GPMD News and Articles

5 Seconds is all it takes to get simple, instant feedback on your designs

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:34:17 +0100

Have you ever heard of www.fivesecondtest.com? well if not, you should check it out. It's a great way of attracting instant feedback within a few seconds. Basically a design appears in front of you, and you have all of 5 seconds of viewing pleasure to click the key aspects that stand out to you. Once 5 seconds are up, you then make notes on what you clicked on and why. A great insightful tool to get initial design feedback. Great Work and a fantastic tool for Designers, Usability, Conversion and SEO experts to collaborate their ideas.

The quick and easy way to update multiple match types for Google Adwords Using Alphabetizer

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:08:44 +0100

I thought I would share an incredibly handy tool, it’s called the Alphabetizer, and I am using it to speed up the process of setting up new campaign matching types on Google AdWords, but of course you can use it for any PPC network. It can be used for a variety of tasks and is capable of performing more complex ones than I am going to show you, but even so, this happens to be an extremely valuable time saving tool.

With this tool I can sort out different matching types within a few simple clicks. Below I have included a step by step for one specific way you could use this tool to improve productivity and make more use of your time when using AdWords.

Step 1: Extracting Data:

I have used the Google Keyword Tool to extract some keyword data that I want to use for my PPC campaign. (see image below)

Step 2: Download the data:

Download your data using the download function and select the option that is appropriate for you. In this case as it’s an example I select the whole data set, but if I was specifically looking at a targeted campaign I would have downloaded “selection only”.

Step 3: Select the keywords for matching types:

Select the keywords from the spreadsheet that you want to adjust for your PPC campaign.

Step 4 : Insert the data into the Alphabetizer tool:

Once you have selected the keyword data from the spreadsheet, add it to the alphabetizer tool. This is where we can specify all the matching options within a few easy steps.

Step 5 : Converting the data into matching types:

Now that you have added the data to the alphabetizer tool we can now bulk update the keywords with the required matching type, which would be the following:

Broad Match = Keyword (We have this already from the spreadsheet)
Phrase Match = “Keyword” (we will use this one as the example)
Exact Match = [Keyword]

Select the following options below for phrase match (In order to do a phrase match as specified above you will need to wrap it in quotations - this is common syntax for PPC) and put speech marks in both boxes, this will tell the alphabetizer to wrap speech marks around the whole phrase by inserting them at the beginning and the end.

Once you have done this, click the button “Alphabetize” and it will do a little magic and return all your keyword phrases nicely wrapped in the matching criteria you specified. (see below)

As you can see from the image above you have all your keywords formatted within a short few steps. If you wanted to change the match type to “exact” you would need to add square brackets to the beginning and end boxes and it will wrap accordingly. This is a short simple procedure to convert your data, saving you the mundane task of formatting each and every keyword phrase manually, which can take an inordinate amount of time if you are doing this for 150+ keyword phrases.

Of course there are other ways of formatting this data using excel but for ease of use and accessibility (not everyone has excel installed) I find this tool extremely handy and it's one that I use on a daily basis.

There are many other uses for this tool which I have listed briefly below, so you may find this ideal for something specific which is in your everyday task list.

Stripping HTML
Ignoring cases
Making all words lower case
Capitalising the first word
Removing Duplicates (another time saver when no use of excel)
Reverse lists
Randomisation
Ignore Indefinite Articles
Ignore Definite Articles

So if you are interested in giving this a go then check out the Alhpabetizer Tool.

Amazon has taken 1 billion dollars worth of orders through mobile technology.

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 01:09:01 +0100

We are truly in the times of mobile technology. Amazon have posted news about customers ordering more than $1 billion worth of products a year by using mobile technology. Smart Phones have transformed the way this industry works, with user friendly rich applications making it beyond convenient to order what you want when you want.

For example, I went to PC World to buy something, but felt the price to be rather costly, quickly fired up the Amazon app whilst standing in the store, and found it to be considerably cheaper, so within a few clicks I had completed the order. This just shows you how mobile technology can affect our buying behaviour; we have so many valuable sources of information at our finger tips with the power of smart phones and new age mobile technology.

Are you taking advantage of this growing market? Things are changing are you going to be a part of it?

Standard Chartered Great City Race 2010

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 09:56:02 +0100

6,500 runners, over 400 companies and 5km of closed-off streets within the famous Square Mile… This is The Standard Chartered Great City Race and it is London’s premier corporate running challenge.

Here's the view from our office window. Well done to everyone who took part!

My friend Ollie is in there somewhere...

The ongoing cost of an Open Source CMS

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:41:00 +0100

We often find that a lot of people we talk to about content management do not fully understand the cost implications of running an enterprise CMS, and sometimes even just the basic costs of maintaining a simple website. In this post I'll explain a little about what an Open Source CMS is, the initial implementation, everything after launch, and give you some links to popular Open Source vendors (products).

What is an Open Source CMS?

An Open Source CMS (Content Management System) is essentially a piece of software or program that is issued with an Open Source license. This licence usually states the the background coding of the CMS and is available for you to download, install and operate. There are a few variations when it comes to software licences, some of which allow you to completely modify the source code of the product, others restrict what you can do with the code. I'll put together another post soon highlighting the differences and what they they might mean in the real world.

This software or CMS is primarily used to update and manage websites. These can be small 5 page micro-sites up to massive news portals with 1million articles of content. This is a good time to point out the other two types of CMS licence. The first is commercial, as in you pay for user licences and these are usually recurring each year (and often get quite expensive) which the second is bespoke. A bespoke CMS is a solution that is custom created for you (or several companies) usually by a single entry (company). There is a slight downside to bespoke CMS's. Again, I'll leave this for another post...

The initial implementation

The cost of the initial implementation of your chosen CMS (and all the feature that you want) can range from £5,000 to £500,000 (no single company would deliver the latter range). This phase is also the biggest and usually most complex. However, when the project is launched, signed-off and completed it isn't never actually "finished".

From the moment the CMS is launched

As soon as the CMS is live and operating there are a series of tasks and services that you need to consider:

Technical Support / Help Desk

Every CMS implementation is different, and each company using the CMS have different requirements, staffing levels and technical experience available. This is why you have to consider technical support and help desk options. Costing such a thing depends completely on:

The amount of time you require from an agency.
The technical people you need available.
How quickly you require responses.

As an example, most of our customers are happy to be charged on the clock whenever they call up or e-mail a request. We track our time and bill to the second, so it is the fairest way to manage.

Secure Managed Hosting

Obviously your CMS has to be hosted somewhere. There are normally only three options: (again there is a lot more to this point than we have space for in this post)

Hosting with the CMS vendor / web agency.
Hosting the CMS yourself on your own servers.
Hosting with a third party such as Byte Mark Hosting.

I won't go into the the pros and cons of each of these, but I will say that the cost implications can be a little deceiving. For example: if you decide to host the CMS yourself and your technical team doesn't have the specific experience to install, update and manage the particular CMS, they are going to need help from somewhere. This is technical support that you are going to be charged for. I've been involved in many projects where the amount of time we have spent helping the customers IT team or whoever, fix, setup and deploy the CMS on their own hardware cost more that the price of just hosting with us for the ENTIRE year. I'm not exaggerating, our entry level hosting package for SilverStripe CMS is £600 per year the same as our daily support rate! You can see how quickly these costs can add up?

CMS Upgrades / Maintenance / Service Level Agreements

I thought the hosting section would have been smaller than that! I'm going to have to get to the point...

As the CMS is a constantly evolving piece of software, it means that you need to make sure it is continually upgraded to the latest stable version, and all available security fixes are applied. There are two benefits to this:

You usually get to use new and improved features that help you work and manage your website
You don't end up in a position in 3 years time where you have a CMS that is out of date, and that it takes literally weeks of development time to get it to the latest stable version. This amount of work will of course create quite a large bill.

Some agencies like GPMD offer Service Level Agreements. These are ongoing contracts where we allocate time and resources to make sure your system is always up to date and secure. We actually offer a few valuable additions to our SLA such as Priority Response Time, Inclusive Support Time, System Up Time Guarantees and more...

Additional Training

Finally the last item I want to talk about is additional training. Now this sounds like a really minor point, but unless you plan the training and make sure your team are up to speed it won't be as effective as it could be. It is much better to have some refresher training for yourself than continuously phoning up or emailing requests about small task that you could easily perform with a little guidance. (and probably faster than the time to take to report it and get a response). This is about being more effective with your CMS.

The CMS should make your life easier!

Now that we have covered the most common ongoing costs to running an Open Source CMS I think it's important to make one point clear. The purpose of having a CMS in the first place is to make your life easier when updating and managing your website(s). If it becomes a burden or a headache something isn't right, but it can be corrected. Get in touch if you would like to discuss this further...

Our choice of CMS at GPMD

We use the SilverStripe CMS and have implemented many solutions at various levels. If you want to find out a little more about SilverStripe visit our SilverStripe section.

Open Source CMS Vendors

Alfresco - open source WCMS and DMS - origin US.
ATutor - a PHP/MySQL based solution - origin Canada.
AWF-CMS - a PHP/MySQL based solution - origin Germany.
Back-End - PHP/MySQL based solution.
Bitflux - based on php, MySQL, XML and XSLT - origin Switzerland.
Bricolage - perl, Postgres solution with DMS and CMS.
Campsite - a Java based solution with good feature list.
Cofax - a web based text and multimedia publication system.
Contenido - PHP/MySQL based solution - origin Germany
Dotnetnuke - built on MS ASP.net platform
EasyCMS - a php based solution that needs no database.
Easypublisher - a solution based on Zope.
eZ publish - used as platform for portals, websites and intranets - origin Norway.
Mambo - OS project with communities across Europe.
Midgard - a php based content management solution.
MMbase - a open source publication system.
MySource Matrix - an open source solution - origin Australia.
OpenCMS - a Java/XML based solution - origin Germany.
phpCMS - a php based solution - origin Germany.
postnuke - a php based solution.
Redhat - rebadged ArsDigita solution, Java/Oracle/Unix based.
SilverStripe - a php based BSD license CMS origin New Zealand.
Simple - a php, MySQL based solution - origin Switzerland.
Typo3 - a PHP/MySQL based solution.
Apache Lenya - a 100% Java based solution based on open standards.
Zope - an Object Oriented solutions based on Python.

How Google Caffeine is changing search?

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:37:14 +0100

Search is changing, it is far more competitive and we have to keep on top of this game to have any chance of remaining ahead of the competition, that's why we need to know what the introduction of Google Caffeine has done for search and how we can make the best use of it.

They called it the May Day Update in Search, but for those of you who don’t know, it was basically when Google announced that caffeine was rolled out but not for 100% of queries. So what can caffeine deliver to us in the aid of search? Well, I'll tell you, it can deliver much faster speeds of indexing which means it can crawl through a vast amount of content to deliver the most relevant results in a shorter period of time.

The introduction of the newly added speed means that Google will deliver fresh content through universal search. This means fresher images, video and rich media, can be indexed within hours, sometimes minutes of the content being crawled.

With Google's added speed with indexation, is it any wonder that we are beginning to think about behavioral search and how caffeine will be more than capable of delivering this? This not only means that Google will deliver far more relevant content, but it shall also line the pockets of the Silicon Valley giant.

Google will be able to deliver extremely relevant adverts on their PPC network which of course could increase the advertisers ROI, which in turn, means the advertiser is spending more with Google. So everyone is happy, well, nearly everyone, it is just going to make SEO far more difficult to achieve. Not only do you have to rank for keyword phrases, but now we shall need to understand the behavioral mindset and deliver appropriate content.

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Wordpress 3.0 Released - E-mail from founder

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:49:32 +0100

Here's a nice e-mail from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. I like the personal approach that Wordpress / Automatic adopt.

E-mail reads:

Subject: WordPress 3.0 "Thelonious" available

"You've probably already seen the notice in your dashboards, so I'll keep this one short and sweet:

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/

3.0 is faster, stabler, and more secure, so you can focus on what matters (your audience) and let the rest fade to the background.

Custom post types, MU merge, menu editor, Twenty Ten theme, over 1,200 bug fixes... there's so much to enjoy in this new release, we're really proud of it. It's the best WordPress yet, and available for a limited time for only free ninety nine. ;)

Tell your friends, help them upgrade, write new themes that use the new features, spread the good word.

Love,
Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt | http://wordpress.org

------------------------------------------------
At some point you signed up for the WordPress.org announcement list.
If that was an indiscretion you'd rather forget, click below."

A nice touch.

Editing content in SilverStripe 2.4

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:02:00 +0100

The latest release of SilverStripe has been available for a while now. Here's an updated overview video of how to manage and edit your website content (with funky background music!).

If you are running a previous version of SilverStripe (2.3 or earlier) and wish to upgrade please contact us on 020 7183 1072.

Varien release Magento Mobile

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 08:57:00 +0100

This week Varien released the Magento Mobile, a mobile e-commerce platform.

It is still in limited release, meaning you need to ask Varien if you can buy it from them. However, it would be interesting to see how this product might integrate with existing, bespoke online stores. From what I have read so far the guys at Magento will manage iPhone & IPad apps within the Apple Store.

If you want to read a little more check out the launch page: http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/mobile

Here's a quick homemade video:

GPMD raising money and awareness for young homeless people

Tue, 25 May 2010 11:05:00 +0100

We have signed up to sleep outside in October 2010 to raise money and awareness for the Action for Children charity. The event is called Byte Night 2010 and is aimed at IT and business professionals.

Please sponsor the team via the Virgin Money Donations website: http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/gpmd

More information about Byte Night can be found on the website and head over to Action for children for more about the Charity.

Each pound counts and of course we'll be tweeting and taking photos of the event on October 8th 2010.

Thanks in advance!

Emma's first day at GPMD

Wed, 19 May 2010 17:00:00 +0100

Today was my first day working at GPMD, it was nice to be greeted by Mark, Rich and an Agenda. I always find the hardest part of starting a new job is the unknown. As I looked through the plan of my day, the butterfly's subsided as I realised my day was about getting familiar with GPMD, seeing what I am capable of and what I would like focus on.

I am here to work with the SilverStripe CMS yet in addition I am being given the opportunity to work in my area of specialisation: Usability. I will have my own Usability project which I hope will give me the chance to grow and learn in the field.

Thank you guys and Sveta! for a very welcoming first day.

Although it is not quite over yet! we are just off to the monthly SilverStripe UK Meetup, I hope to meet you there!

New SilverStripe & Magento hybrid project goes live - Time2.co.uk

Wed, 05 May 2010 10:09:00 +0100

I am thrilled to finally unveil the brand new TimeSquared website. We've been working closely with DM London (the company behind Time2) for the past six months to deliver a solution to an interesting brief.

DM London asked us to come up with a strategy to market and sell fashion watches and luxury watches side-by-side on the same website. We have also implemented an online marketing strategy comprising of an editorial magazine style approach coupled with social media monitoring.

Phase one of the website has all the major requirements covered. We'll be working with DM London on regular basis each month to review and enhance the website. Take a look at it here: http://www.time2.co.uk

We'll be putting together a case study with more detail about the project this month.

Here's a quick list of what we have implemented on the site:

SilverStripe content management system (runs the editorial content)
Magento E-commerce platform
Integration with Eurostop EPOS system
Integration with Communicator Corp email service provider
SagePay Payment Gateway integration
360 Degree image viewer
...and more, just take a look at the site.

I am certain that the site is going to be a big success and I can't wait to start going through the feedback we gather.

Online Marketing & SEO guru Chris Avery joins GPMD

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:10:00 +0100

We are delighted to welcome Chris Avery to the GPMD family. Chris will be heading up our online marketing optimisation services.

Chris studied at Brighton University and has 6 years of commercial experience in the online marketing & optimisation industry.

In his spare time Chris loves going to the beach, playing and watching rugby and listening to his favourite bands, Led Zeppelin, Bedouin Soundclash and many others...

We'll be looking at our current clients online marketing techniques and see where we can improve your search engine rankings and overall online positioning.

New Design Partner - Glow Design

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 09:50:00 +0100

We've made friends with Glow Design, a Shoreditch based design agency who work with clients such as: ICAP, Wall Street Systems, Nimrod and Traiana. Glow have a team of seven, including three awesome designers. They specialise in brand development, advertising, web design, marketing and sales collateral.

Glow have decided to partner with GPMD so that they can offer a solid open source content management solution to their customers. This is a smart move by the chaps at Glow. They now have a solution provider for both proprietary and open source CMS deployment. This means that if a prospect has to use a certain technology, they've got it covered.

We've been working with Glow on their new website (built on SilverStripe) which everyone is very pleased with. www.glow-design.com.

Why GPMD work with external design agencies

Some people ask me why GPMD use external designers and agencies when we have our own designers. The answer is quite straightforward.

We have some extremely good web designers in-house but we don't specialise in off-line design. What usually happens is that the design agency will win a new contract, creating the design, both online and offline. This is where they need the development expertise. Occasionally we find a prospect in a sector that we don't have much design experience in. In this situation it makes sense for the client and us to use the most appropriate design agency.

If you run a design agency or are a freelance web designer and are interested in partnering up with an open source development team, give Rich a call on 020 7183 1072.

SilverStripe 2.4 Highlights

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 09:46:00 +0100

At last nights London SilverStripe CMS Meetup Jamie presented highlights of the SilverStripe 2.4 release of the content management system. We've uploaded the presentation slides to slideshare and embeded it below.

Feel free to post questions on this page and we'll reply as soon as possible.

View more presentations from GPMD.

If you would like to attend a SilverStripe meetup you can register for free on meetup.com

Why Web Development is interesting

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:15:00 +0100

I recently found this video blog by Micah Gold-Markel from avEight Inc, A Philadelphia based web development company. In this video Micah talks about how interesting web development is and how we all have to constantly keep up with the times due to software, hardware and internet progression.

Very true Micah and thanks for sharing this video.

Helpful Geek: Numeronyms - What are they?

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:38:00 +0100

Just in case anyone has to deal with web developers or agencies or geeks you may find this useful.

Numeronyms are words with all the letters in the middle replaced with a number. This number is the amount of letters that have been removed. Here's an example:

Usability becomes u7y
Accessibility becomes a11y

If you are talking about implementing a content management system you may find references to i18n or L10n (Internationalisation or Localisation).

I hope this helps.

Meet Buster - The new GPMD Dog

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 08:30:00 +0100

Today is a very special day as I collected Buster our new office pal from Battersea. Poor old Buster has an ear infection hence the dreaded cone. Still it's nice to have him in the office to keep us all smiling.

Woof woof!

Social Media Content vs Your Own Website

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:38:00 +0000

While waiting at the bus stop this morning I spotted a poster for a new movie called: "Kick Ass". One thing that struck me was that there was not a website address for the movie. Usually you see something like: www.thebourneultimatum.com or www.saw6film.com.

Instead, the poster had youtube.com/kickass and facebook.com/kickassmovie links. This is quite interesting in that the promoters have realised that it is so much easier to generate a social buzz via the most popular social networking website than it is from their own website. On Facebook, the page already has over 11,000 fans and YouTube has over 80,000 views of the Kickass channel.

This is slightly related to the recent Econsultancy post about Websites vs Facebook Pages: which URL should you promote?. In the case of promoting mainstream motion pictures to the younger demographic, I think the Facebook / Youtube approach is correct. The downsides don't really count:

There's no ownership
True, if the movie is a complete duck then it will be made known on Facebook and Youtube.
Not everyone is on Facebook
I would say that almost everyone interested in this movie is on Facebook, but even if they are not, you don't need an account to view a Facebook page.
A Facebook Page URL isn't any more appealing
True, but does it matter with this particular content?
You miss out on SEO benefits
Again, not really an issue because a website about a movie with the name as the URL and some decent inbound links should always rank well in search engines.
A great website is far more powerful than a Facebook Page
I completely agree but in this instance, they do also have a movie website but they choose to promote the more popular medium.

If you are interested in seeing the actual movie website: www.kickass-themovie.com

London Office Fire

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:21:00 +0000

We couldn't get into the office this morning due to a large fire across the road in Worship Street.

There are some photos on Flickr and someone in our building made this video:

Business as usual, the team are working from home today.

Latest photo from our office:

1332hrs 11th March 2010

UPDATE: Latest photo at 1600hrs on Flickr