I spoke yesterday at a PPA Business Media Group session about how, with some lateral thinking, publishers can use their core strengths of trust and quality to attract new audiences. 

To find out more, watch the video intro by clicking on the image above and then head over to view the full presentation on Prezi.

Alternatively, for full details, drop me a line.

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Today, users are consuming on-line content on an ever increasing range of devices.  The relatively new discipline of “responsive design” has a lot to offer publishers.  By designing a series of flexible grids, content can be dynamically formatted to automatically work on the widest range of screen sizes from the largest desktop displays through to the smallest mobile handsets. 

Developing sites in this way, although initially more time consuming, creates a future proof platform for publishers that far outweighs the cost of developing different solutions for each family of devices.

The challenges

The proliferation of different devices is a problem that confronts all web site owners.  Where once we could safely assume a minimum screen size, browser type and hardware, there are now literally thousands of possible combinations.

This introduces some tricky challenges in presenting web content in an accessible and interesting way across devices that …

This years Byte night has been the most successful ever staged with over 800 people sleeping out to raise money to tackle the causes of youth homelessness.

With the current economic situation, as a board, we were naturally wary of setting specific targets this year.

Last year’s total surpassed all of our expectations so this year we focussed on our goals of recruiting additional teams and raising corporate sponsorship to cover the cost of the event.

In the end, we surpassed those targets and the final total is over £160,000 more than we raised last year.

On the night

The reception in London was hosted by Norton Rose, adjacent to the sleep out area on Potters field and the Compound Media team joined 819 other sleepers in London, Reading, Cambridge and Edinburgh.

This was an opportunity to meet some of the young people we’re aiming to …

Over the past few months we have been working with Farrer & Co, one of the UK’s most prestigious law firms to update and enhance their web presence.

While Farrers have had a web presence for many years, the previous version of it’s website had been built more than 5 years ago. However, all websites need to be refreshed and updated periodically.

The style was “of its time” but had become dated. It didn’t properly reflect the more modern image of this 300 year old legal practice.

Improving the user experience

The firm wanted to build a site that would address some of the misconceptions about its brand through improving the user experience and refreshing the design.

The result is a site that is easier to navigate, more dynamic and provides a platform for thought leadership targeted to specific audiences.

Compound Media worked with the Farrer …

Do your target audience have smartphones? Are you already providing them with high quality print products? Do you want to connect with them digitally?

You should be thinking about using QR Codes.

What are QR codes?

Surprisingly, they have been around since 1994, originating in Japan to be used for tracking automotive parts.  QR stands for “Quick Response” and the best way to think of them are as printed versions of hyperlinks.

We’re all familiar with the way hyperlinks enable us to explore the web, QR codes allow us to extend this linking to the real world.

They work in a similar way to barcodes but with a lot more flexibility.  They can contain a wealth of information such as: -

URL’s
Geolocation data
Text
Phone numbers

Using a wide variety of freely available apps, QR Codes can now be scanned by anyone with a modern smartphone.  This provides an excellent …

This article is the second part of a series exploring how publishers might use QR Codes to extend the real world of print to the digital universe. If you haven’t already, you probably ought to read the first part of the article before starting here.

If you scanned the QR Code to get to this page, welcome back! Easy wasn’t it?

Opportunities for customer publishers

The most obvious opportunity for publishers is to use codes within magazine articles to link back to associated on-line content.  Some potential ways this could work would be: -

Special offers
Video content
Competition entry forms
Email newsletter sign up
Follow us on twitter
Links to a Facebook fan page.

For retailers, once product related content is hosted and live, the codes could extend to in-store linking back to product reviews or video previews.

In Japan and increasingly in the US, QR Codes are being used in outdoor …

It’s hard to believe that it’s only 12 months since we last re-vamped the Compound Media website but a lot has happened in that time!

Consulting projects

We’ve been engaged on a wide range of consulting projects from creating a self-service booking system for a fashion photography business to architecting an exciting new web presence for a prestigious law firm.

Jump Suite

We’ve also developed and launched Jump Suite. A unique cross-media platform designed specifically for customer publishers. It enables fast deployment of web, mobile and tablet sites with integrated email newsletters, social media and analytics.

In fact there’s so much to explain, we’ve launched a completely separate site to help you find out more about how it can help you provide digital solutions to your clients.

New clean look

We’ve also taken the opportunity to spruce up the main site. there’s a new, clean design with …

We’ve been working hard over the past few months in order to bring you an exciting new concept in on-line publishing – “Jump suite”.

For the past four years, we’ve been helping customer publishers create high quality, content rich websites for their clients.  We’ve had some great successes but it’s often been a struggle to get past the initial phase of the on-line companion site.

That’s why we created Jump suite.  It’s a fully integrated suite of products that delivers content across web, mobile and tablet devices with email newsletter integration and deep links into social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Modular

With web publishing at the core, the suite is completely modular allowing you to use whichever mediums are the most appropriate for your clients.

In our “Off the peg” product, we’ve used our 12 years of on-line publishing experience to …

The inaugural Byte Poker tournament in aid of Byte Night was a huge success with 50 players trying to out-wit each other for the £500 first prize.

Competition was fierce with Kelly Maxwell the eventual winner very kindly donating her prize back to the Byte Night cause, thanks Kelly!

That, along with the raffle of a signed Jenson Button photograph and various other devious methods to extort money from all that attended helped us raise over £2,100 on the night.

A big thanks has to go out to Rich from GPMD for leading the charge in organising the event and also to Fanni for her (and Intendance) support.

We hope to organise a second event in the new year to kick start our campaign for 2011 and Kelly has already agreed to defend her crown so watch out for that date and sign up for a great …

The new British Bankers Association website went live a couple of weeks ago after a major overhaul led by Compound Media.

Redesign

With the advent of the credit crunch and the increasingly high profile of their work, the British Bankers Association decided that they needed to update their website.

Using a first generation content management system, the site had grown over time to contain more than 10,000 pages in a structure that had evolved in an ad-hoc manner.

Working with Bladonmore, Compound Media led a process to create a new site architecture to better meet the needs of their members and also allow effective dissemination of information to the media.

The process

We started out by managing an audit process to document the current site and then ran a series workshops to define the content strategy, site architecture and wireframes.

The resulting site has bought the organisation right …

Identifying and marketing your site to your most valuable users is a key part of the on-line editorial role today.  As part of our managed services, we’ve been working with the editorial teams to determine the value of different traffic referrers.

Campaign tracking

Google Analytics (GA) will automatically break out the main referral types – direct traffic, referring sites and organic and paid search.

When driving traffic back to the site via other means such as newsletters and social media it’s important to use the campaign tracking functionality to get comparable figures.

One of the difficulties with social media sites such as Twitter is that often, the traffic doesn’t come from Twitter.com but from a multitude of desktop and mobile applications that don’t show up in GA as referrers.

GA campaign tracking allows you to add parameters to the URL’s that you post/tweet which then automatically …

I spoke recently at the Publishing Expo at Olympia on a panel entitled “Digital editions vs Interactive magazines”.  I’m not sure that my presentation actually fitted within those boundaries but I was billed as the sceptic so I took my artistic license to the limits!

I’d popped into the show the previous day as I’d not been along before and I couldn’t believe how many of the presenters , exhibitors and delegates were talking about Digital Editions/E-zines/Interactive magazines.  Not that I don’t think they have a place in the digital landscape but the prevalence of the pageturning technologies was overwhelming.

What was equally shocking was that nobody was talking about web content management, the CMS and search vendors were conspicuously absent so I was a bit nervous about how my presentation would be received.

My argument was that the discussion about whether an on-line …

Everywhere I look lately, there are articles and blog posts full of doom and gloom about print publishing business models that don’t work any more and how newspapers and magazines are dying.  Some of this coverage is coming from industry commentators and some from ex publishing insiders who have seen the problems first hand (one might even argue that they have been partly responsible for them).

For print publishers, there’s very good reason for this pessimism.  In the US, always a marker for what is to come in the UK, newspapers are already going under.  Traditional publishers who happily gave away their content (and ad inventory) for free when the web first came along are now finding that on-line revenues are not making up for the decline in print advertising dollars.

This is being replicated in the UK where we’re even seeing the …