Name:

 S0l

Position in the company:

Drupal Developer

How long have you worked for GA? 

5 Weeks

Describe yourself in 3 words:

Comitas, Firmitas, Gravitas

What sort of music are you into?

Contempo Folk, Psychedelic BreakBeat, Dubstep, Rock & Country

Do you have any guilty pleasures?

Rock & Country

What is your biggest achievement?

Learning Gaelic

If you could be any character in fiction, who would you be?

The Architect

If you won the lottery what would be the first thing you would buy?

A London wide parking permit

What superpower would you most like to have?

China

What three items would you take to a desert island other than food and water?

Photo voltaic cell, earth station, Bit Mining server

Famous last words?

I’m just going to recalibrate the Super Proton Synchrotron

The fair is potentially the easiest and most fun way of viewing and purchasing art from more than 100 galleries under one roof. Click on the image above or below to check times and book tickets.

]]> http://www.graphicalliance.co.uk/affordable-art-fair-website/feed/ 0 http://www.graphicalliance.co.uk/affordable-art-fair-website/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GraphicAllianceBlog/~3/Gj4QdHqoZZU/ http://www.graphicalliance.co.uk/valentines-day-by-the-real-flower-company/#comments Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:02:19 +0000 John Werbinski http://www.graphicalliance.co.uk/?p=4036 For over six months we have been helping The Real Flower Company with its online marketing and surely their hat box bouquets are the perfect Valentine’s Day gift! Check out the full selection at their website here!

If you want to have a look at the quality of the flowers up close and personal, The Real Flower Company has got shops in Selfridges and The Shop at Bluebird in SW3.

The Graphic Alliance Questionnaire

Name: Irina Kozakina

Position in the company: Finance/Admin Executive

How long have you worked for GA? Just started!

Describe yourself in 3 words:  Happy, never stop, action girl.

What sort of music are you into? Techno, deep house and good old 80’s.

Do you have any guilty pleasures? Chocolate Ferrero Rocher.

What is your biggest achievement? Right now, to finish off AAT studies, then create another mission!

If you could be any character in fiction, who would you be? Hercule Poirot, I am like him and ask too many questions.

If you won the lottery what would be the first thing you would buy?  I would go to see my mum for a few months.

What superpower would you most like to have? To be invisible!

What three items would you take to a desert island other than food and water? More food!

Famous last words? And then what!

Product Listing Ads

To promote your products on Google Shopping, Product Listing Ads allow you to display your product price, image, business name and more to interested users. Setting up your product listing ads is easy and you can opt to build your campaign directly from Merchant Centre or from AdWords. Once your campaign has been set up Google will automatically display the products most relevant to a users search query.

Until now product listing ads were only available in the US, but by the end of March 2013 this feature will be available to retailers in the UK, Australia, Japan, Brazil, Spain, Italy, France and the Netherlands. By improving user experience, product listing ads will create new opportunities for retailers to attract additional customers to their stores.

Remarketing

Remarketing is not everyone’s cup of tea as some users find the adverts overly invasive. In a nutshell, Google Remarketing allows you to target your ads at users who have visited your site and then left. You’ve probably seen those adverts which seemingly follow you about wherever your online activity takes you – that’s remarketing at work.

The beauty of Google remarketing is it allows you to display your ads to a targeted audience, helping you avoid wasted spend on unqualified traffic. Browsers targeted by remarketing have already shown an interest in your products by visiting your site, making them the most qualified leads you have available. Remarketing works for some retailers and not others, but if you decide to give it a spin, allow yourself every chance of success with a trial that lasts a few months rather than just a couple of weeks.

Mobile

As each year goes by the stranglehold of mobile technology on our lives becomes stronger. Smartphones are now the last thing many of use at night and the first thing we pick up in the morning. With 9 of every 10 phones sold now a smartphone, 2013 is set to become the year more people access the internet on a mobile device than through their computer.

93 per cent of people in the UK use their mobile everyday to access the internet, so just think of the size of the potential market you are missing out on without a dedicated mobile PPC campaign.

Tracking

With marketing budgets increasingly under the spotlight, understanding how your customers convert and the value they hold to your business is vital. There are many tracking options available to track online activity, but if you’re worried about how to implement the correct code or how long it will take to get through your IT development backlog, Google’s Tag Manager could be the solution for you. Tag Manager removes the hassle and cost of adding and updating marketing optimisation tags on a website. Using a single intuitive interface allows users to edit their website’s tags without having to make changes to the code.

Tag Manager helps to:

• Get campaigns live quickly;
• Remove the need to edit code to add or change tags;
• Catch problems before they occur;
• Error checking to let you know whether a tag is working.

Attribution Modelling

The attribution modelling tool has been greeted enthusiastically by marketers since its introduction a year or so ago for Google Analytics Premium. Attribution modelling allows for greater insights into the customer journey and the success specific online marketing activities are having. This helps marketers to devise strategies which work together to drive sales and conversions across a range of channels.

Attribution modelling will soon be available to all Analytics users by the end of the second quarter 2013. Data will be available instantly and no additional setup is required, allowing you to compare multiple models and values across a range of channels including paid and organic search, email, affiliate marketing, display ads, mobile placements and more.

AdWords & Analytics Data

A Google Analytics account can now be simply linked to an AdWords account, providing marketers with important metrics such as bounce rate, pages per visit and the average duration of a visit, from within the AdWords interface. This provides additional insight for the PPC team, helping them to identify the most attractive parts of the website for customers, as well as determining the proportion of traffic or sales being driven by AdWords.

With so many new tools for Pay-Per-Click marketers to get their teeth into the year ahead certainly promises to be a busy one, and if all goes well, plenty more profitable too!

But first, an aside: “Open what?”

The idea of “open source” has been gaining traction over the last decade or two and is a fundamental change to traditional proprietary models of software development. Without going into too much detail, the most noticeable attribute is that source code for projects is freely available. You have a very high degree of freedom when working with open source, with the only major requirement being that developers modifying open source code must also release their source code.

The result is that communities are built around maintaining and supporting useful tools: help is usually easy to find, bugs are found faster and problems are fixed sooner. This is the advantage of having more people looking at and using the same source code. Given that most open source projects are distributed free of charge, this also keeps software acquisition costs down and can be a huge time saver for developers — instead of writing everything from scratch, bug testing that by yourself and maintaining that project for the rest of its useful life, you just deploy an open source project and modify to suit. This is particularly helpful with functionality most developers hate to code — user authentication, for instance.

WordPress

WordPress is the most-used open source content management system on the web by a fairly high margin — the second most-used in the top million sites, Joomla!, has 1/6th of its user-base. A large part of it is that WordPress was one of the earliest and best CMSes, and it appeared just as the concept of “blogging” went mainstream. This focus on blogging perhaps explains some of its architectural decisions — unlike Drupal or Joomla!, WordPress is best suited for simple websites comprised mainly of “article-like” content. By “article-like,” I mean that it resembles a blog or newspaper article: there’s a headline, body text, possibly tags, maybe an image or two. While this doesn’t sound overly impressive, it works quite well for basic websites. WordPress is also pretty decent for sites with photo galleries.

WordPress’ functionality doesn’t stop there, however. Its extensive plugin directory and user community means that basic WordPress websites can be extended a variety of ways. For instance, a plugin called BuddyPress can be used to create small Facebook-like social networks for site users; another one adds a forum. This extensibility is a key reason why open source content management systems are so powerful.

However, what if your content has a lot of characteristics that might not be so easily described in a paragraph? A real estate site is a good example. Instead of being presented with a big text field, you might want your content to be more structured: How many rooms does the house have? What is its square footage? How many of those rooms are bathrooms? Bedrooms? What material is the exterior? And most importantly, where is it located?

Drupal 7

Drupal is fantastic for such content. It allows you to enter data into a big form with preset options, which simplifies the task of entering this data. Another advantage of doing it this way is that it greatly increases how useful that data is — creating a list of 2 bedroom flats bigger than a certain square footage value becomes an incredibly simple task because you simply have to filter on known values.

While WordPress can do custom content types also, it’s nowhere near as good at it as Drupal is. Not only that, but Drupal makes relating arbitrary pieces of content extremely simple — for instance, adding a “Similar properties” field that allows one to manually select other flats is really simple in Drupal.

Drupal’s also a very good platform for creating really involved end-user experiences. While users in WordPress are pretty much relegated to adding article-like content, Drupal users are able to substantially change the layout of pages without ever writing a line of code.

Lastly, while both can do multi-site setups (I.e., london.somesite.com and nyc.somesite.com share the same codebase and are similar, yet operate independently), I find Drupal gives a lot more control over the end result than WordPress.

What about Joomla!?

I’d be amiss not to talk about Joomla! in this space — after all, in the top million sites, a full percentage point more people use it compared with Drupal.

While Drupal and Joomla! target the same audience (complex use cases and community sites that are difficult to build in WordPress), in my opinion, Joomla! isn’t nearly as refined a piece of software as Drupal. Creating complex content types is more difficult and the administrative interface is terribly disorganized and unintuitive. The biggest difference, however, is that Joomla! plugins are really big chunks of functionality — even fully-built sub-systems — that are generally pretty monolithic and difficult to customize. This can increase development speed, but often at the cost of extensibility and user-friendliness. Meanwhile, Drupal gives you smaller building blocks to use and expects you to build the components you want with them. This often takes more time, but the result is much easier to use and generally more streamlined.

It’s pretty telling that, while Joomla! is used slightly more in the top million sites on BuiltWith, Drupal has almost triple the number of installs when looking at the top 100,000 sites (17.24% compared with Joomla!’s 6.79%) and Joomla! doesn’t even show up in the top 10,000 sites (Drupal, meanwhile, commands 18.79%).

In closing

Hopefully now you have an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the two platforms that serve much of the web. While both are excellent pieces of mature software, understanding where each excels is key when choosing the right content management system.

Ændrew Rininsland is a PHP developer at Graphic Alliance. In addition to his work with WordPress and Drupal, he has also done data journalism for The Guardian and The Economist. He tweets via @aendrew on Twitter and maintains a blog at www.aendrew.com.

As a result there are a now a vast number of readily available and cost effective plug-ins available to enhance the out of the box Magento platform. Here are seven of our essential Magento plug-ins currently available that will specifically have a positive impact on your websites eCommerce performance:

Checkout Improvement – Improve upon the default Magento one page checkout. Remove unnecessary steps, improve layout, and combine related items into fewer stages.

Solution: PrimeCheckout: $150.00

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/primecheckout-7432.html

Abandon Basket Follow up – currently losing 55% through the checkout process

Solution: AheadWorks: $199.00

http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/follow-up-email.html

Amazon Store – integrates and set up Amazon store, fulfilled from website.

Solution: Holbi: Pricing depending on number of products.

http://www.amazonconnector.co.uk/amazon/amazon-connector-integration-with-magento/

Facebook Product Catalogue – integrates and sets up a Facebook shop catalogue, fulfilled from website.

Solution: Beetailer : Free to $300 depending on number of products.

http://www.beetailer.com/

Create product feeds – Create bespoke product feeds for different third party requirements, such as WebGains, Google Shopping, Shopping.com, Yahoo! Store and so on.

Solution: Feed Creator Pro: £139.00

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/feed-creator-pro-6676.html

Back in stock alerts – facilitate alerts for customers who require a product that is not in stock.

Solution: Out of Stock Notification Module: $79

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/out-of-stock-notification-3553.html

Customer Credits – rather than a straight refund, offer a credit as a way to keep the sale.

Solution: MageWorx: $199.00

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/customer-credits.html

Explore more plug-ins at http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/

At the Graphic Alliance, our core expertise lies in creating memorable online destinations and influencing people to visit them. The use of live, indexable type that is also legible, elegant and distinctive is one essential ingredient in achieving both of these intentions.

Previously, non-standard fonts were presented as images. This was the only conceivable way to control the aesthetic of a typeface online. Whilst many would agree that a picture is worth a thousand words, unfortunately, Google isn’t one of them. Google places much higher importance on keywords found in header tags than in the alt tags of images and as a result sites using images to display headings miss out on valuable visibility.

Furthermore modern web fonts remain crisp and scalable on mobile devices and allow users in other countries to access information in their native language with full character sets and inherent personalities. Web fonts also allow brands to deliver visual continuity, helping customers identify a brand’s website and subsequent digital marketing messages as legitimate. In the realms of e-commerce where trust is a key driver of purchase, the value of familiarity can’t be underestimated.

As web fonts have become more popular and more widely supported, the libraries of popular font foundries have grown to include many of our favourite faces as well as introduced us to a handful of exciting newcomers. We’ve rounded up our top 10 free and premium fonts below.

Top 10 Free Web Fonts

1. Open Sans
2. League Gothic
3. Museo Slab
4. Ostrich Sans
5. Lato
6. PT Serif
7. Jura
8. Chunkfive
9. Aller

Top 10 Premium Web Fonts

Our website for makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury makes use of the Vanitas web font

1. Omnes Pro
2. Proxima Nova
3. Din Display Pro
4. Adobe Caslon Pro
5. Vanitas
6. Soho Gothic
7. Rotis Sans
8. Encore Sans Pro
9. Adelle
10. Baskerville

We were chuffed when our 7 foot (REAL) Christmas Tree arrived and was the perfect height! Decorated in the Graphic Alliance pink and blue it is now the festive focal point of our meeting room.

Taken from one of my favourite Christmas films ‘Elf’, “the best way to spread Christmas cheer is by singing loud for all to hear!” Here are a few of our favourite Christmas songs, spread the merriment and sing along!

Last Christmas – Wham!

Fairytale Of New York – The Pogues

Christmas Wrapping – The Waitresses

A Spaceman Came Travelling – Chris de Burgh

Stop The Calvery – Jona Lewie

Broadly speaking there are three things that contribute to great search engine performance. Firstly, having a site built with logical HTML and search engine principles in mind. Secondly, having a site that contains loads of pages with keyword-rich content. Thirdly, having a site with many relevant, quality inbound links from other websites.

PR companies are well placed to manage the link building from relevant and authoritative sites. They own the key relationships with influential opinion-formers, such as journalists and bloggers. Moreover, PRs can also easily optimise a client’s on-page content, particularly as most sites now benefit from intuitive content management systems such as Drupal 7 and WordPress.

So why should PR agencies bother? SEO finally provides PR practitioners with accurate, tangible data to prove a return on investment and also get their hands on accurate metrics which will help them plot more effective future campaigns for their clients. What are the best metrics for PR companies to use? First and foremost, the upturn in traffic – particularly referring visitors – can be measured on a monthly basis. Keyword ranking metrics show how the site ranks for certain keywords in comparison with competitors. Page indexing measurement illustrates that the more keyword-rich pages are published, the more ‘visible’ the website becomes to the search engines. Inbound links generated by PR companies on news publication websites, blogs, social networking sites and bookmarking sites can be tracked and benchmarked.  Finally, conversions of website visitors into customers can be logged and it is worth paying attention to converting traffic from referring sites specifically.

The Appeal gives a prominent platform to its chosen charities and aims to encourage  people to give more and do more to secure the future for the next generation, whether by supplying more music, lifting children out of poverty, safeguarding the environment, or protecting and enabling access to art in all its forms. The new website provides much more information about the Appeal and the role of the new Lord Mayor of London, Roger Gifford.

Graphic Alliance is delighted to support this fantastic cause and in particular the charities supported by the appeal including the City Music Foundation, Futures for Kids, and Gifford Wood Appeal.