It’s at this time of year that Union Room, like many other offices around the country, are playing awful songs on the office radio, eating far too many snacks that’ve been brought into the office and trying to make sure that all of our clients have what they need before we head off for Christmas.
It’s at this time of year that Union Room, like many other offices around the country, are playing awful songs on the office radio, eating far too many snacks that’ve been brought into the office and trying to make sure that all of our clients have what they need before we head off for Christmas.
We’re back on the 4th of January, have a great Christmas and thanks for reading the blog. We’re off to put our feet up and watch the Great Escape.
The Union Room team
x
After our ‘year in search’ blog post a day or two ago, we thought it’d be interesting to see which of our blog posts have been the most popular with our readers.
After our ‘year in search‘ blog post a day or two ago, we thought it’d be interesting to see which of our blog posts have been the most popular with our readers.
We’ve tried to write a mix of content this year, mixing news about Union Room, news about web design, galleries, round-ups and the odd tutorial. Lets take a look at what’s been popular with our readers…
1. 21 Fonts That Shouldn’t Be Free…But Are! – 57, 328 pageviews
2. 10 Super Simple Web Designs – 12,003 pageviews
3. 15 new jQuery Plugins To Help You Conquer The Web – 8,040 pageviews
4. The Webs Best Designers and Their Favourite Fonts – 7,393 pageviews
5. 10 More Super Simple Web Designs – 6,383 pageviews
6. 10 Free Amazing Caligraphy Fonts – 5,355 pageviews
7. 7 New Free Fonts That You Should Definitely Download – 4,014 pageviews
8. 16 Beautiful Black & White Websites – 3,841 pageviews
9. 20 Eye Catching and Colourful Websites – 3,398 pageviews
10. 16 Innovative and Inventive Header Designs – 3,332 pageviews
As you can see, our free fonts blog post we posted back in July was extremely popular and really helped launch the blog. Even four months after publish, it remains to be our most popular blog post month to month by quite a distance. Since its publishing in July, the post has attracted over 5,000 pageviews every month.
We’re going to try and keep posting a great mix of content in 2010 with some larger articles as well as the usual roundups and Union Room news.
The explosion of social media in the last 18 months has many people questioning the future of SEO and search in general. So we thought we’d take a look at our analytic statistics over the last 12 months to see what the trends show.
The explosion of social media in the last 18 months has many people questioning the future of SEO and search in general. So we thought we’d take a look at our analytic statistics over the last 12 months to see what the trends show.
At the start of the year we began to look at how we could use search engine optimisation and social media to our advantage, by meeting new people and increasing awareness of our website, blog and services. We went ahead and completed a full SEO project on our own site (keyword research, on and off-page optimisation, link building etc), opened a Twitter account and began writing articles.
Lets take a look at how our efforts have affected traffic to our website.
Over 60% of our traffic this year has been from referring sites:
1. Stumbleupon – 5,440 visits
2. Twitter.com – 4,966 visits
3. Delicious.com – 4,724 visits
4. Dzone.com – 4,278 visits
5. Design-newz.com – 3,528 visits
Although we submit all of our articles to social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon, Delicious, Dzone etc you can see the effect this had on referring site traffic. pretty much all of this traffic is down to the content contained on our web design blog.
Although we weren’t running analytics on our website for all of last year, if you were to compare December 2008 with November 2009, we’ve seen over a 3000% difference increase in traffic (325 visits in December 2008, compared to 10,406 in November 2009 incase you were wondering).
So what about the search vs social media aspect of our traffic? It’s obviously hard to compare the two as social media can be very instant,.You write an article, post it on Twitter and submit it to a few sites and within 24 hours you could have a few hundred additional visitors to your site. With search however, it’s very much a long term process which can take months for results.
We received over 11,000 visits from Google organically in 2009, over 9,000 of these visits were in the second half of the year which displays the long term growth of search engine traffic. The beauty of search is that in 2010, we could do very minimal work on the current SEO we have implemented and still achieve decent results, whereas with social media we would still need to maintain our blog, twitter account and bookmarking submissions to achieve the same stats we have this year.
With social media only getting bigger in 2010, it’ll be interesting to see what the end of year stats look like next year but we predict largely the same findings. Social media providing good traffic as long as we maintain our design blog and continue to meet people on twitter, with SEO providing the backbone for our main websites traffic.
Yesterday we posted a roundup of what we’ve been up to the last 4 or 5 weeks. Today we’re pleased to announce we’ve launched our latest website, Otter Recruitment.
Yesterday we posted a roundup of what we’ve been up to the last 4 or 5 weeks. Today we’re pleased to announce we’ve launched our latest website, Otter Recruitment.
We’ve been working closely with Charlie Bennett over at Otter Recruitment for the last 7 or 8 weeks or so on one our most enjoyable projects to date. Otter Recruitment provides a bespoke recruitment service to both employers and candidates, so it was no surprise that Charlie was a pleasure to work with throughout the project.
It’s been a busy few months here at Union Room, we’ve worked with some really exciting people on some great projects and managed to keep growing our web design blog! Lets take a look at what’s been going on at Union Room recently…
It’s been a busy few months here at Union Room, we’ve worked with some really exciting people on some great projects and managed to keep growing our web design blog! Lets take a look at what’s been going on at Union Room recently…
We’ve recently launched some great sites spanning the Management, Education, E-Commerce and Security sectors.
While we’ve launched some of these sites, we’ve also been working on some of our biggest projects to date including some great recruitment sites for Nigel Frank and Otter Recruitment. These websites will be launching soon so keep an eye on our blog for some more details. Look below for a sneak peek at the aforementioned sites…
We’re also hard at work with new websites for websites in the Executive Travel, Business Coaching and Human Resources sectors. We’re not quite ready to show you these projects yet but hopefully we will be soon.
We’ve also posted some great articles on our blog in the last 4 or 5 weeks, here’s a roundup of the best we’ve posted:
Keep an eye out for work-related updates in the new year.
There are few brands that really push the boundaries of advertising, creating something truly unique and memorable to push the awareness of their products and company. Here at Union Room we are always interested in what a few brands are up to, one of those brands is Nike.
There are few brands that really push the boundaries of advertising, creating something truly unique and memorable to push the awareness of their products and company. Here at Union Room we are always interested in what a few brands are up to, one of those brands is Nike.
Lets take a look at the evolution of their advertising since the company was founded in 1964.
One of Nikes earliest advertising campaigns was the ‘There is no finish line’ campaign, created by John Brown and Partners. The poster was an instant hit with consumers and has became legendary in the design industry for pretty much launching the advertising ethos of Nike itself.
After concentrating on the running and athletics industry for a number of years, Nike began branching out into other sports. The company began sponsoring track & field athletes like Carl Lewis and Sebastian Coe as well as famous players in other sports, this was eventually shown in their advertising for individual players:
Perhaps the most important sponsorship signing in the history of Nike was the signing of basketball player Michael Jordan in 1984.
As well as Michael Jordan, Nike have sponsored some of the biggest names in basketball and world sport including LeBron James, Charles Barkley, Ken Griffey Jr, Roy Jones Jr, Lance Armstrong, Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Ronaldinho.
Nike has been known to court a little bit of controversy at times, especially with it’s approach to advertising.
This image of Wayne Rooney with a crucifix-syle stance drew mixed reactions when launched, as did the similar image of boxer Manny Pacquiao.
Nike also stirred up some controversy in 2008 when the advertising for the new Nike Hyperdunk series was unveiled, many commenting on it’s “homophobic nature”.
Last week we announced a competition for our readers to win one of three Google Wave invites, simply by leaving a comment on a blog post.
Last week we announced a competition for our readers to win one of three Google Wave invites, simply by leaving a comment on a blog post.
We’re happy to announce that our three winners have been picked! Without further ado, our winners are:
Jimmy B.
Danielle
Luis Lopez
Invites are on the way to the lucky three winners. Congratulations and we hope you enjoy Google Wave.
We were lucky enough to recently receive a batch of Google Wave invites and we thought it’d be a good opportunity to offer our readers the chance of winning one!
We were lucky enough to recently receive a batch of Google Wave invites and we thought it’d be a good opportunity to offer our readers the chance of winning one!
We have three invites to give away, to win one simply post a comment below and we will pick the winners at random sometime early next week.
Inspiration is a big thing for most designers and it can come in many forms. Some of us read books and magazines, some visit CSS galleries and others use image bookmarking services but here at Union Room, we love subscribing to and reading a number of great design blogs.
Inspiration is a big thing for most designers and it can come in many forms. Some of us read books and magazines, some visit CSS galleries and others use image bookmarking services but here at Union Room, we love subscribing to and reading a number of great design blogs.
Chris Spooner posts some fantastic tutorials and freebies over on his blog making it an invaluable source of design inspiration. He also runs another design blog Line25 which contains similar high quality content.
Selected posts:
20 Handy Photoshop Tips For a Faster Workflow
10 Solutions to Easily Create Your Online Portfolio
Create a Trendy Galactic Poster Design in Photoshop
Designm.ag is a great, community-based design blog with a jobs board, news submission section and some great daily articles that range from web design to photography.
Selected posts:
Showcase of Big, Bold Typography
15 Tips for Breaking in as a Part-Time Freelancer
Although obviously targeted towards freelancers, Freelance Switch has some great articles that can help improve the skills of designers in all kinds of employment. It also contains the fantastic Freelance Freedom web comics.
Selected posts:
Leveraging Your Blog to Promote Your Services
Are Freelancers a Commodity or a Profession
To Share or Not to Share, That is the Question
InstantShift posts some of the best roundup-type posts around and contains such a diverse range of content that it’s suitable for designers, developers and bloggers.
Selected posts:
Super-Clean and Minimal Web Designs: 70+ Stunning Examples and Resources
36 High-Quality Latest Free Fonts To Enhance Your Designs
50 Interviews of Popular Web Designers, Developers and Founders
Just Creative Design is ran by graphic, web and logo designer Jacob Cass and features a mix of Jacobs personal work as well as some some useful tutorials and articles.
Selected posts:
How much to charge for design work?
The Top 100 Best Fonts of All Time
This blog is made up of some really original posts and has some good information for developers as well as designers.
Selected posts:
Best Relational Database Management System?
Color: The Next Limited Resource?
10 Free Server & Network Monitoring Tools that Kick Ass
This one is obvious but this kind of list would look odd without a mention of Smashing Magazine. The blog has gone from strength to strength in the last couple of years and is home to some of the most unique and widely-referenced articles in the design community.
Selected posts:
The death of the boring blog post?
Getting Started With Content Management Systems
As well as having one of the most unique designs of any design blog, Webdesigner Depot contains a really varied mix of content.
Selected posts:
Preparing and Planning for a Redesign
In Defense of The Jack of All Trades
Not mentioning the fantastic content, You The Designer features one of the best layout designs for any design blog on the internet. It uses large images and big titles to draw attention to posts and it’s understated colour scheme really help draw attention to posted content.
Selected posts:
Although we sang the praises of colourful web design a week or two ago, we are equally fans of sparse colour schemes that use lashings of black and white throughout their design.
Although we sang the praises of colourful web design a week or two ago, we are equally fans of sparse colour schemes that use lashings of black and white throughout their design.
Some of these sites use a little colour and some nice shades of grey as well but the colour palettes are kept to a complete minimum, here are a few of our favourites:
There are a ton of great articles around that concentrate on nice footer designs such as the ones by Hongkiat and instantShift, but sadly there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of posts highlighting the amazing work designers are doing with website headers right now.
There are a ton of great articles around that concentrate on nice footer designs such as the ones by Hongkiat and instantShift, but sadly there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of posts highlighting the amazing work designers are doing with website headers right now.
Although there’s nothing more I like than an elegantly made footer (web designer wall and iprimidieci are two of my favourites) it’s the header of a website that makes that first, all-important impact on a user, making it perhaps the most vital aspect of your websites design.
Let’s take a look at some of the best website headers and introductory graphics currently around…
Have you seen some great headers that we haven’t mentioned? feel free to mention them below!
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Union Room Ltd. Studio 9, Maling Studios, Hoults Estate, Walker Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2HL.
Tel - +44 (0) 191 228 9444, Email - info@unionroom.com.
Company No. 4648894 | Web Design Newcastle
