And the winner is ....!

We’re all still buzzing from last night’s New Media Age Effectiveness Awards ceremony, where we won the category for Best Integrated B2B Marketing Campaign. We won for the Sage Taxation campaign which we worked on with the lovely Lisa Benner and Steve Porter at Sage.

The (still ongoing) campaign uses Personalised URLs (’PURLs’) and 1-2-1 direct marketing material to promote Sage’s suite of taxation software to current customers and prospects (over 7,000 of them). We were told on the night that we won the award because the judges were impressed not just by the high ROI achieved by the campaign, but also by both the precise level of measurability the use of PURLs provides, and the way we had injected real creativity and personality into a potentially dry topic!

The awards received over 500 entries and there were 23 winners on the night … we’re absolutely thrilled to have been one of them!

Andy’s still gutted that he didn’t take the opportunity to give Claudia Winkleman a peck on the cheek when she gave him the award, but we were more than a little gob smacked to have won, and hindsight’s a wonderful thing! Official photos, a video interview undertaken on the night, and a spread in the NMA Awards Supplement will follow …

Don't we scrub up well!

Fernando Alonso's Gloves - they could be yours!

Last month a woman who works for the BCQ Group (which bda is part of) was in a major motorcycle accident and suffered serious injuries. On hearing the news, a team at BCQ whipped into action to organise a Quiz Night and Charity Auction to raise money to aid her rehabilitation.

The event’s on 13 October at the Buckingham Town Hall, and already over 30 teams have entered. But what’s been even more inspiring is the number of people not directly connected to BCQ who’ve come forward to donate to the cause.

We’re lucky enough to be located in the midst of Formula 1 team territory, with a number of team headquarters nearby, along with the Silverstone racetrack. Rachael Furn’s father, who works in the industry, told a number of F1 drivers about the auction at last week’s Japan Grand Prix, and the result was some astounding generosity.

Scuderia Toro Rosso held a spontaneous whip-around, resulting in a gift of 150 euro. We also have some great F1 memorabilia for the auction:

- Two Ferarri caps – one signed by Kimi Raïkkönen and the other signed by Felipé Massa; and
- Driving gloves – as worn on the day by Fernando Alonso, and also signed by him

Bid for this Ferrari Hat, signed by Felipé Massa

Or this Ferrari Hat, signed by Kimi Raïkkönen

If you or anyone you know is a Formula 1 fan, and you’d like to place a pre-auction bid for any of these items, please let us know, and we’ll make sure your bid is put forward on the night! And, needless to say, any further help or support for the cause will be greatly appreciated.

For more information, or to place a bid, please email anita.wise@bcqgroup.com. (Note that email bids must be received by Anita by 3pm on Tuesday 13 October to be eligible.)

Andy looking surprisingly good in lurid green

Big congratulations to Andy who completed his second Great North Run yesterday, raising £480 for Leukemia Research UK. Shaving five minutes off his 2008 time, Andy completed the half marathon in a highly respectable 1 hour 57 minutes.  He finished in 9,819th position, leaving 44,181 other runners behind him in the dust.

We’re impressed, despite the fact that he was overtaken by someone wearing a Scooby Doo costume on the home stretch!

Thanks to everyone who sponsored Andy  and don’t be surprised if he tries to hit you up for some sponsorship for next year’s London Marathon ….

NZ tennis players, like Brett Steven, know short = sweet!

As we turn up the radio coverage of Andy Murray playing Andy Roddick in today’s Wimbledon Semi-Final, I have a confession to make.

I have very mixed feelings about tennis. Basically, I find it inexorably dull. However, I can handle watching matches where one player absolutely whips the pants off another – like when Venus Williams beat Dinara Safina earlier in the week – because it means the games are really short (53 minutes).

What I cannot stand is a) actually caring whether one of the players wins (and therefore being emotionally involved) AND b) the game taking a long, long time to play. Andy Murray requiring five sets and four hours to win against Stanislas Wawrinka in the fourth round of Wimbledon would, therefore, have been an excruciatingly painful experience … had I been watching it. (I wasn’t.)

With cricket, you know you’re in for the long haul, and can gear up accordingly. You know it will take all day (or five days) to play so you don’t feel the need to stay glued to the radio or TV. You can go to the loo, or to the fridge for another beer, fairly safe in the knowledge that the game won’t be over by the time you get back.

But tennis. Well. The shortest Wimbledon match ever involved one of my Kiwi compatriots – Brett Steven – who put his back out in the first rally of a doubles match in 1995, thus ending the game after mere seconds. Compare this to the game Todd Perry and Simon Aspelin had against Mark Knowles and Daniel Nestor in 2006, where they lost the Wimbledon doubles quarter final 5-7 6-3 6-7 (5-7) 6-3 23-21, after being on court for six hours and seven minutes. That’s just ridiculous.

And now I find myself tuning in to Murray and wanting him to win. If I hear the words ‘tie-break’, ‘7-6’ or ‘sixth set’ within the next one to six hours I shall scream.

Here’s a great post on the patent design Michael Jackson submitted in 1993 for shoes which enabled him and his dance troop to lean forward 45 degrees during “Smooth Criminal”. Very cool!

Spending hours on a blog post can be a waste of sweat and tears if visitors don’t stop for a read, which is why blog design is so important. Blogs should be functional, easy to navigate and easy on the eye. So you should think carefully about the elements you need to include and how your blog can reflect your personality.

Good blog design aids readability, and provides an elegant frame in which your carefully chosen words can shine.

Pulling readers into your content

Web visitors are a judgemental bunch, with the attention spans of gnats. So your blog design needs to tell them at a glance what you’re about and whether they might be interested in what you have to say.

Your blog’s header is the first element people will focus on when they arrive. So it should reflect your personality and appeal to your target audience if it’s going to pull them into your writing. Many aspects of a blog can be easily customised yourself. But if you really want your blog to pull in readers then paying for a professionally designed header can be a canny investment.

Your header can be used to display your logo, illustrate your topic or to feature a slogan telling people what you’re all about.

Other elements

You want to keep people engaged with and reading your blog for as long as possible. So deciding where to position elements that helps them navigate your content is worth some planning.

Elements could include an author bio, subscription options, links to recent posts and a search box so people can delve into your archives. The most important links should be kept above the fold, which means they should be visible to every visitor without the need to scroll down the screen.

Links to your Twitter and Facebook profiles are also popular, but you should be careful not to clutter up your blog’s sidebar. You don’t want visitors feeling overpowered by too much going on and clicking away in confusion. Sometimes simplicity is best.

Minimalist style or action packed collage?

In basic terms, minimalist blogs are carefully arranged to feature plenty of white space and evenly arranged images. Links and widgets are kept to a minimum so that visitors’ attention is focused on the blog’s actual content.

Alternately, you could take the approach adopted by many graphic designers and fill up the screen with graphics, logos and customised icons. There’s a fine line between creating an impression of organised chaos or a blog designed by a child left alone with the crayons. But when done well it’s certainly eye catching.

Top Ten Beautiful Blog Designs

Here’s a mixture of different blog styles, layouts and personalities. Whether minimalist, collage or retro, what these blogs all have in common is that they’re excellent examples of beautiful blog design:

That INDIE Dude

Loodo.com.br

Pays Sud Gatine

L’effet Créa

Objectified

Surfstation.com

No MILK Today

Meagan Fisher

Lynnterpretation

The Bond Makeover

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

I came across a great site recently called datelance.com. In essence it’s a marketing site for a US design agency, dressed as an earnest attempt to find one of their employees – the eponymous Lance – a new girlfriend. Apparently he’s the only single person at Logoworks, and his colleagues are keen to get him hooked up. Within the FAQ section of the site you’ll find a very pertinent: “Is Lance desperate?” question, which is answered with “Lance is definitely not desperate”. Phew.

Anyway, the good news is that bda has its very own Lance. He may not have a Harvard MBA, but he does look good in a dinner suit. His name is Adam. We haven’t built him his own dating website, or created an advertising billboard, but if you are interesting in dating Adam, you can always drop us a line at ideas@thinkbda.com and we’ll make sure he gets your email.

A month out from 25 December, and we’re putting the finishing touches on our Christmas communications to clients and contacts, which should hit their letter boxes and inboxes around 10 December. Incorporating a Christmas card personalised to each recipient, an emailer and an online ‘game’, it’s an opportunity for us to connect with – and amuse – the broader ‘tribe bda‘.

But I’m the New Business Person. So it would be somewhat disingenuous for me to deny that Christmas, apart from being fun and Christmasy and smelling of plum pudding, also provides businesses with a fantastic opportunity to touch base with prospects in a way which won’t be perceived as stalking. A bit like in our personal lives, where Christmas cards are a fantastic way to say: “I know I’ve been completely crap at staying in touch, I forgot your birthday and we still haven’t had you over for lunch, but: MERRY CHRISTMAS!”.