Guernsey Web Design specialists:

Purple Coffee’s design of the new John Thompson Autorestorers was designed to be clean and bold, with an emphasis on usability to reflect the diverse age range of their Guernsey clients. Purple Coffee worked closely with Thompsons throughout the course of the project to ensure the services of Thompsons and the needs of their clients were accurately reflected in the new website. Iconography has been used to aid usability and allow potential clients to quickly relate to and distinguish between Thompsons numerable automotive services. We enjoyed a great working relationship with Thompson’s, here’s what they had to say:

“We had a website set up by an un-named company a few years ago, this was our first website so we followed advice, provided content and left them to it. However after no back-up and disappointment we got in contact with Kate Heywood of The Best of Guernsey who recommended us to Si at Purple Coffee. They have now designed and developed a brand new website which went live today. I have to say I am very impressed with their service and their product, the website looks fantastic and we have built up a good working relationship with them. I would highly recommend them to anyone looking to set up a website for their business.” - Tom Thompson

With more than 25 years experience in the home and garden retail industry, Nick is renowned for his good taste and eye for the unusual. This meant that Nick had a discerning eye for design and was in search of a website that was unique and visually striking.

Guernsey Web Design specialists:

Purple Coffee’s design of the new Avant Garden website really reflects the vibrancy of Avant Garden’s shop at Sausmarez Manor, Guernsey. The innumerable interior and exterior offerings on offer at Avant Garden provided much inspiration for the new design. The shop is a sensual treat; filled with beautiful textures, bright colours and amazing smells, couple this together with its tranquil setting at Sausmarez Manor and you’ll be hard pushed to find a more stimulating shopping experience in Guernsey.

Social Media Marketing:

Further to designing Avant Garden’s new website, Purple Coffee will be co-ordinating a Social Media Marketing campaign to allow Avant Garden to interact with new and existing clients in numerous interactive settings such as Facebook and Twitter. Much of the marketing data gathered from this interaction will be used to continually re-define the way Avant Garden communicate and offer their products to their Guernsey customers.

Print Media and Advertising:

To complement Avant Garden’s online marketing campaign Purple Coffee have designed a Bus Advert to be featured throughout the year on the back of one lucky Guernsey Bus! A combination of targeted traditional advertising and comprehensive online marketing strategy will ensure that Avant Garden is effectively advertised to the Guernsey community both online and offline.

Why use Social Media?

While core business websites provide audiences with information and services, they centre around sales and the promotion of core business values. Social Media systems allow businesses to develop an area, both integrated and separate to their core website, to build a framework for interaction, distribution and analysis of audiences.

Does your Brand have a Friendly Face?

Although many customers today feel comfortable communicating with businesses from behind a computer screen rather than engaging in physical interaction, many customers long for a personal and reassuring touch from businesses. Both current customers and prospective ones are increasingly looking for a real connection with brands. Often audiences favour interaction and reassurance over static information distributed via traditional business websites. Social Media systems allow businesses to develop a personal connection with clients and promote values of trust and community that would perhaps dilute the purpose of traditional business websites.

Whats the Value in been Social?

Your customers are likely searching for your business online; their search for information and their decision making process regarding the engagement with your products/services does not stop with your website. Increasingly customers base their decisions based on social information. In short, why engage with a business based on their marketing pitch or website, when you can speak with your friends or receive an impartial recommendations from people you trust? In this context SMM can be extremely powerful in that it nurtures a community around your products and services, that in turn aids the decision making process of others. People look for transparency from brands, the brands they trust are the ones that have little to hide and join the conversation.

Your Employees can do more for your business than physically provide your product or service. By utilising social media, they can further interact with your audiences to provide a personal touch to client communications. In short, their personality can also become synonymous with your brand.

Your Business Partners/Affiliates can add real value to your SMM campaign. By interacting with other relevant organisations and affiliates in a community driven environment, you are able to add credibility to your brand. For example, connecting publicly via Facebook with supporting organisations or governing bodies of standards can re-assure your onlooking audience. Social media can also provide businesses with the opportunity to connect with others offering a similar service in a different region, this can allow both businesses to expand their relative audience or potential customer base. In short don’t be afraid to “share”, it is the key principal of SMM, you only gat back what you put in.

Social Networking Websites

Such examples include Facebook (Social), LinkedIn (Business). There primary relevance been interaction with clients, building connections, monitoring audiences wants/needs. Often such tools can be customised to match business branding.

Social Bookmarking Websites

Social bookmarking sites allow users to save, share and search web pages. Such examples include Digg and Stumbleupon. There primary relevance been link building and SEO. Submitting content to websites such as these often leads to content been indexed by search engines faster due to there relative SEO authority.

Micro-Blogging

Such examples include Twitter and Tumblr. These platforms provide another SEO efficient platform to contribute to link building and SEO strategy. They are predominately real-time in nature, in that the immediacy and timing of publishing content to platforms like Twitter can have great effect. Search engines are beginning to index real-time content from such systems to further aid users in finding up to date and relevant content.

Video & Photo Sharing

Such examples include YouTube for Video and Flickr for Photo’s. These platforms provide a great way to share multimedia content with users, without the hassle of hosting them on your own servers. YouTube video’s embed easily into Wordpress driven blogs and allow businesses to easily share video and multimedia content on their websites.

1. WordPress is an open source platform.

The WordPress system is open source, in that it is available to all designers and developers to freely integrate into web design and development projects. It can be used, re-used and adapted to provide a multitude of practical solutions for Guernsey businesses. This open source status renders WordPress an extremely versatile and cost effective solution to content management and blogging needs. In terms of business advantage, this means Wordpress costs nothing other than the time it takes to integrate within your website design template.

2. Community driven design and functionality.

Web designers and developers from across the world, not just Guernsey, are able to contribute to the improvement of the WordPress platform by developing new plug-ins and applications that work within the Wordpress Environment. This allows your website to continually evolve and benefit from this evolution. Need an E-mailer, Photo Gallery or Downloads Application? The Wordpress infrastructure allows your website to rapidly and cost effectively benefit from community driven solutions and design refinements.

3. Why Re-Invent the wheel? If it works, roll with it!

At Purple Coffee Guernsey we design and develop online media for a variety of businesses, each with a broad degree of practical needs and wants from their website. While we are adept at creating fully bespoke content management systems for specific client requirements, often Wordpress offers clients with a powerful and evolving content management or blogging solution, without the need for the investment in a more expensive bespoke system that takes longer to develop. While some clients require functionality out of the Wordpress remit, often we find that Wordpress can be effectively adapted to provide clients with the functionality they need.

4. Wordpress is an extremely usable web platform.

WordPress’s collaborative evolution means that it has been through rigorous change and improvement from version to version. The input of designers and developers from across the world has contributed to the success and refinement of Wordpress. For Guernsey businesses, this means the user interface is extremely well tested, proven to be reliable and usable. With little knowledge or training, clients are able to quickly get to grips with updating their own websites; cutting down on ongoing costs often associated with statically built websites.

5. Accessibility matters; with WordPress it comes as standard.

Accessibility refers to a websites compliance with web standards recommended to web designers by organisations such as the W3C. In terms of physical accessibility people often think of access to goods or services for members of the disabled community. Wheelchair access for example. Well the same principals apply to the web. Everyday web users with impaired vision use the web successfully to access information or purchase products. Many websites online suffer from poor levels of code standards compliance, rendering supportive software such as screen readers useless or ineffectual for their users. The WordPress system is AA accessible in terms of its base source code. This ensures websites utilising the WordPress platform encourage and make able equal access to information or services for all users.

Find out more about how Purple Coffee is using WordPress to help the Guernsey Disability Alliance nurture a web based community here.

The website is powered by a bespoke content management system that provides Pink Turtle with finite control over all aspects of their e-commerce solution. It allows customer’s extremely powerful product refinement options that could not have been realised using a third party CMS.

The project was an achievement in communications, the entire brief and project were managed at a distance, with Phil and Tracy from Pink Turtle working from Exeter, while Purple Coffee designed and developed the website from Guernsey, Channel Islands.

This marks the completion of phase one of Pink Turtles website development. We look forward to an ongoing working relationship as the SEO and social media marketing campaign gets under way. Purple Coffee aim to utilise social media systems and analytics to provide Pink Turtle with a cost effective way to present products to new markets, while having the tools they need in place to measure the ROI of the website and make informed marketing decisions for the future.

Visit Pink Turtle Trading at www.pinkturtletrading.com

2010 seems likely to be the year that mobile communications technologies take hold of the average consumer market. With Apple’s iPhone and iTouch experiencing increasing sales and the strategic move of Google to introduce the Nexus this year, consumers are set to experience innovation in products, services and applications perhaps as much a facet of competition between the evolving interests of these two market competitors, as the actual need for the consumer to experience new technologies.

Take the iPad for example, is there really any need for this product, does it solve any new problems, or does it demonstrate the need for apple to distinguish its mobile offerings from its competitors? There is much commodity camaraderie wrapped up in the brand of apple, customers are often blindly allegiant to them, innovation is central to consumers views of the Apple brand to some degree, Apple are forced to innovate and present new offerings before their competitors, because not to do so could conflict with the core principles of the Apple brand and their consumers expectations. We all look to Apple for innovative technologies; to see them miss the boat would compromise their consumer credibility.

“And then there will be the tablets. Most industry observers, including Gadget Lab, expect Apple to release a tablet device, possibly called the iSlate or iGuide, sometime in 2010. Other major manufacturers, including HP, Dell, Intel, Nokia and HTC have been rumoured to be working on tablet-style devices. Smaller companies including Fusion Garage, Notion Ink and ICD have announced plans for tablets in 2010. And many publishers, including Wired’s parent company, Conde Nast, are already working on the software to display e-magazines and other content on tablet devices.“ – Wired Magazine

So with this extract from Wired in mind, is it really any surprise that Apple released the iPad when they did? So other than looking to Apple for innovation, what else is it that motivates consumer uptake of Apple’s new products? If there is no real market need for some of Apple’s products, then why do consumers choose Apple’s offerings over that of their competitors? Perhaps it is this? Apple has an established brand, successful product suite and epitomise values of quality and innovation. Their products often take novel and interesting approaches to what could be argued as inconsequential problems, but utilise new ways of using existing technologies or utilising developments in new media.

Apple are market leaders in technology push innovation rather than relying on market pull. Apple are design led and seek out new market opportunities as triggers for innovation, rather than relying on, or waiting for consumer or market demand for new products or services to trigger their design and innovation processes. To this avail, it is Apple’s brand values and business approach that are integral to ensuring their products remain ahead of the game. In short, they don’t concentrate on current problems; they seek out new ones to inspire further innovation.

Social networking in the form of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now Google’s Buzz are becoming an increasingly unavoidable factor of everyday life for many individuals, businesses and organisations. So with this social networking prevalence and its increasing accessibility in the form of apps for mobile devices, what does this mean for the way we shape our identities and how we present ourselves to others? Do we shape our identities online or do social information systems shape us? Do we pay a price for our self expression?

Social networking systems such as Facebook provide users with many ways to customise their self image, as well as providing numerable ways for users to customise the information they share and distribute amongst their connections in the form of apps or plug-ins. Users are able to customise many things within their social networking profiles that often say a lot about them, or at least demonstrate how they would like their identity to be perceived by others. In a sense it’s like choosing our clothes, or our furniture. These decisions can reveal a lot about our self perceived identity, taste and opinions in a physical and tangible context; social networking simply extends this expression into a new realm.

Take user “avatars” or profile photos as an example; virtually all social systems provide this basic convention that allows users to distinguish themselves and their profiles from other users. In a personal context this is often perceived as very important, since it is often the first point of contact for a user’s connections with their identity online. In a narcissistic sense this is extremely important to many users in projecting a certain image of themselves. This context is not dissimilar for business’s, the way in which companies present their brand to consumers in a social networking sense is just as important as the way they express these brand values via their own websites. So it would seem apparent that users are able to shape their self image or brand within social systems to a certain extent, but how far does this ability to customise go?

I would argue that although social media allows users to customise their on-line presence to a certain extent, that the very structure of social information systems such as Facebook and Twitter are often designed to be consistent from one person to the next, regardless of user’s content changes. Compare Facebook and MySpace for example, while MySpace has allowed the customisation of page layout and appearance, in contrast Facebook restricts this level of customisation and in turn creates a more consistent and usable experience for users. This is in part due to the fact that users become familiar with the page positioning and presentation conventions of certain page elements.

How does the use of conventions across user profiles affect our ability to shape self identity? Is customisation or usability more important to users? If we contrast Facebook and MySpace again we can learn insightful lessons based on their relative user groups and success over one another. While MySpace has traditionally allowed users more customisation options in terms of page layout, backgrounds, colour and other page elements, it has experienced decreasing market share to Facebook, which restricts user’s ability to make such structural changes, in favour of allowing users to amend page elements and add additional applications but preserves much of their positioning and physical attributes such as size.

In terms of effective communication and ease of networking it would seem apparent that Facebook’s more usable system has won the battle with the individual user. However MySpace’s ability to allow further customisation has found a niche in the music industry and with bands. Brands such as this relish the ability to shape identity and brand image far more than is perhaps wanted or needed by individual users. Facebook’s ability to make communication between users comparatively easy and to essentially create a system that requires no knowledge of coding languages makes it a breeze for users to customise, coupled with its ability to integrate 3^rd party applications with ease, Facebook seems to have added to our profiles numerous other ways to easily shape identities and create niche groups or places of security within a overwhelmingly large system. Facebook has in essence created a fully cohesive communications network, or could be thought of as an operating system of sorts, benefiting from its interoperability with 3^rd party applications and ability to easily interconnect user’s and their information. MySpace in contrast remains a collection of user websites that while allowing further scope for self expression hinders the ease of which users are able to communicate with one another and spread information between networks.

So what price do users pay for the usability they experience within social media information systems such as Facebook? I would argue that while communication and limited self expression are becoming increasingly accessible to users, that in effect, the way in which one user presents themselves within systems such as Facebook is not dissimilar to the next. New profile photos, new interests, new links, all however presented in a similar fashion to one another. As usability increases within such systems, in part due to developing conventions, users pay the price for this in terms of their ability to distinguish the way in which they present their content to others. There is perhaps a key reason for the emphasis on usability within such systems. The more usable a product the more users it attracts, the more users it attracts the faster it spreads, the faster it spreads the more efficiently it collates and compares our information as we become increasingly interconnected. Our collated information is the key to effective targeted advertising and hence the holy grail in terms of monetising social media products. In this respect social media is not really free; we pay for our ability to create identity and express ourselves. Google got this model right years ago by monitoring search queries, social media is simply the transcendence of this business model into a social context.

We designed a logo and corporate identity to represent the geographic and management services of John Pepper Consultancy. Our next job was to design a set of accompanying business stationary and website to support his marketing campaign.

The entire project workflow was managed at a distance from Guernsey and Portsmouth; John never had to meet Purple Coffee face to face. This project highlights the fact that with intuitive use of social media, and good communications, that workflow at a distance can minimise costs for clients and result in a great overall web design product. Here’s what John Pepper had to say:

“John Pepper Consultancy Ltd was formed in mid 2009. As the major communications medium to its wider global audience, the company ’s need for a robust, attractive yet authoritiative website complete with branding was of paramount importance. Purple Coffee Interactive Ltd was recommended to me as providing the level of service I needed. A framework brief was provided to Purple Coffee covering branding, logo and website design and content. The company needed a swift response and Purple Coffee responded magnificently in preparing mock ups which reflected the nature and reach of what is a complex business very professionally with a level of flair and innovation in its design and structure that made the content easy to access and understand. The overall task was completed on time in a professional yet friendly manner. Overall, the service offered by Purple Coffee was excellent in terms of response and value for money. I would not hestitate in recommending them to other organisations wishing to develop or update their web presence.” – John Pepper Consultancy

The Healthchek website was integrated with a customised wordpress system that enables full control over both static pages and the Healthchek blog. The vision for the Healthchek website was to provide a system that could grow considerably with time. while maintaining its usability. The website structure encourages the easy spread of Healthchek’s central content to social networks and other social media nodes, this ensures Healthchek’s web based marketing is not neglected amongst the social media market and remains cost effective.

]]> http://www.purplecoffee.co.uk/blog/2010/01/27/purple-coffee-launch-healthchek-guernsey-website/feed/ 0 http://www.purplecoffee.co.uk/blog/2010/01/25/purple-coffee-launch-get-fit-guernsey-website/ http://www.purplecoffee.co.uk/blog/2010/01/25/purple-coffee-launch-get-fit-guernsey-website/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:54:18 +0000 Simon English http://www.purplecoffee.co.uk/blog/?p=146 ...Read More]]> We are happy to announce the launch of the Get Fit Guernsey website. Get Fit Guernsey is a Health and Fitness studio based in Guernsey, Channel Islands. They needed a website that would allow them to update their own content and edit web pages, as well as providing useful downloads and resources for their Guernsey clients to make use of between workout sessions. The Get Fit Guernsey website makes use of a customised wordpress system that allows full control over both static pages and the Get Fit Guernsey blog.