How can you make the most of your online activity?
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.
Web design has come along way
14 Aug 2009
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 to support IE6 until 2014!!
14 Aug 2009
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.
Having a Picnik?
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
Email campaign driving you nuts? No more
In: Marketing
22 Jul 2009
Over the last few months we have added MailChimp to our carefully chosen list of Email Marketing broadcast tools we use. The solution is great for our smaller retail customers, yet we have found it surprising useful for some of our larger clients. It has an interface that is incredibly easy to use with the options for integrating existing mailing lists is also being a breeze.
All this adds up to a great tool for our online marketing team to help add more value to client projects quickly and efficiently – ultimately driving down the overall cost of email marketing campaigns.
You can create your mailing lists by importing email addresses and names and then add as much detail as you wish, town, jobs (all the essentials and as much as you need) to give you extra segmential data to analyse in the impressive reporting tools. You can aslo import your contacts from HighRise
The website is well designed, easy to use and contains loads of resources to guide you through setting up your first campaign. You can choose from pre-tested email templates but we prefer to insert our own html which was also very easy to implement. For any email marketing beginners out there - there is also a handy tick box which will convert any rogue CSS to inline styles, we all know how email clients love inline styles!
The feature I liked most was the ability to view how your email would look in all the major email clients. We all know how difficult it is to get your mail looking how you want.
We’ve found MailChimp ticks most of our boxes and it is reasonably priced. Try it…it’s top banana!
Amazing Augmented Reality App for iPhone
In: Tech/Geek Zone
21 Jul 2009
The morning after watching ACDC at Wembley a few weeks ago we decided to have a jaunt round London village. Stood in the middle of Leicester Square with a headache and mirrored aviators, I could have really done with this amazing app for the iPhone: Watch the video here
My latest must have FireFox plugin
21 Jul 2009As we’ve recently re-launched our site, I’ve been polishing our SEO techniques and I’ve come across a great FF plugin which has helped me out no end.
It’s called ‘Search Status’ and can be found at: http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/
Once plugged in it reveals the Google Page Rank and Alexa rankings for the page currently visiting. And at the flick of a right mouse button you can instantly view useful info such as: META data, keyword density, indexed, pages, link reports, backward links etc. etc. All the data you need when working on your SEO.
New site featured on UnmatchedStyle.com
In: Energy Cell
8 Jul 2009
Our new site re-design has been featured on quite a lot of CSS galleries since it’s launch. But the one I’m most pleased about is the appearance on www.unmatchedstyle.com
LESS does actually mean less
1 Jul 2009I think CSS is the best thing since sliced bread, but sometimes I do find it a bit repetitive, and without a boilerplate or snippet for absolutely everything, it can take a while to achieve the results you want.
But with a great new Ruby add on called LESS you can now create leaner, meaner CSS code using such things as nested CSS rules and variables.
Take this piece of CSS for instance:
#mainnav {width: 960px; height: 200px;}
#mainnav ul {margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
#mainnav li {margin-bottom: 5px;}
With LESS you could nest the rules and write the same CSS as:
#mainnav {width: 960px; height: 200px;
ul {margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
li {margin-bottom: 5px;}
}
Check this piece of CSS out:
#footer {background-color: #353535;}
#h2 {color: #353535;}
With LESS, you can set variables and write the same code as:
@master-color: #353535;
#footer {background-color: @master-color;}
#h2 {color: @master-color;}
Pretty cool I’m sure you’ll agree. You can find out more at: http://lesscss.org/
Top of Google
25 Jun 2009The million dollar question is: How do I get to the top of Google?
If I had a penny for every time a client had asked me this I would be writing this blog laid in a hammock on Necker Island…but I’m not.
Getting your site full of good content, looking great and working is only half the battle. It’s not going to work very well for you if it isn’t being seen by your potential customers. My answer to the big question is always the same…CONTENT IS KING!