Striving for Simplicity

Why is everything so complicated and hard to understand? How do we make sense of the world around us with information everywhere? Why can’t things be simpler?

Great question, but some people believe that simple means banal and anything that is simple must of less value or importance or substance because, well, it’s simple!

When you see a really simple idea you wonder why you did think of it and that’s the whole point - you didn’t because you may have been looking for a more complicated answer!

Leonardo Da Vinci said "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." This is one of my favourite quotes, because it clearly says that being simple isn't banal, it's difficult to achieve yet elegant.

Simplicity in design enables a user to easily and quickly understand how to use a product. Is your software easy to use? Is it intuitive or does it require a steep learning curve? Do you know how to use a supermarket? What about when you arrive at an Airport, how do you know where to go - even if you haven’t been there before? 


Our ability to use any product or service involves a combination of expert knowledge, previous experience, a degree of intelligence, common sense, a basic level of literacy or an ability to understand signs and symbols.

But design is not just about making products - it is about creating a user experience for anything. In their book Design Matters: How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company, Emery and Brunner describe how design IS more than form and function and how great design across everything you do, will make people love your company - it’s definitely worth a read.

Stephen Hawking tried to simplify the origins of the Universe in his book ‘A Brief History of Time’ and to a degree he succeeded - well, a lot of people bought the book, but maybe they were like me and still found it hard to get past the first few chapters. This was because once he explained the basic ideas he delved into the detail that required some degree of expert knowledge.

The same holds true in business, because many organisations concentrate on describing the detail of what they do before they set the scene and describe their ‘Big Picture’. Their audience find it hard to understand what they are saying and they drift off to look at something else.

Why not take a fresh look at your story and how you communicate it? Is it really simple and easy to understand? Are your messages Clear, Concise and Compelling?

Remember, simple is NOT bad, it’s good and it can give you competitive advantage in a world where many messages are competing for attention.

Internet Marketing and Powersuite

As we all keep hearing, the Internet is a powerful tool to promote business.  From a personal perspective, I have learnt Internet Marketing over the past 3 years and it is something that is well worth investing in. The way businesses promote themselves has changed from “shouting the message” to “providing the solution” and those that position themselves in the right places will reap the reward. Having the right Seo tools in place will help you plan and manage a successful Internet Marketing Campaign. This article will review a software programme called SEO Powersuite and asses it’s practical usage.

 Personally, I’m a big fan of this tool – one of the reasons being  you can download a trial version for free which is very good in itself. The programme is divided into 4 separate tools:

1. SEO Spyglass – simply type the web address of a competitors website, and see all the weblinks they have built. This tool is excellent for so many reasons. It's important to build links from other websites as the search engines will class your website as "highly relevant" with the more links you receive. It can be very time consuming, and many links can have little effect, but thanks to this tool, you can run a check on a leading competitors site and see all the links they have built. It also shows how powerful each link is in regards to the Page ranking of the linking site, and the page ranking of the linking page which is really important. This list can be segmented to show all links from other blogs, forums, link directories as well as many other areas. This tool will maximise your time building the most powerful and relevant links for your website. 

 2. Link Assist – this tool allows you to find relevant websites to get links from – it also allows you to send emails to these contacts, and then tracks who and where links have been set up. This is a very useful tool as tracking who has set up a link to your website over a period of time can be very time consuming. 

 3. Website Audit – provides a complete report on your website – it lets you see important information on every web page – also tells you what the big search engines think of your site. This tool was a real eye opener and helped me plan subsequent changes that were needed. Every website should run this report and take the points on board. 

4. Rank Checker – run a report to see how well your website is doing for keywords. This even allows you to choose by country and search engine so it’s very specific. This is my second favourite tool after SEO Spyglass, and you can even build in Google analytics so it measures how many hits you have for each keyword. This tool is priceless as the whole point of Internet Marketing is to make sure you are ranking well for keywords that attract customers...this tool will take care of all the tracking for you!

So to summarise, there is a lot of information to take on board when planning an Internet Marketing Campaign, but having powerful SEO tools at your disposal will save time, money and bring the results you require. I have used many tools over the years, but SEO Powersuite provides all the tools in one place. It's easy to use, accurate and has made my life a lot easier - a must have for anybody wanting to succeed at Internet Marketing.

(This is an article originally written by Chris Sturrock, Marketing Director at Ithaka)