96black blog

New consulting services

Scott — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 04:34:00 +0000

96black is now offering a range of consulting services that we’ve long been supplying to our larger project partners. Now you can engage us for any of these services regardless of whether we’re involved in the design and build phases.

Scoping

Without a clear articulation of what a project is supposed to do and how it will do it, you can’t possibly hope for a successful outcome. With a scope document from 96black you can be sure that all the angles have been thought through: technology platform, interactions, business objectives, content strategy etc. Whatever your requirements are, we’ll capture them in a straight forward specification that can be handed to any competent web developer for implementation.

Wireframes

Hand in hand with scoping comes wireframes. More concerned with steps, interactions, and layout than purely technical factors, a good set of wireframes will spell out exactly how a website will look and work. Stopping short of being a full design, wireframes will show exactly how an ecommerce system might work for example: product selection, shopping carts, checkout, payments, accounts etc.

Style guides

A good style guide for your web content will cover tone of voice, shared vocabulary, keywords, optimal page length, image size and shape and more – all customised for your website and company. Having one of these on hand will remove any inconsistencies from the site, which can be a problem when more than one staff member creates and publishes content, or a staff member that used to create all the content leaves or changes role.

Training

96black can help you and your staff with your training needs. Either at your place or ours, we can hold training sessions on a range of topics: Google Analytics, Content Management Systems, Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click campaigns and much more. Get in contact with us to see how we can help you with your training needs.

If you would like to discuss any of the above with us, please feel free to get in contact with us.

2014 Website design and development projects

Matylda — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 01:56:51 +0000

We’ve been busy recently, designing and developing top notch websites for our lovely clients. We wanted to share with you a few of the public ones.

Have a squiz below! If you would like to have a closer look click on the images to enlarge them or alternatively visit the websites.

nextspace.co.nz - website design and development

theharbour.org.nz - website design and development

cassiarestaurant.co.nz - website design and development

thebigegghunt.co.nz - website development

novoeducation.co.nz – website design and development

synergypositioning.co.nz & synergypositioning.com.au - website design and development

livingsober.org.nz – website design and development

commonground.org.nz - website design and development

wscs.co.nz - website design and development

steerclear.co.nz - website design and development

womens-health.org.nz - website design and development

wboppho.org.nz - website design and development

Metadata know-how

Matylda — Fri, 23 May 2014 03:56:29 +0000

The way to un-geek-i-fy the meta data is to simply describe it as a summary of the website and a condensed description of your pages that allows search engines and potential visitors to quickly understand your website content. Before we dig into the importance of good quality meta data I would recommend you to have a peek here to get a better understanding on how search engines work. In this post, I will reference the meta tags such as title, description and keywords.

Meta title and meta description

Meta data consists of a title, description and keywords. It’s located in the part of the website code and depending on how your website has been built, it can be edited via the CMS or has to be changed by the developer.

The title tag is displayed on the search engine results page above of your website URL. It provides potential visitors with information on page content and also plays an important role in the search engine’s algorithm that determines your website ranking for specific keywords. The recommended format includes brand name, primary keywords and location (if applicable). As shown on the image below, vertical dividers allow to present a title tag in clean and professional manner.

It’s crucial to ensure that meta titles are unique and relevant to the content of the page. Google displays the first 50-60 characters of the title tag.

The meta description is no longer important for search engine rankings, however it plays a crucial part in attracting and convincing potential visitors to click through to your website. The snippet under your website URL is the meta description of the page. In some cases search engines may choose to display a different description than the one provided in the website code. It happens when the page content is more relevant to the search term.

It’s important to make sure that the meta descriptions are highly relevant to the page’s content and as inviting and useful as possible. Best practice says they should include your most relevant keywords, but make sure to not over use them as search engines can penalise you for “keyword stuffing”.

The below image shows examples of two meta descriptions results in the search for “engagement rings” phrase on Google. The first one shows good quality meta description. The second one is an example of when the description is being pulled from website content. As you can see it’s highly irrelevant to the search. It doesn’t only create a bad first impression but also sets this merchant back a step in the sales process of grabbing potential visitors attention. This can happen when page doesn’t have the meta data at all or when the meta data doesn’t include searched phrase and the content does.

Google displays the first 150 to 160 characters of the meta description. As for the meta titles it’s also crucial that all meta descriptions are unique throughout the website.

Meta keywords:

Lastly and in this case least important come the keywords. They have been in fact completely disregarded by Google but are still partially used by other search engines. It doesn’t harm to input them, however they won’t influence your website rankings. The search engines algorithm changes constantly so who knows maybe some day they will become important again!

Steer Clear

Scott — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 04:39:23 +0000

What is it

Our friends Curative asked us to be involved with their project for the New Zealand Drug Foundation’s campaign Steer Clear. To quote the brief, “Steer Clear aims to show some of the ways that you put yourself and others at risk when you jump behind the wheel blazed.”

This campaign is a long term effort to change the widely held perception in NZ that driving high is ok. Targeting young people through a range of media 96black was asked to contribute to the digital component. This would take the form of a website and a video game. Pretty exciting for us as we’ve never designed and built a game.

We’re not talking about GTA V, just a simple way of engaging people to get the message across that your actions have consequences. The game would be hosted online on the Steer Clear website but would also feature in a simulator that will travel NZ spreading the message. The simulator takes the form of a converted van in which the game is projected onto the windscreen and the inputs for the player are the steering wheel, accelerator, and brake. Challenging!

Our part in it

To begin with we had to design the game. Fortunately there was a pretty tight brief from Curative in terms of what the research says about stoned drivers. We chose to focus on the affects on peripheral vision, the ability to maintain a constant speed, and poor lane control. These points allowed us to design some simple games to reinforce these messages, and then create a narrative around it. We merged the point of view driving footage with overlays using javascript and html 5 video.

The biggest challenge for us was to integrate with the physical controls of the van. All our controls in the online version were button or mouse actions. In the van we had to interpret the movements of the wheel and pedals via microcontrollers back into button and mouse actions. Fortunately the broader Steer Clear team has some inventive folk so it wasn’t impossible, just tricky and time consuming. We’re still refining the feel but we’ve got an 18 month campaign ahead of us, so there’s time to learn and refine.

The website itself is starting fairly content light with the idea that it expands as the campaign progresses. For now, it houses the game and some written content. The home page is mostly given over to social media which to begin with is posts from the campaign accounts. There will be hashtags promoted later in the campaign which will allow site visitors, game and simulator players to chime in via their own social media accounts.

Splore

The Steer Clear website, online game, and simulator all debuted on Friday 14th 2014. The simulator was set up for the Splore festival just outside Auckland. The van was housed in a branded tent complete with staff and smoke machine, with the idea to attract passersby as they moved from one part of the festival area to another. A good number of folks went through the simulator over the 3 day festival, with most having their photo taken by the simulator staff and uploaded to a Steer Clear Facebook gallery. That connection was another technical challenge, but made a lot easier by using the Smile Dealers API.

The communications part of the Steer Clear team invited the major news teams out to the festival and very gratifyingly both One and 3 News chose to record and air stories about the simulator and campaign on their broadcasts that night.

Summary

What a great project to be a part of! So many new skills were learnt, trust was given to and earned by our team from our besties at Curative and the stress of such a hard launch is now receding into the rear vision mirror.
The campaign continues for another 18 months so you may see it at an event near you. The news coverage has already lead to organisers of other events getting in contact to ask if the simulator can be at their event, which is the best outcome we could all have hoped for.

Volunteering on Motutapu Island

Matylda — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 01:03:19 +0000

This is 96black’s third Christmas and following in the footsteps of previous years we won’t be handing out ‘corporate gifts’ but will instead be investing that money – and more – to help out a worthwhile cause.

In our first year of business we gave to the Pike River Disaster Relief Trust and last year we gave our time to the Auckland City Mission. This year we had the pleasure to volunteer for The Motutapu Restoration Trust - one of New Zealand’s largest ecological restoration endeavours.

Our team spent a day on the beautiful Motutapu Island, helping with collecting seeds, planting and weeding. Our day to day skills of creative thinking, strategy, and development were perhaps not directly transferable but we managed to get a lot done and had great fun!

We would like to thank all of our clients for giving us the opportunity to take part in restoring the natural landscapes of this beautiful island!