Content on Afroleft

Shortcuts You Can’t Take

Mon, 16 Dec 2013 10:50:00 +0000

Last month Sage approached me asking if I could write an article on marketing for their small business community.

To narrow the context a bit, I concentrated on marketing websites. The outcome of which I’m really pleased with. The short post offers an insight into my past 5 years of researching, designing, building and iterating marketing websites for clients. What works / what doesn’t; all brought to life with three tiny case studies from a few of my longstanding clients.

This is How You Automate

Fri, 18 Oct 2013 08:39:00 +0000

Just received a wonderfully engaging / automated / interesting / human / polite / funny / direct / personal upgrade message (there’s an oxymoron there, I know) from the folk at TeuxDeux. This is how automated marketing should be:

Dearest Tom,

It’s been six months since the launch of the new TeuxDeux and we very much hope you’ve enjoyed it. Given how much you’ve been using it, it’s our guess that you have. In fact, with 1846 items done since you’ve been with us, you are certainly among the most productive people on the planet!

What’s next?

Sat, 03 Aug 2013 20:30:00 +0000

When we hit the bottom of your web page, what do you want us to do? Where should we go next? What are other people saying about this service? Should we get in touch with your team or look at the tech specs for this ground-breaking new product?

Too many websites fail to answer these simple questions.

Think about it: It’s a bit like visiting a supermarket with aisles that lead to dead ends. You either walk all the way back up the aisle, or you loose interest altogether and are forced to use the fire exit.

Product Design: Extending the Metaphors

Mon, 07 May 2012 19:05:00 +0000

Around 2 years ago this August, Mikey, Sean and I began conceptualising our ideas for outheard.tv.

Our idea was quite simple; to create a website for sharing gig videos. On top of this, we wanted to group videos from events together – meaning you could browse up and down videos from the breathtaking gig you attended last weekend.

Quite quickly we realised that we’d need to ask users to tag the event in their video once they’d finish uploading it. The technology and function behind this decision was solid and worked brilliantly – upload your videos and tag them to the event.