Provoke Design

Provoke's Online Marketing Insight, What Would You Like To Know About?

Brand Identity Building Doesn’t Stop With Twitter and Facebook Logos!

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Some companies think that a social media strategy is little more than setting up the accounts to impress the marketplace with your cool and savvy understanding of how it works and ‘the business will come’. Wrong! Keeping your website active with frequent fresh content is how it actually works!

Dinosaur thinking dies hard!

As businesses become aware that something’s ‘going on’ out there, they think they can join in the conversation on a no cost basis when they have a free moment!
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GoogleBuzz puts Gmail on the Social Network grid!

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The lastest move from Google reinforces the rapidly evolving way we can now expect to engage online. Integrating Business, Personal and Social talk channels is where the buzz is – and where online presence drives traffic.

The revamping of email continues! Google’s e-mail service, Gmail, will now allow its regular users – currently around 170 million people – to post status updates, share content from other sites such as Twitter,YouTube, Flickr and Picassa, and read and comment on posts.

Buzz is aimed directly against rival networks such as Facebook – which last week rolled out a new site design for easier message search and chat – and has amassed nearly 400 million users since its launch in 2004. Meanwhile, Yahoo already offers a service that allows people to see updates from sites such as Twitter and Flickr from inside their Yahoo Mail page.
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Analytics – Set Your Sight on A Better Site!

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Knowing which site stats to focus on and those to ignore, analytics is key to really knowing what changes to make for increased conversions. By setting realistic goals you can determine whether or not you are achieving them. Analytics should be the basis of building your online campaigns to obtain better results and growing your business.

Improving site performance is integral to raising the bar on your entire online marketing gameplan. If you don’t know who you are addressing, what they need and how and why their requirements and site behaviour might change at each visit, then you will not succeed in driving sales.
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IE6 Under Attack from No.10!

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Browser Wars continue as hot on the heels of Google’s action to cease supporting IE6 a Downing Street petition now calls for the UK Government to drop Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and upgrade to a more modern browser.

Previously, we posted a blog commenting on the Google withdrawal of IE6 support and how this could be seen as a wake up call to businesses who have failed to keep up with developments of important functionality in website design. As a consequence, they are likely to have been seriously failing to optimise in key areas such as increasing visitor website accessibility, interactivity and online marketing engagement.
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Google Phases Out Support for Internet Explorer 6

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Following cyber attacks on IE6, some services such as Google Docs, will not be supported from 1 March. For the 20% of web users still using a nine-year old browser, which does not support modern web standards and restricts online growth, this should be seen as a wake-up call.

It’s jaw dropping news in itself to hear that one fifth of web users still use IE6!

Aside from the obvious question relating to visitor perception of brand identity in a tough one click competitive arena, some businesses are apparently operating with a lack of current universal visitor access and website accessibility.
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iPad wants us to love taking our Tablets!

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iPhone’s big brother has arrived! Described as a ‘third category’, squeezing in between smartphone and laptop, its ability to let us watch films, play games and browse the web is another reason why website accessibility is more crucial than ever for business in the browser wars.

Being told that we can now, “hold the whole web in your hands”, by Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, who proclaimed that the touchscreen device, unveiled at an event in San Francisco, “…is the best browsing experience you have ever had”.
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Nexus One Launch Heats Up The Mobile Web!

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From the phenomenon that is the all-conquering Apple iPhone to the Google launch of Nexus One, plus the many other smart phones already here and to follow, it’s safe to say that the mobile internet is poised to overtake laptop and Netbook as the must have, smart way to interact and organise your online life!

In a very short period of time, the availability of increasingly sophisticated internet-enabled handsets, smartphones and 3G networks, means more and more people are accessing websites through their mobiles.
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Email Marketing Teams Up With Social Media!

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Some cynics are already claiming that social media was ‘last year’ and will be soon discarded by this year’s new fad gadgets. All the signs are that social network channels are here to stay and businesses will have to come to terms with the changing web!

In fact, the new gadgets and software tools are geared up to take social media to new levels of communication and feedback. With the launch of Google phone, Nexus 1 and shortly, GoogleWave – the longed-for shot in the arm for boosting email conversations into the 21st century – and a great new opportunity for business to transform their email marketing approach with prospective customers.
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SEO -Three Key Ways To Success in 2010

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Businesses like a solid success formula. When it comes to online results, they need to understand what search engines look for if they want to see great results.

Here are the SEO basics :

  • Search engine are forever changing their algorithms!
  • Google’s SEO rules are different from Yahoo, Bing and other search engines.
  • No one rule operates for very long.
  • Long term SEO campaigns are the best strategies.


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Welcome to 2010 and the Online Business Boom!

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Stopping only between 1pm and 4pm for Dinner, the last-minute rush to beat the Jan 1st VAT rise saw an online purchase made every 10 seconds on Christmas Day!

With UK shoppers spending £5.3bn online in November 2009 – sales up by 25% on October, 11% compared to November 2008 – predictions for 4 million UK buyers going online saw the actual average purchase up by 94% at nearly 4 items per order.
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Prepare your website for 2010

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In the age of Twitter SERPS, GoogleWave, iPod and mobile internet, business online means ensuring your website really is hooked up to the growing grid for widest possible visitor access!

The best web design agencies will always take great care to check that your website can be correctly viewed on all major web browsers and site navigation is straightforward, intuitive and easily understood.

Building sites to ‘W3C standards’ – clean code, error free ‘valid HTML’ and ‘valid CSS’ so that they operate at maximum efficiency is now more critical than ever to cope with the demand for instant access and information retrieval via many different types of web technologies.
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Embracing The Live Web Revolution!

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A new digital decade is only days away! As purchasing online grew at six times the rate of high-street sales in the run-up to Christmas, the future is clear for those businesses willing to embrace the continuing live web revolution!

Despite 2009 being another year of economic uncertainty, Team Provoke have been hard at it, as usual, in the front line of weaving their website design magic for a diverse range of clients, starting right here in Manchester and spreading right across the Northwest and around the UK.

Many of our regular site visitors would of course have noticed our big website refresh, featuring regular and hopefully, insightful blogs and articles plus daily Twitterfeeds to keep everyone aware of our latest info and in the loop with latest digital happenings!
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