Resident Slipstream designer extraordinare, Rob Hampson (twitter.com/robhampson), has been featured in this months Smashing Magazine Wallpapers for October.
Check out the post here, and download ‘Doodletober’ for yourself!
Running a site as part of your day to day business can easily be forgotten. How important is checking and updating your site against some of the more /official/ or /traditional/ elements of business admin?
For a business whose website is an integral, or sole, piece of the marketing plan, this isn’t good enough. Clients ask us how they should run their site, what they should be doing and how they should measure success. There is a long answer to this, for another day, but we can keep it simple for our clients by remembering one simple mantra:
Being better than yesterday is important for so many reasons. It ensures growth, it keeps one eye on the metrics (can you tell me your unique visitors for yesterday?), it promotes review of your site, and asks the question of how to make it better.
This process needn’t take long – it’s a case of setting up a repeatable process and set of tools to ensure your seeing, and acting on the most important pieces.
Here’s three top tips for keeping yourself on the ball:
1. Use an anlytics app for your phone or dashboard that makes it easy to get a snapshot of data. We use ego for the iPhone, and it’s great for a once a day look at the key numbers.
2. Limit yourself to 5 key measures; this could be uniques visits, twitter followers, adwords performance, sales conversions, diggs, or anything that is a KPI of your business, the key thing is don’t get lost in too many numbers, and make sure they are easy to see. If you have an online business, make sure you add some developer time in to make a tool that allows you to see signup growth across your plans, and to monitor usage.
3. Do it, and do it often. It’s amazing how seeing these numbers EVERY DAY can inspire you to new marketing ideas. You will be in touch with your online marketing, and your ideas for promoting your business or service will flow much more readily. You will probably increase the growth of the things you are measuring just by being on top of things.
Each of these things can take no more than 10mins a day – if you see something that needs more time, add it to your to-do list and act on it as part of your daily tasks, but set aside this time every day to review, measure, understand and maybe you will be better than yesterday.
Got a great tool for tracking and reporting your performance, or a neat trick? Drop a comment in and let us know…
When you are asked the question “How do you deal with SEO on your site” – how do you answer.
Do you have an SEO agency monitoring your site? Do you think about it at all?
There are lot’s of urban myths about how best to SEO your site to win great Google placement, but here’s on fact – SEO starts at home, and the best SEO is simply good content. Not only will this improve your sites Google Juice, but done well it should also be improving the readers (your customers!) experience.
Here are my top 5 tips to growing your own great SEO, and improving the readability of your posts: (more…)
We make web apps, and products that our clients rely on to promote their brand, or their sales, and on this journey we’ve met some great people and have been introduced to some great reading material.
Here is a selection of three great books, must reads for any Digital focused business or start-up: (more…)
We’re busy planning the next OpenWeb Southampton event (a free metup for anyone in the web / social / digital space) and we’re on the hunt for great speaker. The event will take place in central Southampton in the latter part of September (after the Boat Show has finished).
The event has been lucky enough to get some great speakers recently – Paul Boag, Kev Wilson, Jof Arnold, Keir Whitaker, to name a few, and we’re looking to build on this success with the best of local web talent, sharing 10mins of their experience in any relevant subject.
Want to speak? Drop Dan a line at twitter.com/dangriffey and you could be on the lineup for the next event….
Update: Excited that Merlin Mann is writing a book on Inbox Zero – out next year!
We live every minute by email – auto checking in Gmail / Mail.app and iPhone’s in hand for those moments when a laptop is too far away (normally just in a rucsac!). Here’s a great (not so new, but still great) video from Google Campus / Merlin Mann (43 Folders fame) about keeping the inbox clean and managing email.
Expect some more articles about Inbox Zero coming here soon…
We’ve been spending the past weeks putting the finishing touches to our shiny new web app FileShareHQ (a great way to share files for pro-users). Part of this process is to decide on the price plans that will be available and how they stack up.
We’ve fixed our overheads reasonably well, with a great developer (@elliottkember) a talented designer (@robhampson), some good hosting, and cloud services from Amazon S3. It should be easy to put all of these figures together and work out what a GB/user is costing us, and apply a nice healthy Porsche buyers margin. But we’re not going to be doing that.
So why not.
Well, we have costs and overheads that will need to be paid for from day 1, so we can’t be a totally FREE service, but what we do want to do is generate a loyal and growing userbase by being a great VALUE service. We’ll be letting users sign up to their choice of plan for as little as we possible can (starting with a free plan), and putting in more time than the application can afford for our team to talk with, and understand our users. We’ll make the app better, and hopefully cheaper to use (scaling should quickly lead to cost savings, just check out the S3 pricing model).
We want the app to grow and survive, with great buzz, excited users, and a continued growth curve. And, yes, for those reading ahead, this is where our VALUE model does extend our PROFIT. For sure, costs covered, a lower margin point than the grab and run model, but a sustainable, long term profit that will assure the applications success, positive marketing, and continued growth.
The VALUE is put first, and yes, at the greater good of the PROFIT in the long term, but who benefits the most? You. The customer.
We’ll launch soon, sign up for a BETA at http://filesharehq.com
We’re being pounded. Pounded by signals. Internet signals. Everywhere we go the web comes with us. 3G, WiFi, iPhone, Laptop.
The internet is ubiquitous – we use it everywhere we go, every day, wherever we are. The simplest of cell phones can access the web, see a mobile page, check out the scores. Whatever it may be we use it everywhere and rely on it.
So, this is the reason why we use web apps everywhere today – we are always connected to the web – and not just with a bulky laptop.
So what is a web app ?
We’re pleased to announce that as of today we have launched a new site to accompany the planned (and confirmed) meetup for web people that is happening in Southampton on 12th Feb.
You can check out the new site here: http://openweb.slipstreamstudio.com/
Don’t forget to sign up on Upcoming so we know you are coming, and if anyone is interested we have one speaking slot remaining – contact dan at slipstreamstudio dot com for more info.
There have been some well publicised, and controversial, recent posts talking about the current economy and the ‘Runway’. Jason Calacanis sums up his runway as preserving cash in order to “complete their mission” – in other words, to keep cash in the bank in order to survive a deep recession.
Here at Slipstream Studio, our first challenge, is to stay on the ‘Runway’, while moving fast to deliver on the projects we are working on. We’re moving fast because we are a small company with lots to do, and, where a few months ago decisions came easily, it’s time to keep the pedal down but with a raised awareness of what is happening. This applies to all of our actions, but most of all with regard to our spending.
With big prospects, clients to deliver to, and some (shhhhhhh) killer web apps to build, we’ve got to move quickly, get bigger, employ staff, move into an office and get the tools we need to run effectively.
Our ‘Runway’ is as long as we want to make it, but we are making some key decisions now to give the company the best possible advantage:
These are just a few items from the long list, and we’ll talk more about the company (and maybe some office pics 
) in future posts.
How are you moving fast on your runway – it would be great to read your thoughts.
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