Philip Wilkinson on Feb 06, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products
2 commentsI got collared by the Intruder chaps (Vincent & Eugene) the other week whilst coming out of the OpenCoffee event in Waterstones. Here’s how it went:
Philip Wilkinson on Jan 24, 2008, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, Products, Social Media
2 commentsOne thing which has been really interesting over the past 5-6 weeks is that having an actual site live is a very useful thing. We debated for quite a while whether we were going to put the current version live, bearing in mind the list of bugs and elements that didn’t quite seem to work correctly, going through the following points:
You actually have deployed something which is a great morale booster You learn a lot from how people use (or don’t use the site) through asking them, and mainly analysing detailed statistics on usage It’s a chance to get out of a development environment and really see what the real world issues that are thrown at you are. People stop asking you when you are going to launch!!!
Users who come to the site think that it is a finished version and may not be patient with the flaws You have to keep fixing the bugs in the live environment which takes up valuable development time Investors start asking for traffic figures on the site and to see “traction” when you’ve only just launched and know you need to put another 20 things live and perfect them before your plan really kicks in. Not implementing a menu bar sucks in terms of navigation! Developing the site with a graphic design team and then implementing everything in one big chunk is wrong and inefficient (I’ll explain why further down in this post) We shouldn’t let design get in the way of functionality and usability - it may look great but not if people can’t use the thing Use some good quality analytics packages - we have a combination of our own internal tools, Google Analytics, and Clicktale Make sure you get the blend right between people who want to browse and people who want to search and know what they want. Some design elements and layouts on the web have evolved in a certain way for a reason - being adventurous is good but need to pick the right battles Don’t try and gain traffic too quickly so that you can get feedback and improve the proposition before the masses arriveThe first version of Crowdstorm was a big step for us in terms of trying to build functionality and a design with no historical work to base it on. We took the concept and vision, built 75% of the functionality, then got a graphic design team in to come up with our look and feel. Once the graphical work was done and we were happy with any changes, we then tried to match the CSS / XHTML up with the technical feature set to create the finished product. There was no real way to go back and tweak things without losing time and money.
Fast forward to Jan 2008 - and Crowdstorm V3. This time we have a great team who have had me drill the words “iterate, measure, deploy” until their ears bleed. In a small team of 5, we’ve got two technical developers, one front end interface designer, a search engine specialist, and a product / commercial guy (that’ll be me then).
We build a basic wireframe of a page, write what we want from it, look through any data from the existing site to back up our ideas for change, then code a designed page up in CSS / XHTML. We look through it, play around with a few elements, then go and simplify it by reducing 20% of what we have on it. Once we’re happy with this first version we get the front-end hooked up to the technical backend and deploy it on our beta site behind the scenes, then move on to the next page.
Even then, we’re constantly going back to the older versions and trying new things with the implemented design and refactoring in the technical implementation. We run the analytics software on the pages and get people to try it out too. The main thing I’ve found is that this works very, very well, but it does rely on having all the team on-board in order to understand that nothing is set in stone and everything they do will change.
It’s what I love about the web - seeing a product as a living, breathing entity that evolves every waking minute of the day!
Philip Wilkinson on Jan 22, 2008, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship
No commentsPredictions out on monday from the Advertising Association and World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) and published on StrategyEye - stating that UK online ad revenues could hit £21.97 billion by 2019, up from £15.98 billion in 2007. Now that is some long-term prediction from those people with the crystal ball!
It actually does make sense even in the short term as even if you believe the “predicted” downturn in the global economies, online ad spend is most likely to actually increase as advertisers look to place their money in the most cost effective and trackable channel - the internet.
Look for ongoing increases in display ads, online classifieds, search marketing, and vertical-niche channels.
Philip Wilkinson on Jan 07, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products, Social Media
3 commentsWith markets “potentially” in down-turn’s or corrections, it’s always interesting to consider that the internet actually benefits from those sorts of times as with money tight, marketing executives will continue to gravitate toward the internet, looking for more measurable ad formats to buttress their positions.
This year alone, the US will hit $27.5 billion in terms of online ad spend:
(Chart courtesy of emarketer)
Philip Wilkinson on Dec 22, 2007, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, Fun, Social Media
No comments
Have a great holiday and we’ll be back in the new year with a whole heap of announcements. Thanks for everyone’s support this year - we couldn’t have done it without you.
Oh, and remember you can always come to Crowdstorm UK or Crowdstorm USA when you’ve got your gifts and want to tell the world how good or bad they are!
Philip Wilkinson on Dec 13, 2007, in E-Commerce, Social Media
3 commentsWe’re really pleased to be nominated for the social shopping category in the Open Web Awards run by Mashable. It’s great to be noticed and we’ve got some tough competition, and as of the last count, we’re about 25% behind the leader! So - every vote counts right now and we’d really appreciate it if you could quickly vote for us with just a single button click on their site, via the button below:
I know it’s a PR thing but it’s important for us and we would get to go to San Francisco to the awards ceremony. In fact, if you get us the most votes through your company - I’ll get the whole Crowdstorm team to wear your company t-shirts to the event - how’s that?
Philip Wilkinson on Dec 09, 2007, in E-Commerce, Fun
1 commentThe Sunday Times just published an article on women being the primary buyers this christmas for consumer electronics. It comes via data released by John Lewis saying that “electrical gadgets were more fun for women than ever before and no longer had a male, geeky image.”
Digital radios, iPods and digital photo frames top the list of things they are buying. Now, is this really what is happening or is it that they’re just buying gifts for their other halves - ho ho ho.
Philip Wilkinson on Dec 05, 2007, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, Products, Social Media
No commentsWow - another milestone and about time too eh 
About an hour ago, the US site went live at www.crowdstorm.com
Now of course we have to check for bugs, keep bringing in more of our expert review feeds, and tidying up all the loose ends for the next 48hrs. Still - it’s a great feeling to be operating fully in two countries now (UK and US) and evolving our site and platform from there.
Philip Wilkinson on Nov 23, 2007, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship
No commentsI had an amusing text message last night from one of my good friends who was on an Easyjet flight from Lyon back to the UK. It went along the lines of “Hi Phil, I was flicking through the inflight magazine and was shocked to see you in it talking about Crowdstorm!”. Now you have to admit that is pretty cool.
The article is talking about a selection of entrepreneurs and my piece is at the bottom without a photo (apparently the one with me holding my head on my hand wasn’t good enough - pah!)
Philip Wilkinson on Nov 14, 2007, in E-Commerce, Social Media
1 commentCarrying on with the social + shopping trend, a report has recently come out from the e-tailing group in association with PowerReviews, on this new breed of social researcher.
Key findings were that 70% of users see customer reviews and ratings on products as being very important to choosing a product, 41% liked customer supplied photos, and 22% being customer supplied video:
82% of social researches found reading reviews better than researching a product in-store with a (ahem!) knowledgeable sales associate, and 75% found it helpful to narrow product selection based on feedback from people like them with similar interests.
This last bit is particularly interesting as it’s the first real bit of research touching on the “getting reviews from people you trust / similar to you” in the research / shopping sphere. After all - whose review would you trust more:
The Crowdstorm Blog is about opinions and peppers and stuff like that - honest - nothing to do with a blog about what we're up to and stuff.
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