On a dry, yet windy morning of Sunday the 25th September 2011, director of North, Jonathan Foster took part in The Great Kibworth Run.  It was a superb day, the village of Kibworth and surrounding villages all came out to support the 500+ runners who took part in the half & third marathons, power walk & fun runs.

Jonathan finished 30th in the third marathon event, in a time of 1hr 10mins. We would like to thank you for all of your help and donations during this time.

A total of £1,056.19 (£1,289.69 inc. Gift Aid) was raised for the two charities (LOROS & PROSTaid) that Jonathan ran for.

Thank you all for your kind sponsorship.

We will soon be posting race day pictures here on our Blog so you can see that Jonathan actually finished the race! (Although a little red in the face!)

Well done…

We recently moved our office to Kibworth, Leicester, where this September, Director of North, Jonathan Foster will be taking part in The Great Kibworth Run.  Jonathan says: “I am really looking forward to the run in September, although, it does not seem that far away and with the recent office move, the training has taken a pretty hard knock”.

The new running routes are a lot more challenging than before, owing to the rolling nature of the beautiful Leicestershire countryside.  However, running through fields of cows and hay is much more fun than the city centre.

We would like to thank everyone who donated early to this event and with just 41 days left until the big race, we would encourage you to make a donation to this worthwhile cause if you have not done so already!

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/north

We can now confirm that you are now able to donate online to the Thomas May Excutive Quest challenge through our Virgin Money Giving web page.

Through Virgin Money Giving, you can sponsor me and donations will be quickly processed and passed to charities. Virgin Money Giving is a not for profit organisation and will claim gift aid on a charity’s behalf where the donor is eligible for this. I really appreciate all your support and thank you for any donations.

Please click on the donate button below to make your donation:

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/north

North director Jonathan Foster has been invited to join in with this years Thomas May Executive Quest charity challenge.  Last year, the challenges raised over £70,000 in aid of local charities LOROS and PROSTAid.

Jonathan Foster of North hopes to add to the success of the charity challenge by taking part in running this years Great Kibworth Run in September.

We shall be posting continued updates on his training schedule on our blog and Twitter pages, and of course, let you know how he gets on in the actual run itself.

Coming soon, we will be launching a donation service for anyone who wishes to give to these great causes.

Good Luck, Jonathan.

You’ve spent time and money in your new business, the website looks fantastic and you have some exciting products that you really want to showcase, however, without regular traffic your business is going nowhere fast.

A Pay Per Click campaign may be just the thing that you need to help support your other marketing methods and the big advantage is that it will reach your target market.

An Ad campaign can be tailored to your budget and it’s easy to measure. You’ll be able to specifically target your audience and know if they reached your website as a result of an advert.

You are in control of the pages your visitors see, so you can sit back and watch your traffic increase.

Here is some great advice to implementing a PPC campaign for your business:

1. Research your market carefully.  Highlight your competitors and look for gaps that competitors aren’t filling, the niches within your market to expose.

2. Be realistic. If this is your first time using PPC don’t expect an instant ROI, usually the first months are a testing period to analyse the market and visitor trends. Utilise as many research tools as possible to look for opportunities combining the use of Googles keyword tool. Google insights and Google trends will give you the in-depth information you need to target your audience.

3. Set clear goals for your campaigns – Contact form submissions, document downloads or online transactions, you’ll know what’s important to achieve from PPC.

4. The most effective keywords are competitive these days due to the amount of advertisers online but PPC ads are assigned a position in the sponsored search results by ‘ad rank’. An adverts ‘ad rank’ is determined by a combination of the keyword bid and its quality score – a score out of 10 based on how relevant the keyword is to the page it is pointing to. By creating relevant adverts the quality score increases. Having a higher quality score means you can bid less and still achieve a high ad rank and position in the sponsored search results.

5. To increase the click through rate (CTR) of your adverts you should create advert copy that entices the user, offering something that is interesting and relevant to their query. By including your keywords in your advert copy, users will automatically see them as a relevant ad and your keywords will appear in bold in the ad copy making them stand out to the user.

6. To entice the user to click on your advert you should include a call to action (a reason for them to click the ad) this helps give the user a sense of direction. To really make your ad stand out it is important you separate yourself from the competition, having something extra to offer the user will increase your ad’s popularity.

7. Having a good conversion rate is the most critical factor of PPC. There is no point it having your target audience visit your website if they aren’t converting into sales/leads. To increase the conversion of customers you should make it as easy as possible for them to buy, so instead of leading them directly to your homepage, try to select the most relevant page for them to land on.

8. Make sure your website options to buy are clear and easy to use. Difficult checkout pages and hard pages with no clear message often confuse visitors so ensure your website is quick! Slow loading pages can leave users frustrated and they will be less likely to return.

9. Although PPC can bring about quick results it is still an ongoing development for many companies, you can’t stop monitoring it and optimising your campaigns for better performance. The best way to integrate your PPC campaigns into your existing marketing activities is to understand your target audience and how to address them through PPC. Look at where the strengths are within your business and target keywords around that area or subject.

10. Setting your campaigns to run only in the areas of the world you want them to will help reduce the risk of click fraud.

To speak to North° about your own PPC campaign, give us a call on 0845 544 0507, or drop us an email: ppc@northdesignstudio.co.uk

If you are thinking about having a website developed, one major factor to think about should be the fonts used on your web page.

Whilst you many have a large array of fonts on your own computer, other people viewing your website may not have the same fonts as you and this results in random formatting on the web page and reduced consistency across the web.

There are however, a standard set of fonts that are common to all versions of
Windows and Apple Mac computers have an equivalent, referred to as “browser safe fonts”.

Of course, if you do want something different, there are ways to include other fonts onto your website – see sIFR for an example of this.

There are also a few other fonts such as Symbol, Webdings and Windings that could appear on this list however, only Internet Explorer renders these as text whilst other browsers display the symbols – so we haven’t included them on this list.

We have also left out the bitmap fonts: MS Sans Serif, Geneva, MS Serif & New York. These fonts only really work at set sizes at 96 dpi (dots per inch) and the internet displays things at 72 dpi.

¹ Georgia and Trebuchet MS are bundled with Windows 2000/XP and they are
also included in the IE font pack (and bundled with other MS applications), so they
are quite common in Windows 98 systems.

² Book Antiqua is almost exactly the same font that Palatino Linotype, Palatino Linotype is included in Windows 2000/XP while Book Antiqua was bundled with Windows 98.

³ These fonts work in Safari but only when using the normal font style, and not with bold or italic styles. Comic Sans MS works in bold but not in italic. Other Mac browsers seem to emulate properly the styles not provided by the font.

⁴ These fonts are present in Mac OS X only if Classic is installed.

The end of 2010 saw a difficult period for some online retailers.  Most notably, the snow was blamed for a lack of online sales – perhaps this was due to bad distribution networks, or perhaps, people we stuck on the roads and could not get back to their houses.  This being said, Ocado groceries, John Lewis and Shop Direct were among some of those making profits during the festive period.

With increased VAT at 20%, how can you grow your sales revenue in 2011? We have put together 5 useful points below to try and help you:

1) Know your customer – Try and define who your main customer is – take a look at your data base and past sales and find out who is shopping on your site and then start to tailor your online store to that particular group.

2) Interact efficiently with customers – Make shopping more personal to your customers, whether via web or email, try and tie in local points of interest as these have a big impact on engagement levels.  Split your mailing groups down to regional specific and be prepared to send multiple emails.

3) Utilise search and digital media – Google is still the main leader for people searching the web, but do not be afraid to try other online methods such as Facebook, Spotify or Foursquare.

4) Participate in social media applications – Facebook and Twitter are great ways to interact with your customer – with the emphasis being on participation and not just being a spectator.

5) Mobile applications are a key method to grab people whilst they are on the move.  They enable you to capture new customers and encourage them into your online store.

We hope that this information helps you.  If you would like to find out more, please get in touch and we will be happy to chat a few things through with you.

It seems to me like Facebook at the moment can do nothing wrong.  With more than 500 million active users and 50% of these logging into the social networking website every day, it  is safe to say that Facebook is a true, global success.

With 200 million of these people accessing the site via their mobile phone, is it safe to say that the recent news about the Facebook mobile phone means that Mark Zuckerberg is onto a winner with this latest project?

Coupled with the advent of the Facebook email/messaging service (a service designed not to replace traditional email, yet rather merge the way we communicate), I think that Facebook are here to stay for quite a long time.

Having built up a dedicated following over the past 6 years, I wonder how many loyal subscribers will buy into the mobile phone device?  I cannot help but think that a device such as the mobile phone will be as hugely successful as the iPhone, which currently allows you to post your Facebook status on the move as well as offer a plethora of other apps at your finger tips, Email and Messaging to name but a couple.  But then maybe we will start to see a divide in customer loyalty and people will start to stay with their Brand instead.

Brand Loyalty?

I’m a PC and my friend in a Mac.  Soon, They may be an Mac and I’m a Facebook, whilst my other friend is a LinkedIn and still my other friend is a Google.

As Brands seek to provide everything from Mobile Phones, to social/business platforms, to computers, to e-readers to dare I even say it, films.  I think we are going to have less of an either or statement about who we are, but a greater choice of loyalties.

It has taken a while for Mac and PC to get where they are today, but with the revenue that Facebook and Google are getting at the moment with their advertising platforms, is there anything to stop them coming up with a new supercomputer for us to choose between?  The fact that the U.S. now only have a 5 out of 10 share of the super computer market, may cause these large social networks to begin developing their own super computer device to help us ‘Speed up our communication’.

Rather than spending more money on a fancy new wireless printer, unless of course it is absolutely necessary, why not think about setting up a wireless home network using your existing internet wireless connection?

This is a much cheaper and as an effective result in my opinion.  There are of course a couple of downsides to this – you need 2 computers (one that you are working on and one computer in your office that is joined up to your printer) And the computer in your office needs to be on when you want to print from downstairs.

This really works though if you have two people working in the house but not in the same room.

So how do you achieve this?

To share the printer, I opened the Printers and Faxes folder on the computer that was connected to my printer.

To open the Printers folder

• Click Start and then click Control Panel.
• Click Printers.
• In the Printers folder, I right-clicked the printer’s icon and, in the tasks pane, I clicked Share This Printer.
• I opened the printer’s Properties dialog box, and clicked on the Sharing tab.

I clicked Share Name, and then clicked OK.

That’s it—the printer was immediately available for other computers to use.

Now that I had a network printer, I was ready to connect to it and print from other computers on the network.

To connect to the printer

• I opened Control Panel, and clicked Printers.
• I clicked Add a Printer.
• Search for the printer (You may need to type in a username and password of the other computer).

Instead of adding a local printer, though, I clicked Printer Connection and then browsed the network for the printer.

The whole process took less than a minute before I was printing to the network printer as though it was connected to the computer.

Finally, set this as your default printer and away you go.

Onemillionpixels.co has just announced that it is now to give 90% of all sales away to charity.  The website was constructed in a bid to find out how social media can truly help to spread a campaign around the Internet.

With quite a lot of early interest in the project,  the founder, Jonathan Foster, has now decided to increase the giving from 50% to 90% in order to greatly increase the total amount which can be given to charity on the sale of each pixel space.

Take a look for yourself: www.onemillionpixel.co