The Captain's log: The July update
Our stalwart crew has had another great month!
We’ve been winning awards, starting new client work and engaging in professional development opportunities.
What we’re up to below deck
A busy month for the crew, July has seen The Bigger Boat flying the digital flag for its clients – and it’s been spotted! Our recent headless website for Deuren was awarded Design Rush’s ‘Best Website Design’ and CSS Winner’s ‘Website of the Day’ just weeks after its launch. While we’ll go to the ends of the earth for clients, we love working with businesses close to home and helping them exceed their ambitions. And it hasn’t stopped with Deuren. We’re poised to launch two websites for Visit Calderdale and Film Calderdale, respectively promoting tourism and film making in the local area.
Speaking of home-grown talent, we’ve been graced by the presence of soon-to-be Leeds Beckett graduate, Erin Mullins, who’s shadowing our creative director Doug Main for a few weeks of design work experience. Erin picked an exciting time to jump aboard the design team. Following the success of our L.O.L. Surprise! Instagram filter, we’ve been busy on a follow-up project, creating video content to increase awareness and showcase the fast-climbing success of the brand. In addition to this, Doug hosted one of his legendary brand workshops for Summit – an organisational coaching service from Scott Watson. The team uses these workshops to understand, and sometimes uncover, brand perception and target audience, which essentially informs our creative briefs.
We’ve also been diligently managing our clients’ social media channels, promoting their brands and products. This month, long-time client BABY born unveiled its brand-new BABY born Surprise Mini Babies range, for which we created a web and social media campaign.
Big news from the departments
An update to Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals’ update consists of various metrics, but they do not all feed into the page speed score equally. The three largest are TBT 30%, LCP 25%, and CLS 15%. There are various ways of improving the perceived trust of your site, which is one third of the E.A.T metric. Often overlooked aspects of this include: thorough author pages, which list all relevant qualifications and experience; tagging relevant authors into posts and challenging negative reviews; and not hiding mobile menus behind JavaScript as Google may not be able to crawl sub-pages and subsequently fail to index or rank them.
Landing page experience
Google is continuing to put more emphasis on user experience and landing-page quality. We have seen this with their Core Web Vitals for SEO, and now we have seen similar changes in their ad platform. Along with quality scores, Google has introduced a Landing page experience score to ‘estimate how relevant and useful your website’s landing page will be to people who click your ad’. Whereas quality score is a grade of how well Google deems your whole campaign to be set up, Landing page experience looks specifically at the UX of your landing page.
We’re developing websites even faster
Our utility class-based CSS framework, Tailwind CSS’ most recent update introduced the Just-in-Time compiler, which leverages the browser’s native Mutation Observer to rebuild configurations and classes “just in time”. It’s saved us even more time in development and given us the ability to use arbitrary values in our utility classes, which wasn’t possible before its release.
In the press
We’ve been featured in Prolific North for our websites for Visit Calderdale and Film Calderdale, which are due to be launched in August and aim to bring more people to the beautiful area.
Boat culture
We’re delighted to announce that we’ll be welcoming a new digital marketing apprentice very soon. Our always-helpful SEO manager Ewan is already planning some training sessions to ensure they hit the ground running in the wonderful world of digital marketing. Finally, in line with the latest government guidance, our crew is ecstatic to be setting sail on its first outing in almost two years. If you’re lucky enough, you might spot us in Leeds at the end of the month. And if you do, say ahoy!
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Written by Andy McCaul
Co-founder and digital marketing guru Andy ensures all projects are shipshape, and that we generate the best return on investment for clients.
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