First Internet Blog- latest industry blog

From the SmartPhone revolution, m-ecommerce, the way in which people access the internet is changing. Nowhere can this trend be more clearly identified than when you look at the first day of sales for Apple’s iPad.

Apple managed to sell an impressive 300,000 iPad’s on the first day of launch in the US, although this wasn’t quite as high as the sales of the iPhone, which topped half a million.

More than one million applications were also downloaded from the app store on the launch date, with over 250,000 ebooks purchased from the iBookstore. But what does this mean for the future of web design?

Well just as the launch of the iPhone completely revolutionised the mobile phone sector, the launch of the iPad will completely change what consumer demands from a brand’s website.

Web designers will have to respond quickly and strategically to the changing landscape of web design or risk getting left behind . . .

The debates are over, the tireless political campaigning has stopped and the votes are in. But in terms of who won the ‘Digital Election’ the jury is still out.

This election will go down in history as the most ‘digital’ we have ever seen. Politicians – and bizarrely their wives – took to Twitter to communicate their policies, social media sites such as FaceBook were mobilized to gage voters opinions and it seemed as though almost everyone was taking to the blogosphere to give their two pennies worth.

But who will go down in history as the true digital hero of the 2010 election? Gordon Brown with his outdated blog? The Tories with their ill-conceived i-phone app? No, The Electoral Commission is the true digital hero of this election.

Regardless of the masses of negative press they have received since election night, the Electoral Commission utilised all digital platforms strategically and confidently in an attempt to redress one of the biggest political challenges this country faces – voter apathy.

Unlike Gordon et al who blindly used social media in the most untargeted and unsuccessful way, The Electoral Commission’s digital campaign was targeted and added value to a user’s online experience. Which – ultimately – is what online advertising is all about.

Christmas 2010 will go down in history as the time when all retailers realised they could no longer afford to ignore online. As the high street struggled with spiralling market conditions and dwindling consumer confidence, online retailers enjoyed record sales and an increase in the number of people buying online.

Recent figures from the IAB revealed that one in ten people do all their shopping online, while over 67% consumers say that they go online to shop at least twice a week. Another report, conducted by online consumer watchdog, ‘Think Tank’ found that the majority of people would prefer to buy from a brand that had a website.

The evidence speaks for itself, for businesses to survive the current market conditions; they must have an online presence.

Today, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have become the first nations able to use Arabic characters for entire web addresses. The system was activated yesterday by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) and also enables web addresses to be written from right to left. Despite some websites enabling native scripts to be used minimally, this is the first time that the country codes no longer need to be typed in Latin characters. For example, Egypt will no longer be written as .eg but in Arabic characters. The Egyptian Ministry of Communication is one of the first websites to have a domain name written entirely in Arabic.

Rod Beckstrom, the president of Icann, has described the accomplishment as “historic.” This has opened up the potential for languages, such as Russian, Chinese and Thai to have the same progression made with web addresses. Some countries, such as China have already constructed workarounds to enable users to access websites using their native languages, but these are not internationally recognised and cannot be used on all computers. More than 20 countries have requested to have international domains. Arabic speakers; who may not have used the internet up until now, will have the world of cyber space opened up to them because of this development.

Icann have described this as the most significant change since the creation of the internet 40 years ago as more than 50% of internet users do not use the Latin script. Web address owners in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates can now request domain names to be in their country codes.

Marketing managers, advertising agencies and big brands are constantly try to communicate their message to you in an engaging way and it deliver via a medium you interact with consistently. In the past this has involved print media, radio and TV ads and in the past five years, online marketing.

Initially social media was ad free; its users could interact with their ‘friends’ without being irritated by endless pop-ups and cookie tracking. However, as the social media revolution truly began to take hold, advertisers began to realise its marketing potential; big brands could access demographic information like never before and serve ads directly into the inbox of their consumer of choice.

One by one each social media site gave in to its commercial aspirations. First it was FaceBook, with its targeted CPC campaigns and Fan applications and now – with the launch of its semantic ad platform – it seems micro-blogging site Twitter has joined the advertising party, much to the widespread distaste of its users.

It seems there really is no such thing as a free lunch or uninterrupted conversation for that matter.

Unlike the US, many retailers in the UK have been quite slow to embrace – m-commerce. In the ever changing world of web design, it is vital that e-tailers keep on top of customer demands, especially in the current market conditions.

When you consider that the number of people accessing the internet via their mobile phones has grown exponentially in the past year, it seems inconceivable that many retailers in the UK do not have a website with m-commerce functionality. Especially as this pace of growth is only going accelerate as SmartPhone innovations become increasingly sophisticated.

While many retailers have released i-phone applications, most of these are ill-conceived and not supported by a mobile website; therefore, user ability has been compromised.

The message for e-tailers is clear; if you want to introduce an element of m-commerce into your marketing mix, make sure your mobile proposition is consistent and you have applied the same standards of web design as you have on your main site. Only then can the potential of m-commerce be truly realised.

Some surveys estimate that the average Briton faces 3,000 marketing messages a day. Therefore, when faced with an advert – either on or off-line – we change the channel, hit mute, block our cookies or leave a website.

Therefore, over the past decade brands and their agencies have increasingly targeted our conversation and sought to invade editorial when we are least expecting it. First it began with manipulating social media platforms such as FaceBook and Twitter, now they are engaging in more stealth and subversive marketing tactics.

But why not just get it right in the beginning? Regardless of demographics, every marketeer wants to communicate their brand to an engaged and interested consumer. When are consumers more engaged and interested than when they have sought your website, found it and are then browsing through what you have to offer?

We are not saying that social media marketing doesn’t have a place in the mix, but simply that if you get it right from the point of web design, users will ‘WANT’ to engage with your brand elsewhere, rather than simply clicking on.

One of the main technological innovations, that has changed the way in which we work in modern society, is the increasing speed of business broadband. The phrase ‘going into the office’ while not quite obsolete, has definitely been redefined by high speed access to business broadband.

Therefore, it may come as a shock to some that in some rural areas of the country access to broadband is still limited. However, Virgin Media has announced its plans to extend broadband into more rural communities via its traditional system of telegraph poles.This can only mean good things for web design.

According to the organisation, the telegraph system is a faster and cheaper way of delivering high speed internet access to more remote areas which does not involve the disruption of digging up roads.

It will be interesting to see what Virgin’s competitors do to address the same problem . . .

Here at First Internet, we always encourage our clients to see their online activity as one element of their whole marketing mix. Indeed, for us, our most successful online campaigns have been those which integrate all online activities, from web design and PPC to SEO and Affiliate Marketing.

Today, a recent report by Sky.com has shown that consumers are now demanding that brands take integration online, one step further. According to research by Sky Media more than one in three customers interacting with red-button campaigns go on to buy the advertised brands online for the first time.

Love him or hate him, the legendary co-founder of computer behemoth Microsoft has had a bigger impact on the communications industry and web design than any other individual.

On a personal level, his influence can be tracked back 25 years to a time before PC’s and easy-to-use software applications. Students today have a PC on every desk – as do most homes, as Gates famously predicted – and the thought of writing anything long hand is an anathema.

And without the PC would the internet become so all-encompassing and ubiquitous or –subsequently – web design so advanced?

No doubt computer technology would have developed apace with or without Gates, but I suspect the world – and especially the world of media – would have been a very different place without his drive, vision and influence.