Our blog
If you've never made a mistake, then you've never tried anything new
Feeling nostalgic for frames
I saw a website today that still uses frames to display its content. Anyone remember frames? These were used in the early days of the web to provide layout to pages. They were amazing . 1997 was the year I left Sheffield University with a 2:1 in Philosophy. They were...
Learning about your website's audience face to face
We’re often asked to review existing websites and applications to improve their usefulness or increase conversions. We love doing this. Like any brand property, websites need to develop and change as your users, your products and your competitors change - and there are often several areas that can be tuned...
How to get your IT stuff done fast
We've all been there, you've got a deadline to meet and a critical piece of tech has failed on you. You send your support ticket into the support desk abyss and you sit there waiting for a response hour after hour. You're not sure if it's even been noticed and...
The Versantus Visual Design process
Here at Versantus, we have been refining our visual design process, cherry picking what we believe are the essential components from areas such as graphic design, user centred, and interaction design, to come up with a set of clear effective steps that help us do more for our clients. We...
UX: User testing chat bots before you start coding
It’s becoming harder to avoid the growing number of Voice-user interfaces (VUI) and the variety in their application in our everyday lives. Here at Versantus, having already created several “conversation bots”, we are firmly in the belief that the right VUI’s in the right scenarios can make interaction with computers...
Building a scalable chat bot with Drupal
When someone suggested we build a “conversation bot” for the Badminton Horse Trials, so that eventing fans could get live results, news and interviews from the event, we originally thought “why?”, then “why not?”, and then “how?”. It’s been quite a learning curve to understand how to build a natural...
Some simple tips for improving your website's typography for a better user experience
Today we have so much choice with the styles of fonts available to use on our websites, which go a long way to creating a unique and great user experience. However, it is easy to get a bit carried away with the design and make reading your website's content difficult....
Alexa, get me a carrot
If horses could talk (apart from Mr Ed, of course, of course), they’d want to talk to the new Amazon Echo “skill” that we've just launched in time for this year's Mitsubishi Motors Badminton Horse Trials . In case it’s passed you by, Amazon’s new Echo device is a wifi-connected...
UX Design: Helping your users know where to click next
Although we would rather our website users carefully read entire web pages before taking action, in reality, they seldom do and are more likely to quickly scan your content and immediately click on the 1st indication of an answer to their question. Therefore to help our users make better decisions,...
Creating better homepages for your users
Your homepage is the first impression many users will have of your business, it is after all the gateway to a site’s content as well as a globally understood convention - all websites have homepages. Based on our user experience evaluations of countless websites we have identified six simple concepts...
Award winning work, whether we win or not
I love what we do for all of our customers and partners. Watching our team grow over the last seven and a half years has been inspiring, and the quality of work we do just keeps on getting better and better. We’re always experimenting, innovating and developing our abilities, and...
Wireframing websites made simple
For some time now we have been creating black and white wireframes of web pages to help our clients plan & organise their websites content and features. This process has helped us to: Reduce the number of detailed visual designs we produce, allowing us to really focus on individual components...
Why you need a (great) project manager
So you’re watching The Apprentice, and the cocky team manager has just declared that they’re the “best of the best!” and that ‘”failure is not an option!”. A few minutes later, you’re guffawing at the TV as their project falls apart around them, with budgets and plans out the window,...
Button or Link? Don’t make me think!
Well thought out buttons and links are vital to the success of your website and should make user’s choices easy. Text links do’s and don’t By ‘text links’ (sometimes called hyperlinks) I am referring to the links that often appear in the website’s copy which link to other content of...
Is a slow website killing your business?
Hands up anyone who likes to wait for ... well, anything? No takers? Of course not, because nowadays we can’t cope with waiting. We can get ice cream in under an hour with Amazon Prime Now , instant unlimited music from Spotify , all-you-can-eat movies from Netflix , super-fast contactless...
What are Proto-personas, and how can they help us make better design decisions?
As we begin to value the importance of user-centered design, we must look for ways to both strengthen empathy and get closer to our customers. Speaking to customers about their experiences of using our services is a great way to gain insight into our services. Creating user personas which represent...
What is UX design and why is it important?
As a UX designer (short for "User Experience designer") I think about user experiences. A User Experience (UX) could be anything from how easy a chair unfolds, to how the buttons on a TV remote control feel. For us at Versantus, the UX focus is how intuitive the websites and...
Five simple techniques to improve your organic Google rankings
You want to be number 1 on Google, but you don't want to spend thousands on PPC ads or SEO. How can you use Google's built-in technology to rank more highly for your company's key search phrases?
Simple steps to spruce up your website
Think that your site looks tired, cramped and cluttered? You’re not alone. Let our senior designer, Garry Richardson show you how to smarten up your website with some basic rules of web design.