Where is the market going? Whilst most businesses are focused on digital marketing elements such as Facebook social media campaign, optimising their sites for Google & ensuring that they have e-commerce & online sales capabilities, we keep seeing that successful businesses still focus on their core business marketing activities over and above digital.

Around 60% of the work that we do is with growing or startup businesses (in other words, ones that are turning over under 100k per year and are in their first year of business). Funds are limited for businesses at that stage of growth – which means that money spent on marketing has to be spent on the most cost effective areas (you’d be surprised at how often larger companies spend money on ‘prestige’ projects which do not deliver measurable, bottom line revenue benefits).

In 2012, we have worked …

Magento & ChampagneAndLemonade.com

Magento seems to be taking over most of our working life now it seems! We were contacted by Isi (a friend of mine from 10 years ago down the pub) regarding some issues with getting her Magento website online … so it was E-creation to the rescue.

www.champagneandlemonade.com is a super-cool fashion retail site for pre-loved designer brands online.

Some of the usability tuning we applied included:

Adding some text on the ‘account login’ page to remind people that ‘You need to have activated your account by clicking the activate your account link in the confirmation e-mail when you first set up your account’.

Meta ContentAlthough meta content is playing a decreasingly important role in search engine positioning, a phrase such as “Pre-Loved Designer Fashion and Luxury Goods, Style Steals.” It makes sense to spend a bit of time looking at the …

We have now reverted to using the News section of the E-creation website for blog updates. Running two blogs seemed to be a bit unnecessary!

Integrating Magento & Sage 200 to achieve eBay’s X.Commerce objectives for an start-to-end e-commerce platform

In June 2011, eBay bought the remaining 51% stake in Magento as part of a strategy for its X.Commerce open source platform. eBay’s goal is to provide a complete end-to-end service to e-merchants, bringing together local inventory data, discounts, pricing history, transactions & tools for payment with its auction platform

Most SME businesses aim to become more profitable through growth but cost reduction can yield better profitability with less business growth ‘stress’. Magento (a tool to increase sales) integrated with Sage 200 (a tool to manage stock levels, product information & business processes) yield business benefits throughout SME businesses. However, there has been a lack of integration tools to connect Magento & Sage 200, so E-creation has developed the Sage Magento Integration Connector 2011 (SMIC2011)…

SMIC2011 provides businesses …

Smartphone App Development that makes sense …
After the hype of 500,000 Apple apps, why does the average iOS app lose £16,000+?

Since Apple introduced the App Store in 2008, everyone seems to be developing iPhone applications. 500,000 iPhone apps available in AppleΓÇÖs app store at the end of July 2011 with 15,000,000,000 downloads, but the underlying smartphone market is shifting:

In the UK, in March 2011, the percentage of smartphones sold was:

Android 38%
RIM (Blackberry) 24.5%
iOS (Apple) 23%
Symbian 11.4%

So Apple is in 3rd place in the hardware sales front … something that isn’t immediately obvious given their fantastic PR. Apple is doing very well and making big profits (apparently they had a larger pot of cash than the US government at the end of July 2011), but the profitability for developers creating iPhone apps is more questionable, especially when you consider the 30% …

Twitter & Google’s Instant Indexing

The world of digital marketing moves incredibly fast, with a constant flow of new tools and opportunities for businesses. It was only 5 years ago that Twitter was launched and for many businesses, let alone individuals, the value of creating a Twitter account is unclear. So here is why we think Twitter has become a useful business tool …

Using Twitter and Blogger to instantly list your website content in Google

Twitter is a ‘micro blogging’ website for publishing very short ‘diary statements’ that the public can search, see, subscribe to and republish (called ‘retweeting’). In April 2011, Twitter reached 175 milion users, up from 15 million users in 2010 but still a small proportion of the 750 million active Facebook users in July 2011.

The recent updates to Google’s ‘real-time indexing’ technology has made Twitter a powerful social …

We are voracious book worms here at E-creation and always looking for something interesting to read (any suggestions?) Even though this book is over a year old, ┬áit is our ‘must read’ book for 2011:Malcolm┬áGladwell’s ‘Outliers’

Malcolm Gladwell scores a hit with another one of his books in our office, this time with the rather quirky ‘Outliers’. Vaguely reminiscent of Freakonomics, Gladwell takes a look at people and unusual statistical ‘outliers’, analysing how ‘destiny’ drives success.

As Malcolm put it himself ‘Did you know that there’s a magic year to be born if you want to be a software entrepreneur? And another magic year to be born if you want to be really rich?‘ when explaining his book.┬áSports stars have ‘magic months’ to be born, with a huge percentage of professional hockey and ┬áfootball players being born in January, February and March. …

How does a typical budget website design & development project breakdown?

Many businesses taking there businesses online are confused by the offer of ┬ú500 e-commerce website design packages, which 95% of the time simply do not deliver on their promise to generate value to a business. A complete e-commerce website design & development process from E-creation typically starts at ┬ú5,000, ten times the cost of the budget ┬ú500 website design package you might see offered in the advertising panels in the right of Google – but offers better value for money. Why? Because of the time spent on initial thinking, design and coding together with the unique experience going into making the best value website:

ΓÇó Consultancy – define objectives, content & navigation for clarityΓÇó Design ΓÇô create engaging design & experience for website visitorsΓÇó Coding ΓÇô convert design into HTML code …

Complete professional brand, stationary & website design plus development for under £4,000

CLIENT

Berlingual

PROJECT SCOPE
Brand, stationary & website design

BUDGET
£1,500 for branding & stationary, £4,000 for website design / programming

TECHNOLOGY

Website built using HTML with multilingual elements in Flash

International business appeal

E-creation was provided with a blank slate ΓÇô come up with a memorable company name that communicates ΓÇÿprofessional English training provided from BerlinΓÇÖ. Berlingual was the resulting brand name and E-creation delivered:

ΓÇó Concepts and design of company logo and stationaryΓÇó Design & development of website & online marketing

At the heart of the design, E-creation demonstrates that ΓÇÿbusiness communication is not just translationΓÇÖ using common English business metaphors with literal German translations, demonstrating the complexity of business English.

Using language road signs for International business

As with all design E-creationΓÇÖs design, deep thinking was applied on every level, even in the selection of the corporate font ΓÇô …

Concept sketches for XTM International

I really need to update this content but here is where we started from with the animation concepts and overall design ideas for the website.