Whether you call it a downturn or a full-blown recession, there is no doubt that these have been tough times for UK companies. Either by good planning or good luck (quite possiby the latter) we’ve remained extremely busy and are continuing to expand.

What the slowdown has done is educate us about client attitudes to web development and their wider internet strategy. Because when money gets tight, companies have to spend money on the things they believe are important. And some cases, those priorities don’t include web development.

As things have got tougher, we’ve encountered lots of companies looking for web design bargains of the “my brother could do this for £200″ variety. Unfortunately, they seem to be making the assumption that [company + any old pages on the net = massive profit]. Given how long the web has been around and the (blindingly obvious) difference between good and bad sites it’s a little disheartening that some firms still can’t see the potential for web developers to add real value to their web presence.

Thankfully, the slowdown has made a number of other companies realise just how integral their web strategy is to the success of their business. They understand how a usable, well-integrated site can give them a huge edge over the competition (both through the ‘front-end’ increasing sales and the ‘back-end’ cutting administration overheads). And they understand they need a company that knows the web inside-out to help them achieve this.

And, just occasionally, there is the ‘eureka’ moment. Like the lovely chap who thought his site wasn’t selling because of the font face it used (and wanted us to do a ‘quick and cheap’ fix). And who, when we explained the ‘slightly’ more significant issues of a chaotic information architecture, reams of unreadable text and a truly eye-popping colour scheme, just got it.

So, we’ll keep on providing insight rather than being tempted in to high volume, low-cost ‘code monkeying’. And if anyone really does have a brother (or sister) working from their bedroom who can develop a web site for £200 – we’ve got enough potential clients to keep you in business for years to come!

So as many bloggers have noted Google have now announced that they will incorporate tweets in real time into their searches. I guess they were never going to leave it all up to Microsoft who earlier announced the same deal for the Bing search engine.

It will be very interesting to see exactly how the tweets will be incorporated – and particularly how it will compare to Twitter’s own search facility. Presumably Google will be cross-referencing as much data as possible to show results that are relevant from a wider perspective ? Microsoft have the head start and it will be very interesting indeed to see how the two giants compare.

This could really change the face of “search” – since with Twitter there is a lot of “signal velocity” and there should be enough signals to make out a meaningful melody amongst the noise (ah tweeting was such a good term for it!) The search engines will start to pick out the landing domains and URL’s in people tweets which gives us yet more reasons to be chirping.

Better start tweet-deck up… happy tweeting everyone.

We’ve been offering Search Engine Optimization to our clients for more than 12 months now, with some pretty good results (e.g. ‘holiday accommodation in Sitges’ for Outlet4Spain). So Simon and I thought it was about time we applied some of our new-found SEO mojo to our own site. And that’s where the trouble started, because there’s no easy way to optimize for ‘joined up thinking’. Let me explain…

When a client comes to us for help with SEO, we ask about their business. Once we know what they do, it’s usually pretty easy for us to build a list of key words and phrases to target. But, when we started keyword analysis for our own business it became pretty obvious things weren’t so clear cut.

In the olden days (somewhere about 1995) it would have been easy – we would have been optimized our site for the search term ‘web designers’. But the explosive growth of the sector and the desire for companies to carve out their own niche within it  has muddied the waters immensely.

Whilst we still call ourselves ‘web designers’, optimizing for the term increasingly seems to be bringing in the sub-£2000 first-time site brigade. It also misses the core of what we do – working with a company to shape, build, maintain and develop their web presence over the long term. We’re web strategists, we’re user-experience experts, we’re SEO specialists, email marketeers and UNIX hosting gurus. Optimizing for any one of these dilutes the  big picture – and devalues the ‘one stop shop’ approach we believe is so vitally important to making the most out of the web.

So, if anyone knows how to optimize for ‘joined up thinking in web development’ we’d love to hear from you. Until then we’ll just have to press on with the keyword-rich blog entries

Twitter is one of the those internet trends that bitterly divides those with nothing better to than comment on internet trends. Is it really just a “chorus of minutiae from morons” or is it “the next killer-app” . In all probability it’s neither, but it could it have positive uses for business? And what exactly is Twitter anyway?

Twitter is a service that lets the world know what you’re doing (via short messages of less than 160 characters) , and lets you ‘follow’ what other people are up. Depending on whether you’re generation Y or generation z, you can think of it as either broadcast SMS or your Facebook status on steroids. Some 6 million people now  tweet – among them Stephen Fry, Britney Spears, and John Cleese.

At first glance, tweeting and business don’t seem to offer each other much. But hold on a moment. That’s exactly what people used to say about blogging and business. But numerous companies and senior employees are now using blogs as a very efficient way to inform and interact with customers (a trend we first noted a couple of years ago).

While we’re still not convinced tweeting will be as revolutionary, we’ll be adding it to our site as part of our upcoming redesign. We already see it offering some benefits and hope we’ll uncover some unexpected postives as well. In the short term we’ll be using it for:

• Publishing system status updates that don’t merit a global email alert (e.g. a small percentage of client sites running slowly due to transient technical issue) 
• Communicating our availability (e.g we’re all on company training today – call our mobiles)
• Alerting clients to general internet / tech developments that don’t merit a whole blog entry
• Letting clients know about promotions / discounts in a way that less intrusive than a mass email 
• Showing first time visitors that our site is something we care enough about to update regularly 

We’ll let you know how we get along with twitter once the new site is launched. Until then we’ll be tweeting at http://www.twitter.com/osbornebrook

For months now, it has been impossible to open a newspaper or watch the news without being told that the four horsemen of economic apocalypse are upon us. House prices and consumer spending are down; foreclosures and energy costs are up. It’s affecting marketing firms and web designers too.

We’ve noticed a marked increase in enquiries whilst new contracts remain level – suggesting that people are approaching more agencies for any given contract and increasingly taking the lowest quote (or even deciding to delay development). It’s an unfortunate situation, because now is the time where companies need to be aggressively developing the web applications that will help recession-proof them (both through cost reduction and low-cost marketing opportunities).

So it was great to see the Times on Sunday with an atypically upbeat piece in the business section on how web development is helping small businesses not only survive but flourish – even in the current economic conditions. Where high street sales dropped 3.9% in June, online sales have increased 38% in the first six months of this year.

The reasons are simple. Consumers are increasingly looking for the best price. Online services, with lower overheads are more cost-effective marketing can often beat small bricks-and-mortar operations.  According to Michael Petevinos of Cap Gemini, niche players can really clean up.The report also shows the value of SEO (search engine optimization). Against the general picture of retail gloom Notonthehighstreet.com have been injecting around £22k per month on search engine marketing. The results have been impressive – a 350% increase in sales year-on-year (to £3.5million).

So, while a lot of firms are “pulling their heads in” for the recession we’re told is coming, fortune is favouring the brave.

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling increasingly conflicted about the iPhone’s UK debut. Emotionally I want them to be available now (especially in light of my trashing my N95 in a freak cycle accident yesterday), but logically I know that Apple would be be making a big mistake in shipping the current incarnation of the iPhone to the UK. Why? Solely because of the lack of 3G support.

Statesiders don’t seem to think the lack of 3G is much of an issue. I can only conclude this is down to (very) patchy 3G coverage. In the UK and Europe, where there is pretty good 3G coverage (and many people already have 3G cell phones) the picture is likely to be very different.

The iPhone is directed at early adopters; geeks who want (and/or need) the internet on the move. The trouble for Apple is that in the UK those geeks have already made the jump to 3G (or even 3.5G). For example, on my trips between London and Brighton, my N95 gave me a pretty solid 384kbps connection; my 3G USB modem often gives me 1.4Mbps.

So, no matter how cool the iPhone is and no matter how much I want one, I know that buying one before 3G is supported would be incredibly frustrating. The thought of surfing at GPRS speeds makes me break on in a cold sweat, and I know that it would only be a matter of weeks before a 3G-less iPhone would be thrown off the top of a very tall building.

I know Vodafone share this concern and for once I hope Steve realizes the limits of his reality distortion field. A 3G iPhone would be a killer device; a 2G one would do nothing but hurt Apple’s European reputation.

Simon and I have been in web design in one way or another since 1992 (remember Mosaic 1.0 and its revolutionary ‘image viewer’?). In the intervening fifteen years only one thing has remained constant – change. The web is constantly evolving as new technologies become available and users find new (and often unexpected) ways of using them.

At the moment we’re in the process of rebranding ‘Small Fry’ as ‘Osborne-Brook’. As part of the process we’re completely rebuilding our site – something we last did 2005. Since then there have been significant advances web technologies and we’re looking forward to the chance to cut loose and incorporate some funky features with Ajax.

However, what strikes us most about the last couple of years are the cultural changes that have taken place. Although these may have been enabled by the rise of web 2.0 technologies, they are primarily the result of a quantum shift in how businesses perceive the web.

Web applications (such as LinkedIn and Salesforce†) are becoming an integral part of many businesses and a significant proportion are trying to colonize (and monetize) social networking sites such as Facebook. Whether this change is for the good or not, it’s the ‘brave new web’ in which we all have to compete.

These changes show the value of continually assessing your web strategy. This goes for us as well!

In 2005 we dismissed a company blog as largely irrelevant; in 2007 it’s the first part of our new site to go live. That’s why we like working in this industry – challenges and change are all around us.

Don’t forget to drop back to see our whizzy new site in a couple of weeks!

† or Salesfarce as we like to call it when we have to try to integrate client’s sites with it!