1) Have you tested the site in all the major web browsers. It may look great in Internet Explorer (version 8, 7 and 6), but does it also play nicely in Firefox, Chrome and Safari?
2) Does the design match that photoshop image you painstakingly crafted a few months ago – pixel spacing adjustments can make all the difference.
3) Do you have your SEO on track and Analytics in place – it’s really useful to see how people are interacting with your site post launch and without the right title tags and content you risk losing visitors to somewhere else.

Best of luck! We’re looking forward to presenting the new selection!

Of course planning a whole decade is difficult, so I’m going to focus on the immediate future. January 2010 sees us booked up with website projects. We’re well on the way to launching the full website for new UK charity City Year London, we’re working on an exciting new online magazine, producing a website for a local school and ramping up development on a couple of soon to be launched ecommerce sites.

Something tells me it’s going to be a busy year!

We have concentrated on providing a consistent and coherent user experience across the sites, with commonalities of navigation and branding, building on the comprehensive brand redesign exercise carried out in 2007. The sites each feature the core colours and logo type for each of the divisions, and provide the ability to move quickly to other divisions. Visitors to the site(s) are directed to the appropriate home page based on their location, so for example, people in the US will move directly to the US homepage, while those in Europe will be directed to the European homepage.

View the sites:

• Matrix Knowledge Group – European Group homepage »
• Matrix Insight Ltd – works to deliver better outcomes, better performance and better use of resources through consultancy and research »
• Matrix Evidence Ltd – high quality reviews of national and international evidence in accessible, succinct reports that show what works »
• Matrix Decisions Ltd – provides software that helps to make better decisions: sooner, sharper and simpler »
• Matrix North America – Matrix’s new US office »
• Matrix India – Matrix’s new Indian office »

On the plus side for Ech, this means we’re busy putting together Christmas Cards and Christmas HTML emails for several of our clients. A personalised greeting that touches gently on your business as well as sending out best wishes and season greetings can be a good way to remind your clients and contacts that you’re around and ready for work. Its nice to say thanks for another year of good business with the best clients in the world – yours!

Reminds me, we had better get our Ech xmas cards finished too!

With all this online shopping activity it’s a sure sign that Christmas is coming. Besides the general tidings of good will, there’s money to be made and a recession to beat!

House Consulting works to implement progressive public policy, supporting public sector organisations to improve practice and overcome challenges.

Ech were commissioned to design a minimalist blog site which provides clients and partners with company information and provides a snapshot of current news and projects. We have developed a compact site which doesn’t labour the point – offering an elegant, text light summary of the House philosophy. The site employs a randomised background image so that different visits offer a different glimpse (more images to come in the coming months) and is fully content managed so that House staff can add new pages, blog posts and sections at their own pace.

www.houseconsulting.co.uk

Fortunately then, we have also taken on some quicker engagements allowing us to keep busy as the larger projects change pace. A couple to mention: We’ve produced a small portfolio site for up and coming furniture maker Oliver Haddon and have added a content management system to a site designed and built by someone else a few years previously for Solo Fitness. The new Wordpress driven version should make it a lot easier to keep the site up to date and moves the code forward from old style HTML tables to the much nicer semantic XHTML / CSS.

On the print side we’ve been carrying out some brochure work for the Caledonian Hilton Edinburgh and designing a report for the Department of Health.