Mayes, more than accountants

Mayes Business Partnership Ltd, the Accrington based chartered certified accountants and registered auditors who serve the entire Northwest are in the midst of a rebrand and refocus exercise.Experiencing great success in the provision of business services which confirm their moniker as Added Value Accountants they felt they wanted to evolve their brand to leverage the Mayes name, clarify their offerings and bring their image right up to date for the bright future ahead.

Appointing Preston digital agency Interactive Dimension (www.interactivedimension.com) to develop their brand and website, a thorough blueprint phase was undertaken which helped both parties focus on their customers and aspirations. Taking this step back, deep breath approach has rewarded Mayes with a fresh new, modern and unique look and feel to the company identity, one which will be followed though in all their marketing and communication materials over the next few months.

A detail of the logos bespoke type treatment:

"One thing which stood out to us was the need to leverage the great Mayes name and clarify what they do, but with a novel way to show they do so much more. Our creative team developed a clean, stylish and sophisticated brand that introduces the 'more than' concept which will be applied across their service portfolio. We're very pleased with the results and look forward to seeing it work hard for the client. We particularly wanted to boil the identity down to 'Mayes' as everyone knows them as that. They are an accountancy firm with a great personality, not a machine and we wanted that to be the focus." said Jonny Wilde from ID.

"It was something we'd all wanted to do for some time. It's a big step but we felt the timing was right; the future for Mayes is about focusing on what we do best to deliver great results for our clients, we simply do more. We can't wait for the full transformation to be complete and we're very excited about the future for us as a practice. This new brand identity spells it out for our existing clients and prospects alike." said Anne Parkinson, Managing Director at Mayes.

Moving forward Mayes will continue to provide the best possible value business development services for their clients, focused on accountancy, tax, audit and other financial services.

ID are in the process of developing Mayes’ new site which will showcase their services and host a number of value added tools for their clients leveraging web based technologies and systems integration with Mayes’ back-office systems. The project is perfect for ID with their creative, build and integration capabilities which have been homed and proven over the last 15 years the agency has been delivering digital solutions.

Why not catch their old website now on www.mbpacc.co.uk before it's replaced by www.mayesaccountants.co.uk which is currently in development.

Preston Carers come to ID

Preston Carers support carers in the Preston area. They offer a host of information, advice, services, support and activities for carers.

They have selected Interactive Dimension the Preston based digital agency to support them with their new website design and build.

We'll be bringing the site up to date with an improved structure, design and content management system so they can edit the site themselves moving forward.

We're proud to support such a worthy organisation and increase our support for Preston as a whole. This, along with our Preston Vision win increases our local portfolio and we're very happy about that.

Keep an eye out for the new site, the current one is here: http://www.prestoncarers.org.uk/

Were you at WordCampUK?

Last weekend Louis from ID attended WordCampUK, an "informal annual gathering of WordPress publishers, designers and developers based in the United Kingdom, held at a different location around the country each year". The event was a fantastic mixture of geeks, lead developers, plugin authors, theme designers and complete beginners to the WordPress platform. Louis has been using WordPress as a blogging platform for over 5 years, but in recent years WP has turned into something that Louis and ID use for full websites, not just blogs.

The event was held at the Metropolitan Business School in Manchester over the weekend 17th-18th July.

Saturday started off with a talk by Michael Kimb Jones 'How WordPress Themes Changed the World' (slides) which was a great insight into the very profitable arena of theme development for WordPress. Some of his own sites were featured which highlighted the very versatile nature of the latest WordPress platform.

Also on Saturday 'Wonderflux' was revealed. This is a framework which "bridges the gap between developer and designer enabling the creation of powerful WordPress themes & functionality" A great session by Jonnya gave us the basics of framework possibilities. Louis came out of this session feeling excited, particularly how versatile this framework could make his and our existing WordPress sites.

The quality of the content from all the speakers on both Saturday & Sunday was fantastic and catered for all WordPress users from beginners to hardcore fanatics. It wasn't just all talk though, there were several 'tracks' and activities to choose from as well as some superb Q/A sessions and some 'Site Doctor' arenas.

If you wanted to go but couldn't, there is good news! A lot of the slides from the speakers presentations are now available online, and the whole weekend was captured on video by the lovely folks at Orange Coconut this footage will soon be available on wordpress.tv.

Overall Louis got a tremendous amount out of WordCampUK 2010. He met some great approachable people who we're sure we'll be working with in the future on upcoming Wordpress projects. WordPress has now evolved! If you think WordPress is just for blogs, think again! ID think you will be surprised which sites you visit everyday are actually running on WordPress!

Many thanks to all who helped organise WordCampUK 2010 it was a truly great weekend!

Always nice to hear about clients success!

Just had a nice sit down with a client who let us know they had reached their KPI for 'new business via their website for the year' within 3 months of it being live!

Really good to hear things like that, it confirms approach, reasoning, strategy and all those creative juices were all on-point.

In today's climate marketing spend has to be effective. Else it erodes the business and can quickly prove to be a burden rather than an investment. Talk to Interactive Dimension, the creative digital agency in Preston about your fears, aspirations, requirements around your website, intranet, branding, print or exhibition media. We're sure we can help. Today just proved it again!

Kenta is coming!

Digital agency Interactive Dimension in Preston are in the process of finishing an app which will allow Private, Public and 3rd sector organisations to benefit from being able to manage their intangible resources and increase efficiency in ways they never thought possible.

The app build is going well. It will be ready to beta very soon. ID are in the process of recruiting pilot clients at the moment and the demand is really pleasing to see.

It's is exactly what large organisations need to navigate the uncertain paths ahead and transform the way they do business.

We call it Kenta. And it's an exciting venture between Interactive Dimension and Bodyproject. Interactive Dimension bringing our extensive branding, web design and website development skills to the partnership and Body Project driving a consultancy methodology which is truly revolutionary.



Watch this space... oh, and do 'like' it if you like the sound of it. That way your organisation could benefit from it too as you'll be kept up to date by our Facebook page.




P.S. Thanks to you all Liking our Facebook page we now have the username URL of http://www.facebook.com/mykenta secured. Thanks!

Fresh Fish Sold Here Today!

One of the best lessons learned throughout 20 years in design, marketing and communications was taught to me, not exclusively of course, by a truly inspiring old-school agency guy named 'Granville Jagger'.

Now Granville wore a bow tie every single day, and was always on-point and up-to-date with the latest equipment, software and techniques. What was most remarkable about Granville was that he was past retirement age, yet had one of the sharpest minds I've ever had the pleasure to be associated and involved with.

Anyway... Granville dropped 'Fresh Fish Sold Here Today' on me while we were working on a new brochure for Bodycote, one of his clients, now our client since he stepped down and we secured them after pitching against a number of agencies.

The cover needed to express the service offering without clouding it in frills, bumf and unnecessary words that could have made the subject matter dull and overly technical.

Obviously this isn't a unique or exclusive approach, lots of people know the story and I'm sure lots of people apply it to their design/marketing/comms approach. There isn't a book in it.

I just wanted to share it, I use it every few days myself still to this day and it's probably one of the best techniques to boil things down to their essence. Something that is critical in everything we do day-in day-out to gain clarity in a message, focus to an advert and the most relevant these days is probably cutting the crap away when delivering messages online. It's a 'known' fact that people don't read every word of your content online, they scan for points of interest, nuggets of interest and then progress until they find what they want, or lose interest and go and try elsewhere.

I say 'known' because truthfully we don't know, we assume, guess, make it up and base it on previous experience most of the time. It would be great to test and try everything with every client to know the facts about their users, but most clients don't want to spend money on that.

You probably know the story but here goes anyway:

A guy, walking past a fish shop, saw a sign that reads,

“Fresh Fish Sold Here Today”

Guy: I see you have quite some fish there.
Merchant: Yes, they are fresh from the dock early this morning. Would you like to buy some?
Guy: No, thank you, I’m just walking by, but I have some advice on your sign.
Merchant: Please share. I’d love to make it better.
Guy: Well, you don’t need to say ‘sold’. You’re a shop right?
Merchant: You’re right. (Erases the word).
Guy: Actually, I didn’t think you were selling it tomorrow, so I’d erase ‘today’, too.
Merchant: That’s true. (Erases).
Guy: While you’re at it, I’d also erase ‘here’ since you’re not selling it over there, are you?
Merchant: Err… right. (Erases that too).
Guy: You surely wouldn’t sell non-fresh fish, either, so ‘fresh’ has to go, too.
Merchant: Ok. (Erases).
Guy: Well, frankly, anyone can see that you’re selling fish, or are they fruit?
Merchant: (Erases). But wait…

Basically what this is telling us is:

No element should be in your design or message without reasons for its existence.

Of course there are arguments to be had, for example you could have changes 'Fresh' to 'The Freshest' to differentiate yourself if you were on a street packed with fish shops.

And you may introduce a picture of a fish on your sign to attract shoppers on a busy shopping strip easily.

These are all factors around the environment in which you are trying to promote yourself.

But the essence of the lesson remains. Keep it simple and the message will work. They will understand.

The relationship grows!

Dead chuffed we're growing our scope of work with Preston Vision since they selected us for their website (ID have Vision). We're now working on advertising and exhibition materials for them.

As ever with ID it's about relationships which are mutually beneficial.

We want to win clients, not projects... and this once again proves our approach works.

One-page-site SEO success!

The one-page-site we did for Northern Stock Auditors (http://www.northernstockauditors.co.uk/) has only been live for a few weeks and already it tops Google.co.uk for their key phrase 'stock auditors preston'. No mad science or witchcraft, no PPC, just good content. Very happy.

See the results here - till they change of course ;-)
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=stock+auditors+preston

ID Have Vision

Preston Vision are joining forces with ID to create a new website to support their initiatives and projects elevating Preston in the minds of potential investors, residents and visitors.

It’s a strategically important project for Preston itself and we’re looking forward to creating a vibrant dynamic site which announces the new brand and leverages many exciting social media channels to involve the community and spark debate.

The website will come alive with images and comments from Preston’s residents and will empower Preston Vision to communicate project news and updates and engage the users of the site with the powerful IDCMS.

The pitch was open to the leading agencies in Preston and ID is proud to have been selected by the Preston Vision team.

Emma, Head of Marketing and Communications at Preston Vision commented: “Preston Vision felt that ID have exactly the right qualities and experience to help us to launch our first website, and we are delighted to be working with them”.

It’s going to be a lovely site and we’ll be pulling out all the stops to get it launched as soon as possible!

ID hit the nail on the head!

We've just launched the new site for The Nails Place, a nail and beauty salon who came to us for a fresh new look to go with their fresh new salon.

The site is stylish, fun and glossy and suits the personality of the staff and owners perfectly!

Eventually the site will integrate an online booking feature and a PayPal backed online shop, becoming more of a revenue generator for the salon and point of contact and comms for the customers, the booking system will SMS appointment reminders and automatically assign appointment times moving The Nails Place ahead of the competition by leaps and bounds.

Happy client, happy ID, great fun!