Category Archives: Web Design

Finally get to grips with your website

  • Annoyed your current website isn’t delivering results?
  • Frustrated that it is hard to manage or amend?
  • Confused by social media and search engine what-ever-its-called?
  • Just don’t quite know where to start?

You are not alone

Urban Elephant works with small groups of businesses to develop their websites. Working alongside each other for peer support, as we hand-hold you through the process of design, functionality, content, copy, search engine optimisation, online marketing strategy, social media and e-commerce if necessary.

Going through the small business package will not only give you a website that will provide a return on investment but will give you a knowledge and understanding that can be applied to future on line marketing activities.

Getting it all explained

Urban Elephant will alleviate all your fears and concerns about websites while we work with you to build a new one.

We understand small businesses need websites that offer a return on investment. So we offer training to understand, manage, maintain and utilise your new site. We will help you develop your understanding of online marketing and social media so you can integrate it with your off line marketing.

Proven to work

Bishop Simeon Trust, Ideal Eyes Opticians and Euthenia Coaching all launched together in 2012

bishop simeon trust website image

ideal eyes new website

euthenia coaching home page

Your new website in March 2013

The first group ‘kicks off’ the process on Tuesday 22nd January 2013. If you need to sort out your website and want to join this unique opportunity to network, get instant peer feedback and support then email lucy@urbanelephant.com for more details or call 01993 776999 for a quick chat to discuss.

 


Special Effect’s new website, more than playing games…

Urban Element choose one charity a year to support and in 2012 we were proud to offer Special Effect a new website free of charge to support their amazing and life changing work the best way we know how.

Special Effect is a charity dedicated to enhancing  the quality of life for people with disabilities using technology.

The Special Effect of our approach

When we build websites, we go through a vigorous project process refined over the years, from sales and consultancy to design, build and testing.

Regardless of the size, industry or budget our approach ensures that we have done all we can to create a website that will help our clients achieve their goals.

Special Effect Website Visuals

Game Therapy

Mark  Saville from Special Effect wanted to overhaul their current website that offered no engagement.

“We need to tell people the benefits of what Special Effect do quickly and visually. We do a lot more than help people play games. People sometimes see games and computer games as a social thing rather than ‘game therapy’ which it really is. We help people who are severely disabled use and access technology. We do whatever it takes to help people benefit from our services”

From day one

From the very beginning we took the time to understand Special Effect’s work and requirements. The whole Urban Element team have been involved and the experience has brought both organisations much closer together. We were also keen not to miss out on the opportunity to play computer games using eye gaze controls!

Eye gaze control gaming!

Some of the team

Changing Perceptions

We felt strongly that the new website could achieve so much more for this client. The previous website desperately needed a redesign. We took it as an opportunity to reinvent how this charity could be perceived online.

And that’s what we did..

The new website is without doubt one of the best we have ever designed and built.

The biggest challenge was to make it compliant with all of the requirements that the website of this caliber needs,  without compromising on design and user experience.

What gives this website an even bigger advantage is the Adobe Business Catalyst Content Management System (BC) — a powerful, extremely capable system but also simple to use. There’s almost no limits to what the client can do with it. They can update, make changes and manage the content themselves without being reliant on any external agency to help them.

A big part of BC’s brilliance is that it gave us the ability to build completely bespoke web applications for events, media centres and more. These aren’t pre-existing customisable applications – these are powerful, built from ground up, web apps specifically made for this client’s needs.

Special Effect do so many great things and we are very proud to be part of the solution that promotes their work to the world. It has been an absolute pleasure working with their team to produce their new website. We hope that all of these efforts combined will help them achieve extraordinary results.

Before

Special Effect Previous Website

After

Special Effect New Website
Special Effect New Website

Visit Special Effect Website »


Urban Elephant, ready to launch !

Brand new identity

Urban Element’s small business package now has its own identity as Urban Elephant. With a logo and colour scheme of its own this unique process, now has its very own identity. It’s big ideas for small business, working together in groups as elephants do to achieve what some clients might think impossible!

Latest Urban Elephant group launch

Our latest Urban Elephant group are about  to launch their websites and we are able to give you a sneak peak of one of the sites. Continue reading


Niki F graduates with a First Class Honours Degree

After a very nervous morning last week Niki was finally able to log in to the Oxford Brookes Portal and get the results for her degree, and was delighted to see she’d graduated with a First!

Niki used her internship at Urban Element last summer as a work experience module counting towards her degree, and her dissertation was largely based around the web design process she had learnt at Urban Element.

Niki is now working full time in the design department at UE, and enjoying the more cooshty living of no longer being a student.


Why Do I Not Always See the Most Up To Date Version of my Website?

When we update a website for our clients, we are often asked why one person can’t see the updated version of the site, while their friend can. I find it hard to answer this question without getting too technical so I am going to try hard to explain it without you glazing over!

Ok, so bear with me. Every domain has a domain name server (or DNS). When you type in a web address (e.g. www.urbanelement.com), your computer associates this with an IP address which it then looks up (kind of like a name and phone number stored in your address book).

This is obviously on a much larger scale, and so in order to find the IP address of the site, each website domain has its own authoritative, primary server. In order to find the server that the website is hosted on, one server will ask another until it finds the right one (there is an amount of logic to it, e.g. by a site being a .co.uk domain, a server will be sent down a certain route).

However, each server can cache data from other servers higher up the chain, meaning that if it has recently found the server that you are looking for, it will already have the data stored. It stores a copy of the site files for an amount of time (this is set by the servers A Record and could be an hour or days) and serves this to you. Depending on when this copy was taken, this may be minutes old or hours old, and so if changes have been made to the site in this time, you may not be viewing the most up to date version of the site. Therefore, depending on which server you reach first, you may be viewing a different version of the website than your friend next door.


New Cookie Law implications

What Are Cookies?

Cookies are the messages that web pages use to store information about visits to web pages. We use them on the UE website and they are used at some level on all our client sites because we use cookies to track visitors through google analytics.

How does this effect us?

New Privacy & Electronic Communication Regulations (PECR)  require all websites  with a UK website presence to clearly identify that they are using cookies. This is to protect users privacy, and at the moment ‘implied consent’ which would be the ideal and least intrusive solution is not considered sufficient. So other solutions that still comply but do not interfere too much with the web design are needed.

You can read the full government implementation guide by following the link http://alphagov.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/gds-cookies-implementer-guide.pdf

What’s the solution?

Urban Element are currently in the process of identifying the cookies they use on the UE website and we will be adding a cookie law solution to the UE website soon as an example of best practice.  We will share this with all our followers and will  be in touch with all our clients to help them implement effective and tailored solutions.

We would love to hear your comments and if you have seen any good solutions on other websites please let us know.


Two new recruits for Urban Element

We are pleased to announce that we have increased our ranks with two new starters here at Urban Element.

Lucy Lavers joins us as Business Development Manager, while Stephanie Bouguet has started her internship as a Graphic Designer.

Lucy Lavers

Lucy has a background in marketing and PR and has worked in the industry since graduating with a 2:1 in PR and media in 1999. Her previous roles include Marketing Manager for a multi-national bathroom manufacturer over seeing all UK and Ireland marketing operations. More recently, she has been working in online affiliate marketing and SEO, so is well placed to work along side Nikki with our online marketing clients and with Jon on new initiatives. You can read more about Lucy on LinkedIn and you will also find her increasingly on Twitter.

Stephanie Bouguet

Stephanie Bouguet is from Bordeaux, France and started at UE this week. She is in the UK for 3 years to gain experience in Graphic Design having completed a Masters degree in Art, and undertaken further training in graphic design. You can see some of Stephanie’s work at http://www.s-creative.fr/. During her time at UE she will working with the web design team on projects including our new website . After her internship, Stephanie plans to remain in the UK as a website designer.


New Website Launches at Urban Element

January was a busy month here at UE with four websites launching in recent weeks. All of these sites have been built in the Adobe Business Catalyst CMS and using the combined skills of our web design and SEO teams.

The first two sites to go live were Classic England and Classic Scotland. These two sites are part of the Leisure Creations group who specialise in providing customised tours throughout the UK and Ireland. As well as incorporating all the usual tourist sites, their personalised tours also include author themed tours, gardens, whiskey tours and. The site makes use of the customisable web apps feature in Business Catalyst which will allow Leisure Creations to easily update details of their tours.

We have also launched a website for UKCPI, the leading association for the UK cleaning industry. We are looking forward to working with UKCPI on an ongoing basis, helping them with the content strategy for the website throughout the year.

UKCPI website design

Last week saw the launch of a new e-commerce site for Beaumont Forest, a large timber merchants with branches in High Wycombe, Ascot and Hertfordshire. This new site also allows their customers to obtain a quote for their timber products, as well as buying them outright.

Beaumont Forest Website Design

All of our clients are really pleased with how their new websites haves turned out but we would love to know what you think!


Support of Internet Explorer 6 and 7

End of IE6

Before Christmas, Microsoft announced that they would no longer be supporting versions 6 or 7 of their Internet Explorer browser. The browser is currently on version 9, with version 10 being tested and from January 2012, Microsoft have begun automatically updating users across the world to newer versions.

Microsoft have been keen to stop people using  these old versions for a while as  they do not support many features used by modern websites, including the new Timeline layout of Facebook.

As such, Urban Element will no longer be working to make all functionality of our websites compliant with these versions of the browser. Although we will ensure that the websites still display correctly, we will not guarantee that any advanced functionality that is used on the website will work in these browsers, and will instead encourage users to download a more up to date browser where this is used.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please contact us. You can also download the latest version of Internet Explorer from the Microsoft website.


Busines Catalyst Version 3 – Sneak Preview

I thought I would use my first UE blog post to mention the exciting updates both short and longer term for our agency’s main weapon of choice Adobe Business Catalyst.

Since becoming a partner a couple of years ago, the feedback from our customers on the Business Catalyst system has been fantastic with main clients feeding back  that it is an a VERY easy to use system that offers a great deal of functionality.  Our website designers have also hugely enjoyed using a well supported and fully featured Content Management System which means we can now offer our customers more functionality than ever with modules such as Blog, E-Commerce, Text editing, Photo Galleries, Form Builder, integrated CRM (the list goes on).

Being an Adobe product, Business Catalyst is now getting some serious investment and development and so there are some exciting times coming up for us with what we will be able to offer our customers, and indeed with what our customers will be able to achieve with the system.

One of the first things that Adobe are looking to do (that customers will notice) is to release Version 3, which is a big change in terms of the User Interface that appears when you login . As a partner we are able to use this interface right now as it is in ‘Alpha’ release, so i thought i would give some sneak previews of the new sleek looking interface:

business catalyst

Business Catalyst V3 - Client Dashboard

business catalyst

Business Catalyst V3 - Now in Alpha Testing

business catalyst

Business Catalyst V3 - Quick access to workflow items

Just to allay any fears, the new version of the interface will run alongside the old interface for a long time and our clients will be able to switch between both versions until they feel comfortable. We can of course offer training and advice on the new interface so please contact us if you have any questions or need any help.

Having used the new interface I must say it is really clean, slick looking and easy to use. It is great to see BC moving forwards so rapidly and from the recent Adobe webinars I have been watching, this is just the start of a 2-3 year plan to make and keep Business Catalyst ahead of the competition. For us it really helps justify the investment into Business Catalyst for ourselves and our customers, and we cant wait for some of the new features to be released so that we can offer even more powerful features to our clients.

Some recently released features that are available right now

As I mentioned, Adobe have been busy adding (very quietly) some great new features to BC over the last few months,  so I though I would also mention some of the latest released features that some of our newer clients are already using on their sites, but that could be useful on some of our existing client websites:

1) Social Media  comments:

Visitors to your website can now comment on blog posts or e-commerce products by logging in through Facebook or Twitter (an example here on Witney TV)

Witney TV

Website visitors can now leave comments/feedback on news/blog items or e-commerce products via Social Media such as Facebook or Twitter

2) Blog Profiles - When posting Blog or News articles, you can now publish a profile with your post (screenshot below)

business catalyst

3) E-commerce - Some really handy new e-commerce features have the ability to change the ‘status’ of an order and then send an automated email if (as an example) the order has been dispatched. Also customisable packing slips and package labels are now available (print one or multiple at a time)

business catalyst

If you have any questions about Business Catalyst features please drop us a line and we will be more than happy to help.

Look forward to speaking  soon

Malcolm


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