We’re delighted to be recognised by Carmarthenshire Business Awards in the category of Creative & Digital Business of the Year.

Congratulations to the other businesses nominated.

We’re looking forward to dusting off our eveningwear for a fancy night out to see how we do!

Donald Norman, director of The Design Lab, and author of “The Design of Everyday Things” of a door that displayed a ‘Push’ sign on a pull handle the quote above.

Kind of really sums up usability in my opinion (both on the web and in the real world): at its best you don’t need instructions, you naturally know what to do.

We’re really proud to be shortlisted for the 2017 Zokit Customer Focus business award.

The award recognises businesses that have exceptional customer service throughout the whole customer journey – something that we’re really focused on for both our clients and their customers, so being shortlisted is really important to us.

The winner’s announced on the 18th May, and we’ll let you know how we do!

Targetting Local Search effectively can be a game changer – particularly for small businesses.

The difference between and ‘also ran’ and a company at the top of local search results is lots of free, relevant traffic.

This handy infographic navigates you through the key steps that’ll put you in the driving seat.

We’ve recently put live a new website for Cosy Under Canvas: a fabulous glamping site near Hay-on-Wye, offering fantastic domes that come with comfy beds and private hot tubs – all in a beautiful woodland setting!

The new website is fully responsive and uses full-screen video to capture the essence of the Cosy Under Canvas experience.

After a little time to bed-in, the on-site analytics data shows that the new website has reduced number of users that leave straight away (the bounce rate) by more than 25% year on year – as well as driving an increase in reservations.

Emma Price, the site’s owner, told us:

“I came across Curious quite by accident and as I was in a difficult situation with my existing web developer I thought I would give them a call. I am delighted that I did so. Working with Simon and his team is a pleasure. They are keen, quick and confident and communication with them is faultless. They are cheerful, creative and insightful as well as being very efficient. High quality design and build work is produced quickly and thoughtfully with excellent attention to detail. I would not hesitate in recommending I Am Curious for any web design, optimisation or online marketing project commissions”

Emma Price – Cosy Under Canvas

Want to find out if we can transform your website?

Request a free website review to see how you can make more money from your website.

Put aside the look & feel and first focus on the content

When most companies redesign their websites, they normally start with, well, the design.

The process typically starts with a design brief, and the first output will usually be a beautifully rendered design concept filled with placeholder text – generally Lorem Ipsum. It might look something like this…

Lorem Impsum is pseudo-latin text that’s used by designers to fill spaces that are intended to have text in. The idea is that it gives a visual sense of the what the page will look like but, as it’s effectively nonsense, doesn’t inadvertently colour the viewer’s meaning of the page.

There’s an inherent problem with that though: the meaning a web page communicates is fundamental to how well it works.

In evaluating a design that’s filled with placeholder text, you have to make assumptions about the final content that will sit on the page – the information the page is going to communicate. With that in mind, you’ve no real idea if it is going to be effective in getting your message across to users or not.

Copy is important

When designing a website, copy is generally seen as the design’s poor cousin – the last thing that gets slotted in – and when you think about it, that’s crazy. You can have the slickest design imaginable but, when it comes down to it, the words are the most important thing on your website.

People might glance admiringly at your glossy design but, without compelling words, it’s unlikely that they will buy anything.

It’s frustrating then, that finding the right text to sit on the pages is so often a last minute affair – the final task before the site can go live.

‘Design first’ hobbles websites

There is a second problem that Loren Impsum creates: when you eventually come to replace it with copy, you’re left with the challenge of writing the right amount of copy to fit the space.

Now, chances are that the perfect message for a particular space isn’t going to match the pre-defined amount of space left by the placeholder text. This leaves you with three pretty unpalatable choices:

• Use the perfect copy for the circumstances, but break your design
• Make compromises with the copy to fit the available space
• Redesign the site to fit the final copy

Depending on which you pick, you’re either stuck with a sub-par website or a bill for additional work.

Take a look at this (rough) example:

What might look like a sensible design goes to pot when you add in finalised copy.  Adding in real words, rather than convenient dummy text, overflows spaces, pushes alignments out, and breaks the intended design layout.

There must be a better approach.

Content first

Instead of immediately focussing on the design, try flipping the process on it’s head.

Start instead with setting out the content that should appear on each page:

• Define the objectives of each page: who should it be appealing to, what action(s) do you want them to do?
• What are the key brand messages you want to communicate to them
• What information do your users need to know before they’ll the action.

Once you’ve got the guidelines for the content, you can start writing – set out the headlines and titles and then flesh out the words underneath.

When you know exactly needs to appear on the page, you can then create a layout, including headlines, body copy and images, that communicates your messages effectively

Finally, you can apply a look and feel that’s relevant for the layout and creates a webpage that’s coherent and relevant to the audience.

Better all round

It’s not just a question of creating a more coherent site. We’ve found that this approach allows for a much smoother process all round.

Focussing on the objectives and audience creates a far more tightly focussed website – not something that’s driven by a graphic design concept.

It’s much easier to catch and correct issues. The process creates some really clear stages where the client gets to review and correct thinking:  defining objectives; producing content; setting layouts; and final design.

And if something’s not right? Well, it only means redoing the last package of work – coming up with alternate designs is pretty simple if everyone’s agreed on the broad layout of content on the page. Equally experimenting with different layouts of what people agree to be the required content is pretty straightforward.

Paradigm Shift

We need make sure that content is the starting point, not an afterthought. After all, if a website doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter what it looks like:

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works”

Steve Jobs

Flipping the design process upside down creates a far better outcome: Web content that is focussed on guiding users down a path – meaning a website delivers on both the user’s and the business’ goals.

We’d love to know what design process works for you. Have you found issues with this approach? Has it come up trumps for you? Let us know.

For a few months now, Google has been testing different ad layouts on it’s search results pages – principally moving the paid advertising from the right hand sidebar, into the main column of content.

Well, it now seems that they’ve finished testing and are rolling out the change more widely. This is likely to have a pretty significant impact on search behaviour.

Upsetting the status quo

For a while now, search results have always looked a bit like this:

Two columns of results, the main column including up to three adverts at the top and then natural search results, with more ads, shopping results and other widgets in a right hand sidebar.

Google’s been testing alternative layouts for a while, and the version that’s been spotted in the wild most is a single column: 4 adverts followed by natural search results, Google Local results and, at the bottom, further adverts. Like this…

Well, it seems that as of this week, Google’s rolling out this change more widely.  Moz have been tracking this and have seen this layout now appearing around 20% of the time.

Why are Google changing?

Google plays their cards pretty close to their chests about what’s driving any particular test, but there are likely to be three factors:

1. Revenue

Google need to ensure their profits maintain a positive trajectory and, despite having fingers in lots of pies, advertising still makes up over 90% of their revenue.

Google need to ensure that people see, and click on, the ads in their search results and trying new format layouts allows them to find ways to increase this.

2. Mobile penetration

Mobile is becoming the primary way people view the web. It could be that, as the results sidebar doesn’t fit on a mobile screen format, Google are trying to al

3. Improved service (for advertisers!)

With Knowledge Graphs, Paid Shopping Blocks, and Google Local panels appearing the right hand column over the last few years, adverts are often pushed below the fold. There’s likely to be pressure from advertisers to ensure that ads are more consistently viewed on screen.

Whatever the driver it’s clear that things are still a little volatile, but it’s reasonable to predict that this screen layout become the status quo.

What does it mean to me?

If you’re a Google Adwords user, it’s simple. The first four ad spots become far more valuable. If your ad appears below position 4, the chances are the number of clicks you’re going to get will drop significantly – the ads are far less likely to get seen. With that in mind, you’ll need to adjust your bid strategies accordingly.

Beyond Google Adwords, the impacts are more wide ranging. Obviously, if an extra advert is being squeezed on to the top of the page, the natural search results get pushed down a bit.

That doesn’t sound like the end of the world, but a large number of people aren’t aware that any of the search results are advertising – the last research I saw put the figure at 36%. So the effect of the extra ad is likely to be that being top of natural search for a given term is likely to deliver less reward than it has.

There’s a problem though…what happens when Google decides to show other content as well as its Ads in the search results?

Well, here’s the results page for ‘cardiff hotel’. As you can see Google Local results are appearing immediately below the adverts, which means all natural search results are pushed well down the page, below the fold. In this circumstance you can expect the Adverts to get a far higher proportion of clicks from the page than they traditionally would.

So, what should you do? Well, the first thing should be to keep an eye out. Use your analytics to track traffic from Natural Search and see if performance levels change.

If you want to try and recover any lost traffic, well, the obvious answer is start using Google Adwords to appear at the top of the page. By testing ads on your key terms to see if they’ll deliver you profitable traffic to your website, you may find that you can actually get more traffic than you had before!

We’d love to know your experiences of these changes. Have you seen a dip in traffic levels in the last few days? Let us know in the comments.

Update – 23/2/16

Google have now confirmed that this new layout “is designed for highly commercial queries where the layout is able to provide more relevant results for people searching and better performance for advertisers.”

Effectively this means on searches where customers express an intention to buy. Despite their comment, we are seeing it pretty broadly though!

Have you noticed strange traffic patterns in your analytics reporting? Massive spikes in traffic that don’t relate to any of your marketing activity or are you sitting back wondering why what appear to be thousands of visitors aren’t translating to new business?

It could well be that all isn’t as it seems and that you’re suffering from ‘Referral Spam’.

Referral Spam is effectively ‘ghost traffic’: rather than real site visitors, it’s traffic generated by computers, and in some cases never even touches your website server.

Whilst it’s normally fairly harmless, it can prove a massive annoyance for people looking to get meaningful information from their website analytics, and mislead website owners into thinking they’re getting more traffic than they really are.

Referral Spam has become more and more prevalent over the last year or so to the point that most websites will be affected by it in some way.

Read on to find out what it is, how to spot it, and more importantly – how to correctly strip it out of your analytics reporting.

What is Referral Spam

Referral spam is the footprint left by web ‘bots’ (computer programs) that scan the web looking for targets to attack. These bots scan thousands of websites, sending out a fake request to the website’s server for a page. Each web server records the details of these requests in their access logs.

Alternatively, other bots just target your Google Analytics ID, leaving behind a fake set of data about traffic that’s visited your site.

If you look in Google Analytics for your website, you may well be able to see some of these requests (Look in the report at Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals).

In the column of referrals sources, you may see websites that you’d expect to send traffic to you, but you’re also likely to see names like:

• • semalt.semalt .com
  • buttons-for-website .com
  • anticrawler.org

These are referral spammers.

Why do they do it?

Referral Spam tends to be happen because either:

1. Spammers want to promote a website and are trying to get you to visit the site or use a search engine to search for it.

They’re hoping that you will notice these strange URLs in your analytics or weblogs and visit the pages to see what they are about. This could just be because they’re looking to drive traffic to pages selling something, or sometimes these pages contain malware or viruses, and their goal is to infect as many people as possible.

2. They want to boost their rank on Google search engine results pages.

Some websites’ access logs are publicly available via a webpage so, when spammers make their fake requests to websites, they are hoping that this will be publicly recorded along with their URL. When search engines later scan these pages, they’ll see these links to the spam site which will potentially improve the spammer’s SEO rankings.

Can I stop Referral Spam?

The short answer is not really.

It’s nigh on impossible to block all the ghost traffic to your website without being sure you’re not affecting real users, BUT  you can make sure that it doesn’t affect your reporting.

There’s lots of advice as to how you can exclude spam traffic from your analytics reporting, however some of it (such as filtering out individual sites) is like playing whack-a-mole, and some (such as using the referral exclusion setting*) is just wrong.

The most effective approach is to create a data view that filters out all traffic that doesn’t physically visit your website – and it’s fairly simple to set up.

Filtering Referral Spam from Analytics

We’ll show you the steps you need to follow in Google Analytics as that’s the most common system used out there, but similar approaches can be followed on most other analytics platforms

We’ll be creating a filter on your  analytics data.

You can apply a filter to your main view in Google Analytics, but if you do that you’re permanently excluding this information from your reports, which means you’ve no way of seeing what you’re filtering out.

When creating filters, we always suggest using a new ‘view’ of your data. That way, if something goes wrong,  you’ve still got a complete set of data that you can compare back to.

So, first of all, let’s create a new view…

Log into Google Analytics and click on Admin in the top navigation. This will take you to the Administration screen where information on your Account, Properties and Views is displayed.

Make sure the correct website property is selected and then click on the ‘view’ drop down:

You’ll then see an option to ‘Create new view’

You’ll then be asked to enter a ‘Reporting View Name’ and set the ‘Time Zone’. We’re going to call this view “Spam Free” and set the Time Zone for “United Kingdom”, “London” time, and then click the ‘Create View’ button.

You’ll then be taken back to the Admin page with your new view selected.

First off,  click on ‘View Settings’. That will take you to a screen where you can set your default currency and enable ‘Bot Filtering’. Whilst this  function (Excluding all hits from known bots and spiders) sounds great, the reality is that it’s not all that effective – however, every little helps!

Next, click on the ‘Filters’ tab on the left navigation. Here you’ll see a red button with an option to ‘Add Filter’.

Clicking on the Add Filter button brings up a series of options

To set up the correct filter, you’ll need to enter a name – we’ve called this one Exclude Referral Spam.

Then, leaving the ‘Filter Type as ‘Predefined’ select the following from the three drop down boxes:

‘Include only’  ‘traffic to the hostname’  ‘that contains’

Finally in the text field, type the main part of your web domain. It’s very important you don’t include the http or the www.

This instruction tells Google Analytics to only record traffic to your website when it emanates from your server name.

Finally click the blue ‘Save’ button and you’re done.

This filter should now exclude the majority of spam from your analytics view – you just need to remember to select the ‘Spam Free’ view when you log on.

If you’ve set up Goals or Ecommerce Tracking on any other view, you’ll need to copy those onto the ‘Spam Free’ view if you want to be able to use them in your reports.

Finally, also remember that Google Analytics settings only affect reports from the date they are set up onward, so they can’t and won’t clean up historical data.

Let us know how you get on, and also if you know of any other ways to improve handling of referral spam in analytics reporting.

*Although the name sounds appropriate, referral exclusions are designed to ensure traffic being passed between a company’s domains is reported correctly – using this to tackle referral spam will make any data problems worse.

If you’ve been on social media today there’s probably one thing that’s dominating your feed – The John Lewis Christmas Advert.

In case you haven’t seen it, it goes a little something like this:

A little girl is looking through a telescope where she spots a man on the moon. He seems a bit lonely, but when she tries to contact him he doesn’t respond because he can’t see her. She decides to send him a present, on a balloon (very Up), which is a telescope so he can see her back.

As per every John Lewis Christmas advert it plays on your heart strings. You feel sorry for the lonely old man on the moon and you coo over the kind little girl trying to show him she’s there.

You feel happy and joyful when he can finally see her little face, smiling and waving to him from the Earth.

Not One Product in Sight

It’s an advert you instantly remember and one you’ll know is for John Lewis within the first 5 seconds of it starting.

It’s for this reason that the John Lewis Christmas campaigns are so special and so fascinating – because at no point in this advert does it feature any products for sale, nor a single bit of information on the company being advertised.

At no point in the advert does it try and sell you something.

The majority of Christmas adverts on TV will talk about price and what to buy this Christmas. Toy stores will talk about the latest action figure available, shops stocking a multitude of items may talk about delivery or prices, clothing brands may show you what the trends are for this years Christmas party.

But John Lewis mentions nothing of these.  We know nothing about what John Lewis has on sale this Christmas. We don’t know anything about opening times, delivery information or any deals they may have running over the festive season.

So why is it then that the John Lewis Christmas campaign is arguably one of the most successful advertising campaigns of the decade, and is responsible for them racking up some £734 million in the 5 weeks up to the 28^th of December 2014?

Two words : Story Telling.

It’s an Emotional Rollercoaster

Humans love stories. They’re powerful and capture the imagination. Each part of a story allows you to feel an emotion. Be it happy, sad, anxious, excitement… the list is endless. And when it comes to consumer behaviour, emotion is key.

To get into the geekiness of things, here’s why emotional marketing works:

We may think of ourselves as logical beings, but actually we’re emotional and base the majority of our decisions on emotion. When thinking about a brand or a product, we’re most likely to evaluate it based on a feeling towards it rather than any information about it.

So for example, if I was to show you a picture of a logo of an animal and ask you to donate £2 a month, you’d probably decline because all you’ve remembered is that it’s a dog charity that wants £2 a month.

If I was to show you a picture of a dog, looking incredibly sad, lonely and showing obvious signs of abuse, you feel sad for the dog, anger towards how it got into that situation and a feeling of needing to help.

When you find out for a little sum of money you can help get dogs, like this one, out of these horrible situations you are likely to donate. Why? Because donating has made you feel better about the situation, it has made you feel pro active and that you’re playing a part in giving these animals a better life.

Therefore, creating an emotional response to an advert has a far bigger influence on consumer behaviour than that of an advert simply showing products.

So when John Lewis plays out a story (be it Monty the Penguin in his quest for love, the little boy excited to give his parents the Christmas gift he’s bought them or in 2015, the man on the moon lonely at Christmas), it’s the emotional rollercoaster we go through in those 2 minutes that has made John Lewis’ Christmas sales rocket year after year.

So when you’re watching the adverts on TV this year, have a think about the ones you remember.

Do you remember it for the information, or because of an emotion its made you feel?

Then look at your own marketing campaign: Does it connect emotionally with your customers? Or are you basing your advertising on boring business logic?

Back in 2012, Water Services Ltd put live their new website. I think anybody working in the web industry would agree that it really is a thing of beauty – a gift that keeps on giving.

Just when you think you’ve taken in all there is to see, you uncover some other little detail that brings another shiver of joy…

Obviously, it’s awful.

But, it’s so awful that it transcends awfulness and becomes something fantastic!

From the wonderful 80’s video game music that welcomes you at massive volume as soon as the site loads, the crazy number of different animations on the page to the random Roman Centurion, I love it.

It’s a beautiful lesson in how not to design an effective website. To help you avoid the same mistakes, here are some of their techniques you should probably look to avoid:

Animation

Movement is distracting. That’s not to say avoid it completely, but make sure it’s working for you, not against you.

There’s so much happening on the Water Services Ltd site that your attention is being pulled around the screen making it really hard to focus on anything in particular.

Autoplay

One word: don’t. The last thing you want people to do when the arrive on your site is have them panicking for the volume button or some other way of shutting off the noise you’re making (often closing the browser).

A key rule of usability is don’t take control away from users: let them decide whether they want to play that video or listen to music whilst they browse.

Creating Confusion

People aren’t great with choice. Choices confuse us. If you want proof, take a read of this famous study of jam sales.  Give a users too many options as to what do and we freeze – we suffer choice paralysis and are very likely to make the easiest decision possible – to leave.

Keep things straightforward and direct users down a clear path to your ultimate goal – rather than bewildering them with options.

‘Mystery Meat’ Navigation

‘Mystery Meat’ was a term applied to Website Navigation by Vincent Flanders to describe a navigation where the link isn’t visible until someone hovers over it (the name comes from the bland unidentifiable meat served in dodgy cafeterias that could be anything).

Mystery Meat Navigation (or MMN) is basically a bad idea: if your users have to guess where they need to click to do something – chances are they won’t do it.

See the rotating circle of images in the middle of the page? You knew that was how to navigate to the different section pages didn’t you?

Distract from the message

The majority of websites’ main objective is to communicate a message. Images and design should aim to support that process – adding context to the message, making a load of plain text more visually appealing, or perhaps illustrating a point to make it easier to understand.

If your design isn’t supporting your message, but is in fact obfuscating it – either by drawing your attention away or, in this case, often by just covering it up – then it’s failing. Far better to strip it away and get your message across!

All that said, I’m not completely oblivious to the possibility that Water Services Ltd have built such an unusual website on purpose.

It’s so bad, it’s hard to believe that anyone would sign off the design for any other reason. Perhaps this was the only way they could think of to get people talking about the site? If so, it might be working beautifully.

What do you think? Do you know a WORSE website? Tell us in the comments below!

“My mother says she’s cold and then makes me put on a coat”