We’ve recently took the plunge into the unchartered world (sort of) of HTML5. We’ve used our own site as the ‘test subject’ and taken the progression from Strict XHTML to HTML5.
Giving our clients the best solutions possible for their online presence is paramount, so keeping in touch with the latest internet technologies gives The Energy Cell the tools and knowledge to do this. We felt the emergence of HTML5 and the platform it gives for delivering such things as richer multi-media, rendering graphics on the fly, geo-location and the ability to access web applications off-line were features we wanted to be able to deliver for our clients. We shall be developing some of these techniques in our ‘testing’ area and we will share our findings once we are happy with them.
So a small reward is for our hardwork to be recognised and featured on the HTML5 Gallery
So we just need the browsers to catch up…sound familiar?
In: Marketing
5 Jan 2010
We are pleased to announce the launch of the brand new Mars Drinks UK corporate website.
The new site sees the introduction of a new content management and web application platform delivering a range of dynamic content and services to Mars Drinks customers.
Thanks to everyone involved at The Energy Cell and the team at Mars for helping to make this happen.
New Online Shop coming soon in Phase 2!
In: Energy Cell
24 Nov 2009
Fellow designers will know what I mean when you find you’ve been working on a project for such a long time that you begin to question some of you own design decisions you made at the early stages.
It can be hard to see the ‘wood for the trees’ once your latest site has gone live or brochure has gone to print, and appreciate how good (or not so good) your work has turned out. So it can be reassuring when your work is recognised by your peers, and it’s the turn of our website to receive some attention this week.
So well done energycell.co.uk
In: Tech/Geek Zone
29 Sep 2009
I’ve recently changed my mobile phone to the ’snazzy’ HTC Hero.
As the phone’s OS is built on the Google Android platform, many Google doors have opened up and I have duly stepped into them. One of these doors is Google mail, or Gmail depending on how early you have signed up to this excellent FREE service from the guys at Google.
What attracted me intially was the ability for me to store all my phone contacts as Google contacts. This means that they are stored in ‘the clouds’ as oppose to on my SIM card. This contacts list is also my address book in Google Mail. So when I make any edits to my contacts list via the web in Google Mail, my phone’s contact list will update itself. I know, amazing!
The same goes for Goole Calendar. Any event added to the calendar via my phone, will appear within Google Calendar on the web within seconds.
I am now completely ‘cloud based’, although I still have my POP3 account also collecting mails as a backup. I’m sure it won’t be long until I’ve completely fazed this out however.
It seems I’m not alone in embracing cloud based personal organisation. In a recent poll published on CSS Tricks. 53% of people asked, used cloud based email systems compared to 18% local machine based.
Go to CSS Tricks to read more about this poll.
In: Energy Cell
29 Sep 2009
Great North Run 2009
On the 20th September 2009 I travelled up to Newcastle to complete my first Great North Run. It was a very sunny September day and the amount of people running was absolutely unbelieveable – never have so many lycra clad Paula Radcliffe wanabes converged in one space! (Well if they have I certainly wasn’t there!)
The atmosphere was amazing, the crowds were brilliant (a big thank you to the young girl at 11 miles handing out ice pops!) and 13.1 miles of pavement pounding later I crossed the finish line in a time of 1 hour 40 minutes and 47 seconds – finishing a respectable 190th in the ladies section (and beating Gordon Ramsey!) I must say a special thank you to the rest of the Energy Cell team for their support esepcially to Dave for recording it for me – next year maybe we can have a few more Energy Cell team members on the start line with me??
Watch this space!
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new site produced to Mars, the FLAVIA Distributor Consumer site. The Energy Cell team have worked closely with the Mars Drinks to create a new site to support the marketing efforts of a network of hundreds of distribution partners servicing thousands of customers across the USA.
Our design and technical teams worked with FLAVIA’s US marketing department on the design, build and implementation of content management tools. Needless to say, the site is built encompassing the latest web technologies and passes all WC3 Strict XHTML and accessibilty guidlines with flying colours.
Visit the site now and take a look for yourself, please let us know what you think…
In: Inspiration| Marketing
19 Aug 2009The positive barrage of online media choices and the ever increasing willingness for people to adopt them means that, for businesses to be a success online they need to create a different kind of relationship with their customers and then manage carefully nature it.
As consumers and decision makers we receive our information online, process it and are continually influenced by the Internet, social-networking sites, mobile phones and much more. Despite the technological advances in most of our lives, each designed to make our lives simpler – most people use the same logic to make their online decisions as they do offline ones. We all understand how the average online decision maker has more information at their finger tips than ever before with more products, businesses and brands to choose from. But it’s ‘choice’ that many businesses still struggle to get to grips with – your customers choose who they are interested in, they choose the products they buy, the brands they become loyal to and businesses they deal with.
It dosen’t sound that long ago but when you see how some of the most popular websites looked in the late 90’s you’ll be amazed.
Microsoft has announced that it intends on supporting it’s ageing IE6 browser till 2014, 4 years later than it’s original deadline!
I’m absolutely over the moon about this and I intend to organise a celebration, and invite all my web professional peers, where we can dance through the streets and rejoice! 
.
Obviously…I won’t be doing this. What I will be doing is spending hours of my time adjusting and tweaking my clean, semantic XHMTL code, inserting hacks and filters to accommodate this prehistoric browser.
Over time I have conditioned myself in constructing my sites in a way that I tend not to need any hacks and filters for my sites to work in IE6. I’ve learnt what not to do and which is the best way to achieve, visually, what I want. However as web technology continues to progress and new functionality becomes available such as jQuery and CSS3 techniques, this is where my time is lost trying to crowbar these features in to an IE6 environment.
I understand that IE6 is core to some large businesses and corporations and the upgrade to a more recent browser would be a large operation. But it seems Microsoft aren’t doing enough to encourage users to upgrade to at least IE7 and possibly IE8. The recent announcement reinforces my feelings.
I’ve being using FireFox for my primary browser since V1, and it seems, judging by the browsers increasing market share currently at 22%, many more people are doing the same.
Let’s all contribute to retiring this browser and utilise our power of choice. Try out these alternative browsers…you’ll never go back.
In: Stuff & Nonsense
6 Aug 2009I have just discovered one of the best websites I have seen so far in my long search to make life just a little easier – www.picnik.com is a great site that allows you to edit, resize, crop, rotate, flip and just about anything else you would like to do to your images for FREE!
Upload photo’s from your own files or from various other resources such Facebook, Flickr and MySpace. All the basic tools are free, although you can upgrade to Premium for just $4.95 per month. The basic freebie package is full of loads of great stuff though and will be perfect for most people wanting to re-size images for work or to improve family holiday snaps. For photos there’s an auto fix function, red eye fix, exposure correction tool, colour adjust and many more extensions of these functions to help you get your photos just right.
The best thing about it is most of the tools are one click wonders, simplicity in itself – this means even the most novice photo editor can achieve great results without hassle or cost. Oh and the other best thing is once you have ‘fixed’ your photo or cropped your image – you can email it to your friends, family and work colleagues ready for them to use, just use the ‘Save & Share’ function.
This really is a great site and i’m sure if you use it once you will definately be back for more picniks!
see www.picnik.com
