, learns to structure and present related data that is otherwise unclassified. This form of artificial intelligence is absolutely necessary as the web transitions to a more semantic, social form.
We hope to release elements of the Application Programming Interface (API), allowing developers to build their own apps on the Bantr ecosystem. Other parts of the API will allow us to develop premium accounts for site owners and marketers who wish to track user behaviour through Bantr.
As long as there exists the compulsion to comment and share online, Bantr will continue to re-empower users and allow for their voices to be heard.
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Solopress
One of the Southeast's largest printers wanted to focus their brand & increase their sales in the downturn. -
Client Background
Solopress are the second largest printers in the UK. The business was looking to maximise conversion and consolidate their offline success with their faltering online presence.
Setting
Poor Conversion
Solopress had not capitalised on the majority of visitors to their site, despite enormous levels of traffic generated from highly effective PPC campaigns. Most had not converted into paying customers and for those that did start to place an order, the site got in the way of them completing their purchase.
Site Issues
New and inexperienced users were confronted with a visually busy, jargon-filled page that had incoherent categorisation and no clear message.
The ordering process was perhaps one of the most confusing elements of the site. Not only was it ridden with bugs that failed to calculate business days and applied multiple charges for deliveries, you would also have to arrange quantity and delivery options before the prompt for artwork.
Additionally, submission of the artwork relied on a Javascript uploader that did not function properly, forcing users to download an FTP client, configure it and log in to an unsecured database where they would have to upload files with confusing naming conventions.
Negative Effects
As a result, bounce rates were incredibly high, hovering around 60% on key pages, and there was an over-reliance on redirects to offline channels. Their saving grace was that, unlike most other printers, their phone number was prominently displayed across the site. In fact, it earned them a reputation for excellent customer service, which was not being communicated online.
Solutions
What We Did
With most web projects we undertake lasting 3 to 6 months, we first needed to implement a solution in the short term that would carry Solopress through to the planned major site relaunch. We spent two months on new interim designs to remedy many of the problems facing the checkout process.
How We Did It
We examined analytical data to optimise "micro-conversion" points, such as product views, cart adds, cart removals and checkouts. We worked to simplify a cluttered homepage with clear navigation and modular features. We reduced the steps in the purchasing process and corrected dozens of bugs and inconsistencies. This resulted in a near 10% boost in online sales.
The Site
Solopress has now taken ownership of its reputation of having a 24 hour turnaround time, proudly conveyed through a complete rebranding and a prominently displayed tagline above the fold on multiple landing pages.
All processes, user paths and categorisation were rethought, tested and retested. Sophisticated information architecture provides a framework for increased functionality, findability and higher conversion. User journeys were defined to inform a sales process that is as quick and easy to complete as possible.
Free shipping was introduced to simplify the ordering process - a significant change to the business model of the company. Administration processes are now reduced, allowing Solopress to concentrate on more proactive and strategic activities.
The Impact
VI is currently working to refine conversion on a very sophisticated level, by unifying all of Solopress's marketing efforts into one channel. VI will be monitoring and optimising the site, taking into account customer interactions that occur on and offline, helping Solopress achieve real, sustainable growth.
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FEI Awards
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Client Background
The Federation Equestre Internationale (FEI) is the worldwide body governing Olympic horse sports. Click here to see more work we have done with the FEI.
Each year, they hold the FEI Awards to celebrate achievements in the equestrian world. They came to VI looking to change the public perception of the awards – they wanted to be the “Equestrian Oscars,” whilst still appealing to youth supporters and riders aged 15-25 years old.
Despite working on a mammoth new web presence for the FEI as a whole, the Awards site had to stand alone months in advance of the wider site relaunch.
Solutions
How We Did It
Before the microsite, voting was a tedious and expensive proposition of direct mail and free postage return mailers that had a much lower level of engagement across the global membership. By moving this process over to the web, the FEI would not only simplify the process, but cut costs in the transfer to digital.
The site itself was highly user-friendly, a simple and intuitive microsite with a 3-click process to vote for nominees. This was made even simpler by a custom in-built predictive text engine that mapped all the thousands of potential nominee names, helping to deliver easily readable data for administrators, who could export the results into a variety of file formats.
For the identity of the Awards, we took their existing logo and extended its identity into a striking new design. It was a chance to give a flavour of things to come, but it was also a crucial move to engage their membership online and get as many people as possible to vote. We reimagined a traditional rosette pattern, through the repetition of a horseshoe symbol. It brought a strong stamp to the Awards, subtly implying the FEI's longstanding prestige and reinvigorating the traditions it celebrates.
The Result
The site for the FEI Awards was a huge success: within the first week, four times as many people had voted than in the entire year previously.
What's more, they hailed from over 60 countries, and one in four visitors to the site voted - an impressive 25% conversion rate.
Richard Johnson, Head of Communications said, "we are thrilled to bits with the result of the awards site. VI know how to deliver with conversion." It all boiled down to a highly user-friendly, simple and intuitive microsite with a 3-click process to vote for nominees.
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Virgin Media TV
VI is working with Virgin Media Television to bring Living TV to the web. Partnering with video streaming leader Brightcove, we've built a monetisable video platform online and for your mobile. -
Client Background
Virgin Media Television is the content subsidiary of Virgin Media, which is the first “quadruple-play” media company in the UK – providing TV, web, mobile and telephone access to millions. For Virgin Media Television’s popular Living cable channel, VI was tasked with creating a whole new brand named Liv, and building it as an internet television destination.
Setting
On-demand television on the internet accounts for up to a fifth of all UK web traffic. Over a billion videos on YouTube are viewed online every day. With media consumption becoming more and more fragmented, all sorts of niches have become destinations unto themselves. Catering to these segmented audiences is an increasingly complicated business.
VMTV were keen to expand their reach online. As an experiment, they asked us to develop an online channel for one of their television networks that, if successful, would lay the groundwork for other channels in their portfolio, like Dave and Bravo, to transition into larger web properties.
Solutions
Brand Production
As an offshoot of Living TV, we created an entirely new brand that would expand its reach with youth audiences through a combination of free, exclusively commissioned and acquired short-form content online. As a cost-effective portal for up to the minute magazine-style celebrity news and gossip, it is targeted at a demographic of young women, who are accustomed to seeking out content geared to their interests.
How We Did It
VI worked in close partnership with online video specialists Brightcove, who work with some of the World's top producers and broadcasters. Whilst many content providers utilise Brightcove's "out of the box" players, they are built for mass adoption and not optimised for specialist requirements. After Flash prototyping of designs and basic functionality, we realised that we would have to create a bespoke solution to ensure the best possible viewing experience. As a result, we created our own coding framework which would provide the kind of responsiveness web-savvy individuals had come to expect.
What the Player Can Do
With a clear layout of content that is fully searchable, the player is equipped with a number of tools that help users to easily share and embed content, taking up prime real estate on the Living TV homepage, with significant cross-promotion across Virgin Media Television's properties.
The Impact
Although we are unable to release viewing figures, the trial has been tremendously successful. To further build upon this success, we suggested the creation of a Liv iPhone Application as a logical extension of an online brand specialising in short form content. It will be one of the first apps to take advantage of Brightcove 4's first Software Developers Kit (SDK), which allows for mobile app development .
Due for release in early Spring 2010, the app will feature all of the video content available on the website, using a portrait interface and landscape video playback mode. Echoing the original player's design, it will be free of pre-roll advertising and have sophisticated analytical tools built into it to track user adoption, usage, location and other vital metrics.
In the Future
Updates to the player will include social media integration with Facebook and Twitter, allowing for easier sharing and increasing exposure for the nascent brand. A major upgrade to the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) by use of iFrames will create virtual pages for each piece of video content. This will translate to greater findability, more video views and consequently the higher page impressions that will increase VMTV's online advertising revenue.
Future editions are already being planned with push notifications of new videos, unique content to the iPhone, sharing tools via popular social networks, affiliate marketing schemes, dynamic overlaid ads and links to other Living TV apps and TV guides to unify Virgin Media Television's online brand experience.
