VR3 Media Ltd

BuddyPress

2010-05-28T12:03:00.000-07:00

VR3 have designed and developed sites using WordPress for the last 3 years. We have found that as an open source CMS it is user friendly, excellent for SEO and has a growing number of plugins, including eCommerce, Tweet Blender and AdRotate.

The developers of WordPress have released BuddyPress, an open source Web 2.0 application that allows website owners and managers to add a self hosted and customisable social networking element to a website. The BuddyPress website refers to the application as 'social networking in a box'.

What does it do?

BuddyPress has all of the manageable elements expected of a social networking website, including friend connections, private messages, discussion forums, groups and activity streams. With it being an open source application there are also a number of plugins available, with more to come.

What can BuddyPress be used for?

BuddyPress can be used to build a network as a communication tool for sports clubs and special interest groups, online portfolios for schools and colleges as well as building captivated groups of clients/users for commercial organisations.

The features and plugins allow the users to communicate with each other, sharing ideas, opinions, events and blogs. They also allow commercial organisations the opportunity to share information of special offers, product launches and future developments to a targeted audience.

Oak Building CGI

2010-05-14T03:16:00.000-07:00

The 5 most important elements a hotel website needs

2010-04-26T04:04:00.000-07:00

A well thought out website will improve business for a hotel, guesthouse or bed and breakfast. Search for a hotel in any area of the UK on Google or Bing and chances are you will find many unprofessional looking websites with poor design, badly taken photographs and off putting colour schemes. There are 5 elements or web tools a good hotel website should have that will improve bookings and therefore increase revenue.

A good design

This goes without saying, the home page on a website is the shop window to your online business, a good design will catch and hold people’s attention and give them reason to navigate to other pages and content on the site. The design needs to be up-to-date with current trends including the use of a subtle and non-conflicting colour scheme, well taken clear images and image placement and a clean standard font. This website for example, it has a clean and modern design, large well shot photographs and a simple menu. This is the perfect example of a bad, out of date design. A recent survey found that 40% of traffic researching hotel accommodation ‘clicked away’ from a website due to its poor design and functionality.

Booking System

All hotel websites need a booking system 15% of all bookings are made online and is the number 1 purchased product/service on the internet. There are a number of 3^rd party systems such as eviivo that will integrate into most existing websites. Some are free of charge and other will take a commission on the booking.

Links to review sites

87% of user researching hotel accommodation will use Trip Advisor to read reviews on a hotel or restaurant. Links to these reviews should be posted or embedded into your website. This would seem quite daunting as there could be a negative review about your establishment. Firstly use negative posts to improve your service, you may think that the rooms are a good temperature but if your guests think that it’s too hot them turn the heating down. Secondly users don’t trust reviews that are all positive, it looks fake. You can claim your listing on Trip Advisor, which is free and make sure that the information in correct, also communicate with the user who leave positive and negative reviews.

Photographs and Virtual Tours

A set of well shot images strategically placed or a gallery of photographs will help sell the hotel to visitors on the website. If a hotel is situated in an area with stunning views and beautiful scenery include images of the surrounding areas on the site. Virtual Tours will give the potential customer an immersive and interactive view of what the hotel has to offer. As part of a Social Media campaign you could allow customers to upload their own images to a page on Facebook.

Contact Details

Seems a simple idea but there are many hotel websites that don’t have the contact details in a prominent place. Make sure that they are easy to find, are correct and that there is always someone to answer the phone when it rings, do not allow it to go through to an answer machine, that is a lost sale as chances are they will not try again. Confirm any bookings made online by telephone or SMS and keep a data base of customers and people who have made enquiries for future marketing campaigns.

Sub Groups in Adwords, Improve Your Click Through Rate

2010-04-21T05:47:00.000-07:00

As a company VR3 Media offer Paid Search marketing as a service, we set up and manage accounts for clients and have had a lot of success.

We also use Paid Search to market a couple of our own services, mainly using Google's Adword application to generate sponsored links on the results page. Using Adwords as a marketing channel for our 3D Design and Animation services has been very successful.

VR3’s website is not an e-commerce system so we have no hard and fast conversion rate to measure the effectiveness of a keyword, ad group or ad version within the paid search campaign. Reports within Google’s Analytics application will show what is and isn’t working and give you an ideas of changes that could improve your campaign(s). By segmenting paid search traffic data and setting ‘goals’ it is possible to measure the user habits of paid search traffic. One goal we have set up measures the amount of user who navigates to the 3D Gallery on the website. The gallery is not a landing page for any of the ad groups so it shows that users are interested enough to view more content on the site.

One of the key metrics within Adwords is the Click Through Rate (CTR), this is the percentage of users that clicked on your ad against the amount of times it was activated. We find the CTR to be a useful statistic for measuring the effectiveness of the campaigns keywords, cost per click and ad copy.

Relevant Ad Copy

One way of reaching a high and constant CTR is to break campaigns down into sub-campaigns (ad groups) by keywords you wish to target specifically, in this case 'architectural'. Each ad group has its own ad which means that you can write copy relevant to that keyword. For example, we have a sub-campaign called '3d architectural visualisation'. Within the keywords that will activate the ad are broad, phrase and exact matches all containing 'architectural' or 'architect' combined with, if possible '3d'. The title and the body of ad copy for this sub-campaign contains one if not two of these keywords.

Example Keywords

3d visualisation
architectural visualisation
[3d architectural modelling company]

The Resulting Ad

This has 2 positive effects on the overall effectiveness of the campaign, firstly, users are more likely to click on a link if the keyword is in the title or ad copy, secondly, it improves the quality score Adwords gives the keyword. The quality score is given based on the relevance of the search term to the ad content, the landing page and the initial search term. The better the quality score the less you pay when a user clicks on your ad.

It is worth experimenting with different ad groups to see if the overall campaign’s CTR can be improved. We have recently set up an ad group based on the keyword ‘3d designers’, again with relevant copy in the ad. After 2 weeks we will run reports and decide whether it is worth keeping or deleting the ad group.

Nothing Stays the Same, Google Insights Says So

2010-02-24T20:16:00.000-08:00

Its a fact, an obvious one that nothing stays the same. Over any length of time things change, fashion, what we eat, what information we digest and the media we use to do so. There are number of forces that create the need for change, time of year, what certain fashion designers are designing and popular culture as a whole.

Google Insights allows web managers and marketeers to research the search habits of potential customers/clients/subscribers. By using the available settings it is possible to research and compare search terms and catergories over a certain length of time in a number of different areas. For example, lets say I run a hotel in Leeds and need to improve occupancy at the weekend, I could begin to target Hen parties using a Paid Search campaign. I can use Insights to work out how to optimise a strategic marketing plan. The image below shows changes in use of the search term 'hen party hotels' in the UK over 2007 and 2008.

Judging by the graph above, the best time to concentrate the majority of my budget for the campaign would be January, February and March. Although looking at the rest of the year, especially July (where the is a steady climb towards a peak) it would be worth keeping the campaign running, maybe with an lower budget.

Using Google Insights for Search it is also possible to view habits in certain pre-defined catergories, for example, search terms related to film(s) in Scotland and England in 2009 (see image below). The image shows the difference between searches made related to film in the 2 regions as well as the most popular search terms. This example shows that the term 'cinema' was the searched the most in this category.

The statistics are not delivered as pure numbers, instead Google scale the figures to give a range of 0 to 100, the former being the peak. Looking at the graph for 'hen party hotels' the lines starts at its highest in January (100), around May it is down to 30, then back up to 50 by July.

Bounce Rates, How important a metric is this?

2010-02-16T12:09:00.000-08:00

When looking at the analytics for certain websites developed by VR3 Media there is always a metric that can ruin any day for us, the dreaded bounce rate. VR3 have a number of sites, all with varying bounce rates mainly due to the vast range of clients in our portfolio.

One particular client of ours runs an emergency plumbing and boiler repair company in North London. Google Analytic stats show a very high bounce rate, where visitors are landing on the homepage and exiting before clicking through to any other sections on the website. On this particular website the contact details are in a prominent position on the homepage and the content tells the visitor all they need to know about available services and how much they will pay.

Taking these factors into consideration and the fact that if you did have gallons of water flowing through your ceiling or your boiler had packed up in the middle of the coldest weather for 30 years, then chances of even bothering to go beyond a page with the relevant details are slim.

As important bounce rates are to websites with sales processes or multiple pages of information, sometimes the visitor can find what they need to know in order to commit to using a service on the landing page. Other metrics within Google Analytics can show whether users are engaging with the content. 'Average time on page' will show how long users are spending viewing the page, for example the home page of the plumber has an average of 2.27 minutes.

There are other factors that may effect the bounce rate such as the fact that as part of the marketing for the website we have set up a paid search campaign using Google's Adwords application. The text adds that appear in the search results include the telephone number as well as click-to-call on the mobile ads.

PQS Banner Animation

2010-02-01T14:37:00.000-08:00

This is the banner animation for the PQS website. Produced in 3DS Max and compressed in Sony Vegas.

Google Wave

2010-01-20T09:12:00.001-08:00

Google Wave, although still at a stage where you have to be invited to use the BETA version has already become our key tool for online communication, collaboration and project management. The working day at VR3 Media carries on well past 5pm and we also have freelance developers and designers who work for us remotely. Instead of relying on numerous emails and telephone calls, not forgetting the perfect memory recall, Google Wave helps communicate effectively online.

Conversations or 'waves' work like instant messenger with a number of added features. For example the messages are shown as they are being typed and can also be edited after the fact. The two features that I find the most useful are that anyone involved in a wave can upload files, jpeg, mp3 etc. It is also possible to play the waves back when ever required with each element of the wave loading in sequence.

Both of these features allow colleagues who were not part of the conversation initially to see what had been said, sent and agreed without the need for another long phone call, email or face to face conversation where every last details has to be recalled.

Google will be releasing APIs and giving access to the code allowing a number of developments including embedding elements of the platform into other web applications. A feature I would like to see added and maybe it will be in the future would be a real time voice recording system that could either convert voice into text or save as an audio file. It would also be useful to be able to send links to a wave to a colleague or team member by email or SMS.

We will continue to use Google Wave to complete projects and general communication, I look forward to any future developments to the system and no doubt VR3 Media will be putting all new features to good use.

Importance of Return Visits to your Website

2010-01-06T14:11:00.000-08:00

The importance of attractive returning visits to your website cannot be understated. Whether your site is eCommerce or an information resource, keeping the content relevant and dynamic is important in insuring people revisit your website.

According to this artice on the BBC a user will take just 50 milliseconds to form an opinion on the quality of a website, so its hard enough to grab the attention of a first time visitor. With this is mind the load time of your web page should/must also has to taken into consideration.

Considering the length of time your website has to hold the users attention it becomes even more critical that the visitor lands on a page that has the information or product they are looking for or it is easy for them to find and navigate to.

Users on an eCommerce site may visit the same site (browsers) a number of times before committing to a purchase. Making the browser's experience easier on their revisit is key. Using a shopping cart that holds their selected products while browsing over multiple visits cuts out the need for the user to search for the product a second, third, fourth time. After sales service is just as/if not even more important (you now have their cash) as the content or usability of the website, late deliveries, damaged or the wrong goods when delivered could kill any potential repeat business stone dead.

If you don't have an eCommerce site content has to be relevant, engaging and kept up-to-date. If you already have some returning visits to your web site you should use web analytics to discover the content they are viewing. We have noticed with a number of our clients that any users with 4 or more visits were viewing the news page as the second most visited page (on one website is was also the most popular landing page for direct traffic). Based on this both clients started update the news and events pages on a much more regular basis.

Here are a few tips on attracting returning visitors;

Make the content relevant and engaging for the user the first time they visit, use targeted campaigns, right keywords and landing pages

Offer a excellent customer service before, during and after purchase/subscription (Live Chat, quick replies to emails, easy to find telephone numbers)

Analyse the content the returning visitors are viewing, keep that content up-to-date, also use other reports such as the Visitor Loyalty and Recency

Add an element of interactivity and participation to your web site, addictive games etc

Use Social Bookmarking on websites such as Digg, Deliciuos and Twitter as well as RSS feeds

Gather feedback on your web site and service, use the fivesecondtest tool to get an idea on people's opinion on your design

Keep your existing customers/subscribers up-to-date with regular contact (be very careful with this and always allow a way of opting out of receiving any marketing material)

This is my first ever blog and would appreciate any feedback! Thanks