It’s an often quoted fact that more graduates stay on in Sheffield than in any other UK city, and Sheffield regularly tops the charts when it comes to best student city. The heart of the ‘Sheffield Made Us’ campaign encourages students, past and present to share their memories and experiences of how their time in Sheffield made them who they are.

Rckt created a suite of above the line material to support the campaign which included an overall identity, You Tube channel, print advertising, outdoor media and online banner advertising.

So, if you happened to study the University of Sheffield and have some great memories to share why not visit their You Tube channel and submit your own memories!

http://www.youtube.com/user/SheffieldMadeUs

Over recent years the University had been creating video content, but this needed bring together into one powerful online home.

Rckt know us very well, and have a intrinsic understanding of our brand and its values. They have brought this brand understanding to the fore in creating a single home for our online video content. This gives us a great platform to use for student recruitment across the world

David Stanley
The University of Sheffield

Youtube Channel

The North of England’s best research-led universities have come together to form a unique collaboration to enable business and industry to access world-class knowledge and gain a significant competitive advantage. This prestigious project chose Rocket to deliver their online presence.

The needs for all the universities needed to be met, and it’s quite an impressive line up: Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York. So we did well to impress them all, even though we say so ourselves.

Rocket continue to expand our expertise in the higher education sector and this project takes the number of universities we have worked with to almost 30, if you include the European institutions that are involved in the ESTOOLS project.

Have a little look at the N8 research website yourself.

We’ve been a trusted and popular provider of all sorts of creative services to the University of Sheffield for a few years now and the most recent offspring of this great relationship has been the creation of a brand new website for the University’s Executive MBA. The Management School asked Rocket to create something a little different and particularly wanted to tap into our experience of professional business to business communication.

Despite working with the University many times this project had a little unexpected twist. An off-line advertising campaign was well into the planning stage by the time Rocket came onboard and the launch date had already been set in stone. This meant we only had a couple of weeks from winning the work to making the site live. But everyone here at Rocket thrives of this sort of challenge. We worked together with our University pals and delivered the whole website in record time.

We were looking at our Google rankings, and were very pleased to see that we’re scoring very well for the word “rocket” – higher in fact than NASA (who should know a thing or two about rockets!).

On Google.co.uk, we’re currently at position number 8 in the world for “rocket“, out of just shy of 10 million web pages. This is particularly good news because getting listed for very generic terms such as this (particularly with multiple meanings – think lettuce, and steam trains as well as spacecraft) is one of the hardest search engine optimisation feats to achieve.

Of course the main benefit of this is for clients (and potential clients) who will find us much more easily when searching – but it is nice to know that Google likes the coding and content we put up – something we also apply to clients’ sites. As we’re in the process of redesigning our own site, we want to be especially careful not to undo all the good work we’ve done so far.

We’re also doing quite well on rckt (number 1), rocket science (number 5), mashup website (number 4), sheffield design agency (number 3).*

* All correct at the time of writing – but these things do vary over time…

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Sheffield International Venues (the company behind such well known venues as Ponds Forge, Don Valley Stadium and the Hallam FM Arena) appreciate the power of e-mail marketing in communicating with their customers. So when it came to getting a promotional e-mail out to members of their Fitness Unlimited gyms, they called on Rocket to provide the design and technical infrastructure to deliver it to their members.

While they have used e-mail marketing in the past, the previous systems have lacked the sophisticated personalisation and response tracking we offer.

The first step was to redesign the layout of the e-mail to be more effective, while retaining existing campaign branding. Rocket advised on rewriting the e-mail’s copy in order to make the benefits and calls-to-action more succinct. The final step was to deliver the e-mail to thousands of recipients, timed perfectly to coincide with when the sales team were fully
staffed and ready to deal with the responses.

The result was a campaign which saw a response rate way in excess of the industry average, and additionally gave SIV detailed data about the responders, including self-cleansing the e-mail addresses which were no longer deliverable, allowing them to improve the quality of their marketing data.

Fitness Unlimited have now moved their quarterly newsletter (previously printed and distributed to tens of thousands of gym members) entirely online, in a move which makes their communication more immediate, and is also is environmentally friendly -reducing paper usage and carbon emissions in their distribution.

Despite the immense amount of hard work, blood (never been good with a scalpel), sweat and tears that have gone in to my illustrious career as a Graphic Designer over the last 10+ years, long ago I resigned myself to the fact that there are better, more talented people in existence… Possibly somewhere in Norfolk, who knows.

But no, the powerhouse that is Google have decided that I fully deserve the right to be hailed the global Chief Graphic Designer as their listings clearly show:

Google search for “Chief Graphic Designer”

That said, apparently Google are of the opinion that I also have a penchant for kicking children… I may sue:

Google search for “Andy Barratt kicked kids”

Perhaps this is a good illustration of just how Google rankings can reflect positively and negatively on those pages you may pay little attention to?

I feel our resident SEO Guru, Mr Cookson should enlighten us all.

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How much chance and randomness is really involved in the way your website is ranked? A non-technical perspective on search engine optimisation.

Best estimates claim there are currently around 120 million websites, containing around 12 billion web pages. The Internet is certainly big. Most of us navigate around this enormous world with the help of search engines. These search engines perform millions of searches everyday, delivering their results in milliseconds. We tend to take this for granted, but if you stop and think about it for the same time it takes Google to search 12 billion pages for the term Rocket (that’s 0.05 seconds by the way) it can get a little mind-boggling.

As the programs and algorithms that run search engines have evolved into highly complex ‘brains’ those interested in giving their website a higher profile have had to keep pace with this complexity. But as program is piled upon program and as search engines become more sophisticated have a few ghosts appeared in the machine?

The term ‘ghost in the machine’ appeared in the late 1940’s as a new way of thinking about Ren

Rocket is as pleased as punch to announce that we have been selected by the University of the Highlands and Islands to develop a major new online project. After a tough tendering process, culminating in a three way pitch, Rocket saw off strong competition from across the country. This is a first for Rocket, as it is our first major web development project in Scotland and offers the opportunity to get to know a lots of new people.

The project involves extensive database and IT infrastructure integration, as well as drawing on our well known web design and development experience. What seemed to clinch it for UHI though