This week saw the official launch of a new service from Evoluted designed to help you track your website’s position in all the major search engines – SEO Tracking. The project has been a joy to work on as I honestly believe it’s a useful product, something that will make site owners lives much easier.

The hardest part of the project has been deciding a name for the service; we toyed about with loads of variants:

• search engine tracking
• search engine tracker
• website position checker
• search engine ranking
• website position tracker
• seo tracker
• seo tracking
• website ranking checker
• search engine placement tracking

Normally we’d choose a great sounding name with an eye on what keywords are really popular in the search engines. However in this field the most popular keywords crossover with the actual SEO market, something at this stage we don’t want to be confused with. So after much debate we went with SEOTracking.net, a great sounding name easy to relay over the telephone or in conversations.

I’ll be updating more in the coming months to keep everyone updated with status of SEOTracking.net so make sure you check back.

Please head over to SEOTracking.net and take a look around. I’d love to hear any questions or points so please feel free to comment!

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It has been a busy few weeks at Evoluted, we’ve got a number of sites ready to launch this month and we’ve already launched two cracking sites which we hope will go far:

• Sheffield Best Bar None a site to promote and encourage the responsible management of licensed premises in order to reduce the risk of alcohol related harm, disorder and crime within the City Centre
• Car Mat Supermarket, a new site for an existing client which as the name suggests sells tailored car mats for a huge range of make & models.

Check the two sites above out, and perhaps even get yourself some new car mats whilst you’re there!

At Evoluted, we’re always excited to work on creative projects for big, international clients – and they don’t come much bigger than Polydor Records and hip hop phenomenon Eminem.

Following the success of our ‘Quagmire It!’ Family Guy site, Polydor commissioned us to create a similar site to promote Eminem’s new album Relapse, which is set for release on Monday 18th May.

The E-Lapse site converts any website into a unique Eminem browsing experience, complete with preview tracks, Eminem-styled text and links to pre-order the new album.

Polydor, who are part of Universal Records, were impressed by the innovative concept and technology that we contributed to the Relapse album launch.

Digital Campaign Manager Aaron Bogucki said:

“Our aim with Eminem was to change the fan’s browsing experience, to turn every website into an Eminem marketing experience. Through E-Lapse, Evoluted made this happen. They’re definitely a development team we can rely on.”

Evoluted’s Managing Director Ash Young was equally pleased with how the project turned out.

“It’s great to be marketing one of the world’s biggest recording artists, for a world-leading record label. Even better, we were thrilled to be able to create a fun and original experience for Eminem’s fans. Getting customers involved in a product, rather than just telling them about it, is what today’s marketing is all about.”

To find out more about Evoluted’s innovative web marketing solutions, and how we can help you engage customers in exciting new ways, visit www.evoluted.net or call us on 0845 638 3148.

Visit E-Lapse – www.e-lapse.net

Imagine the scenario when a potential client gets in touch and asks “I want an e-commerce site like Amazon.com, how much will it cost?”

Now I’m sure you’ve spotted the issue here, unless you know the client works for a massive blue chip company then it’s unlikely they are after Amazon.com. You have to read into the client’s requirements, and in this case they are likely after a fairly standard e-commerce setup.

In these situations it is tempting to go with your gut and quote the client for a standard e-commerce platform, following up as usual in a few days to see if the client is interested. It’s at this point that everything can start to go wrong.

On your follow up phone call you discover that the client wishes to go ahead with their Amazon.com clone. At this point you really need to be clear with the client and confirm the functionality that you’ll be supplying for this project. If you haven’t already sent the client a specification, then send one now and get them to sign it!

If you don’t clarify your position with the client you may run into the follow 3 issues:

1. The client only sees a fraction of the functionality on Amazon.com, probably searching or browsing for a product and the checkout process. They don’t see any of the backend or any of the “clever” stuff.
2. The development team working on the project sees a separate set of functionality and envisages the backend functionality, plus some of the “clever” stuff.
3. The user doesn’t see certain functionality they require but assumes that Amazon.com must have it somewhere and that the development team will code this into the system.

If this void between the client and the development team isn’t resolved then your project is doomed to fail, overrun, go over budget and perhaps even get cancelled.

For jobs such as these it is worth the time spent writing a specification upfront to accompany your quote to make sure the client understands the exact functionality they are getting. Once you’ve done a few quotes they’ll take next to no time to knock up. If you don’t write a specification you run the risk of the project going seriously wrong and costing you time, money and potentially worse of all – reputation.

I always find it pleasurable to work at both ends of the scale from massive content managed websites right down to small brochure sites. No matter the project you’ll find yourself learning something new each time.

Time and time again we see people at Evoluted who believe that having a website will lead to success and riches. It’s a common misconception, the media is full of stories of young businessmen who setup a web venture and then bang, they were millionaires! Sadly whilst this happens for some it just isn’t going to happen for the majority.

Setting up an e-commerce site is akin to opening a small shop in quiet part of town with low foot fall. To get people to visit your shop you need to shout about it, let them know where you are. It’s no good expecting customers to know where your shop is, what it sells and what great value it is!

There are a number of ways to bring traffic to your site and develop a sucessful online business:

Target a Niche Market.
This makes everything considerably easier as you are narrowing your focus, there are less potential customers but they are easier to reach. It maybe that your offline business is already in a niche market, such as Trafalgar Marine Services (one of our clients) in this case you’re onto a winner. In other cases, if you can specialise then do so, rather than opening an e-commerce site selling electronic equipment, pick a particular subset such as cameras, or even narrower such as high end pro cameras. 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The holy grail is search engine optimisation; if done well it will drive traffic to your site for free! How much success you’ll have with SEO depends on your competition and your market. The key is to includes lots of text full of relevant keywords and ensure you update your website regularly. Ask your web developer how well optimised your e-commerce site is, can anything more be done? 

Pay Per Click (PPC) 
Pay per click marketing is a massive business which really makes sense for many e-commerce sites, we use PPC with our clients to supplement existing natural search engine results. The market leader here is Google but you may well find better value per click with Yahoo! and MSN. 

Email Marketing
Get your latest offers and news out to clients and potential customers, don’t let them forget how great your shop is! Email marketing is a comparatively cheap form of marketing, the key is to ensure you are using a good quality set of email addresses that you have permission to send to. You should be capturing email addresses from customers when they make purchases either online or offline. 

Social Networking / Viral Marketing
Encouraging your users to share your latest and best offers is an approach that will work if your offers are really great, bringing exposure to customers that you wouldn’t normally reach. Add share buttons to the product detail pages on your shop to encourage customers to post your offers and products to sites such as Facebook. 

That’s it for now but if you’d like any advice or tips then please get in touch!

If you’re a designer this could have just made your job really easy, the client has given you an exact idea of the style that they like. Or they’ve made it really hard and they won’t be happy unless their website or artwork looks identical to the example provided. Who can tell? From where I’m sitting it doesn’t matter, there is only one choice, the right one.

If you’re sat there thinking that you’d rip off the example provided then I’m afraid you’ve just lost a potential client.

In these situations you can really tell designers who take pride in their work apart from those who just knock designs out on production line. A good designer who is worth anything won’t mindlessly rip off someone else’s hard work and talent, they’ll refuse. Deep down all designers crave the warm fuzzy feeling provided by a client’s love of your design. Ripping off another design doesn’t provide this, it just makes you feel cheap, dirty and used.

Copying designs is something that we never do at Evoluted so if you’re a designer that loves creating unique work then why not get in touch.

From the beginning we’ve been willing to work closely with other design agencies, marketing companies and even other web development companies. We prefer to handle the entire contract from concept though the design phases and finally to creation but we realise that the world isn’t perfect. Often we have clients who have an existing graphic designer who doesn’t have the technical skills of create a web site and correctly optimise it for the search engines. We also private label, or white label our services for clients such as marketing agencies that prefer us to remain in the background.

Whilst this certainly contributes heavily to our bottom line it can be frustrating on a personal level as we’re not always able to shout about the great sites we’ve worked on. This is one of the harder things for me, and sometimes it can look as if we’ve had a quiet spell – which is not the case!

The brief for this project called for a Flash front end, something that we haven’t had a great deal of experience with at Evoluted as we’ve traditionally shyed away from building sites in Flash for usability and search engine optimisation reasons.

However there are a limited set of instances when Flash websites can and look really great at the same time. Many bands have great Flash websites, as do art galleries and graphic designers. The Scream site combines a traditional CMS powered backend, with a Flash front end powered by XML. With this Tyrone Wood and his team at Scream are able to change imagery and copy at the drop of the hat. Something that’s not always been so easy with Flash.

Thanks to everyone at Evoluted who worked hard to get this project live, I know there was a learning curve for all involved.