Worldspan Creative has worked with the RNLI to produce a World Cup South Africa 2010 wallchart and team sheet to help you keep up to date on all the results as they happen.

Deborah Ferns of the RNLI said “The poster has been really well received by organisations and businesses who have not previously taken part in fundraising activities. The World Cup Sweepstake is easy to organise and the donations that we receive help to to save lives at sea.”

So what are you waiting for? Make a space on the wall and get downloading. The PDF sweepstake kit is free to download here.

If you would like to make a donation to the RNLI please contact:

Deborah Ferns
Community Fundraising Manager

Royal National Lifeboat Institution
Unit 8, Quartz Point Business Park
Stonebridge Road
Solihull
West Midlands
B46 3JL

Tel: 0121 780 6960
Email: deborah_ferns@rnli.org.uk

From meeting rooms and conference facilities, to office support and business advice. Units for start-ups and floor space for big-hitters. And, maybe best of all, it’s a place for local firms to network and train in great seminars, most of which don’t cost a penny to attend. (In fact, it’s so good, we like to think of it as a Swiss army knife for businesses.)

But the Centre knows that it can’t just do great things – it has to tell people, too. That’s where Worldspan comes in.

Worldspan Creative worked with Conwy Business Centre to give them the ideal solution. And that meant developing a detailed understanding of the Business Centre’s work, clients, and goals – because when you understand an organisation, you can give it the ideal tools. It’s a philosophy that the Business Centre itself understands perfectly.

Look out for our small (but perfectly formed) guides to ‘What’s on’ at Conwy Business Centre, and you can find a great, free training opportunity for yourself. (Better still, keep it with you – we made it pocket-sized for a reason.)

Or, you can order one by contacting Nia Jones on 01492 574574 or businesscentre@conwy.gov.uk.

If you’d like to see some more big ideas, take a look at our work.

But whilst sophisticates like us understand the value of good web design, some people don’t. They try to get great results from cheap web builders, often with painful consequences. Let’s look at the more common ways people slip up with cheap web builds.

1) Quality or ‘Look, it may be broken, but at £100, it’s bargain broken’

Your purchasing manager knows a good buy when he sees one – you can tell from his polyester tie and Sunday magazine aviator’s shirt. “Feel the quality” he implores, as the static charge arcs from the dralon. “It’s supposed to do that” he explains, radiating energy like Emperor Palpatine. That’s why he’s been entrusted to find a reliable web provider for your business – he breathes quality. And there’s nothing more reliable than the build-your-own website service he found online – £100 pounds, and a choice of two emails! “It’s hosted in Tuvalu” he notes optimistically. “ They make my aviator shirts.”

2) Ability or ‘What do you mean those students can’t build it?’

Oh yes, there’s a reason Gavin and Darren were so cheap. Mainly, it’s because they’ve always been paid in lager up to now. But there’s a bright side: as your brand new website is quarantined by Google, and you can’t stop the word ‘bosoms’ from flashing on your homepage in ten inch letters, take comfort from knowing you’re helping future I.T. giants in their formative days. Specifically, the period where they move from Gavin’s bedroom to his mum’s garage.

3) Reliability or ‘Hey, since we paid, they don’t pick up the phone!’

The best web designers work from the pub, and that’s a fact. And you know this guy Dave must be good, because he made his own Vladimir Putin sound-alike answerphone message for his iPhone. He doesn’t do the internet – he is the internet, in crisp-eating form. That’s why you trust him to build the e-commerce site you need to pull ahead of the competition. That’s why you’re surprised when your website turns out to be a direct copy of PepsiCo’s, and you keep getting some very rude letters from their lawyers.

Over the next three months, you ring Dave’s mobile once a day. He never picks up, but the Vladimir Putin answerphone always makes you laugh. And you’ve had a lot of orders for cola.

4) Compatibility or ‘Argh! It didn’t look like that when they demonstrated it!’

It takes a professional to build a site that works with five major web browsers, on PC, Mac and Linux. You, however, bought a site from ‘AAAAAA11111 Web Design’ because it was at the front of the phone book. Currently, your website can only be viewed properly by a 1996 version of Netscape. 99% of browsers can’t connect to your site, and redirect users to a web page about weasels.

Your site is so bad, The Gadget Show devote their Christmas special to you. Ironic slacker types wear t-shirts with your company logo on. It didn’t help David Hasselhoff. It won’t help you.

5) Individuality or ‘Why do we look the same as a hundred other sites?’

Admit it – you should have gone for that proper web firm, the one with the nice office and a girl offering you tea or coffee during your meeting. She had a really pretty smile. And bourbon creams. “Overheads!” your Director bellowed at you. “We’re not paying for their expensive overheads! And we don’t need something unique!” Now your horticulture business has a template-built website with a picture of a Ferrari on it, and some American-looking people high-fiving one another. “Snap!” your butcher emails. “It’s awesome! I’ve got one just like it!”.

In time, you find a dozen nearby businesses with the same design. Slowly, you start to communicate regularly with one another, to socialise, and even date. You marry a wonderful girl who used your template to promote her hairdressing salon. A college band that uses your template provides the wedding music, and the cake comes from a template bakers. Life waltzes its slow dance, and you have children, and for ten years you seem happy. And then one day your wife says she’s gradually learned you’re not the man she thought, that you were never really interested in clip art Ferraris and high-fiving Americans. Your website lied to her, and now she’s running off with the template butcher.

Sometimes, as you drive home from work in the lonely winter evenings, you see the design agency girl who brought you a cup of coffee, walking along the pavement. She looks ageless, and untroubled as a summer’s day. And my friend, you think of the website you could have bought, and you weep.

So, that pretty much encapsulates things. But what have we learned? Well, for one thing, you tend to get what you pay for. And if your business wants a tool that works, it’s worth getting the right tool – from photocopiers to websites. Also – and there is a lot of anecdotal evidence for this – if you build a cheap website, the opposite sex won’t find you attractive, and people will claim you do all your shopping at the pound store.

Just so you know.

The good news is that the number of women dying from breast cancer has fallen to less than 12,000 for the first time in almost 40 years.

Thanks to improved detection and better treatments, more people are beating breast cancer than ever before and now 8 out of 10 breast cancer patients survive beyond five years.

At Worldspan, this is a cause that is close to many of our hearts and we wanted to do something to help join the fight for women’s survival and help beat breast cancer.

In addition to our own fundraising efforts we are also encouraging our clients to get involved, so for every new brief we receive for our event or creative teams throughout the months of February and March that result in confirmed business, Worldspan Group will donate 10% of the profit to Breast Cancer Research UK.

Please email your briefs to charitybriefs@worldspangroup.com or contact the team on 01745 828400 for any more information relating to this campaign or any of our group services.

To confirm their place in Premiership Rugby, we were given the brief that Gogledd Cymru was to be renamed RGC 1404 to reflect the year that Owain Glyndwr became Prince of Wales. Our creative team was also tasked to incorporate elements into the badge branding that reflected this history… Glyndwr’s men went into battle under the golden dragon standard and the team will take to the field with that same golden Welsh dragon alongside an ornate Celtic graphic within a knight’s shield.

We would like to wish RGC 1404 the very best of luck for the forthcoming game on Wednesday the 17^th of Feb v’s Worcester at their home ground,  Parc Eirias.

2009 was an extremely busy year for the team at Worldspan Creative and we think this is reflected by the quality and diversity of the material on display in the work section of the site. As you can see, we work for a wide range of clients ranging from larger national companies to local businesses but, whoever we work for, we always give the project our all.

We’ve tried to keep our new site simple, easy to navigate and visually appealing and also to keep the emphasis firmly on it being a showcase for our work, as this is what we are passionate about and what we are most proud of.

We’d love to hear any comments you might have so please feel free to get in touch, whether it be for a job you’d like to talk to us about, or just to tell us what you think of the new look.

Here’s to a great 2010!

The Worldspan Creative team.

Much like in the dawn of email, many businesses have been overly concerned with the potential misuse of social networking services and have failed to embrace the endless possibilities that instant communication to an infinite audience can offer, however there is no time like the present to get to grips with everything that Web 2.0 has to offer you and your business.

Web 2.0 technologies offer the perfect opportunity to establish interaction with your clients, customers, prospects, partners and even your own employees. Whether it is through the development of an interactive community blog, offering RSS Feeds, Podcasts or video blogging through your website, contributing to user generated content such as Digg, YouTube and Flickr, developing Mashups and web applications, or simply by working with websites such as Facebook and MySpace, instead of against them, they can dramatically improve your business.

Blogging

If you have valuable experience in your business sector a blog is essential. Alongside creating relevant, interesting content which enhances the number of repeat visitors to your website, you can attract inbound links from other sites who have found your content useful and, as such, can dramatically improve the visibility of your website across major search engines, enhancing your exposure to potential customers and partners. Allowing comments to be posted (which can be moderated) means that your readers will feel part of your community and can, in turn, offer you valuable feedback on new ventures. Of course there are a huge array of Web 2.0 tools that can enhance your blog and drive traffic to your website, the most vital of these being social bookmarking services such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Reddit to name but a few.

If your business model requires you to drive a significant amount of traffic to your website, then you must not underestimate the power of social bookmarking. The phenomenon known as ‘the Digg effect’ regularly crashes hosting servers, as popular Web 2.0 sites link to a particular blog post or page and increase traffic with such dramatic effect that the website’s hosting simply cannot cope with the demand. The premise of these websites is simple, their individual communities give the thumbs up to a webpage either by ‘Digging’ it, ‘Stumbling’ it, or simply adding it into their bookmarks on such sites as Delicious and Reddit. Their friends see their favorite websites and, again, give it the thumbs up (or down) and, quickly enough a page can go from having 10 or 20 hits to having 20,000 plus in a day. As with all social networking, there is very real, hard work involved in building up your profile, developing a reputation as a community member and contributing meaningful content to the particular community.

Social Networking Services

You’ll no doubt have heard about the unexpected explosion of the ‘micro-blogging’ tool, Twitter, but you may have wondered just how it could benefit your business. The answer is remarkably well, if you know what you are doing. Computer company Dell have almost half a million followers who benefit from the hardware giant regularly dishing out special offers on new and reconditioned systems, whilst Starbucks use the social networking platform to involve their customers by, treating Twitter as an open forum where they put out news, new releases and promotions and respond to feedback from their hundreds of thousands of active followers.

The beauty of a tool like Twitter is that communication with your customers is instantaneous, as is the opportunity to gauge feedback, but it’s not just your marketing that can benefit from instant communication to multiple users. Productivity, internal communications and business development can all be strengthened by taking advantage of the business benefits of Twitter. Tracking colleagues’ whereabouts, opinions and schedules can easily be achieved by an entire team using Twitter as their main communication device. Links to useful and interesting web articles can easily be shared across your micro-community. Just think how many one-sentence emails you send on a daily basis. From a networking and learning perspective, interesting figures from within your business sector will be increasingly using Twitter and can be followed for their valued opinion. You could even use the community, in a similar way to LinkedIn, to find potential clients and partnership opportunities. All this whilst, of course, telling everyone what you had for lunch and what you’re watching on TV tonight!

Touching quickly on the much maligned social networking ‘friend’ sites, creating accounts on websites such as Facebook can ensure that you have a presence in a community where so many people spend so much time and dependent upon the nature of your business there is infinite scope in the potential of marketing to users of ‘friend’ websites. Just look at the revolutionary effect MySpace has had on the music industry. Creating a ‘page’ on Facebook is another way to gauge public opinion on you, your company or your product; other Facebook users can become a ‘fan’ and leave comments to any posts you make. Be careful however as you cannot moderate feedback in these environments, ensure you have a popular product or a thick skin; the price to pay for gaining such massive, wide-spread and free publicity is exposure to the harsh truth of public opinion!

User Generated Content

User generated content can also be embraced into your business model. Setting up a channel on video sites such as YouTube and becoming an active member of their communities can see hundreds of thousands of users passing through your interactive content. We’ll leave the benefits of viral marketing for another post altogether. But, needless to say, in this day and age its impact upon your business can be monumental.

Industry specific user generated content portals such as TripAdvisor, which allows travelers to leave honest reviews and recommendations on hotels, destinations and activities (similar sites cover restaurants, tradespeople and electronics, to name but a few) can be as negative as they are positive, but it is essential that you create an account and get involved. Responding to feedback is much more beneficial for your company’s image than letting the public have their voice and keeping yourself out of the loop. Do some research on your ‘webutation’ and use all the tools you can to enhance your online reputation. It’s certainly not unknown for companies to create ‘fictional customers’ who are in love with their products and want to tell the world about how sensational they are, but beware of being ‘too clever’. Online communities are a savvy bunch and over-egging the mix can quickly turn into a surefire PR disaster.

So what next?

In order to successfully achieve your goals, it is essential that, first and foremost, you know your customers and, in particular, understand what Web 2.0 applications would work for them and decide which technologies you can realistically maintain. Merely setting up an account and letting it drift away will have the same detrimental effect as out-of-date ‘latest news’ on your website.

Of course, once you have geared your business up to embrace the many benefits of Web 2.0, you will need to keep one eye on the dawn of Web 3.0, where the advent of mobile applications and intelligent, personalised search engines and browsers will allow users to simple ask questions such as “where shall I eat”? Your personal likes and dislikes along with your current location will be taken into account before your mobile device quickly fires a list of personalised recommendations at you. For any of you with an iPhone you’ll already know that this is a reality not so far away, so ensuring that your business is ahead of the game in the technology you embrace will become an increasingly important constituent of your overall business strategy.

We’ve really just touched the surface of what cutting-edge internet technologies can do for your business, Worldspan Group offers a full range of services and consulting on all elements of web and interactive technologies and will happily discuss your strategy and goals with you and your business, contact us for more information.