Webfly blog

River Island learns the hard way!

In March 2006 River Island launched an all-Flash e-commerce website to great fanfare. The launch was reported throughout the marketing media and trumpeted as a technological break-through. The agency responsible for creating the site quoted

"Our design for the River Island website demonstrates the full potential of Flash technology. When used well, Flash is a fantastic platform for developing clean, efficient and intuitive websites. It allows you to create a really simple, easy-to-use site and there's no jumping around from page to page, which seems to hinder so many e-commerce sites. This website raises the bar for fashion retailer's."

Unfortunately, the site turned out to be completely inaccessible (see our legal partners Out-law) and pretty much invisible to search engines! The furore that followed all quarters of the press, pressure groups, web experts and individuals was immediate. River Island was forced to issue a public apology and promised to address the issues immediately.

Fast forward 12 months (almost) and below is an image of the site as it stands now.

 

Whilst I have a degree of sympathy for the River Island marketing team that commissioned the site (Their agency should have known better) the continuation of this problem into 2007  is simply unforgivable and simply serves to make a bad situation worse.

Personalised Search coming to a PC near you!

The idea of personalised search has been around for sometime now, however Google recently announced it's intention to greatly expand the take-up of it's personalised search service. In simple terms,personalised search replaces the searches we all get at the moment via Google, replaced instead with a set of results based upon our individual preferences.

Whilst this may well have a dramatic effect upon how search marketeers operate, the question most people need to know is how are my results personalised? The answer lies in the fact that anyone who signs-up for any Google service using a Google Account such as Gmail, Adsense and Google Analytics will automatically be enrolled into three additional products:

Search History

Personalised Search

Personalised Homepage

Obviously it's the first of these three products that will provide the data to feed your personalised search results, you can choose to switch-off Search History, although it's worth noting that whilst the data will not therefore be used to serve up personalised results the information is still stored by Google for use in aggregate form.

From a search marketing perspective, the expansion of personalised search should not be too problematic if you have a quality site, you just need to make it easy for users to add your site to their personalised pages by offering functionality such as Add To Google buttons.

Danny Sullivan has posted a comprehensive review of the changes and how to manage them over at Search Engine Land.

Google Maps

I have been looking at Google Maps for a few weeks now and was interested to see this image posted over at Search Engine Land showing a London restaurant proudly displaying it's presence on Google Maps.

For those of you unfamiliar with Google Maps you can find out more by following this link: www.maps.google.co.uk

If Steve Gregory over at Adinuff is right and local is the new global' then we all need to take note and get our listing updated. I'm awaiting Google to send me my Google Maps PIN so I can ensure Edgeworks listings are correct - I suggest you all do the same!

Team ASICS 2007

This week Edgeworks has been working with Asics (UK) to launch www.teamasics.co.uk a site that provides a focus for their support of six ordinary runners preparing for the Flora London Marathon 2007.  Each of the 6 runners plus a couple of TV celebrities, Tony Audenshaw (Emmerdale) and Vicky Binns (Coronation Street) have been selected to benefit from a range of sponsorship support activities including one-on-one training advice and analysis from Olympic silver medal winner Liz McColgan.

As an added bonus, each of the 6 runners has been provided with a personal blog on which to share their highs and lows whilst training for the big event. We have also created a personal blog for Liz via which she will pass on expert tips and guidance as well as hopefully respond to questions from her team members.

From an online  marketing perspective this should be a really exciting project to work on as the whole campaign will benefit from a fully integrated approach including, blogs (naturally), organic SEO, Pay-Per-Click across multiple search engines, as well as utilising the latest social networking opportunities.

I will post highlights of the campaign as we progress and hopefully I will be able to share some interesting insights.