Read the latest news and insights from our team, partners and clients.
Everyone is talking about digital experimentation, and rightly so. It is the cornerstone of building continuously improving digital products and experiences. Where once we would build a digital product and consider it ‘finished’, we have now a deeply established approach that involves continuous iterative optimization and improvement based on analytics, feedback and other data.
Shiny new features are always well received, however it’s always good to step back and consider what they mean at a higher level and where they can make a difference to both our day-to-day digital operations as well as the experiences we deliver with the Optimizely platform.
In an era characterised by rapid digital transformation, there is an imperative for enterprises to redefine and continuously optimise their digital experiences to stay competitive. As organisations pivot toward enhancing their online presence and digital customer interactions are to achieving business objectives, the role of Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) has never been more crucial.
It is impossible to ignore the remarkable growth and innovation in the headless CMS market over the last few years. The rising demand for personalised user experiences and the need for omnichannel content delivery is driving this surge in demand.
Creating experiences that deliver value doesn't happen by accident. It only happens by design. This eBook covers the three ways you can design digital experiences that help you deliver value, fast.
Just like a leaky pipe, the causes of user attrition are often difficult to locate and you may not know what to look for. Your marketing team may be doing a stellar job of attracting people to your site, but you’re not maximising your digital investment if you lose them before they complete the transactions that bring you most value.
Two of our valued clients in the legal sector, Farrahs and Charles Russell Speechleys, have been confirmed in the top spots in the latest website ranking growth stats from #Digital100. The Digita100 ranks top UK law firms for their digital marketing – across website, social media presence, and other digital marketing effort - and assigns a score based on key metrics such as website traffic, engagement, and search engine optimization.
Upgrading to the latest version of any software is typically considered good practice. However, sometimes upgrades are simple, quick and barely noticeable and sometimes those upgrades are much more substantial, feature rich and require a greater investment of time and effort. So, why should you be considering upgrading to CMS 12 sooner rather than later?
As with designing any UX experience, building great B2B commerce experiences comes down to understanding the needs of the user: their motivations, needs and context. Unpicking their mental models and their jobs to be done are central to this. It’s like a colleague said to me, 'B2B is like B2C, only more so'.
Saturday 22nd April marks the 30th Earth Day, an annual event that promotes awareness and appreciation for the natural world, and encourages people to take action to protect it. We are proud to be supporting Earth Day at Netcel. It is an opportunity for us to raise awareness of the initiatives and activities that contribute to our environmental sustainability targets, a vital part of our ongoing ESG programme.
It used to be the case that, if you knew what to look for, a fake was easy to spot. Typically humans are quite adept at spotting fakes when they don’t seem ‘quite right’. There’s usually some kind of giveaway that prevents you from trusting it. The best fakes make those giveaways difficult to detect, but they tend to take more skill or cost more money. Often both. Gaining someone’s trust is crucial to starting and maintaining any relationship, and the more that relationship requires any kind of financial, intellectual or emotional investment, the more crucial it is to establish, and remain deserving of, that trust.
At Netcel, it’s our mission to build a diverse and inclusive culture and we want to encourage others to do the same. Which is why we are supporting International Women’s Day to #EmbraceEquity amongst women, specifically in the Digital and Technology industry. Currently, women are underrepresented in our industry, with only 5% of leadership positions in the technology sector being held by women. That is why reached out to some of our female clients, partners and employees working in senior digital positions, and asked them to offer their advice and opinions on why women's should consider careers within this industry. Read what they had to say.
If there's one thing we can agree on it's that, when it come to design, everyone has an opinion. We can't help it. There will always be that first impression, the emotional response, that keeps us interested or drives us away. If the design is for something that it meant to be used, that first impression is superseded by a second: does it work? Then a third: is it helpful? And a fourth: Is it easy? For product designers, creating these impressions is what we get out of bed for in the morning. As someone whose business depends on that product, it's everything. This book covers three ways you can design digital experience that deliver the outcomes you're looking for.
Congratulations to Netcel Solutions Architect, Minesh Shah whose expertise and commitment to promoting excellence with Optimizely has been recognised with confirmation of his OMVP status. Achieving this coveted status is a not to be underestimated and is awarded only to those who act as ambassadors and for Optimizely and actively contribute to Optimizely World and Slack communities, blogs, and forums.
Personalisation has become a buzzword in the digital world, and for good reason. It has the power to transform the way businesses engage with their customers, resulting in a more meaningful, relevant and satisfying experience. With the tools readily available to digital marketers today, we can harness data, connected systems and even AI, meaning that personalisation has the potential to go beyond recognising a customer’s name or presenting relevant products and content based on their previous browsing.
Google Optimize has been a great tool for digital marketers and those investing in CRO. The native integration with Google Analytics provided access to behavioural insights making it easier to target segments you’ve discovered using Google Analytics. With Google’s recent announcement that it will be sunsetting Optimize on September 30, 2023, companies are having to search for alternatives to keep their experimentation programs running.
At our recent webinar, we asked our panel of experts from Forrester, Netcel, Optimizely and Siteimprove a question: How to be a Leader in an era of digital evolution? Inspired by the results of a market insights report - From Digital Transformation to Digital Evolution - published by Netcel, Optimizely, Siteimprove and in partnership with London Research, the discussion explores if transformation is an outdated concept. And how organisations can adopt an evolutionary mindset to achieve continuous improvement and better digital outcomes.
This is the third part in a series where we'll be looking at the role design plays in creating digital experiences that have a positive impact on both business and customer. For many, creating something 'innovative' is the holy grail in terms of achieving success in business. If I create something new, it will give me an edge over my competitors. This is true, but only sometimes. There are many examples where new and ingenious ideas have failed to find an audience: the Sinclair C5 and the Segway are two famous instances of novel engineering solutions that, in the end, didn't do enough to appeal to potential buyers.
On the 10th of November, three members of our team went back to school for the day to volunteer for BIMA Digital Day, at Parmiter’s School. Phil, Head of Design, Allyn, Lead Front End Developer and Pedro, Junior Front End Developer.
This is the first in a series of short articles discussing a collection of UI components that may be perceived as trivial, but they happen to be very significant. In my experience and when working with other designers, the footer always seems to be one of the last components to be designed. So much UX and UI time is spent on the header, search and navigation along with other high priority content, that the footer can get overlooked. It’s important to get the footer correct.
It is always gratifying to win an award, but as one our team so eloquently put it, “some awards are more worth winning than others”. And this is definitely one of those - to be winners of the Optimizely Customers’ Choice Partner of the Year Award is a fantastic endorsement!
This is the second part in a series where we'll be looking at the role design plays in creating digital experiences that have a positive impact on both business and customer. A phrase we're all familiar with is "Familiarity breeds contempt". Meanwhile, a mantra for product design is "Don't make me think", taken from the title of Steve Krug's excellent book. Together, those two phrases contradict. But when designing a digital experience intended to surprise, delight and empower people, we must balance the new with the familiar.
Netcel are committed to creating accessible digital solutions for our clients and supporting Purple Tuesday is one way of keeping accessibility at the heart of our design practice.
Here at Netcel, we are incredibly proud of our great team. To celebrate that team, we are interviewing different people across the business in our blog series ‘In the Spotlight’ to find out more about them and their journey with Netcel. Next up ‘In the Spotlight’ is Chief Technology Officer, Justin Masters...
For anyone doing something creative, the most exciting point is often at the beginning, when it's just you and a blank canvas. The possibilities are infinite, and the end result is waiting to be discovered. Projects for personal enjoyment or emotional expression allow you to have happy little accidents, but when creating a product that has a specific purpose, the approach has to be much more considered. We must know what the end result needs to be, and how design can help get us there.
The B2B buying landscape has changed dramatically in the last decade, a transformation accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, and proving to have a sustained impact on buying behaviour. To successfully navigate this evolution in B2B buying, businesses need to shift their focus to digital sales channels and elevate the digital experiences that now form a crucial part of the sales process.
Netcel is committed to the highest standard of information and cyber security and as part of our ongoing activity to ensure maximum protection, we have now added Cyber Essential Certification to our security accreditations.
We don’t need to establish whether data is important. This is a given and has been for a long time. It’s firmly understood that data, the right data, can provide a clear view of the past that we can identify learnings from and, in some ways, predict what might happen in the future.
Netcel are delighted to announce our digital project partnership with AF Group, the largest cooperative farm input buying group in the UK.
On June 15th, 2022, Microsoft is retiring its Internet Explorer browser, the once dominant market force that you now use to download a better browser. This is a big step in the web and for us at Netcel, so we had a little send off in the office for our least favourite browser.
Over the past two decades, digital has proved itself to be the theatre for the most exciting, innovative and disruptive commercial and social initiatives to impact how we shop, connect, build relationships, become more efficient and grow our businesses. This report has been designed to take the temperature of where we stand in 2022, after many years of discussing the concept of digital transformation as a strategic goal to enable these benefits.
Over the past few years, behind the scenes at Netcel we’ve been evolving. Outside of Netcel a few people have noticed. But most have not… until now. So for those that hadn’t, here’s a short summary of how Netcel has evolved, why, and what happens next.
It is easy to state 'being data driven' as an objective - but its not always so easy to articulate what this will actually mean.
To mark International Women’s Day, we are celebrating women in Digital & Technology.
To celebrate our team, we are launching a new ‘In the Spotlight’ blog series, where we will interview different people from across the business to find out more about them and their journey with Netcel.
The words unprecedented, pandemic, social distancing, pivot, virtual and even a new verb ‘to Zoom’ - are now embedded in our parlance as we find ourselves in a ‘new normal’. But what has been the impact of the Covid pandemic and changing expectations and behaviours of consumers and on the adoption of marketing technology?
Netcel were delighted to be presenting at the recent Financial Services Forum event, The Tech Driven Customer Journey, with our partner Optimizely. With two great presenters - Joey Moore Senior Product Director from Optimizely and Dom Graveson, Strategy and Design Director at Netcel, it was always going to be an engaging and insight packed presentation.
Netcel are delighted and honoured to be named as the winner of the DXP Partner of the Year Award (UK/IE) at the Optimizely 2021 Partner Awards! The DXP Partner of the Year category focuses on the adoption of the Optimizely Digital Experience Platform (DXP) through solution partners.
It is always gratifying when a respected, independent group of subject matter experts and researchers validate something that you already know to be true. And this is where I find myself having read the latest Forrester Wave™ Digital Experience Platforms, Q3 2021 report which was published at the end of July.
On the 10th of November, our Lead Front End Developer, Allyn Thomas and our Marketing Executive, Lorna Johnson, went back to school for the day to volunteer for BIMA Digital Day, at Sir John Lawes school in Hertfordshire.
Optimizely (Episerver) has been named a Leader in The Forrester New Wave™: Feature Management and Experimentation, Q2 2021. Read on to find out how to download your complimentary copy of the report and helpful guide for digital product owners looking to invest in an experimentation platform.
Optimizely (Episerver) recently acquired Zaius, the leading activated customer data platform (CDP). But what is a CDP? And what does this mean to those already using Optimizely (Episerver) user, or considering using it in the future? Netcel's CTO, Justin Masters, explores how Zaius can enable you to create hyper-personalised experience for your customers.
Optimizely (Episerver) has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Agile Content Management Systems, Q1 2021. Read on to find out how to download your complimentary copy of the report and helpful guide for digital product owners looking to migrate to a new CMS.
Gartner has recognised Episerver (Optimizely) as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms (DXP). We explore the strengths of Episerver (Optimizely), and share why we believe it should make the shortlist of enterprises and mid-markets looking to re-platform.