Latest News : Matt Tomlinson - Digital Marketing specialist based in Bristol, UK

A bit of advice about LinkedIn

One of my main projects at the moment is helping a blue-chip technology company's resellers get to grips with Social Media. I can't really talk about the project, but what I can do is share some of the fruits of the work. One of the main questions I get asked at the moment is what companies should be doing about Social Media. I'll answer that in a future article (it's a biggie), but for most businessess that sell to other businesses (B2B), we feel that the most important Social Media tool is LinkedIn . Though as ever in marketing (and life), what you do should reflect your objectives,and in some...
Read more...
Google Makes Website Forms Easy

I've mentioned before how online services make capturing data from websites much easier than in the 'old' days , but if your needs (and resources) are more modest, then Google Docs' form and spreadsheet tools are an even quicker and easier way to collect data from your website. Since the tools are free, put no limit on the number of submissions and require no software to be installed on your website, Google Docs are a great choice for creating forms like "Contact Us", RSVP's or even for simple polls and surveys. Forms can span multiple pages and contain fields such as text (short and...
Read more...
Ruby Wedding Design Website Goes Live

I'm pleased to announce that another web project has gone live. This one is a website for my good friend Georgina Webb's company Ruby Wedding Design ( www.ruby-weddings.co.uk ). I can't claim all the credit, the design was down to our good friend Ho, Jo and George wrote the text whilst Louise provided some great photos, and I really just brought everything together. George seems delighted with the end result and it will hopefully help create a few sales leads and keep her out of mischief! To find out more about the site take a look at the profile on the portfolio pages ....
Read more...
Exit Through the Gift Shop

One of the reasons we relocated from Reading to Bristol was that we were missing big city culture and having interesting things to go and look at. So we were delighted to see that Banksy’s film ‘ Exit Through the Gift Shop ’ was showing at our local arts cinema, The Watershed . It’s sort of a documentary of contemporary graffiti artists and Banksy himself, but with a twist. Now I’m not a massive fan of graffiti, but I do like the witty and creative stuff, and this film contains loads of it, including features on other artist such as Space Invader and Shepard Fairey...
Read more...
A Return to Classic ASP

For those who prefer not to worry about the techie detail of building websites, Classic ASP is a server-side script engine for dynamically generated web pages. Classic ASP is roughly comparable to PHP or ColdFusion, and is easy to learn, but it’s not the most efficient or robust tool. It can be hard to manage and debug code, and it can be difficult to do anything beyond the basics without resorting to buying additional, and sometimes expensive third-party components. As a result, Classic ASP has now been largely superseded by the far superior ASP.NET , which is my preferred tool. But a number...
Read more...
Online Tools Make Market Research Easier

In a former job I used to produce a lot of web-based market research questionnaires. ¬It’s a task for which the web is ideal. Unlike a paper-based questionnaire, you can make your questionnaires full colour with interactivity, make sure that people complete questions, show or hide questions based on previous answers and above all, the data is already digitised, so you don’t have to get data keyed-in, introducing the risk of error. If you get the basics right, you can send out an invitation to a mailing list, get great response rates and meaningful data within a few hours, often...
Read more...
Fun with Heat Maps

Whilst the rules of good website design are fairly straightforward and usually pretty easy to follow, it can be hard to know if you’ve got things right. Links that you think are quite obvious can be seemingly invisible to users, whilst features that you think will only attract minimal attention can be unexpectedly popular, and deserve more screen space. Some insight can be gleaned through tools such as Google Analytics, but they’ll only indicate that a link from one page to the next was followed, which isn’t much use of you’ve got multiple links to the same page, or have...
Read more...
The Joy of Search

I’ve been working on a search-engine inspired review of a client’s websites this week. Having been in the business for longer than I care to remember, it’s nice that search engine optimisation of websites now has some scientific substance, rather than being a black art involving loading the site with as many keywords as possible and sundry other dirty tricks. Search engines are far more sensitive to poorly structured HTML now, so I tend to start any review by going through the website with SortSite ( http://www.powermapper.com/ ). This nifty little tool will go through a whole...
Read more...
Website Benchmarking Project Win

I'm delighted to announce a new business win in the form of a website benchmarking project. Unfortunately I can't say who it is for, other than it's a global electronics manufacturer, but you've definitely heard of them. The project involves assessing the websites of the client's resellers to ensure that they are as effective as possible in generating leads, sales and repeat business. That means not only compliance with technical and best practice standards, but also in terms of design, functionality, usability and the copy on the website. What's more, the major aim of the project is to help retailers...
Read more...
The Pure360 Website Goes Live!

After what seems like an age, the Pure360 website has finally gone live, you can see it in it's full glory at http://www.pure360.com.
Read more...