Features / Sector spotlight
Sector spotlight: Web design and development
(Image: Gravity Well)
Fact:
- In a report released earlier this year, Powering the Digital Economy, Bristol and Bath were named as the areas with the most dynamic growth in digital companies outside of London.
- 61,653 people are employed in the digital sector in Bristol and Bath.
- Bristol is the second largest tech cluster in the UK.
COMMENT: THE FUTURE OF SEARCH
Mike Karthauser, Brightstorm
Brightstorm is web design and development company that has been developing websites and applications from its Ashton office since 2001, counting Future Publishing and Virgin Media among its clients.
“Google has recently announced a new update to its Search Engine called RankBrain.
Unlike other more conventional methods of result ranking, programmed by humans, Google new RankBrain Artificial Intelligence system, uses artificial intelligence to process a vast amount of language. If it sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, Rankbrain is able to take a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.
As 15% of daily searches to Google contain search phrases not yet seen before, this new method of processing results using the knowledge it has gained to get better results back to the users: Especially helpful to those searching using their mobile phones and tablets, looking for fast accurate searches.
Google hasn’t announced many details about this new service, but we do know that it is being used to find pages that may not have contained the exact words that you searched. For example, it’s adept at dealing with ambiguous queries, much more like how we ask questions naturally in conversation – e.g. ‘what’s the name of the boss of big corporation‘..
The addition of RankBrain to search is part of a five-year push by Google to push Artificial Intelligence technology into every aspect of its business, and is another tool to keep it ahead of its competition.”
IS SEO STILL IMPORTANT?
As new and progressively more intelligent search mechanisms emerge, is the old game of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) becoming obsolete?
“It’s definitely still important but it’s changed from the early days of keyword optimisation and link building as Google’s algorithms have become more and more sophisticated,” says Yvonne Struthers of Yoke, a design agency specialising in causes for positive change. “In 2015, Google is no longer just looking at exact phrase matching, but looking at the meaning of the content on your site to work out who you are. Google also looks at the user’s experience of the site, is it easy and intuitive to use? What’s the user’s experience on mobile? If you give your users a great digital experience, Google will reward you in your search rankings.”
Google recently announced that mobile friendly sites would be ranked higher than unresponsive sites, a move dubbed ‘mobilegeddon’ by some.
There are strategies for raising your online visibility. “Having a site which follows SEO best-practice is always a good place to start,” says Tristan McDonald of Perma Design; “but apart from that I’d advise updating your blog often with posts which will be of benefit to people, as these posts are more likely to be shared by your users on social media. Try to make a series of short instructional posts to help your users. Own a cookery school? Write a weekly recipe. These type of posts will boost your SEO as well as increasing traffic to your site.
“There are no shortcuts. Google’s interest lies in providing relevant search results to their users, and they penalise any dishonest SEO tactics.”
“Don’t think that you can just build a website and visitors will come,” adds Lisa Freeman from web agency 18a Productions, who also started a not-for-profit organisation – The Web Guild – to help educate businesses on how to get the best out of the web. “Once the site is live, the work really begins.”
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
There are good websites and there are bad websites: works of art that entice you to explore and clunky dinosaurs that you can’t close quick enough. What’s the secret to crafting a good one? Content is king.
“Having a focused message and clear goals for your website is absolutely key,” says Tristan McDonald who started his company, Perma Design, in 2013 to serve small businesses with websites, design and photography. “People are prone to writing bloated, self-indulgent copy when talking about their own business, and they often miss out the essential basic facts.
“Identify the purpose of your site before anything else, and create content based around that. Do you want people to contact you? Include big, clear buttons for people to do so after each focused, concise piece of copy. Do you want to reduce the amount of annoying calls you receive? Answer people’s frequently-asked questions clearly on your site, and don’t hide this information away. See your site from your users perspective; always use language showing your site’s users how you can benefit them. You should include a clear, single-sentence tagline summing up who you are and what you offer, at the top of the first page your users will see.”
White space, simple designs and attractive typography are two design principles almost universally recommended by developers. “A good website is visually attractive and balanced,” says Christophe Marceau of Clifton Web Design. “Its design needs to be consistent (typography, use of colours, icons, etc) and make use of high quality imagery if possible. White space is also important, as it gives breathing room – one can make elements stand out by adding white space around them.”
Image – the team at Newicon
“Whatever they have visited your site to do you must let them do it in the quickest most effortless way possible,” says Steve O’Brien, CEO of Newicon, a web and software development company. “We have extremely short attention spans and no loyalty when browsing online you only have a few seconds of time. Get it wrong and that user will ‘bounce’. The bounce rate is the number of users that do exactly this, leave as almost as soon as they arrive. This stat must be ferociously monitored.”
OPPORTUNITIES
With so many web developers out there from bedroom techies to full-scale operations, there are always murmurs of saturation in the online space. Are there still opportunities for people looking to enter the field?
“Yes, definitely,” says Yvonne Struthers from Yoke. “The digital sector in Bristol is booming. Digital is a really exciting industry to work in. As a career move, it’s a safe bet as it’s estimated that the digital sector will be generating more new jobs in five years than any other sector. We get contacted daily by really talented designers, animators and illustrators, but literally never developers. It is a great time to learn those skills, especially working with CMS systems such as Drupal. There is a real shortage in skilled technical people in Bristol.”
To illustrate the point, local heavyweights Dyson, IMDb, IBM Cloudant, and MixRadio are all hungry for developers.
Nathan Riley, Design Director at Green Chameleon, says a great web project is a combination of creative design and innovative programming. “From a recruitment perspective we look for specialists in their respective fields, so the need for a ‘jack of all trades’ designer/developer is dying out.”
Away from coding, there are still opportunities: “Not every job in web requires that you are trained web developer, versed in every framework,” says Jenny Corfield, Business Development Manager at Focus, which specializes in websites for young people with disabilities and their families. “There’s a whole range of job roles that keep the industry afloat that don’t involve coding. Project management, key account management and business development to name just a few; someone with a graphics degree, for example, might think about where their skills can cross over.”
Newicon believe there’s still a growing market: “Tech is everywhere and it’s all powered by the web and web technologies. Web technology is quickly becoming the defacto set of tools to build applications. Whether it is a car touchscreen dashboard, a smart phone application or a website,” says CEO Steve O’Brien.
Uniquely, the web design industry is very fragmented and market share is spread thinly. Rather than saturation, at the moment that affords opportunity for producers, creativity and flexibility for clients.
“I don’t think saturation is a particular problem,” says Toby Coulsting, Operations Director at Mentor Digital, a 30-strong digital agency in central Bristol. He sees plenty of space in the sector: “Bristol can support many competing agencies. Thriving agencies will have their own niches, products, and specialisms, and should welcome more competition and collaboration to bring more prospects, skilled staff, and investment into the city. Although future consolidation within a relatively young sector is inevitable.”
“Bristol is already a major technical hub for the UK and we see no reason why it may not continue even further,” concludes Gravity Well‘s Creative Director, Simon Bos.
FACILITIES
We’re breeding so many app and web developers in part because of the great facilities here in Bristol. The Engine Shed, home to app and web service incubator Webstart, is currently expanding its space; Pervasive Media Studio supports a range of creative web businesses.
“The continued success and hype surrounding Bristol Temple Quarter is pretty significant,” says Caitlin Roxburgh of Booking Live. “The initiative is looking to support high-tech businesses through creation of a tight-knit hub, which will provide more jobs and help businesses through provision of high-speed internet, all of which are beneficial to the success of the web deign/development industry.”
Conferences are springing up to support the flourishing sector. Freelance web designer Andy Gardner helped to organise Bristol’s first developer conference, Bristech, in October: “It sold out fast.”