October 30, 2018
Winter is well and truly here! The team have been hard at work, mainly to keep their fingers from freezing, and have produced some great work. We have also had time to look over all that was learnt at the Brighton SEO Conference, and we celebrate the Tobacco Factory opening their new theatre.
UX Test Animation
Our designer Tom’s been playing around with interactivity and video recently and has worked up a quick test for one of our clients Ellani Cars website – this is just a concept, but we’ve been slowly incorporating more animated elements to enhance the user experience on our sites – there’s a lot more to come in the next few months so keep a close eye on some of our future launches!
Inktober 2018
Over the last month, our designer Sam has taken part in the challenge of creating 31 illustrations – one for each day of October. The challenge was set by illustrator Jake Parker to create one drawing everyday of October. The guidelines are pretty loose, as long as you create drawings from ink, pretty much anything goes. You can choose to draw whatever you want or follow the official Inktober daily prompts, which is what Sam opted to do this year. The goal this year was to maintain a consistent style using line and dot shading (a technique which isn’t best suited to quick turnaround drawings) and to produce artworks he wouldn’t normally tackle. We really loved seeing Sam’s ideas come to life, and if you’d like to see more of his work (which you definitely should!) you can view all 31 illustrations on our Instagram page.
Speilman Theatre Opens
We love being in such a creative building, with so much talent and so many amazing ideas floating around. We have been here for 17 years, and have no plans of leaving anytime soon. For our design team being in the middle of a hub of ideas, imagination and creativity helps fuel our work. This is why we were delighted to help support this renovation by sponsoring one of the seats in the new theatre.
The Tobacco Factory Theatres were able to raise an incredible £1.6 million for the renovation, which just shows how well supported the theatre is. Work had begun in January and after months of hard work it was opened this month. The new theatre aims to welcome 30,000 audience members each year, for over 360 performances.
Brighton SEO Conference
Our marketing team made the journey down to Brighton at the end of last month for the bi annual Brighton SEO Conference. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is one of our specialities here at Fanatic, but with Google forever changing their algorithms and so many developments in technology it is a constant learning curve.
We always want to be the best at what we do, and so the team spent the day taking in all that they could, from talks to hands on activities. This event had a big emphasis on the importance of site speed! One of the biggest challenges with site speed is on mobile devices. Often the user is browsing on data, or in a public area with a shared connection. Google has also introduced Mobile First Indexing, highlighting that it feels mobile web pages are the most important at the moment.
Having your site speed at the forefront of your mind when considering your site, layout and content is key. Some recent statistics from Google show how just small increasing in load time can have a huge impact on bounce rate and loosing users. A Think with Google study found that 53% of all site visits are abandoned if page load takes more than 3 seconds. As page load time goes from one second to 5 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 90%. The BBC for example found that seen a loss of 10% of their users for every extra second of page load.
Since returning from the conference we have been investing a lot of time into auditing our client’s site, from both a content and technical point of view. This gives us the ability to see what pages are slow/under performing and allows us to tackle these issues.