Access All Areas July/August 2018 | Page 50

WHAT’S HOT? JULY/AUGUST | TECH A monthly look at the newest products and services for the live events industry Tent types Another brick Kayam’s tent range has grown. Valhalla, a very large tent is its widest and highest. Kayam is a more normal scale tent, designed to be intimate and stylish. The Concert-tent meanwhile, lends itself to indoor stage productions. The Stage-cover model is an open end which can be used on the end of a standard tent. It covers the stage and can cover part of the audience. kayam.co.uk ARX ‘s High Security Mobile Fence System is now available via Portable Floor Maker. The mobile fence system features a modular design, which can adapt to almost any type of installation including perimeters at a music festival. ARX is designed to protect critical infrastructure and revenue streams. www.portablefloormaker. co.uk Silver service After losing its founder, Seth Fellner in 2017, Silver Stage is hitting new heights by new managing partners Melody Fellner and Mojo Fell of Airstream Facilities. “We live and breathe our company ethos. As Europe’s largest supplier of TriSpans and the only UK supplier to offer the Triad and SL system, we can supply a modular range of options for stage covers and temporary event structures both in terms of design and configurations. The adaptability of our fully brandable, visually striking, acoustic tent designs has secured some of the biggest global festivals and corporate events. Sound and lighting perfectly compliment the structures without H&S compromise. We also supply many alternative solutions to the events industry, such as our versatile Quadra-Sided structures”. Their 10x10m tents can connect to some of their main structures, creating additional internal space with a multi-room effect. 50 Digital shopfronts By James Morgan Your website is your shopfront. It’s the tool to pull in future clients as well as keep current clients on board and informed. It’s also the end point for the inbound traffic you have driven from social media posts that point your customers to more information on your business. Research has shown that website visitors are continually looking for better experiences and more interactivity when visiting a website. Remember you have seven seconds to convince a visitor to browse beyond the home page. Mobile first is the only way to think about websites nowadays. Most users view on their mobile devices rather than on a laptop or desktop. Your website must be designed in a way that gives the user a great mobile experience. But what sort of content should you create? Research shows that animated graphics engage users a lot more than standard images. Animating your company logo or telling a short story is going to be big. For example, images that illustrate the various aspects of your business will engage visitors. Bold colour palettes are also going to become more popular. Page design that shouts out your messages is more effective. Greater interactivity can be achieved through a few different tools. Using gamification or polls to ask questions and then take visitors to a page that is personalised based on their responses will provide a ‘stickier’ user experience. Other interactive tools such as live chat plug-ins or AI enhanced chat bots are becoming popular. These tools help build closer relationships with visitors, providing instant responses to questions. Lastly, video is still one of the main engagement tools to get a complicated details or explanation across. So, consider spending some cash to get great video content.