Over the past year you may have noticed how the marketing world has been bombarded by an avalanche of information about the merits of contextual marketing and personalisation.No-one is doubting that to be successful in today's market, your online experience has to mimic a traditional physical experience. But experience is deeply subjective and unique to each individual, so it is very difficult to define precisely.One thing is clear though. A mass approach to marketing won't do any longer, we are living in the age of the consumer, and ...

For the 2nd year running 3chillies have successfully been recognised as a supplier on Digital Marketplace’s GCLOUD 8 RM1557viiiThe Crown Commercial Service (CCS) acts on behalf of the Crown to drive savings for the taxpayer and improve the quality of commercial  and procurement activity. CCS’s vision is to deliver value for the nation through outstanding commercial capability and quality customer service. Its procurement arrangements can be used by central government departments and organisations across the public sector including local ...

Life is good at 3chillies. We work hard, but every now and then we like to play hard too.The foosball table has become an important part of office life at 3chillies. In a way, I suppose it’s our watercooler area… but make no mistake, the foosball table is no place for dilly-dallying. The competition is intense!We absolutely love the game. In fact we love it so much that each signature move has been assigned a nickname! So if you don’t know your bamboozler from your bobbler, why not take a moment to read up on this amusing, but deadly ...

Dear Friends, Partners, and Loyal Customers,Over the last few years, we’ve been sending out some rather imaginative Christmas cards. We hope you’ve enjoyed the creativity behind them…chili peppers aren’t exactly the most festive of food items, but we’ve always managed to sneak them into the design work.If you’ve been lucky enough to have received one of these cards in the past, please don’t be offended when you don’t receive one this year because we’ve decided to do something a little different.Instead of paying to design, print and send ...

Contextual Marketing is all about “Providing the right content to the right person, in the right place, at the right time. You may have heard similar statements in the past, but have you ever stopped to think about what that really means? Let’s take a quick look at our definitions:“The right content” – This is simply another way of saying “Relevant Content”. The relevancy of content is subjective, but we’re aiming to provide real content which is genuinely helpful to the prospect. “The right person” – This is all to do with delivering ...

We cannot ignore the huge shift in digital marketing and the disruption it has caused across the B2C & B2B environment. Prospects and customers have become more demanding, competitors have become more technically savvy, and technology has changed. Customer requirements are evolving faster than traditional marketing practices allows us to cater for, but digital marketing is very different – it’s reshaping industries, transforming businesses, and more importantly altering consumer behaviour.(B2B) relationships represent 69% of all ...

Setting the Secure Flag So, a Sitecore site I've been working on recently underwent a penetration test, which turned up an interesting item. The ASP.NET_SessionId and SC_ANALYTICS_GLOBAL_COOKIE cookies aren't set with the 'Secure' flag.  Furthermore, my own checking showed that the .ASPXAUTH token was also set without the 'Secure' flag.As the entire site is only served over HTTPS, this seems to be a bit remiss.Fortunately, there are a couple of easy fixes to this that can be set in the Web.configUnder and set requireSSL:And ...

It’s always exciting when a new version of Sitecore arrives because it usually means bigger and better functionality for us marketers. Our CTO, Bryan Archer, has taken some time to point out some of the more substantial changes that could help marketers improve their performance. Let’s start with the experience editor because there have been a number of changes that ultimately result in a more fluent editing experience. Experience Editor ImprovementsIf you’re using the experience editor, check the “Associated content” checkbox. ...

We’re happy to announce that 3chillies are now official Umbraco Certified Gold Partners We’ve been building Umbraco Sites for a number of years now, and the change in our partnership status reinforces our position as a leading UK Umbraco development agency.What is Umbraco?Umbraco is an open source content management system based on the .NET framework. The platform delivers high performing, cost-effective, websites for world-class brands.Why we became Gold PartnersWe became Umbraco Gold partners to demonstrate our commitment to the ...

I was really impressed with what we were able to achieve in a recent project by simply leveraging the facets functionality of the Sitecore Lucene and SOLR integration. We used this functionality to produce a list of search filters, just like the ones seen on most e-commerce websites. While performing a search within the content search you are able to call the .FacetOn() method, the first property for this method is the index field you wish to facet on, you do this via a simple LINQ link expression: (x => x.PropertyName).  The second ...