All Case Studies posts

No charge for the photo: marketing Cambridge’s biggest landlord

How many properties do you think the biggest landlord in Cambridge owns? 20? 50? 100? Amazingly, having bought his first home in 1965, Dennis Whitfield has accumulated a portfolio of over 500 properties in the area. That’s a lot of houses.

The Whitfield Group are a genuine, local success story, having started small and built over time. The only thing they didn’t have in place was a useful presence on the web so they approached us at Endis Solutions asking for a simple site through which to advertise their services and empty properties.

The challenges from the content side were:

My 2-year-old eats iPlayer for breakfast

The other morning I came downstairs to find my 2-year-old already up, and watching his favourite programme on the Internet. Nothing remarkable in that per se, except that he was alone. And I had shut the computer down the night before.

This isn’t about how smart my child is (although he can complete a Cat-in-a-Hat jigsaw in under 5 minutes reverse-side up and calculate the exact opposite of everything we ask him to do instantaneously, before implementing it without flaw).

No, the point is that in iPlayer the BBC have designed a web site so easy to use that a 2-year-old can master it.

Red Gate’s free iPad and an offer you probably missed

You can go and enjoy the culture of a larger organisation or you can get stuck in to creating the culture in a small one.

There are currently six of us at Endis Solutions. We build web sites for SMEs. We’re looking for a developer who has some flair and vision to come and make the company awesome.

Our culture so far involves finding genuinely good clients and building them genuinely useful web sites. We provide so much more than a site template, because we want our clients to succeed. We custom-build. We give business advice. We learn. We create stunning content and design. This means close collaboration between design, development and content, which you can do in a small company.

Poet laureate mangled in the Times

Last month I wrote about how The Mirror messed up a new poem from the poet laureate by laying it out badly on their web site. The main point is less that poetry should be handled carefully (which it should), and more that we should be sensitive to when content requires tailored presentation, rather than shoving it in generic article templates that ruin it by, say, putting a large animated advert in the middle of it.

Well, The Mirror are at it again, with the same unfortunate author. Carol Ann Duffy’s poem about UK flights grounded because of the Icelandic volcano appears on their site with all the same mistakes as her first one, only this time missing a word to boot.* (Believe it or not, an even more horrific version appears elsewhere on the same site).

This time, however, the Times are at it too.

Presenting poems and other valuable content

Don’t worry, you don’t have to like poetry. You don’t even have to know who or what Carol Ann Duffy or a Poet Laureate is. This is about valuing content in the way that you present it on your web site so that your readers will value it too.

Here’s what happened. Carol Ann Duffy is a talented British poet. She wrote a topical and smart little verse about David Beckham being ruled out of the World Cup because of an Achilles’ injury. The Mirror, one of the UK’s tabloid newspapers, published it exclusively on its web site last week.

And that’s where it went Goldenballs up:

Microsoft copy: Nietzschean emptiness with a Freudian slip

By now you’ve probably seen the monumentally embarrassing Windows 7 party video from Microsoft. Hopefully, you’ve also caught the censored version that imbues an entirely different meaning to ‘make sure you have the right devices to hand’.
And you’ve probably worked out, shortly after asking the question, ‘how could a global corporation with billions of dollars and swathes [...]