It’s not unusual that in a digital agency the producer will say to the designer “ just put in some Latin, and we’ll put the copy into the CMS later”. This got me wondering; by doing this are we relegating a very important part of our messaging to an afterthought in the creative process. Is Lorem Ipsum killing design?

We have all heard a thousand times, that “content is king”, but do we really believe it? Websites are information services  and as much as this may offend many designers, the User isn’t coming to the website you are designing to Marvel at your use of colour, or be impressed with your choice of typography; they are there to find the information they want. Don’t get me wrong the design is far from irrelevant, but it's role is to make the user feel comfortable and guide them to the CONTENT they are looking for.

Have a think about how “normal web users” use  websites. The people I am talking about are people like your parents, the type of person who uses the scrollbar to scroll, the person who uses the internet every day, but won’t know what a browser is. These people are more than happy to ignore the design and put up with cumbersome usability, as long as they can find the content they are looking for. Good copy is responsible for helping people find what they are looking for and good copy should be clear, concise, and informative. Throwing some copy in at the end will more than likely be none of these things. If the content is the most important part of any website,  why aren’t copywriters embedded into the beginning of the process of  all digital agencies? They are the ones who can make the real difference to the success of any website.

Have I offended all the designers reading this yet?

You shouldn’t be offended. We should encourage designers to be part information architect , part copywriter and of course part designer. We need designers to think about the user at all stages of the design process  and get them asking the two most  important questions “Where do we want the user to go?” and “ what messaging can we use to get them there”. From a user perspective the advantage in this approach is clear, but there is an added advantage to the designer themselves. By placing considered copy into your design your clients will better understand the messaging, making it easier to get sign-off. The other advantage to the designer is not trying to force the final copy, which is always twice as long as the Lorem Ipsum placeholder, into the keyframes. Everyone's a winner.

So before you hit cmd+c on the Latin,  stop and think about what you should actually be saying.

South by South West in Austin, Texas is the largest web technology event in the world. I had been sponsored by the UK Digital Mission to go there and launch DASH our web app product for streamlining the process of setting businesses up online. Despite the global recession the event has grown rapidly over the last few years from several thousand to 15 000 delegates. This was the first time the event had taken over the entirety of the ACC - Austin's gargantuan conference centre.

Before I went I had a vision of distributing thousands of flyers, talking briefly to hundreds of eager new users desperate to blog and tweet about my stunning new app and returning victorious with a database full of new DASH clients. As you can probably tell I am normally the guy building the tools for other people to go out to market with. This was my first experience of product marketing and I was in at the deep end.

Unsurprisingly I wasn't the only guy out there with something to sell. In fact I think virtually every tech company I could name had a presence there and they were chucking money at it. The trade show felt like a busy Souk with every trick in the book (free t-shirts, Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, booze, celebrity endorsement) being employed to grab the attention of the delegates. Additionally this was a festival of learning, most people were here on their own time and money, so likely to be a little resistant to direct sales unless I was wearing hot pants and handing out beers.

By the end of Day 1 I had given out 10 cards and done 5 lengthy demos. Plan A - Connect directly to end users - Scrapped.

Practicing what I preach a little more I decided to try and target a selection of key influencers and journalists. The poster boy for the start your own business crowd (DASH's primary audience) is a guy called Gary Vaynerchuk. The problem is that everybody wants a piece of him. Whilst I chased him from room to room I noticed a few regular faces, his support staff and PA, and although I actually got to my man in the end it will be those guys that I try and schmooze on twitter now.

I then started to look at the fringes of the conference and made appearances at events called "core conversations" where audience participation is encouraged and the speakers are the up and coming Garys of tomorrow rather than the social media celebrities of today. I used my insights as a web designer to contribute my thoughts on branding and technology which built a platform for talking about DASH. At the end of those sessions I was handing out 50 cards a go. (I should give a shout out here to the fantastic Ian Sanders for inviting me to talk in his Unplan Your Business session

I began to use the same tactics with journalists at the conference by effectively trading my personal commodity - content - in exchange for plugs on DASH. Look out for me on Techfluff.tv and Computer Weekly shortly!

Finally good old fashioned networking at the parties created some of the best opportunities. By not overtly thrusting DASH down peoples' necks and bonding with them personally I am pleased to say we will now be working with one of the world's top interface designers (who is also pals with most of the bay area startups), an advisor to angel investors who is bored on gardening leave and feels like a challenge and the promise of a few mentions on the larger tech blogs.

From a business point of view the success of this trip will be judged by moments in time rather than hours of hustle.

After all, no one ever clicks on the sponsored links.

We are really pleased to announce the re-launch of our popular Twitter application - Twilert - at the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin Texas as part of the UK Digital Mision.

Twitter search alerts via email

Twilert is a Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service... well any keyword you like really! In a nutshell, its like Google Alerts, only on Twitter.

Why the need to re-launch?

Last year Twilert was unfortunately a victim of its own success. It was featured in publications such as Twitter Marketing for Dummies, numerous high profile blogs, as well as being regularly mentioned on Twitter itself and it began to hit issues scaling against the demand of the number of users we had. Sadly we had to switch the service off and rethink the architecture.

The platform has been completely re-built to perform much better and scale efficiently against the Twitter API. We have also developed a more user friendly web interface to help you manage your Twilerts and add new ones really easily.

Have a look for yourself! www.twilert.com

If you have any suggestions or feedback please feel free to get in touch on support@twilert.com and we will do our best to help you out. Thanks to all our users for the support so far and we hope you enjoy using the new service.

We did it again: this time for Tepilo. The company that we started last year with TV's Sarah Beeny has been ranked as a top start-up business by Smarta.

A judging panel that included Dragons Den's Deborah Meaden and the Founder of Bebo, Michael Birch, has ranked our property selling website as one of its top 100 in their inaugural awards.

According to the blurb:

"The Smarta 100 is the ultimate business accolade, recognizing the UK’s smartest small businesses. Smarta.com has uncovered remarkable companies who have gone the extra mile to differentiate themselves from the market or found clever ways to compete, from their marketing plan to their ethical stance. The result is a fascinating insight into the unique business ideas that are thriving in the current economic climate. The finalists proved to the judges that they have what it takes to run a successful venture, from spotting a new opportunity to making it a reality."

Tepilo really has gone from strength to strength since we launched it in the summer of 2009 and we've got some great initiatives that will be revealed this year. Not just a pretty face...

In recent weeks I seem to be getting more and more briefs landing on my desk, requesting "web 2.0" graphics or a "Glassy effect". I find it interesting that this language has seeped into to the mainstream, however, this is a prime example of clients jumping allowing their personal preference to get in the way of their audience's preference. This way of thinking relegates the design process to simply applying a style and colouring in-between the lines and doesn't consider the design as communication.

Design should never be a style or a fashion rolled out and applied to a wireframe. Design is about relevant effective communication with your target market. It is often forgotten that the design is the first experience a user will have with your website. Before the user has read a word, they have already scanned over the page, taken in the visual language and made an instant decision on whether or not this is the right sort of site to be able to find what they are looking for. This is where good design will stand out and help guide the user through the page, without them even knowing. For the best design does not announce itself to its audience but is accepted and engaged with without them even realising.

Here at codegent, once we have identified the audience we want to communicate with and the key message which we want to leave them with we begin intensive research into that audience. We look at competitors and then look at other brands which our target audience engage in. I have written before about the crucial nature of knowing your audience but I can't stress this enough. You need to know everything about your audience, you need to know where they go online, whether they use social media, whether they access their email through a blackberry, the kind of visual language are they used to, what sort of symbols they associate with value. By getting to know your audience, you can learn the best visual language to communicate to them with .

Once we have collected this information we sit down and analyse the visual language. In the simplest terms this is identifying themes in typographic styles, colours used, style of photography and how these graphic elements are brought together. Once this visual language has been deconstructed and the meaning of all of these symbols has been identified, we can use this visual syntax to be able to create the right message for the right audience. This can then be used to guide the audience through the website, getting them to take the path we want them to follow .

This semiotic approach is at the heart of all good design. By taking this approach all design decisions become quantifiable and it removes personal preference. As much as the client's wife may want to make it "glassy", if the researched visual language doesn't support this, then it is the wrong decision to make.