What’s this show got to do with graphic design and new media? - well consistency of design. But first a few words about the show. It’s a new six part show about the world of estate agency, Kris Marshall and Bryan Dick lead the cast. In design terms the Estate Agency uses various forms of promotion. Wether you like the style of design or not, one things for sure, it demonstrates good consistency in design, through all formats from point of sale in store to sale boards to window displays. We  consider this to be one of our main strengths at Titman Firth and the benefits are that it helps build on brand recognition and avoids brand dilution maximising market budget.

Peterborough Exclusive Magazine has this month published an article featuring PJH Law and Titman Firth. The article acknowledges the multitude of companies offing website production services and gives tips on how to select the right one.

The case study focuses on PJH Law and the re-brand/website that Titman Firth designed and produced for them. Based in Stamford, near Peterborough, the Law firm’s profile has increased, helped by the on-going search engine optimisation and website development Titman Firth provides.

Read the full the article in PDF format. You can get Adobe Acrobat here if you do not have it.

We are delighted to be featured by the magazine and grateful for PJH Law’s support.

About Peterborough Exclusive Magazine
The magazine, published by Peterborough Evening Telegraph is a glossy lifestyle magazine featuring local content. The sales and editorial team is based in Stamford - at the offices of the Rutland & Stamford Mercury office which is owned by the same company. The team also produces Stamford Exclusive and embrace magazine, which are similar lifestyle products, as well as one-off publications such as an annual weddings magazine and an annual 68-page lifestyle magazine. Circulation of Peterborough Exclusive is approximately 6,000, largely delivered free to homes in targeted areas in and around Peterborough.

Titman Firth together with two other local firms presented an hour long seminar to around 60 marketing profeshionals last week. The seminar hosted by the CIM Chartered Institute of Marketing provided practical steps you can take to make your site more search engine friendly covering technical, design and copywriting aspects of optimisation.

There is a huge amount of information available on search engine optimisation (SEO) but it can sometimes seems like a mysterious, complicated subject. But this seminar covered the essential principles of the subject and showed some highly practical tips and techniques to improve search engine rankings, and therefore traffic, leads, sales and ultimately profits.

The seminar provided answers to these questions and more:

- How do search engines work? (and what are the implications for your site?)
- What can you do to identify the right keywords and phrases?
- What are the design techniques that help (or hinder) SEO performance?
- How should you write or rewrite your site’s content to incorporate keywords?
- How can you build links from other sites to boost your ranking positions?
- What sort of monitoring will help you achieve ongoing improvements?
- If you want to bring in specialist help, where should you focus your investment?

Guests came away with an achievable checklist of things to do themselves with the option of contacting Titman Firth for further SEO development.

For further info please get in touch.

Being involved in a wide variety of graphic design projects I often weigh up the best way forward in terms of promotion effectiveness compared with cost effectiveness.

In terms of promotion effectiveness the difference between a brochure and a folder with inserts really depends on the type of services or products you sell and your audience. But with cost effectiveness the difference is not straight forward. Surprisingly a brochure can cost far less to print when compared to an equivalent folder with inserts.

The trick is to work out how regularly the literature needs to change, be updated or added to. In many cases just one or two pages of a brochure may change over a period resulting in the whole brochure being re-printed. So although a brochure may be cheaper initially, when re-printed the cost could be greater than an initial investment of a folder with inserts as only the affected inserts need re-printing.

Alternatively several smaller brochures or leaflets can be more cost effective than one large brochure.

Another benefit of a folder system is that inserts or smaller brochures can be used separately when required as well as together, adding further flexability and cost benefit.

For a free cost comparison please get in touch.

If you have read blogs before you may know what an RSS feed is and already be subscribed to some. For those of you who don’t know, it is a way you can choose by subscription to receive regular information.

Typically RSS feeds deliver information from websites that are regularly updated and where the content is of current interest. Information such as news headlines, weather updates and magazine articles etc are common. The platform you choose to receive the information ranges from computer based applications to mobile phones.

Subscribing to a feed is easy, you can subscribe to the Titman Firth Blog for example by clicking the RSS feed icon below, then simply select the a reader method of your choice. Our technical team currently favours ‘Newsgator’, this works both online for remote use, and with your Outlook email software and alerts you when a new post is published in the same way you are alerted to new mail.

The business benefits are great as the only people to receive the feeds are ones that have chosen to do so, which means they have an interest in the subject matter, great for current and potential clients. Better still is the fact that the process is automated, readers can subscribe, de-subscribe and receive all new posts automatically.

Additional information on RSS feeds and other types of feeds can also be found clicking the RSS feed icon below. For more information on website design and development including blog and post production please leave a reply to this post (and subscribe!).

Last week Titman Firth completed its latest re-brand project for employment law specialist PJH Law. The re-brand for the solicitor firm consisted of logo development, literature, advertising, folders, website and search engine optimisation.

What is special about PJH Law is their use of new media to communicate with their current and potential clients. Upon commission they already operated a blog and had podcasts on employment law changes.

We provided a graphic design and website solution that integrated their blog into their new website so the site would benefit from the content of the posts and thus improve the sites optimisation.

Upon launch PJH Law kindly put a post on their blog in recognition of Titman Firth’s efforts. Please take a look.

If you would like to know more about how we can help raise your firms profile and integrate new media formats please call us on 01733 253934.

Last weeks Apprentice, week 8, was all about graphic design, promotion and advertising. Needless to say being a graphic designer and director of Titman Firth I was particulary interested to see how the chosen design agency handled the apprentice’s briefs.

However, what transpired was in some ways more interesting, each team was asked to design a logo, billboard advert and TV commercial without any creative design assistance of the agency. The problem though was that the design ability of the candidates was limited (understandably) as no one had specific design training. The logo’s seemed weak and the less said about the adverts and TV commercials the better. That said most liked the designs they came up with but as I have said before, it’s not so much that you like it, it’s what your target audience likes.

The chosen audiences were smaller then the wide potential audience of ‘Nike’. I could not help but feel that they had lessened their potential market by doing this and maybe should have been bolder and better or at least aim to match the branding appeal of ‘Nike’.

Most surprising of all was that no one seemed to have seen the film ‘What Women Want’. This film would have given them a vision to think beyond the ’street’ audience they chose to target and strive for the difference their brands needed. Not to mention the importance of knowing your audience.

For those who don’t know, a blog (short for ‘web log’) is a website (or part of a website) where posts are written in a reverse chronological order. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

Blogs can commercially work better that traditional newsletters and news sections of websites. Incorporating a blog into a company website can be far more beneficial for several reasons:

1) For providing potential clients with up-to-date relevant information on a regular basis.

2) Blogs tend to use content management technology and can easily be updated in-house.

3) They are great for optimisation benefit, if implemented correctly the content can count towards a websites total content.

4) A user can opt for an RSS feed and automatically receive new posts direct to their email in-box.

5) Because posts tend to be short they can more easily be created and made more specific.

6) They tend to be more effective as they are written in a less formal manner and more like a conservation.

7) Best of all they are interactive, comments can be made by readers and made to appear by the relevant post enabling credibility.

If you would like to talk about adding a blog to your current site, improving the SEO of a current blog or branding an existing blog with consistent graphic design to match your current website please get in touch.

Last nights Apprentice, week 5, lead by Sir Alan Sugar, was all about selling photography. The teams had to choose photography art to sell. You may ask what the relevance is to the graphic design and the website services we offer? Well we too are in the business of using imagery that appeals to a particular audience to promote or sell goods and services.

It came of no surprise to me that the success of the last nights winning team came down to two things:

1) Target audience size
2) Quality of leads

At the end of the day the greater the audience the more products or services can potentially be sold. In this case the target audience of horse imagery was far greater than that of say the narrow audiences of lip images or seafood.

But the missing trick that the apprentices failed to realise while buying the art was to gain a current client list from their chosen supplier which they could use to sell to. Only one team did this and to me it too was the difference between success and failure.

For more information on the series visit their Website

In this day and age the possibilities for new media and its mix with traditional medium as promotion are endless, but however good your methods are at initially attracting the target audience the follow up is crucial.

Yes, I agree that instant new media methods such as email, pdf attachments etc can work well but more often than not printed literature cannot be ignored.

A well planned, designed, written and produced piece of literature is worth it’s wait in gold, especially when used to back up initial response.

I guess it comes down to good targeting and knowing your audience. It’s true to say that most sales processes still (and will for a long time to come) demand a postable response. Whoever your target audience is though, the confidence given by printed literature is hard to beat.