projects Archives - Switch - Digital & Brand

What's next?

Mike — Fri, 15 Apr 2016 13:07:50 +0000

The last time I contributed to this blog, I went on an extended rant about the sequence of events that life threw my way while I was busy getting Switch off the ground. Taking a dream and turning it into four walls, the whirring of Macs, ringing phones, and a team of talented nutjobs is quite an arduous one. But here we are, twelve years on as I’m sure you’ve heard, and things are looking brighter than ever.
But I can never stand still. While I’m putting the finishing touches on one project, I’m already starting the next. And usually dreaming about another couple that I’ll get my hands on within the near future. So here’s a little backstory and a sneak peek about the next project that’s brewing in the Switch ecosystem.
When I left the world of large agencies to create a smaller, more boutique-style, outfit, I was mainly attracted by the possibility of more design freedom. And while agency work remains thrilling, I’ve always felt more personally invested in projects that require pure design.
There’s a satisfaction to the process of taking a problem and designing a solution to it, creating a functional outcome that can be beautiful in its very nature, often without the need of decoration. With the team of exceptional designers at Switch I’m happy to have worked on projects that go from the production of an electric tricycle to the revival of The Wembley Store in Valletta and the shop-in-shop concept of the Victor Azzopardi flagship store in Pieta’. We’ve turned naked spaces into personal, functional, beautiful homes and created bespoke retail furniture and entire office spaces.

Now we’re pushing on to the next level

We’re in the incubation stages of a workshop project that will create a much more hands-on space for the Switch team to spend their thinking and creative time while providing us with a structure that will focus purely on design. There’s a lot in the oven right now and we’re slowly turning a new space we’ve taken over into this hub of creativity and spatial design. I’m not giving too much away right now but please do watch this space. It will turn into something quite interesting, quite soon.

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Lessons Learned While Building BeeWits

David Attard — Fri, 04 Dec 2015 11:50:14 +0000

A few months back, Richard Muscat Azzopardi, a co-worker I knew from a previous job, approached me with an interesting proposal. Whilst setting up Switch Digital Ltd – a digital marketing agency – he ran into a few organisational problems.
Of course, like we all do, he turned online to look for a solution for his nagging issues – and was surprised to find there seemed to be no software solutions to address these problems.
As an experienced Product Manager, Richard offered me the opportunity to build a solution for these problems for Switch Digital, and of course in the process, build it for the rest of the world.
This is part of our story.
Whilst developing BeeWits, which is about to start inviting users for our Early Access program, we learned quite a few things. Here’s what we learnt. The good stuff. And the times where we might have fucked up.

The Idea + The Research

1. The Web Design industry is alive and kicking, and generates at least $20.1Bn in the US economy alone (Source: Yahoo).
2. There are many people who face organizational issues like us. When we reached out to fellow web designers like us, we learnt that organizing of projects is a serious headache for many agencies and freelance designers.
3. Research – make sure your idea is not saturated with competitors. There’s always room for competition, but the market has to be large enough to sustain all of you competing for it.
4. If you’re going for a saturated market, make sure you have a few unique selling points which will hit the spot for the niche you’re targeting.
5. When reaching out to people like yourself – particularly with an idea for a solution, you’ll get plenty of people who are in the same problem as you are. Converse and discuss.
6. If you don’t get any feedback, or people who face the same problems as you – then you might want to rethink your “next big thing”.
7. Test the waters. Before rolling up your sleeves to develop a solution – cheat a bit. Design a page as if your solution existed and ask for an email address. If after driving traffic to your site, a significant number of people give you their email address – good! You’re on the right track. There are other great tips at The Lean Startup – get the book and read it.
8. Test the waters some more. Now that you know that some people are interested in your proposed solution – see whether they are ready to pay for it. Add a pricing tab with gut feel prices. See whether people click to see the pricing and still give your their email address. If they still give you their email address in significant numbers, then there is potential in the market for your solution.
(Hint: Use Google Analytics Click goals to monitor clicks)
9. Read, read and then read some more. There are hundreds of great people out there giving excellent advice. You’ll recognize the experts from the trash when you learn amazing stuff you would never have thought of. YCombinator how to start a startup is an excellent starting point. So is Reddit/r/startups
10. Take notes. Especially of the excellent ideas. Stickies are fine. A whiteboard. A real paper notepad. You’ll be plenty busy, and if you don’t write you’ll forgot a few good ideas.

The development of BeeWits

11. We bootstrapped (and self-funded) the development of BeeWits. Make sure your company is able to fund itself and the development of a product.
12. Identify a target demographic and build towards that demographic only. You may have plenty of ideas and see tonnes of potential – but start with laser focus on one demographic and make sure you get that right.
13. Start small. Build a Minimum Viable Product – a product which is small enough to provide value to your target demographic but not large enough to bust all your budgets.
14. Estimate a development time with your developers. Multiple the estimate by at least two and ideally three. Developers are surprisingly over optimistic. You’ll run into other problems too so prepare yourself.
15. If you’ve got a good development partner company and excellent communication with them – off sharing development is a good budget-conscious idea. Don’t offshore to people who you don’t know, unless you’re ready to dump everything and start from scratch with a new partner.
16. Make sure communication with your developers is spot on. Language barriers can create serious problems all over the place.
17. Node.js developers are severely in demand. If you have a choice, you might want to avoid it unless you’ve got a deep pocket and are prepared for turnover issues.
18. Staff turnover will severely impact your project timelines, especially for small development teams. Seriously consider making your developers founding partners.
19. Mocking up ALL screens is the best way to spec a project. Visuals with accompanying text go a long way in taking an idea from a concept to a working screen.

20.Push your suppliers for better prices. You’re a startup, use it to your advantage.

The marketing + the exposure

21. Build it and they will come is a fallacy. It *might* work if you’ve got millions of VC dollars to burn through and are super well-connected.
22. Start marketing your solution from day one. Seriously. You have to put as much work into marketing as much (if not more) as you do into development.
23. Write epic blog posts for your target demographic. Find a problem and fix it for them. Share the idea. Such as the Ultimate Web Design Checklist.

24. Google+ is not dead. It sends SEO signals too. Mark my words.
25. Good design goes a long way in establishing trust. Spend time and money on making your site, blog, and everything else which is public look pretty.
26. If you’re not spending more time promoting your great content than writing it – you’re doing it wrong.
27. Your only marketing aim whilst developing your product should be getting the email address of users in your target demographic.
28. Tools such as SumoMe go a long way in collecting email addresses. Offerring a free ebook in exchange for an email address is a surprisingly effective method.
29. Offering a download bundle which is useful for your target demographic for the “price” of an email address is also a surprisingly effective method. You might want to get our 101 Free Fonts or our Web Design Contract bundle.
30. Once you’ve got email addresses – make sure you keep your users engaged with consistent targeted mailings and content.
31. Building small free but helpful tools for your target demographic can be a very good source of driving traffic to your sites.

32. Outreach is hundreds of times more effective using these helpful tools as opposed to blog content.
33. Don’t forget to create a privacy policy and abide by it. People like to be reassured their email won’t be sold to spammers.
34. Use email outreach or Contact Us pages to get in touch with people who are likely to feature your blogs.
35. Make outreach emails all about them. Butter them up, be very contextual and topical to their sites, and be very very brief. Read about sending outreach emails and use something which works well for you.
36. Warm people up to your outreach by establishing a relationship via social networks, commenting on blogs works wonders for your outreach. Incidentally, have you joined BeeWits on Facebook and Twitter?
37. Use voilanorbert.com and Findthat.email to find the exact email address of people you want to contact.
38. Use SideKick to know when your emails have been read (and ignored).
39. Follow up after two weeks with people who have not replied.
40. Sometimes you’ll get links without getting a reply. Pat yourself on the back for all those times when you were completely ignored.
41. Do not get discouraged when you are ignored. It’s a game of numbers. Some people will reply. Some won’t. It’s a fact of life.
42. Try going for the big fish if you’ve got a very good free tool. You’ll be surprised at your success rate. We’ve been featured by Creative Bloq, LifeHacker, DesignTaxi and Fast Company Design, and Co.Drops.
43. If your success rate is abysmal – you might want to go back to the drawing board. Is your tool REALLY as good as you think or … ? Does it have awesome design?
44. Maintain a good relationship with anybody who replies to you. When you’ll need them again, it will be easier to reach out and get results.
45. Attend conferences. You’ll learn lots of stuff especially if you speak to your potential customers. You might meet investors too. Free t-shirts work wonders.

The Launch

46. Plan a viral giveaway with a prize your target demographic will kill for as part of your launch. Spend as much money as necessary getting it right.
47. Use good communication with your leads. Intercom seems to be a very nice tool for us.
48. Use onboarding tools to guide your users. There’s plenty of good libraries and services. We’re using Hopscotch but there are plenty of others.
49. Start onboarding users slowly. Don’t get overenthusiastic and invite few people at a time. Listen to what your customers say.
50. Don’t let perfect get in the way of done but don’t leave obvious ugly bugs.

The Revenue Ramp Up

51. Contrary to what you might have heard, converting clients to a recurring revenue service is harder than converting for one-off products. A 3% conversion ratio is fair, 5% and you’re doing great.
52. Make sure that your subscription prices work in favour of your clients, not in favour of your bottom-line. You’re looking to establish a long-term relationship with your clients, with minimal churn.
53. Handling subscriptions is a complex use-case which you should not endeavour to build yourself. Interface with a payment gateway or opt for a subscriptions plugin such as the ones listed here.
54. Make sure your support is absolutely top-notch. Your clients need to feel fully at ease if you want to keep them long-term. A long-term client also increases the LTV (lifetime value) average, allowing you to spend more on marketing and sales.
55. If at first you don’t succeed, iterate and improve. Get feedback from your clients and implement some of their best suggestions. You’ll find that feedback in general will return mostly the same comments, so it’s fairly easy to prioritize your development.
56. If you still don’t succeed – pivot. There are plenty of ways to monetize your service, or blog traffic, particularly if you’ve done the marketing right. As long as you provide value, your readers will be happy to take your advice.
We’ve learnt lots more, and we’ll surely be sharing more of these tips in the future. In the meantime, we’d love it if you would sign-up to the BeeWits for a 30-day trial. If you’re into web design – you’ll be happy and you’ll make us happy!
This is the sort of great stuff we do at Switch Digital, not just for us but for our clients too!

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Ready for take off – Seeing projects through to the end

Switch — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 13:07:36 +0000

“What do you really do at work? Apart from having fun?!” Well, my role is to manage online projects. Sounds simple but at times it gets nerve wracking.
Creating websites for clients is exciting knowing that they are ready to help their company step-up its game and become more visible to the google world. Clients usually look forward to having a new look and feel for their own brand.
But it’s not all that simple. How familiar are they with the latest websites? How old is their current website? Will changing their site completely shock their audiences? Is their audience knowledgeable enough with the web to navigate through?
These questions always seem to pop up in every new project we embark on and they can be mind boggling at first, but after creating a few sites, and realising that these problems are recurring, we decided to come up with a pattern to help us out with this journey and make our life much easier.

1. Warm Up

Get to know your client. Ask a few general questions to make sure that you are both on the same page regarding tastes, objectives and target audience. Prepare a moodboard and share it with the client to get visual buy-in, too.

2. Show them the light

Give them an idea of the milestones for the entire project, in this way they won’t be in the dark and won’t feel the need to bombard your inbox 3 times a week (or a day if you’re unlucky). Planning and proposing everything to the client before the project begins saves a lot of time later on in the journey. So yes, a lot of time is spent getting organised, but it’s essential, and it’s basically a win-win situation. Once all the cards are on the table you’re ready to begin. Let’s do this!

3. Jump the gun

Yes, in my position, I would have my own milestones set ahead of time. Prepare. Brace yourself. Problems, unexpected problems, will occur. Keeping some boundary time between milestones helps me to keep the whole project on track as much as possible. At times it helps, other times it just causes more and more delays. Having everything planned ahead of time will avoid encountering major meltdowns half way through the process. Nobody likes a zombie project.
Incidentally, you might want to put a project management software in place. BeeWits (our very own tool!), Trello or Asana are also great alternatives.

4. ChChCh-Changes

This is my favourite – in every project, no matter how much you plan ahead, there will always be changes. Changes to improve the user experience or just simple changes from the client’s end. This is understandable, and so it’s something I always allocate some time for in the planning process. Everybody has his own way of imagining things, so when one sees it visually, it might not look as appealing as they had imagined it to be. This could be one of the hardest stages since at the end of the day you would like to make your client happy, but sometimes you just need to slowly back off.

5. Test. Test. Keep Testing

No matter how many times you test a website before going live, something always seems to break. So keep testing and get other people in the office to test it out too. Everybody will pinpoint out something which slipped your mind, especially if the project has been going on for months, you basically become visually impaired to the obvious. Apart from that this is a great exercise to have the office informed of what you’re up to! Monitoring will continue going even after you launch, you can never trust what’s out there.

6. Launch? Now?!

Clients will chase you, and will ask how things are and when they’ll be done. Hopefully you’ve tested enough for the site to go live, and you’ve sent a preview of the test site which was approved by the client (make sure they love it). Once that’s done…it’s time to launch their baby. Are the developers around? Yes. Are they available for a few hours? Yes. Hosting? Check. Is it Friday? Nope! (damn). You should never launch on a Friday, the people you will need might not be around over the weekend if hell breaks loose.

7. Show Time!

Fingers crossed, that everything goes well. When moving a site from the test platform to the actual domain you might end up breaking elements, so your developer needs to be there holding your hand, hoping everything will move in one piece.

Once this is done you just need some polishing up of bits and pieces but these will only be little tweaks which will make everyone look good at the end of it all.
And yes! One more project crossed off my to-do list. Until the process starts all over again.
So yeah, apart from having fun, this is what I do at work… Hot chocolate Richard?

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Switch focus

Mike — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 14:47:18 +0000

It’s been a while since I wrote last, at Switch. In my vocabulary, putting pen to paper normally refers to anything but writing – doodles and sketches are more up my street. I was recently having a rather interesting chat with a young graphic design graduate. Among the topics we covered was the right career path to take. I asked whether he had a particular inclination towards seeking employment with a design agency or offering freelance design services. He very promptly replied, “Both! I’ll work as a designer at an agency and then do freelance work from home in the evening.” I sprung out of my seat to express my sincere disapproval, forgetting for a moment that this person was all excited and eager to start his journey in the real world. So, I simply shared a small part of my story, hoping it would serve as an eye-opener.

April, 2004: the birth of a child, a house, and an agency.

Our first child was only a couple of weeks old and suffering from severe colic. I was never an early sleeper but this took sleepless nights to a whole new level. I’m sleep-walking up and down the corridor with this poor being in my arms and even if the first seven months felt like eons, I look back at those days today and smile. I can proudly say it was worth every kilometer of ground covered. Thanks for keeping me in shape, John!
We were also blessed with a new home. A place with great potential needing to be gutted, redesigned and done up in just over three weeks. Packing and moving out hadn’t yet featured on my never ending To-Do list. I would get home at around 3am every night, hop into the shower and get ready for my night’s walk 🙂
By now I’d spent 10 years of employment with a number of agencies, and I enjoyed the occasional freelance design project in the evenings. I had decided to give up my agency job and dedicate more time to servicing the clients I had. Staying solo for good was not an option because I truly believed that collaborative efforts and great teamwork offered a much better output. This was an interim period until I set up the agency which, by this time, had become a very pressing matter as projects were piling up. One Sunday afternoon, while free from the utter chaos of the house project, I decided to lock myself in the room I was using as an office to get some work done. I needed a name and an identity for the agency. How hard could that be?

12 hours, 9 coffees and 43 names later I had nothing. My brain was fried.

Heading out of the room, I turned off the lights and was enlightened. This little device, the light switch, had the ability to change so much – so ‘Switch’ it was! The time it took me to reach a conclusion made it obvious that I needed to stop and focus my efforts on one of the projects at hand. Trying to juggle a house that needed redesigning and project management, meet clients’ deadlines, set up an agency and cope with family life was slowing me down.
It’s not all about the money. Unless you really want to work two or three jobs in order to save up for something huge, I’d stop and ask myself whether the love you surely had for design since childhood is turning you into a slave.

Bring the love back

If you have an eye for detail, a great love and passion for the creative and design world, and self respect, then there’s no way you can ever hate your job. If you do, you’re probably over doing it, or you’re simply not cut out for this industry. Stop and think about your most valuable qualities and capabilities. Are the people you share most of your time with a great source of inspiration? Are you doing your 9 to 5 job at the agency and speeding off home to meet more deadlines for more demanding clients? Are you getting enough rest? Master the mysterious art of sleeping. I haven’t quite mastered it myself although I’m working on it. Dream. Build a repository of ideas – the next bit of creative to break the internet could be yours and should be yours.
It is wise to satisfy your craving for design, to create or innovate with a complimentary project that ideally changes your physical posture. Try to avoid sitting behind a computer screen the minute you get home unless you are keeping yourself in-tune with current design trends or simply to get inspired. Be positive and a source of inspiration for the people around you. Grab a camera. Capture amazing moments. Try new recipes. Restore an old classic.

Switch to a simpler life

Clear your mind and your busy schedule. Focus on the one large project or job at hand and give it your utmost. You will be surprisingly more productive and you’ll find that you can make time for lunch and if planned well, dinner too. Ever since I’ve tried this, coffee intake has been reduced considerably and naturally, so have coffee spills. Replacement keyboards are few and far between.
Keep yourself inspired and appreciate the quality of your own output as a powerful motivator to create even more greatness. Learn lessons from your own story and that of others. If I look back at what time has taught me, it is mainly my appreciation for simplicity, a love for functional aesthetic, and the family. The family at home, the family at the office and the family of clients who we form amazing relationships with. And if you’re stressed you probably see no way out. Don’t make excuses – switch to a simpler life as soon as you can and you’ll reap the rewards before you know it.

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