With the rise of AI (or perhaps ‘machine learning’ as it more correctly could be termed as) as an ever increasing feature of the digital landscape, its introduction into the very tools we use to market in this environment has been an inevitability. So is it the time to go ‘all in’ on AI in paid advertising or is there some way to go yet before we hand over the keys to our keen digital friend?

What inspired us to really sit down and get down in words what we’ve been discussing for some time around the water cooler was the revelation that ‘broad match’ keywords have become the default for new search campaigns across Google Ads - however, there are dozens of examples we could have picked as the spark to ignite a discussion. The launch of Performance Max campaigns in November 2021? Responsive Search Ads in July 2018? Looking a bit further back we’re actually not too far off the ten year anniversary of the introduction of Smart Bidding even.

A common thread which runs through each of the above is the lessening of the control afforded to campaign managers in favour of the platform itself running the ads. And if you were following the recent antitrust trial brought against Google over the last year or so you might be minded to think that was not such a fantastic thing.

It’s important to emphasise at this point this is definitely not just a ‘Google thing’, it’s a staple of the setup for all major advertising platforms. Only recently we were tasked with an audit of an existing Meta Ads account for a British-based holiday company which had an ad running with the music of Tarantella Napoletana (a classic Italian folk song) overlaying it. A curious choice indeed. The cause of which was the toggle switched on for the AI-driven ‘Music’ enhancements within the Meta dashboard, whereby Meta had deemed the song a good match ‘based on its content’. How, we’re not so sure.

I think what makes digital marketers such as myself a little cautious when it comes to the rise of the default use of artificial intelligence across paid advertising is how much we’re relying on these particular platforms in understanding the nuances of your business.


We all know you’re the experts in your business but what we believe is crucial in providing CORE’s true value as your digital partner is that we immerse ourselves to the greatest extent possible in your world. Only by understanding your pain points, your USPs, your short term desires and your long term vision can we provide a service truly tailored to your success. Does Google or Meta or Microsoft understand your business like that? Could they ever? A debate for the long term but we believe a ‘no’ in the here and now.

The easy option not always the right option


What we certainly don’t want to pour scorn on is the definite advantages artificial intelligence can bring to the building, maintenance and promotion of your digital presence. We at CORE use it every day to assist us in our working practices and we are dedicated to remaining at the cutting edge of this digital frontier. However, the key word perhaps to dwell on is ‘assist’ - it is certainly not a replacement for all of our working practices.

It is this perception that using AI is the ‘easy’ option in creating and managing digital advertising campaigns that we perhaps baulk at. It is in the combination of using AI - to either provide data-leveraged suggestions (which we then have the final say in utilising) or to speed up our processes - with the knowledge of a business which can only be acquired through a holistic understanding is where the sweet spot lies.

With all of the above in mind we’ve pulled a short list of key points together to consider regarding use of AI in PPC campaigns you may wish to consult:

No AI-driven campaign should just be ‘set and left’. Many ad providers will tell you they only need your website and budget to create a campaign which will deliver results for you - as they can generate ad text, target keywords and bidding strategy from those basic inputs. Regardless of this claim, we strongly recommend you check in regularly on any campaign and review the data available in order to steer it in a better direction if they have gone off course.

Negative keywords are your best friend for broad match campaigns. By its very nature ‘broad match’ target keywords will put your ads out there across a wider set of users. This can indeed lead to your ads being seen by relevant users you would not have thought to have targeted as they were unknown to you previously but it also means they can be seen by completely irrelevant users. The only way to stay on top of reducing the latter is by regularly viewing the search terms report within your advertising platform and marking those irrelevant searches as negative keywords to prevent budget being wasted on them in the future.

Avoid auto apply recommendations in Google Ads. A subject of a previous insights post, allowing Google to automatically apply recommendations to your campaigns is a potentially dangerous move. At a minimum it can lead to inefficient campaign running while at worst prevent your ads from running at all.

Review the ‘Advantage+ creative enhancements’ in Meta Ads when creating an ad. Aside from the ‘creative’ music choices mentioned earlier in this article, Meta also suggests such features as juggling the order of image/video assets in ads depending on their popularity with users within its ‘creative enhancements’ section. Although this sounds logical, for many advertisers their ad creative has been structured to tell a story through their ads so carefully consider if that story continues to make sense with all the assets jumbled up.

Ensure you have enough conversion data before accepting Google’s suggested ‘maximise conversions’ bidding strategy. Again, ‘maximise conversions’ sounds like a no brainer in how you want to bid for users. However, the truth is in order for Google to understand how to maximise bidding for conversions they need to understand what a converting user actually looks to you. If they have no (or little) conversion data to fall back on they are going to struggle to understand what these preferred users look like. We recommend campaigns should be at a conversion activity level whereby they are achieving 30 conversions in 30 days prior to switching to a ‘maximise conversions’ strategy.


Of course the above is just a flavour of how artificial intelligence is utilised across PPC. If you’d like to have a discussion about whether AI is currently helping or hindering your digital advertising and what can be done to weight it towards the former, we’d be delighted to carry on the conversation. Drop us a message or @ us on our socials.

Control - or the lack of it - is an important consideration to any digital marketer when approaching a campaign. 

Following rigorous assessment by UKAS accredited standards auditors, URS, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve met the requirements of ISO27001 certification, meaning that our internal processes and procedures have been approved by the world’s best-known standard on information security management.

ISO27001 sets out what is required to effectively implement a robust information security management system (ISMS). It provides a framework and guidelines for organisations like us to follow and supports the maintenance and improvement of our ISMS going forward. 

We’re a full-service digital agency who endeavour to do the very best for all our clients. While we have always been compliant with the principles of the ISO27000 series of information security standards (cybersecurity has, of course, always been a top priority in our line of business), our ISO27001 information security management system has now been officially recognised and certificated.

Information security demands a strategic approach. Achieving and maintaining ISO27001 assures our clients and partners that we’re protecting their information and data by carrying out thorough risk assessments, applying stringent policies and controls, and operating as safely and securely as possible at all times. 

It’s not only about the technical measures we put in place though; we also ensure that our business controls and management processes adequately address the information security threats and opportunities that we’ve identified and evaluated in our risk assessment. By implementing best-practice, we ensure a well-rounded perspective that addresses people, processes and technology.  

With our holistic approach to ISMS now backed by ISO27001 certification, we’re a digital agency that you can trust to secure and maintain the confidentiality and integrity of your business. We can assure you that our robust policies, procedures and controls will keep your information assets protected and secure.

 Demonstrating our commitment to information security as an ISO27001 certified digital agency

If you are a business of any shape, size or sector with an online presence, cookies will (or should) have become a key consideration in recent years. Online privacy and data protection has become a prime concern (and rightly so), with users far more savvy as to how their data is or isn’t being stored and utilised.

We strongly suggest a level of cookie control is implemented as a standard on all sites (e.g. OneTrust, Civic etc) which safeguards businesses against potential cookie breaches. With such tools cookies are separated into categories - including ‘necessary’ (cookies that simply have to be created for the website to function), ‘analytics’ (cookies that are used to collect data as regards website performance e.g. Google Analytics), ‘marketing’ (cookies that collect user information in order to fuel marketing campaigns e.g. remarketing). Users are then able to select or deselect each cookie category and only those cookies which have been selected will be created.

Although it sounds relatively straightforward, the trouble comes when merging this concept with any tracking or tagging you might have already created or wish to create in the future (certainly if there is a degree of complexity to it). For example if you were to implement cookie control on a site which already had hundreds of tags attached to fire onsite via a number of different ways (e.g. page load, user interaction), that’s a lot of rewiring you’re going to have to do to get your site up to code!

It is with this backdrop of site owners wrestling with both these enhanced expectations when it comes to user privacy and desire to holistically monitor website performance that Google launched Consent Mode as a beta offering in September 2020. In its own words it:

‘…lets you adjust how your Google tags behave based on the consent status of your users. You can indicate whether consent has been granted for Analytics and Ads cookies. Google's tags will dynamically adapt, only utilizing measurement tools for the specified purposes when consent has been given by the user.’

What this means in effect is that Google will do the ‘heavy lifting’ in deciding what tags should fire (and where the data is sent to) based off a user’s consent settings.

Implementation is achieved through configuration of your Google Tag Manager and your Consent Management Platform. This process is far slicker than a host of other alternatives to Consent Mode (such as trigger groups) and also takes up far less space in your GTM container (with one such client we implemented Consent Mode on saving around 42% worth of container space!). However to emphasise this point, as it’s an important one, Consent Mode does not replace a Consent Management Platform. You will still need a OneTrust or a Civic or another CMP in order for Consent Mode to function.

A fundamental difference between how Consent Mode works and other cookie control methods is that Consent Mode doesn’t prevent data from being collected even if consent is denied, it simply anonymises the data and prevents you from viewing it (Google still receives the data).

This is where somewhat of a grey area comes into play, so as to answering the question; ‘is Google Consent Mode privacy law compliant?’ The answer really is ‘according to Google, yes’. Now is that good enough?

It’s fair to say the combination of Google and privacy law has been a topic of increased discussion in recent years, with rulings in 2022 by both Austria & France deeming GA’s implementation a breach of GDPR & EU privacy laws. Indeed although GA4, the newest iteration of Google Analytics, does have more of an accent on privacy, it certainly can’t be said that Google is seen as wholly privacy law-compliant by ruling bodies.

It is in this environment to which Consent Mode has been introduced. This has made some naturally more than a little sceptical, leaning more towards a judgement that any data collected by Google after a user has selected ‘no’ in tracking a breach of GDPR (even if no cookie is created). This is an argument which certainly could be argued.

Cookies - formerly only known as a snack now comes to represent something far more complex in the digital world. Is Consent Mode the answer?

Cookies and privacy are massively hot topics in the digital space at the moment, can Google Consent Mode be both a safe and effective solution?

Unsure if your site is cookie compliant? Get in touch to ensure your good to go with the latest security standards.

A common word which might feature in discussions around Consent Mode may be ‘interpretation’ - a word which could make some a little nervous when it comes to legality. However, we would also emphasise that, at this point, we cannot find legal precedent either way as regards to Consent Mode and you would also like to believe that given Google’s heightened awareness around privacy laws they would not be launching a new feature which would apparently flagrantly disregard these rules.

We would suggest implementation of Google Consent Mode will depend on which half of the above paragraph your sentiment is drawn to. We have witnessed first hand how much easier Consent Mode can make wiring up user consent to user tracking and how much it can optimise your Google Tag Manager container. However, there are still lingering privacy concerns which make it difficult to embrace fully as the future without a more definitive legal ruling. With this in mind it may indeed be useful to consult legal advice (if available to you) in order to gain that all-round perspective you might be seeking. 

If you’re in the UK, you may also be awaiting the progress through parliament of the new Data Protection and Digital Information Bill (completed its second reading at time of writing). The UK government seems to be adopting a slightly softer approach to cookies than their EU counterparts and it will be interesting to see how any amendments or subsequent adoption of this bill will affect data gathering generally or Consent Mode specifically here.

Let us know if you have any thoughts around Google Consent Mode and we’d be delighted to take the conversation further, we think it’s a topic primed for a debate! Find us on Twitter, LinkedIn & Instagram or give us a shout at hello@wearecore.co.uk.

Cyber Essentials Plus is the highest level of certification awarded by the Cyber Essentials scheme. It shows that we’ve passed an information security and cyber threat audit conducted on our processes and systems by external cyber security experts. 

While we’re delighted to have achieved Cyber Essentials Plus certification, it’s only one part of making sure that our systems and professional practice are as watertight as possible against today’s ever-increasing risks of doing business online. We’ve also secured accreditation from FSQS and we’re currently working towards ISO 27001 accreditation (scheduled for assessment in Autumn 2022).

The Financial Services Qualification System provides a cohesive and collaborative platform for managing supplier compliance assurance information. It provides finance companies with a fast and efficient system for assessing suppliers, therefore cutting out a lot of red tape.

We’ve gained this key accreditation through our ongoing commitment to excellent security and compliance, and the process has also enhanced the professional development of our team. We completed a rigorous audit process, meeting standards across several areas.

The bottom line is that financial institutions know they can trust us as a provider. Having achieved the FSQS benchmark for potential partners we can approach them knowing that we can deliver the extra assurance they need and make it easier for good, safe business to happen. 

We’re extremely proud to have reached these milestones with FSQS and Cyber Essentials Plus. Our dedication to ongoing professional development, both as individuals and as an agency, is vital in providing our clients with an exemplary service that operates at the cutting edge—digital evolves and so must we.

Update: In Autumn 2022 we successfully passed ISO 27001 accreditation - read more about what this entails in our insight post

We're pleased to announce that our team has achieved Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus certification for a third year running. 

Strengthening security for ourselves and our clients

Let’s say you’ve built a website (hooray!). It looks great, is developed using the very latest thinking in web technology and you’ve chucked loads of money at a massive social media campaign to promote it. Can’t fail right? Wrong, I’m afraid. The truth is if you haven’t done your research on your users, there’s no way you can build your site with the proper care and attention your specific user base requires. 

The answer to this is a crucial stage at the very start of the website development process; persona development.

A persona is a representation of a particular audience type which may be interested in your site. It can be as brief as a short list of their key details (e.g. age, gender, job title) or more complex with the inclusion of insights such as buying behaviours and related interests.

It would be quite rare for a site to simply have one type of user visiting the site. If you believe that may be you, have a think to see if that one user you are thinking about could actually be multiple types of people (they might be different job roles, different ages or different nationalities). Conversely it’s wise not to create too many persona types as this may result in you getting muddled and losing sight of your key users. We would advise ultimately around 5-10 are fully fleshed out as actionable personas.

Due to the wide ranging nature of personas, you can really grab your data from anywhere you have knowledge of your customers. If that’s a little too vague then a good starter for ten would be your Google Analytics account (and if you don’t have a Google Analytics account, you really should have a Google Analytics account!). The Demographics section is a minefield of data which can give you insights on age, gender, interests, browser preference and device type.

Another tip is to ask your sales team or whoever deals with your customers on a regular basis. They will be able to tell you more about the human side of your customers, dealing with them on an emotional level and therefore adding a further dimension to your personas.

In any way that is easily consumable for the reader. Ideally it would be visual in nature and succinct in its wording as what we’re really looking for is for a vast range of people to be able to dip in and out of these personas. This means we want to stay clear of jargon as much as possible and waffly descriptors.

Now that you have created physical representations of your target audiences you can really try and put yourselves in their position. What do they want from your site? How may they find your site? Is the site easily navigable considering the level of digital experience of your audience? (e.g. different considerations for those in their 20s/30s to those in their 60s/70s)

If these questions are asked from a pre-build stage, the answers can help inform site structure and even future marketing, preventing you from playing catch up while on the back foot post-launch.

No! The shelf life of your personas last long after your site is launched. They should help you in every iteration you want to make to the site. Whether that is a new feature or a piece of content, having your site personas to hand will give the update in question a focus and remind you of overall site goals.

That is not to say that they should be left untouched. Of course, your user base may change or evolve, so it’s always a good idea to revisit your personas from time to time. Even if no changes occur it will help to reinforce your user to you, enabling you to make smarter decisions based on the user’s preferences and not yours.

If you are interested in finding out more about persona development, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help get digital working for you.

In developing a great website, your users have to be the primary focus. Here we discuss how personas can help you gain a stronger understanding of your audience.

It’s a question surprisingly left unconsidered by a large proportion of brands and can lead to a great deal of wasted time and resources.

Apps are useful for a host of reasons but they’re also non-essential in many cases. Pouring effort and money into something you might not really need and something that perhaps won’t even be published - it does happen - is something you want to avoid. 

This isn’t to say we’re proposing the idea that mobile-friendly web presences aren’t of the utmost importance. Making sure your brand and your business is mobile-friendly is crucial. According to Tech Jury, over half of internet usage is carried out on mobile phones. With this in mind, it would be a mistake to discount any options regarding these devices and potential for growth. However, making sure your brand is mobile-friendly doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with apps. 

As long as you have a ‘mobile-friendly’ website that reflects the effort put into your desktop-view website, there’s no need to worry. Some brands and companies are less invested in making sure their mobile-view is as well-rounded and accessible as their desktop site. If your site isn’t optimised for mobile users then you’re going to lose out on a lot and so are your users. Additionally, if you put as much effort as possible into your mobile-view site then this, in most cases, will eliminate the need for an app altogether. 

As mentioned earlier, there is also the chance that your app might not get past the development stage. All too many apps have been finished and developers have found that their hard work, time and money had gone to waste because the app wasn’t published. Apple has a policy that an app needs to offer something different, something that a website doesn’t or can’t offer. This means that your app would need to offer something totally new, you can’t just have it for the sake of it. 

Something you have to ask is: “What could my business/brand get out of an app and what could our users get out of an app?” If the answer to that question is that there’s nothing an app could provide that a website couldn’t, then that should tell you something.

If you have any questions about whether an app is right for you then you can always contact us, we’d be happy to talk it over with you. 

Whether you’re planning your site, or it’s already up and running, it may have crossed your mind that you might need a mobile app. But would it actually benefit your business?

If you’ve created a website then you’ve probably wondered if you need to make an app too. Let’s walk through it.  

We, as a full service digital agency with a variety of clients, know that different clients like to have different levels of control around the social media content that appears on their channels - which we totally understand!

In a busy business environment, it can be very easy to feel as though there are not enough hours in the day. Social media marketing can be extremely effective for businesses and through scheduling tools that are available, it can be completed in a very time effective way. When scheduling your content in advance, you are able to have a full overview of your day/week/month ahead and easily view the variety of messages that you have scheduled to go live. It may take a block of a couple of hours (depending on how many messages you want to be sent), but then you can relax knowing your content will be automatically sent whilst you carry on with your day to day tasks. It’s especially useful for posting content that is typically outside of your business hours, such as evenings and weekends.

To accommodate the needs of our various clients, we have been trialing and testing different social media scheduling tools to see what works best for us (and for them). There are multiple tools on offer, but we were looking for one that would allow us to publish across multiple platforms for multiple clients and have a customisable approval process. The tool that we found to be the most effective and that allows us the most flexibility with the range of clients we work with, is Gain.

Gain works as a social media traffic manager, notifying the designated users of drafted content, gathers feedback from clients and moves the social posting process along until everything is approved and everyone involved is happy with the social media post.

Using the Gain app, we as an agency can liaise with our clients and customise the approval workflow to suit their individual needs. For example, we can create the social content, the client can approve it and be the ones to press the button for the post to be scheduled, or they can add a comment to the post and send it back to us to modify.

Another feature of the Gain app that we love is the calendar format which allows you to see all of the upcoming social content that is scheduled in a monthly format. This overview is great for seeing what days have what messages planned and the labels feature within the calendar allows you to add colour coded notes (we ♥ this) to each desired day. The visual effect of the calendar is great in allowing you to see at a quick glance at what is drafted, approved and what posts are live.

Whichever of the many social media scheduling tools you choose to use, having a platform that allows you to plan, approve and schedule social media content in advance is extremely useful and effective. Having one platform that can facilitate the needs of multiple clients and having all of the information stored in one place is great for everyone involved in social media marketing.

How we work in partnership with our clients to schedule their social media content.

If you are for help with your socials and want to talk more about working in partnership with a digital agency to get the most out of your channels, reach out to us today.

Here at CORE, we have a broad range of experience with content management systems of all shapes and sizes, from the usual open source suspects such as Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla through to enterprise systems such as SiteCore and Kentico. We’ve also seen our fair share of bespoke solutions and even developed our own client-only CMS; Blokk. Over the last 15 years we’ve worked with the good, the bad and the ugly.

One of the reasons we enjoy working with web technologies so much is because of the constant change, new thinking and new tools - there’s never a dull day. And, right now for us, one of the exciting things we are working on is our new approach to content management systems and content management solutions for our clients.

In this article we are going to introduce the key concepts and big ideas behind CaaS (Content as a Service), sometimes referred to as a Headless CMS, and how we see them shaping the future of our work here at CORE.

Content as a Service (CaaS) is when content components are independently set aside from the development of a website (in terms of the technological build process). In more traditional CMS platforms, the backend and the frontend of the website are glued together. A Headless CMS (sometimes known as a decoupled CMS) enables us to consider the elements independently and separate the front end (whatever type of application it may be: Rails, flat HTML / CSS, React, PHP) from the content management system, or, more accurately, the content as service system.

Via a CaaS system, the authoring and editing of content is a standalone feature. The Headless CMS is not in charge of business logic, delivering website services (such as form processing) or any element of the user experience (outside of content). Neither does it touch how the content will be delivered or presented to the end user, it simply delivers the content via API’s (Application Programing Interface) - a method with which other applications and technologies can consume the content.

Although CaaS has been around for some time, Headless CMS platforms are an emerging theme in a modern web development workflow with more and more companies taking this step into a decoupled mindset.

By far the most attractive and powerful features of adopting this method of working include:

By separating content systems from presentation systems both time and money can be saved.

Content for a range of websites / services can be managed from one location (e.g. a dedicated mobile application, a website and an email marketing campaign).

Content can be created to adapt to multiple frontend applications depending where the user is throughout their customer journey.

The possibility to give content authors and editors custom views and workflows built around their needs.

There are quite a few providers in the Headless CMS space and new ones are emerging. Our two current favorites are Contentful and Prismic. Here are a few standout features:

Define your own, unique content model that’s tailored to your project.

Host and manage all of your assets in one place, and update files without breaking public links.

Multiple API keys allows you to limit the content access by either device or environment type.

Built in Markdown editor allows for faster writing and wider publishing.

With secure previews, drafts and completed entries can be previewed without worrying about leaks or disruptions.

Teams can work with the externally-hosted content directly in the web app.

Preview changes on the website or app before publishing.

Ability to track all site modifications and discover who made each change.

Ability to localise your content and go global with native support and translation workflows.

Editors have the freedom to create components while the design and front end development remains consistent.

Custom Content Modeling features including a powerful ‘drag and drop’ content model builder.

Allows for publishing to any platform, design, programming language or framework.

As we’ve said, this is an area we are excited to explore further and we’ll be doing a more in-depth analysis of Headless CMS including code examples in forthcoming posts. So check back soon and follow us on Twitter to get notifications of future posts.

Headless content management systems and how are they changing the way we work.

If we have your attention piqued regarding how a headless CMS could solve your content problems, get in touch and we'd be happy to discuss how an integration could work.

On 26th February 2015, Google made the announcement on its official Webmaster blog that it would be “expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal”. It also made the very unusual move to announce when this algorithm change would begin taking place; April 21st.

In terms of its direct implications, from what we can tell Google will be rewarding websites which have optimized for mobile usage, be that responsive or 'm.'. Now to anyone who's been listening to Google or recent features they have been pushing lately (including it’s mobile-friendly labels which have appeared on mobile Google SERPs), this will not have been a surprise.

From a Google POV, user experience is key and those sites which don’t cater for their mobile visitors don’t deserve the best rankings. In short, those which don’t have a site optimised for mobile usage may well see their organic mobile rankings drop.

In terms of what Google deems ‘mobile’, that may be a little harder to determine. Tablets may exist in the grey area of this update, but from recent trends it may be safer to presume tablets will be included as mobile in this update.

That really depends on the nature of your business. At a recent conference, a key trends analyst from Google stated that this update will be bigger than the much-feared Panda and Penguin updates. Although, he also importantly noted that the algorithm change will only affect your mobile rankings and not your desktop terms.

‘So if I don’t rely on mobile visitors to my site for conversions, I’m alright then?’ 

Well maybe in the very short term, but in the long term you're probably sticking your head in the sand. If you’re not providing for your mobile visitors then you're not providing a good user experience in general and if metrics like bounce rate and other user engagement signals take a plunge, this will affect your desktop rankings.

In the long term, there must be an ambition to optimize your site for mobile. This becomes a greater priority if you know from Google Analytics that you rely on your mobile visitors for sales or conversions.

If you want to check to see if your site is optimised for mobile in Google’s eyes, they have launched this easy-to-use Mobile Friendliness tool. Simply type in a URL from your site and Google will give you a binary response of yes or no (and an Americanised ‘Awesome’ to make you really feel good!)

In general, this update is a solidifying of Google’s increasing emphasis on mobile, but really you should be thinking of your visitors’ user experience anyway. Take the time to flick through your website on a mobile device and really think, would I use this website?

The SEO community has been all abuzz as of late, which usually means one thing; algorithm drama. This time it’s the turn of mobile which has the spotlight shining bright. So what’s really going on?

With Google’s mobile algorithm update on the horizon, we take a look at its real implications for you as a business.

If you're concerned as to how a mobile view of your site might be letting the side down, get in touch and we'd be happy to chat through your options.

We see some very beautiful, well laid out visuals: very detailed, grid based designs with precise typographic layout.

We often think of these ‘flat’ layouts as being the ‘breadth’. They are fully immersive snapshots - and are representative of how the website will look on a two dimensional plane. Often they are detailed and engaging. However, these designs, while often submitted as the finished article, are only the initial visual interface of the website; the projection of the identity and the brand values as visual design intended to create an emotional resonance with its audience in a matter of seconds.

Our issue with this is that graphic designers are mostly trained to achieve engaging results in two dimensional visual media. When working on a website layout, therefore, they often treat it the same way as designing a poster. Striving to achieve a fine balance with elements of interface design: moving the elements of the design two pixels to the right, two pixels to the left and, perhaps, back again. All carefully and thoughtfully crafted to achieve the best impact and balance possible.

Our clients and partners work hard on this aspect of a project and, once completed, the end client is usually fully on board and happy to sign it off. Then it’s over to us, and the fun begins.

As a front-end web designer I strongly feel that this is only one half of the (visual) puzzle. Although there has undoubtedly been a great deal of consideration given to the visual impact and emotional resonance of the flat design up to this point, they can often fail when marrying the user interface (UI) with the user experience (UX). A graphic designer is rarely asked to consider the whole user experience on a functional level and across different devices, and this is something that we, as web designers and developers, excel at.

Where experienced web teams can add value is in considering the ‘depth’ of a website. Web developers, as an intrinsic part of their role, have to consider how a user is going to follow a path through the website.

At Core we find that in situations where we are able to work in tandem with graphic designers at the visual design stage of a project, then a better solution can be presented to the client. If this can be done before they buy into a visual design that is not as practical or workable then it’s a better situation for all stakeholders in the project.

We have over 20 years experience in marrying the breadth and depth of a successful web design. We are always happy to discuss any potential issues with our design partners and offer reasonable and practical solutions throughout the process - often before the end client is involved. Presenting a design for sign-off with little or no assessment of the function of a website could result in lengthy re-design processes, failing to meet deadlines, and worst of all undermining the client’s confidence in the successful delivery of the project.

We can help to avoid these pitfalls - we champion breadth and depth in web design, as well as the true spirit of collaboration and working in partnership to deliver outstanding results.

Building a great website that performs well is a multi-faceted task. Graphic designers and developers working together as a team should be a rewarding and successful process, and will mean nothing is left out of the brief.

In this post, we give you an insight into how we go about designing our websites and the thought processes behind our decisions.

Pinterest is currently one of the most popular social networking sites, gaining a vast number of subscribers once it came out of beta development in the summer of 2012, and opened membership to all.

The idea is that users create ‘boards’ within their accounts and ‘pin’ images and other media (videos, for example) to their boards, which other people can follow and ‘repin’ if they like them too.

Pinterest encourages users to find these images, videos and articles on the web and to ‘give credit’ to the creators of these media items. Indeed, its own copyright page states this:

“Pinterest respects the intellectual property rights of others and we expect people on Pinterest to do the same.”

This doesn’t mean that everyone using Pinterest complies with this request, and credit is easily removed when pinning or re-pinning images.

Users are also encouraged to upload and pin images that they themselves have created, to avoid any copyright issues.

In Europe (and particularly in the UK) research suggests that the majority of Pinterest users are women though the opposite is true in the US, where Pinterest’s users are more representative of the demographic spread who use the internet as a whole.

Inevitably, with the plethora of wonderful images available online - many of which belong to professional photographers, artists and designers - these are going to be the ones attractive to ‘pinners’. We already have Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (to name a few) to share our own attempts at photography, and images more suitable for friends and family than the world at large.

Here’s the catch. Pinterest doesn’t own the images posted there, and by carefully worded statements and legal notices, it avoids encouraging people to ‘steal’ images. But by the very nature of its business and purpose, it is in effect facilitating this process without being explicit about it.

It’s a valid argument that for the significant amount of publicity that brands and individual creatives could, and do, achieve from enthusiastic pinners, they are prepared to sacrifice some of their rights. But when you are a small business perhaps, or a sole trader earning your living from your creative work, you might be less inclined to take this line.

Whilst in the UK and US copyright is created along with the creative work - be that art, photography, text or music - it can sometimes be a lengthy and expensive business to prove who owns these works.

Some professional photographers and designers have decided that it’s too risky to leave their work on the site. It’s risky enough displaying work online at the best of times, but it is a necessity in this day and age. Unfortunately, unless you are prepared to sweep the internet for copies of your images and designs, it could still be difficult to stop people pinning them without giving you credit. In addition, a few conscientious (or cautious) Pinterest users have decided they don’t want to get inadvertently embroiled in a copyright battle, and deleted their own accounts.

However, whilst Pinterest has clearly put the onus on the user to take responsibility for crediting the owners of images, it is still possible to enjoy using the site both as a ‘pinner’ and as someone who owns copyright. Pinners should always credit from the original source - good practice in any situation when reproducing work or quoting; and the creators of visual work need to be careful not to publish their complete works online, to use watermarks, and low res images. Having your own website that establishes your ownership of the copyright will go a long way to protect your rights.

We at CORE are experts in managing issues such of this for our clients and partners. To find out more, get in touch with us through our contact form or tweet us @WeAre_Core.

While Pinterest is extremely popular both amongst individuals and brands as a visual sharing platform, potential issues around the copyright and use of images on the site still need to be considered carefully.

Staying legally secure online is vital for any business, so what are the rules surrounding copyright and images on the popular social sharing tool Pinterest?

An important part of our work here at CORE is ensuring that the websites and web applications that we build work in all major web browsers - but what exactly does that mean?

Some companies and organisations are way behind when it comes to issuing their personnel with up-to-date versions of browsers and there’s always a few stragglers amongst the general public.

What version of what browser are you using?

Do you even know or do you think that you should even care? And if you do know that you are using Firefox or Internet Explorer, do you know which version? Is it the latest version? Well, it matters greatly to us here at CORE and especially our web development team.

But you just want stuff to work, right? So, if we can’t realistically be expected to go on supporting older browsers indefinitely, where should we as web designers/developers draw the line?

Support or ‘your browser, your problem’?

Surely some of the responsibility for browsing experience should be with the user in keeping their browsers up-to-date. Well, that’s a credible argument for the general public and we can, to a certain extent, hand-hold someone whose browser is out-of-date and encourage them to upgrade. There are, after all, good reasons for doing so. Older browsers suffer from a range of security issues leaving their users more vulnerable to viruses and phishing attacks as well as other threats. Additionally, as websites and web applications become more sophisticated there are some features that simply will not work on older versions of the most popular browsers. All good strong reasons to encourage users of older browsers to keep their IT up-to-date.

Corporate clients, or those working at other large organisations, are the proverbial elephant in the room in all of this. These are environments where users generally have little or no control over their own IT set up. Often the bigger the organisation the more likely it is that it will be running products or services that tie them to using older more restricted versions of Internet Explorer.

A recent project we have been working on here at CORE involves plotting change management processes on a timeline. At the start of the project we were told we had to support IE8 users but it wasn’t until we were ready to ship the work that we discovered that their corporate versions of IE8 had been restricted, across the majority of the IT infrastructure, to IE7 compatibility mode. That caused us considerable problems as the software we were using to build the application (modern JavaScript libraries) is not supported in IE7.

In another recent example where we were involved in public sector work, we discovered that thousands of their staff had IE6 set as the default browser. It turned out they did also have IE8 and Chrome installed but as IE6 is set as the default browser many were not aware they had alternative options and/or do not use them. Then when they opened links from their email applications or other software the default browser was launched. It was this that caused us problems as we were involved in distributing access to our work via email.

So, the question is this: how low do you go or how low do you think we should go? How far back do you think it is reasonable to test, and what support or strategies, if any, do you think it’s reasonable to provide for older, out-of-date browsers?

Tweet us @WeAre_Core and let us know what you think.

This is the first in a series of articles we are going to publish on browser testing and browser support. Bookmark our blog and follow us on Twitter to be kept up-to-date with all the latest news and articles from CORE.

Wikipedia entry on usage share of web browsers, some interesting background on measurements too

Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report on Browsers

Our favourite browser and operating system testing tool

When it comes to internet browsers, are you at the head of the pack or are you still lagging behind with out-of-date versions? 

When we build our websites we always ensure that our work is functional across all the major web browsers. But where should you draw the line?

Technology insights

AI in PPC - are we there yet?

ISO27001 certified digital agency

Introducing Google Consent Mode

Strengthening security for ourselves and our clients

Personas - keeping your users in mind

Should I develop an app?

Social media scheduling

Content as a Service (CaaS)

Mobilegeddon?

Making Better Websites

Pinterest and copyright

Browsers: how low do you go?