Lesley Hays, Author at Bluewire Media

Lesley Hays is one of Bluewire Media’s web developers and a web strategy advisor. Internally, Lesley drives Bluewire’s ‘service methodology’, utilising her natural project management and communication skills as our customer experience manager.

Lesley’s native genius is ‘organising ideas and planning’ and she can take multi-faceted and -layered needs and ideas, and produce streamlined, workable solutions.

In her spare time Lesley studies horticulture, plays the cello, sings in a choir and enjoys camping. Follow @lesleyhays on Twitter.

Blog posts by Lesley

Posted on Sep 22, 2010 by Lesley Hays

REVIEW: What’s the Secret? To Providing a World-Class Customer Experience – 4.5 out of 5

John DiJulius is the authority on customer service and this book, “What’s the Secret?”, proves it. If you’ve ever wondered why good service is so hard to find these days, why your employees don’t get it or why some companies seem to be able to charge whatever they like… you’ll find the answers in here!

Why I liked it

Throughout the book, it’s easy to understand how the information relates to your own company and how you could implement it yourself. Plus, it’s filled with graphs, lists and diagrams, which I love!…

Posted on Sep 21, 2010 by Lesley Hays

Why projects fail, your website sucks & nobody reads your blog! (Weekly round-up Vol. 73)

The two key causes of web project failure – Smart Company
…and how to avoid them! Craig Reardon explains how 1) major changes of direction can throw a project out of wack and chew up budget and 2) competing phases that don’t align can create dominos of missed deadlines.

4 Reasons Your Website Sucks – Hubspot
How to make your website not suck: make sure people can find you (search engine optimisation is a start), focus on your client/user (talk about them, not your company), have clear navigation and calls to action (more important than “wow factor” or bleeding-edge design), don’t automatically play sound or video (people will leave before finding the “off” button).…

Posted on Sep 13, 2010 by Lesley Hays

Google Instant, designing great presentations & more (Weekly round-up Vol. 72)

Last week saw the launch of Google Instant – Google’s new real-time, predictive search. Right now, you might only be able to see it when you’re logged into a Google account (it’s being rolled out slowly) but you should come across it in the near future. Here’s a quick wrap-up:

Mashable’s live notes from Google’s launch presentation
Reload Media’s response to what Google Instant means for SEO
Mashable talks about the different results for single letters (eg. “w” brings up weather results before you keep typing)

My initial thoughts are that it will be a toss up between speed and visual disturbance from the constantly shifting results.…

Posted on Sep 7, 2010 by Lesley Hays

Let me give you something for free!

I’d like to share something with you… that sharing’s pretty cool!

Jason Fried is from 37 Signals, the company behind the suite of products Bluewire now uses to manage projects (Basecamp) and contacts (Highrise).

Taking a look at the kind of companies that also use these products, I think he knows something about marketing… This video discusses the merits of “marketing by sharing”: getting the word out about your product, service or business by teaching and sharing information.

Jason starts by explaining how he subconciously stocked his kitchen with utensils and books by companies and chefs who had taught him something in the past.…

Posted on Sep 6, 2010 by Lesley Hays

Weekly round-up (Vol. 71)

Building Online Authority: Have You Given Up on the Sale? – Search Engine People
You’ve probably read a lot of suggestions on how you should be using social media with your business – it can be pretty overwhelming! So many of these suggestions revolve around focusing on your consumer, providing content and backing off on the hard sale. So it’s refreshing to read this article on how you can hit a balance between these things and still selling your product or service.

4 Tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts – OPEN Forum
These tips are both easy and effective.…

Posted on Aug 30, 2010 by Lesley Hays

Weekly round-up (Vol. 70)

Social Media is the New Rock and Roll – The Hopkinson Report
This is a fascinating and well written article comparing the rebellion of rock & roll in the 60s with social media today. It’s a very interesting concept and most of it rings true, though it might all be about to change! Because…

Older Adults Nearly Double Social Media Presence [STATS] – Mashable

My mother is on Facebook and yours probably is too. Scary? Well, this article doesn’t really say what they’re doing on social media but they’re almost certainly checking up you!…

Posted on Aug 10, 2010 by Lesley Hays

Weekly round-up (Vol. 67)

This week we’re looking at website conversions and take a trip back to the future. But first… whatever happened to Google Wave? Well, apparently not much and just last week, Google effectively canned it.

RIP Google Wave – Mashable
Google’s revolutionary product that blends email, instant messaging, file sharing & wikis “didn’t get the uptake they’d hoped for & Google won’t be continuing to develop Wave as a stand alone product.” It only launched in 2009.

Here at Bluewire, we think the problem was the product’s contagiousness, or lack thereof.…