Engage Interactive Blog

Over the last couple of months we’ve been hard at work with the Livebookings guys to roll out Pocket Diner, our restaurant mobile website service to Germany and Sweden so even more people can take their restaurant mobile.

After an initial ‘yeah that should be straight forward’ reaction, it quickly became apparent that translation throws up all kinds of little design issues you wouldn’t think of.  Never the less, with a bit of tweaking and to-ing and fro-ing, we have today re-launched both the Pocket Diner main site, plus the mobile site and CMS in both new languages. Ja!

This comes at a time when Pocket Diner is really starting to take off, with our friends at Livebookings already installing it for over 200 of their customers in the UK alone.  As part of the exercise we’ve been researching and delving into the mobile explosion and came up with some pretty amazing stats.

First, some general mobile trends

• There are currently 13.9 million mobile internet users in the UK. This figure is expected to rise to 17.3 million by 2012 and 18.6 million by 2013.
• Smartphone manufacturers shipped 100.9 million devices in Q4 2010, while PC manufacturers shipped 92.1m units worldwide. It’s the first quarter in which smartphones outsold PCs.
• It’s estimated that by 2015 more people will be browsing the web via a mobile than a desktop PC

Now some more specific stats based on what we’re seeing from our own restaurant clients:

• 400% rise in mobile traffic in the restaurant sector, year on year
• 12% of all restaurant traffic is now on a mobile device (that makes it more popular than IE7 or Google Chrome)
• 65% iPhone, 14% Android, 7% Blackberry, 7% Symbian

These stats even surprised us, especially the huge increase in mobile traffic from just one year ago.  We’ve also seen a recent jump in Android visitors, doubling in just 6 months.

It’s still early days (we can’t quite claim world domination just yet!) but it’s continuing to be an interesting learning experience for us, and it’s quite exciting to launch a web app and then see it grow into a multi-language product being properly marketed in several countries at once.

Hey blog readers, I’m Dan Gough, I’m 18 years old and in short, I’ve had an awesome week at Engage!

For those of you that want to know more, here’s the long version:

Last year I saw that Engage were hiring new talent for their team (those positions were filled by Tom and Christian late last year) and I decided I would enquire about work experience and, well, here I am!

Travelling from Surrey, I was eager to get into the office and do whatever the guys needed me to do. I had set no expectations and entered with an open mind – it seemed this would be wise when working for the people behind the Giraffe site! I was welcomed with firm handshakes and friendly smiles, moving around the team one by one – Alex, Erin, Julie, Tom, Will, Christian, Durham and Dave. Yes, in that order. I let out a sigh of relief – they weren’t a pack of pretentious pencil pushers or demon designers, no, they were just a friendly bunch of people tapping away on their keyboards, with banter bouncing across the room. I knew then it would be a good week.

Alex prepped me for what I’d be doing during the week, it was nothing particular, more so an exploration of what I could do and how I could grow as a designer. This was important for me as I’d been doing client work without another designers input for coming up 3 years (www.codecake.co.uk) and was excited for criticism and for someone to give their opinion. Assured by Alex that he would most definitely critique my work, I was excited to get started – but before I could, the weekly Monday meeting was to take place; and for a Monday everyone looked surprisingly awake.

Once sat down at my desk, which was previously Dave’s (who had now been locked in the cage in the back room*) I began to do a design route for <top secret client name omitted> . I was presented with a clear brief,  customer journey forms (Engage give these to clients to gather as much information about the project as they can) and a wealth of source assets. After an initial critique, which zoned in on refinement, I looked carefully at my design and began the refinement process accordingly. The result was far better than my initial proposal, illustrative of how taking a step back and looking at your work with an objective eye is an essential part of the design process.

I won’t detail the different tasks I worked on at Engage, I will instead summarise them as a learning curve which has, in such a short time, helped me mature significantly as a designer.

On Wednesday we ventured into town for a meal outside of work, securing my understanding that this was a team of friends rather than employees. We ate, and ate, and ate some more and then drank, and drank and drank some more. A fantastic night that was filled with banter, laughs and flowing conversation.

The team here at Engage are humorous and laid-back, yet plentiful in ambition, drive and focus. It is this combination that sets them aside from other agencies, they don’t take themselves too seriously, they all love what they do, and they all do it superbly.

Being here at Engage has cemented in my mind that I have made the right choice by not going to university, I will find an agency as vibrant, personable and skilled as Engage and begin my career as a designer in style.

Follow me on twitter @codecakeuk

*Dave wasn’t harmed in his cage, we kept him well fed and watered.

It’s an exciting day in the office as we’re launching our first ever product – Pocket Diner. It’s a fully content managed mobile website for restaurants that unlike a standalone App, works across all phones from iPhones to Blackberrys and beyond. With mobile browsing set to explode over the coming years, we really hope that Pocket Diner will help set a standard for how users interact with brands on their phones.

The idea came about, because as many of you will know, traditional websites simply aren’t built for the small screen. Navigation is often fiddly, frustrating and involves a lot of pinching, rotating and squinting. Pocket Diner helps sites resolve this as it’s been designed specifically for these small screens, and is quite simply a pleasure to use. So whether at home or on the move, visitors will have a much more pleasant and efficient browsing experience.

As for the techy stuff, our simple detection code, once added to the <head> of a website will filter out all mobile traffic, whilst at the same time detecting the capabilities of their handset. Then depending on their phones xHTML support, they’ll be automatically served an appropriate mobile, Pocket Diner powered version of the site

We’ve packed in a load of cool features too, with everything being fully content managed (including the design) from our custom admin Control Panel. From here users can add all their menu items, locations, offers and more. Already using Twitter or Facebook? No problem, as these can all be linked up too. We’re also already working hard on the next version, which will allow visitors to book a table via their phones, which we’re really excited about!

We realise that many of our readers aren’t the exact target market for Pocket Diner (unless you also manage a restaurant, or have some as clients!) but we hope from a web design perspective that you like the work that we’ve put into everything. We’ d love to hear any comments / suggestions below.

Visit the full site here – www.pocketdiner.net

The time has come for us to expand our lovely little team to accommodate some of the great new work we’ve got lined up. Therefore, we’re looking for a fantastic design & build person to join us. For the full job advert and details on how to apply just click here.

If the job perhaps doesn`t quite match your skill set but you know someone who’d be perfect for the role then please send them this way – or just re-tweet it if you’re feeling really nice using the button below.

Thanks for looking and good luck to all applicants! Closing date for applications is the 16th August.

Recognised as the leading international award honouring excellence on the Internet – we’ve always quite fancied grabbing ourselves a Webby Award (plus it looks like it’d make an awesome paperweight) and today we’ve found out we’re one step closer – having reached the final 5 in our category for the site we designed and built for Giraffe Restaurants.

Press buzz…

“The only award show for Internet sites that matters.”
- The Los Angeles Times

“The index of success in the global new media scene.”
- The Guardian UK

“Celebrate sites that pave important paths to the internet’s next phase.”
- The Wall Street Journal

So what does this mean?

Well firstly, it must mean we’re doing something right as the nominees have been whittled down from thousands of entries which comprise some of the best sites in the world (their words not mine!) Also, if we are lucky enough to beat off the stiff competition and grab first prize we get to attend the glitzy award ceremony held in New York – which would be absolutely awesome to be perfectly honest. We’ll just have to cross our fingers for that one though!

What’s next?

Well the restaurant category has two awards up for grabs – one for the site deemed to be the best by the judges panel, and another award for ‘people’s choice’ which is basically voted for by you guys. Now I’m sure you can now guess what I’m going to say, and yes, you’re right – we would really appreciate your vote!

Having gone through the voting procedure myself, I realise it’s a bit of a ball ache as you need to sign up first – but if you do choose to persevere and give us some love, then you can get that little warm feeling inside, like when you save a puppy or eat soup. Simply click the button below to kick things off – and thanks for the support!

Voting has now closed – thanks for all the support!

Creating sites which survive the test of time can be a tricky affair. Firstly, you need to avoid the temptation to jump on the current design trend bandwagon, as despite pink graffiti looking ‘real dope’ today, it’s going to look ‘real crappy’ a year down the line. Then you have all your CSS, JS, and (x)HTML amongst others to consider  – Web technologies can move at a frightening pace and there’s always something on the horizon to do the same job better, and use less code doing it.

I’d imagine most of you reading this have client sites that they’d love to be able to re-visit, ripping out box model hacks, adding a few bits of nice CSS3, replacing  sIFR with Cufon (any thoughts?) or maybe even moving the whole site onto a development framework such as Codeigniter? The hurdle that you’ll inevitably face though is that if you’re not changing the design itself (which to your credit may have stood the test of time and still look great) it’s hard to convince the client that investing in everything bar the ‘tip of the iceberg’ is just as important as the design itself.

So what are the benefits to the client? Well, the big one is  reduced time (and cost) for ongoing maintenance and development work. Some people will argue that reduced development time is a bad thing, as it means less hours invoiced and less money in the bank for iPods and Threadless tees. We’d then ask would you rather spend twice as long doing some pretty mundane updates to a site, or get them done nice and quickly (impressing the client with your responsiveness!) and then spend the time saved pitching some fantastic new ideas to them and working on those? We think it’s a no brainer, and our experience has indeed shown that exploring new ideas can often result in acquiring larger budgets down the line anyway.

Also, if you’re like me, then just knowing that a site isn`t using the latest jQuery point release or that your Google Analytics code is being repeated on every page rather than in a nice a global include will niggle you like you have mild OCD!

Thankfully, we’re fortunate to have clients who listen to our advice, and when we pitched a refresh of the Cafe Rouge site, which is close to celebrating it’s 4th Birthday, they were completely on board. The result is a site which runs faster, uses less bandwidth and is more usable and thus easier to navigate – vastly improving the visitor experience . Their ongoing development work has reduced and we’ve got some exciting new projects underway for them as a result.  Now if that wasn`t a worthwhile investment I don’t know what is!

If you’re in a similar position, what are your experiences? Are refreshes something you actively pitch, or something which you’d like to address but haven`t quite worked out the best way to do it? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. In the meatime, I’m off to refresh myself with a pint. Good day to you all.

We’ve been a little light on blog posts over the last few weeks, not because we’ve been sat here lazing around and playing Xbox – in fact quite the opposite, we’ve been crazily busy with all kinds of interesting work. Rather than blog about everything separately, I thought I’d use this momentary lull in proceedings to provide a quick digest of the last few weeks…

We popped along to FOWD Leeds

The future? Perhaps not

For those not familiar with the acronym, FOWD stands for ‘The Future Of Web Design’ and the Leeds leg formed part of a UK wide tour of conferences run by the guys over at Carsonified. The day was a good chance to mix with a whole range of people from the industry and listen to presentations on various aspects of the web. We weren’t necessarily sure that it dealt with the Future of web design particularly, but it was a good day out nonetheless and gave us a chance to catch up with a few familiar faces. If anyone’s reading this and also went – what did you think? Let us know in the comments.

Work started on an exciting new project

We were chuffed to hear we’d been appointed as the new digital agency for the restaurant chain Giraffe after impressing them with the work we had been doing for STRADA. Since winning the account we’ve been busy working on some great new designs and features that we’ll be rolling out as part of a brand new online and marketing strategy.

We can’t give too much more away at this stage, but keep an eye on the RSS or Twitter for updates over the next few weeks.

Our Arc Karaoke microsite launched

Livin' on a prayer!

As if students didn`t have enough fun already, our friends over at Arc Inspirations have just installed some brand spanking new karaoke booths for people to murder practically every popular song ever written.

They asked us to create them an engaging little microsite to promote the new offering, which is exactly what we did for them and we even threw in a nice bit of Javascript goodness for good measure too.

You can see the finished site right here.

We did some spring cleaning

As many of you will know, updating your own site can often get overlooked in favour of client work and going to the pub.

Even so, we thought it was about time to add Will and Neil to the team page, update a few pieces of work and amend the homepage layout slightly.

Under the hood everything’s been given a good spray of WD40 so it all slides and scrolls that little bit smoother. We hope you like the changes, despite them being small. I guess we’ll be due a redesign soon, but I’m blocking that out of my mind at the moment!

Dave got swine flu

Squeal Piggy!

Quick, call in the paramedics and order the Tami Flu! Yes, Dave managed to get Swine Flu. He says he picked it up from the kids – but we think he spent too much time worrying piglets down at the local farm. Either way, he’s off work at the moment recovering so if you want to send him presents and chocolates just address them to me and I’ll make sure he gets them…promise!

Yes, we’re back!  Though we’re pretty sure everyone was too busy celebrating to miss us that much. As for Santa, he was a bit hit and miss this year (Sorry to sound ungrateful Santa if you’re reading this – but it’s true) Anyone want a ‘can cut anything’ kitchen knife (…it can’t) or pot pourri gift set??

2009 is set to be a great year for Engage. We’ve got some really exciting work on the horizon that we can’t wait to get our teeth into and we hope that our regular blog readers will continue to check in on us from time to time and cheer us on as we continue on the path to web design greatness!

So until next time, stay classy San Diego (and those located elsewhere of course)

Alex, Dave and Will x

It’s nearly time for us to shut the studio doors and head off  to eat, drink and be merry for a couple of weeks. Our official last day is next Wednesday, though I’m sneaking off early to pay Berlin a visit and see how the Germans do Christmas  – photos to follow in the New Year!

We’ll all be back in the office on January 5th, refreshed, fat and ready to start 2009 with some exciting new launches, so stayed tuned. In the meantime, all that’s left is to say those famous words and wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! We hope you’ve all been good for Santa!

A few months ago we wrote a pretty detailed post about how we went about creating what we still believe to be the World’s first Orientation Specific iPhone site. We’re still trying to think of something a bit sexier to call it than ‘Orientation Specific’ (all ideas appreciated below) but it’ll do for now.

Anyway, since we wrote about it, it’s become the biggest driver of traffic to our little old blog with 50 times the number of views than any of the other posts (which are equally informative!) It’s also inspired a load of you to get your hands dirty and work on your own versions, which is fantastic.

Google seems to like us too. Try searching for the terms ‘iphone website’ and you’ll see little old us, nestled snugly on the 1st page amidst sites like O2 etc.

So what does this all mean for us? Well, nothing really to be honest. It’s just great to see our hard work being recognised, shared, picked apart and helping others to push their limits. This all may sound a bit ‘idealist’ but it’s a great way to operate. Where’s the fun in just churning out ‘safe’ sites day after day – yes, it’s easy to do, but you’re never going to stand out from the crowd and excite your clients, and before you know it you’ll be left way behind as the industry keeps progressing at such an exciting rate.

From a commercial perspective, iPhone users only account for a small percetnage of the mobile market, so the need for these kind of sites is still fairly limited (but who says you can’t have one just to show off?). But, as we see this market share increase as the iPhone becomes more attainable on lower tariffs and available across more networks – we’ll be there to handle the barrage of people jumping in the ‘orientation specific’ express! (Groan!)