Web Ramblings

So we finally made it to 2010 and the noughties are at an end. I don’t know what this means to all of you but to me it means its been 10 years since I graduated from university. Which successfully makes me feel very old! ~ grin!

I’ve already seen lots of blog posts predicting design/web trends for 2010 or telling everyone what their goals will be. I’m not going to bore you all with my new years resolutions (mostly because I don’t make any as I never stick to them) and I’m not going to give you an in depth review of my 2009 either. Although I will review in brief …  coffee, work, twitter, work, tea, brother got married, work, more tea, work, twitter, sleep, Christmas.

As you can see 2009 was busy for me, obviously I have missed a few things out (I do occasionally have a social life and I do also eat). December 2009 was like a mad dash toward the finish line so I thought I’d take a little bit of time to catch you up on what I’ve been doing.

Creative Boom Birmingham

Many of you may already know that Creative Boom recently launched local hubs of their popular blog. The Birmingham Hub is being run by digital agency Gas Street Works and when they needed a HTML newsletter designing to shout about all the creative events going on throughout the West Midlands I volunteered my services. The first enews has now been sent out. If you didn’t receive it in your inbox you can view it here.

To tie in with the enews the standard template header on the CB Birmingham Hub’s website was also changed to my design. As a result the guys at Gas Street Works very kindly wrote a small piece about me for CB Birmingham, which you can view here, and I also noticed they added me as a tag when they wrote about the newsletter, which you can view here (I’m very chuffed about having my own tag! ~ I know its the simple things).

Oswestry Festival of the Word

The Oswestry Festival of the Word is also gaining momentum now with lots of exciting events being planned as I write this. The festival is being organised by John Waine from The Best of Oswestry and already has lots of local businesses involved. To help keep the pace going, once a brand had been agreed, a coming soon page was needed.

Designed by me the page needed to do 3 things. It needed to tell people when the festival was happening, needed to give a hint of what is being arranged and allow people to sign up to receive updates as they are confirmed.

So far, the page has been a great success. The ‘visitor – sign up’ conversion rate is 16% (this means 16% of all visitors so far have signed up to receive updates), which is absolutely fantastic as a 5 – 7% conversion rate is usually considered good. Although I think the success is due to the owl looking at the form when you enter your details rather than the page design! ~ grin!

So that’s what I’ve been up to. I hope you all had a cracking Christmas and 2010 continues to be busy!