Staying Ahead of the Curve - Agency Tips From Parallax
Staying ahead of the curve to foresee changes in the industry is an essential part of working for a digital agency. Things move pretty fast in the digital world, blink and you’ll miss it.
Keeping an eye out for the trends that may be signalling a change on the horizon is a crucial part of our process and the management of the work that we do for our clients.
As an agency in one of the largest digital pockets of the UK, we thrive on being ahead of what is to come to ensure our work remains cutting edge. From design to development and from content marketing to project management, we keep our ears to the ground.
Ahead Of The Curve
There’s a global community online creating and developing concepts to better our use of digital and make the web a better place. Inhouse as an innovative agency, we like to contribute in our own way too.
We have monthly hack days when we take a day to work on different initiatives away from our day to day projects. We’ve contributed an open source tool jsPDF as well as working on innovative industry changing products and ideas to not only stay ahead of the curve, but to be part of it.
Shaping The Curve
As a digital agency, we aim to be leaders in the development and creative process of how users experience the web and how we can help others in the industry create better websites and better online experiences.
With new resources available, the web has become more and more about the user’s experience. Done correctly and well thought out, a more succinct experience will see higher conversion rates with more online sales and leads generated. We’re constantly trialling new software and new ideas to stay ahead of the game; contributing to the global online community at every opportunity is an important part of this. Our blog includes tutorials and insights into new ways of thinking and solving digital problems.
There are always problems and trends that emerge working in the digital sector so we took a cross section of our team to took a look ahead at what anyone involved in digital should keep an eye on.
Curveballs
Some of the team here at Parallax have put together a few ‘curveballs’ that we foresee for 2014 as a digital agency, alongside the pieces of software, web tools and trends that we think will emerge.
Jump to the section of your specialty or interest:
Front End Development – Optimising website for Television
Digital Design – Fresh Design
Content Strategy – Organising Campaigns
Account Direction – Business Development
Digital Marketing – Google’s ‘Better Web’
Project Management – Scope Creep
Back End Development – MV* Frameworks
Curveball #1 – Optimising websites for Television
Danny Le Page, Front End Developer
Back in 2010 Ethan Marcotte introduced the term ‘responsive web design’ to the tech community. Since then, the concept of developing websites which adapt to an ever-growing number of device sizes has amassed significant media attention and unsurprisingly, a whole host of developers and designers who practice the responsive web design to enhance user experience in their work.
The approach is now arguably ingrained as part of the professional web environment and its usage is ever increasing; so where next?
Although the emergence of handheld devices has unquestionably been the instigator to responsive web designs’ success, the rise in Smart TVs means the viewing of web sites in a wholly different setting.
Optimising websites for TVs adds a certain amount of complexity to user interface design and in turn, the development process itself (aside from exploring different user peripheral capabilities aside!). Despite being initially similar to the desktop screen, there are a number of key differences that need to be considered between TVs and their smaller screen counterparts.
For example, the distance from user to device will naturally be much greater than anything that we have developed on the web before. This increases the need for a lot of components to be bigger – think fonts, icons, links, imagery, pretty much everything needs to be made larger to accommodate for the extra viewing distance. Colour contrast also need to be thought through as well as user-navigation, not forgetting textual inputs. In fact, a whole plethora of web components need to be reconsidered and redefined for TV.
Recommendations:
Despite being in its infancy, TV website design has already attracted style-guides from the likes of Google, Opera and the BBC to help aid the webTV development process. Samsung has a development guide on how to interact with their APIs. It’s clear that the resources are out there to delved into and explored.
Whether the jump from desktop to TV however will be too large to encompass in one singular site is still up for debate, however when 3rd parties release libraries and APIs to hook into the difficulty of webTV, development will slowly begin to subside and may open the gap for such possibilities.
How it will keep you ahead of the curve:
Keeping up to date with style-guides and academic studies (heuristic evaluations etc.) will help developers and designers grow into webTV rather than playing catch-up on the other side.
Jamie Webster, Digital Designer
When working in an ever-changing industry, being at the top of your game is important so your design style reflects what’s current. Design can look dated very quickly so its important to stay at the forefront of your craft.
Recommendations:
Keep up-to date with design trends. What the ‘big brands’ are doing are not always best practises, often they’re not on the cutting edge of design. Visit web design galleries such as Awwwards and Web Design Served for inspiration. Don’t be afraid to try new techniques, try not to do the same thing on each project. Have an understanding of the technical workings behind what you do. Read and watch video tutorials. Make sure you’re using the most current version of whatever design software you use.
How it will keep you ahead of the curve:
Bettering yourself as a designer should be natural and will come with time. If you have the technical knowledge and refresh your design style to fit what’s happening in the digital world you’ll be able to adapt to any project easily. It will also keep your work interesting!
Curveball #3 – Organising Content
Robin Swire, Content Manager
When running a content marketing campaign, it can often become incredibly overwhelming very quickly.
With multiple articles needing to be written for internal blogs and outreach, design work, and social media, things can easily be forgotten or fall behind schedule.
Not only that, gathering feedback from colleagues or clients, distribution channels, and tracking the results of each part of the campaign can become very confusing. Finding a straightforward way to manage the campaign is absolutely essential!
Recommendations:
Get yourself organised with a content calendar. Whether you choose to use some of the amazing pieces of software available to you online such as Divvy HQ and Relaborate, or whether you decide to stick with a trusty Excel spreadsheet, effectively planning every piece of your content will help to ensure that the whole campaign is a success.
How it will keep you ahead of the curve:
With a content calendar, you can plan out all of your content by date allowing you to effectively manage the campaign. Use it to write tentative titles for your content, assign who is responsible, when it needs to be delivered by, and where it is being distributed.
Keeping it organised like this is also a great way to plan for contingency. If a piece of content is running behind schedule, move it back a week and move another piece forward. If something unexpected pops up that you need to deliver immediately, no problem, just move some of your dates around and you’re still keeping track of everything.
Using a content calendar, you’ll turn your content marketing campaigns into slick, well oiled machines. Here at Parallax, we couldn’t live without them!
Curveball #4 – Business Development
Dario Grandich, Account Director
Organisations don’t spend enough time planning or thinking about how to do things better. It’s so important to carefully plan a route to success. From establishing clear strategic goals and user research, to deciding on functionality and a marketing approach, it’s super important to get everything right from the start.
Recommendations:
There are so many products and tools that can help organisations do better online. I’ve chosen three that can really help organisations do better.
1) Facebook Pages – If you have one then it’s a great tool to learn about your audience demographic. The Facebook insights pages will tell you how old your audience is, their gender and where they’re located. Using these insights you can create personas which are important to plan effective campaigns and build better websites.
2) Google Analytics – If you have a website with years of analytics information then you’ve got a wealth of data at your disposal to help you improve. Look at usage behaviour from mobile devices, desktop resolutions and browser versions. See what content gets high engagement and the content that gets ignored. Look at creating some conversion goals for the key call to actions and track these over time. Do they change? If so try to establish why – did you do more marketing or did you alter your content? Constantly tweak and test to improve.
3) Stripe – You’re in business to make money so maybe it’s time to start taking payments online. Stripe, which only launched in the UK a few months ago offers an excellent way to collect revenue from your online channels. From one-off card transactions to recurring payments and quick refunds; it really does it all. Stripe’s fees are straightforward, the interface is easy to understand and integration is much friendlier than most payment processors as there’s no need to build PCI compliance into your website. We’ve used it on a few projects so far and it’s given our clients fantastic results and a healthy ROI.
How it will keep you ahead of the curve:
Lots of thinking combined with careful planning and research will lead to success. If you don’t have time to do that, then find an agency (like us) that will do the hard work for you.
Curveball #5 – Google’s ‘Better Web’
Alex Peters, Marketing Executive
Staying fresh in the digital marketing world can be difficult. This is particularly pertinent with SEO, an ever changing industry. Keeping ideas on brand yet also interesting, and more importantly engaging enough to gain exposure online is going to become particularly interesting moving into 2014; especially as we see Google’s subtle algorithm updates become more and more frequent as they seek to perfect the search experience.
Recommendations:
Read, research, and keep learning. Find out how content is being created in different ways. What digital trends are there in terms of design and development? How can you apply these to your content marketing campaigns? Keep ahead with the design of the web – as compelling as your content may be, executing this in the best way possible is incredibly important.
After all, we are conscious of our web presence and what we share is a personal reflection of us. We want to share interesting and cool things with our friends and colleagues – we won’t share interesting content if it looks dull.
Working in SEO, I’m constantly finding fantastic blogs and none more so than those over at Moz and Econsultancy who offer cutting edge advice as news breaks to the digital world. Of course you can also find out what’s going on in the search marketing world on our blog.
How it will keep you ahead of the curve:
Google is wanting a ‘better web’ – this is a place where good content gets rewarded. This gets results and also means that we will see more and more investment by businesses (big and small) in content creation, in order to gain exposure and increase domain authority to get the keyword rankings they crave.
Understanding this is important as it should be at the heart of your online marketing objectives. Outstanding content that provides value for people will lead to brand exposure and great keyword rankings.
The sooner large organisations realise, the sooner they will be able to keep ahead of the curve and see a long term return. Content creation, but specifically interactive content for SEO will become even more significant and popular in 2014.
Tom Faller, Project Manager
Clients sometimes request functionality that may not have been entirely thought through. They may have seen it used well elsewhere, but it might not be relevant in the context of their business. Staying on top of this and prioritising the correct functionality is key.
Recommendations:
T-shirt sizing is a great model for ensuring both the agency and client are happy. By classifying each desired feature’s size relative to other website features as Small, Medium, Large or Extra Large, it’s easy to keep control over the project. For example, something that may have a small impact to business value but have a large development cost is probably not considering initially.
How it will keep you ahead of the curve:
By listing pieces of functionality, attaching cost, time and importance values to them, you can make it clear to clients which pieces of functionality are ‘quick wins’ and which pieces of functionality can be dropped (either for a later build, or completely).
Curveball #7 – JavaScript MV* Frameworks
Jack Roscoe, Back End Developer
It’s incredibly rare that any monumental changes occur in the realms of back end development. We’re not likely to see anything come in that will top the adoption of MVC for example (although you never know), but small and gradual changes in the way we’re using back end technologies are happening all around us. Most notably, the recent shift in data processing from the back end to the front end.
JavaScript frameworks are becoming more powerful than ever, with free resources available such as Backbone, Knockout, Ember, Angular, amongst others. Using libraries like these, developers are trimming down their server side processes to only carry out basic CRUD commands, all the while feeding their data into their JavaScript framework often in JSON format allowing them to work with the data primarily on the front end.
The shift in data handling is only going to increase in popularity as the browsers become more powerful and the JavaScript frameworks continue to improve. Of course, it’s not a solution to fit every case (things rarely are) but for many people it’s an appealing option.
Recommendations:
If you’re new to the various JavaScript MV* frameworks available, your best bet is to just start playing around. There are some great free learning resources available for the most popular frameworks; Knockout, Backbone and Angular. Undertake a quick search and you should find what you’re looking for.
TodoMVC offers open source code for a simple ToDo application written in all of the major frameworks. It’s worth taking a look at a few source code examples here to see what the different frameworks are capable of.
One last thing is to keep an eye out for sites that use these frameworks. If you find one, take a look at their source code and see how they do it (this is one thing you wouldn’t be able to do with server side code). Try to find out how much of the processing takes place on the front end. How much of this work would ordinarily have been done server side?
How it will keep you ahead of the curve:
Naturally, it’s always a benefit to know what your peers and competitors are doing. On top of this, there are a number of direct benefits. For example, depending on your usual back end language(s) of choice, moving your MVC stack to the front end can make the debugging process easier thanks to inbuilt browser tools such as Chrome DevTools and Firebug. Other benefits can include easier to maintain code, and the fact that less focus on your back end language of choice makes it easier for other developers to get up to speed with and maintain your code regardless of their server side experience.
We hope you find our recommendations for 2014 useful and that they will help you stay ahead of the curve! You can read more agency advice on our blog.
If you have any suggestions to add to our list, let us know on Twitter or Facebook.