Archive for the 'About Precedent' Category
-
How Precedent will change the world…
Now the British summer is finally approaching, we at Precedent are casting aside the umbrellas, stocking up on the sunscreen and swapping the morning traffic jam for a gentle amble or relaxing bicycle ride instead.
The idea came from this website: www.changeyourworld.org.uk it’s a really great website from Sustrans, showing how you can use your daily commute to do your bit for the environment.Suntrans are hoping to encourage, us (i.e. lazy commuters) to ditch the car for just one journey, and walk, cycle, or use public transport instead to help reduce car traffic by 10%.
So go on - take your first steps now at www.changeyourworld.org.uk
-
“Modern Universities’ websites: trends, observations and best practice
We recently sent out the first in a series of reports that we are producing on the University sector. This report will shortly be followed by other reports on traditional universities and other higher education establishment’s websites.
These reports are also closely linked to our seminars on the same topic. At the end of 2007 we ran a very successful seminar based on the findings of the Modern Universities report and we will be hosting this again in the spring of 2008.
We will follow this with a second seminar to launch the new report on the Traditional Universities report – a practical and thought-provoking seminar aiming to surprise, educate and ultimately provide university marketeers with the tools and knowledge to improve their organisation’s online offering.
We would like to hear from people interested in this area… so if you have any feedback, good or bad, feel free to leave us a comment.
-
Vote for Sustrans’ Connect2!
Connect2 is a UK-wide project from one of our favourite clients, Sustrans, that aims to create new walking and cycling routes to encourage us all to make greater use of sustainable transport for those everyday journeys. There are local schemes in every country within the UK, some in our most deprived boroughs.
Sustrans’ Connect2 is competing to win £50 million for walking and cycling as part of The People’s £50 Million Lottery Giveaway.
At Precedent, we’re backing Sustrans and we’d like to encourage you to do so too.
Find our more about the project at:
http://www.thepeoples50million.org.uk/projects/connect2You can vote online for Sustrans now at:
http://www.thepeoples50million.org.uk/vote -
Kindle has arrived. Long live the book!
I’ve been a bookworm for as long as I can remember. My shelves at home are groaning under the weight of books that go back to my early reading days. They’re starting to stack up on the floor too. I have a ‘to read’ stack, a ‘must re-read stack’, a ‘recently read’ stack and several random stacks.
So ‘Kindle’ should be the answer to my prayers, and save me from having to move house within the next year or so too.
Amazon’s new ‘ipod of reading’ is an amazing idea. Downloading books, blogs and newspapers onto a single device which you can carry around with you and buy the instant you want to should be my idea of heaven. I need never run out of reading matter again. I can be reading the next Richard Flanagan or Margaret Atwood the minute it’s launched, even if I’m miles from a bookstore.
But…
Where I was quite happy to relegate my CD collection to a drawer and leave my CD player untouched in favour of my ipod, I attach far more sentimentality to books. CDs are plasticky and nasty; books are tactile, they ooze wisdom and experience, they smell fantastic, they’re design objects in their own right. The perfect combination of paper and type and image makes each book distinctive. A well designed and printed book is a wonderful thing. Reading books on a screen that claims to look like paper, using a wheel to scroll and running out of power just at the most important bit just doesn’t appeal to me at all. And how will I lend a book to my friends saying ‘you must read this!’?
And is it just me or does it look UGLY?
http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA
-
Precedent Pumpkins
Jon steward once said “The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom” Well, this post can be viewed as an enthusiastic child displaying their latest “make and do” on a classroom wall! Meaning last Tuesday lunch time saw us harking back to our childhoods with the launch of Precedent’s first inter-office Halloween carve off!
Our three offices based in
London, Cardiff and Worthing worked hard to produce some of the scariest pumpkins seen in cyberspace! You can check out our photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/19252872@N08
The winners were “Mike” – the terrifying one eyed pumpkin and the feline terror that was Nikki’s entry.
-
A powerful tool for Welsh business
Neil Davis, Director of Strategy at Precedent, has been talking with the Western Mail about Precedent’s arrival in Cardiff and our take on the potential impact of digital media on the Welsh economy.
“the businesses that succeed are typically those that assign a business manager to look after their websites and invest properly in a fully integrated ebusiness strategy”
Read the article in full: Make your website make money, Western Mail
-
Trend Spotting – New tool for new reports
Back in June we took a stand at the Ideal Business Show Wales. One of the ways that we attracted delegates to us was to offer them a free 10 minute review of their websites (see screen shot).
Now we could have just produced a paper questionnaire and completed a form with a pen, but being a digital communications agency we decided to develop an online tool, which hooked up to a back-end database so that we could analyse the results as a whole after the event. And in fact we were able to get an overview of business websites in Wales and spot some common trends and themes (see Neil’s previous post).
You may be thinking that developing this tool was overkill for a couple of days at an exhibition, but there was method in our madness since we have plans for the prototype we developed.
After spending some time recently, extending and refining the review criteria, and tuning the database we are now in a position to begin to use the tool to produce trend-spotting reports into the websites of any given sector.
This is not a new venture for us, since we, or more specifically I, have been producing sector benchmarking reports on websites for many years. (see the reports section of our site).
However, this does represent an evolution of the report format. Previously the objective of the reports was to identify and highlight best practice, in relation to the basics of good website design, but the web has moved on and in our opinion everyone should be getting the basics right by now. What makes a really good site stand out is its ability to encourage brand awareness, communicate its proposition, and meet the organisation’s business objectives. So with this in mind we have defined criteria which will enable us to measure how able sites in any given sector are at meeting these needs as well as spot trends, and comment on the effectiveness of those trends.
We believe that our new reports will be unique since they will be a departure from the ubiquitous “Your site scored 8 out of 10 for accessibility” format and will provide a real appreciation of what works and what doesn’t for any given sector’s web presence. The data that our new tool will help us to collect will enable us to provide our clients and the broader industry with truly insightful commentary which we believe will demonstrate Precedent’s leading thinking.
Our first report on traditional universities is due for release at the beginning of October. It will be quickly followed by similar reports into Modern universities and HE establishments in the UK along with an appreciation of any variations in their online channels of communication.
-
…it’s the way you say it
July 18, 2007 In this seminar we go back to look at one of our most basic communication tools: design.
Communicators have become so concerned about segmenting audiences, framing messages, meeting emerging standards of usability and accessibility that they often tend to forget about design. Design? That’s important? Yes, the way the message is presented is still vital. And indeed, remains the biggest single factor in whether that message gets noticed, absorbed and acted upon.
This seminar looks at design in a completely new way. Going back through the history of communication, we distil nine essential principles of effective design - never before identified - that it took human beings more than two thousand years to figure out. And then, applying these principles to the contemporary web, we show what works - and why. Web 2.0? The secret of why some organisations are ‘getting it’, and others aren’t, is all here.
This seminar is held at The St David’s Hotel and Spa, Cardiff.
-
Digital Marketing and You: From Web2.0 to Second Life
August 2, 2007 September 6, 2007 In this seminar we will be discussing what is becoming a vital part of any organisations communications strategy.
In the early days of the web, a successful web strategy consisted of launching a new website and getting it listed on a single search engine. E-mail marketing was a nice-to-have, and online advertising was considered too expensive unless there was a product to sell. For many, online marketing was just about having a website and being successful was measured by visitors to the website. But times have changed and so have your audience.
Dean Russell, our digital marketing expert and Jane Austin, one of our senior consultants, are going to give a thought-provoking and inspiring presentation titled Digital Marketing and You: From Web2.0 to Second Life. Jane will demonstrate some techniques to help you get inside the mind of your audience and will show you how to use this knowledge as a basis for a successful digital communications strategy.
Dean will then talk through some practical tips and examples on the good, the bad and the ugly of modern digital marketing and how communicating your organisation’s message can now be measured. He will cover the concept of word of mouth marketing in this new era of the web and the far reaching impact this has for you and your customers.
This seminar is held at One Aldwych, London.
-
Change your world
Sustrans, the charity behind the National Cycle Network and Safe Routes to Schools are one of Precedent’s longest standing clients. This week, Sustrans launched their latest campaign, Change Your World.
Change Your World is asking all of us to swap just one car trip from 1-7 July
and choose something that’s better for the planet instead - from taking the train or bus to walking and cycling.We think its a campaign worthy of your time and support - take a look.
Comments Off
