Blog

Warwick Economics Summit

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It's not often that you receive the opportunity to work for the second largest student run event in Europe. Our work for the summit involved us creating the brochure, to be distributed to the approximately 400 students from around the world. As well as the creation of their marketing posters, to be placed in sizes A1 to A3 around campus. The campaign was highly successful with internal tickets selling out in 57mins. The work for Warwick Economics Summit is part of our 2012 initiative to help out more non-profit organisations and this is one of many exciting project that we are developing.

Below is the brochure that was designed, keeping in line with their branding and marketing campaign.

Website Graders

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We often get asked about the tools that we use when conducting a performance review of our clients websites. This blog post is a guide to some of the tools and terms that we use.

These tools analyse your SEO and marketing, allowing you to improve your search ranking and the effectiveness of your site. Therefore, helping you to drive more traffic to your site.

Website Grader

Website Grader is one of the most popular website graders, providing you with details of your sites traffic rank, backlinks, social media and charting of your sites performance over time. In addition, it analyses your on-site SEO, such as keyword and title optimisation. Total Inbound links are also factored into the score, these provide an indication that your website is trustworthy and contains good, relevant content. These are all aggregated to provide you with a score in comparison to other sites that the system has graded. As of 3rd December, our site is ranked with a score of 84, this means that we score higher than 84% of other websites.

Nibbler

A new grader which offers a simplified version of Silktides Sitebeam. This system tests your sites Accessibility, Experience, Marketing and Technology. Factors that are considered include W3C compliance, printability, link formatting and image format. In addition, it checks Facebook and Twitter to see how well marketed your site is on social networks. All of these factors make Nibbler one of the most inclusive ways of testing your SEO and Marketing.

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is one of the best ways to analyse who is linking to your site. This is important because Search Engines look at these to determine a sites Popularity and Authority. Having good links strengthens your sites authority, the better the quality of incoming links the higher your site will appear on a search engines results page (SERPs).

Google Analytics

www.google.co.uk/analytics

This must be the webmasters favourite tool, it is rich with features and information as to the performance of a website. Its key features include how many people have viewed your site, allowing you to analyse traffic sources, demographic, keywords and content. Recently they have added a real-time overview allowing you to see who is online at that moment in time. In the above example, you can see a spike in traffic that was caused by a direct marketing campaign through facebook and email newsletters.

Google Webmaster Tools

www.google.com/webmasters

Another fantastic offering from Google, allowing you to review where specific pages / keywords appear within SERPs. You may often hear us talking about Google Page Rank, this is probably one of the most important parts of Google's Algorithm to determine your sites authority. Unlike other sites, webmaster tools provides full details of linking domains for all pages rather than just to the home page.

Jaguar XKR Photography

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

An in-house project to photograph a luxury car. For this picture we used our DIY 6.4m x 6.4m light modifier made from four 3.2m x 3.2m lightweight dust sheets. This sheet effectively becomes a giant softbox, with the added advantage of fantastic light control. By moving the flash heads even a few degrees in each direction an entirely different result can be produced. This picture was processed through Lightroom to increase clarity and reduce noise, as well as adjusted in Photoshop, to isolate the car from the environment.

Further pictures can be found in our full photographic portfolio.

Before Post Production

Web Design Trends

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post we will talk about the web design trends that have influenced our work in 2011. We will look at some of our work that has been released and some that is awaiting release. As you will see, our new website encompasses many of these elements.

Big Typography

This trend of bigger text which has been growing since 2008 and has become even more widespread this year. This can be seen mostly on personal blogs and on the websites of design studios. Although we at Chameleon Media have not fully embraced this trend to the same extent as others, it has still had some influence in our work.

Big Typography on the About Us section of this website

Examples of this can be seen at Chameleon Media and at Sandy Beach Huts.

Banner Images

Websites are becoming more visual with a greater variety of ways to display information, such as info-graphics and in particular large banner images. This has influenced our work considerably in the past few years with larger images, larger banners and more sliders. These large banners serve as a great way to grab a users attention and a fantastic way to visually convey information.

A large banner on D&Ls website showcasing their high quality spares.

An example of this can be seen above on D&Ls (Not Yet Released) website as well as here at Chameleon Media and at New Forest Language School.

Fonts

Embedding non-standard fonts is the biggest growing trend at the moment. Proxima Nova is the font we have been using in most for H1's and H2's through the @font-face tag.

Proxima Nova on the new M.J. White Website

An example of this can be seen above on M.J.White Haulage (Not Yet Released) as well as here at Chameleon Media.

Simplicity

Simple but effective design has been around since the birth of the Internet and it is still influential today. With this trend, subtlety is key to create a visually impressive site.

The simple and effective Sandy Beach Hut Website

An example of this can be seen above at Sandy Beach Huts as well as on our Photo Portfolio

HTML5 & CSS3

This is the new web standard. This site is the first one we have created in HTML5 and CSS3. A number of our websites other websites have been converted, allowing the use of text shadows to be rendered through CSS rather than images which are not readable by Search Engines.

HTML5

Chameleon Media is our first site to be built around the new framework.

Launch of Bearprint Electric Bikes new website

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The website for Bearprint Electric Bikes has just been launched. The site features an integrated Content Management System allowing content to be adjusted and new products to be added quickly and easily.

For this project, all bikes were photographed in our studio to give the site a proffesional look. These pictures are now in their shop at John Brown's Garden Centre.

Visit Bearprint to view their excellent electrics bikes.