Sk-etchbook

This popped up at the top of a search listings the other day.

http://www.google.com/explanation.html

This got me thinking. In a society of free speech and via a medium which is difficult, nigh impossible to moderate what kind of filtering is actually going on in search results? I image specific words are filtered out for the purpose of safe searches but filtering of obnoxious and offensive opinions can not be simple.

Furthermore should it be done? In a developed society surely all are entitled to their opinions. It would be the responsibility of the offender to justify his stance point yet to refrain from persisting to the point of forcing their unwelcome views on others. The offended then should equally respect the offenders view and not take offence. Rather it is the offendeds responsibility to offer their contrasting opinions and justify them. Disagreement is likely but should be respected.

Total comprehension and through understanding of any situation or element requires complete information. Positive, negative, objective and subjective.

There is a limit of course when these views are acted upon where it does become immoral, turns to bullying and can degrade the quality lives however this is not the topic here.

To me, offensive opinions are not offensive. They are mealy the results of the individuals life experiences and the influence of their exterior. A mind ravaged with hate and anger is the worse prison of all. There are no bars, no doors and no windows. You remain trapped for as long as they exist.

Would it not then be the right thing to help these people escape their prisons. Censorship and condemnation has no positive returns.

The manifestation of conciousness at a sentient level is a truly miraculous thing. We all possess the ability to manage, construct and reconstruct our own realities, our personalities and perceptions can be moulded. The only way to overcome the negative aspects of our own psyches to to question our beliefs. Questions which sometimes need to be offered others.

Negative, spiteful opinions towards generalised groups or stereotypes, even ones based on our own experiences or "what we have been told" are nothing more than childhood monsters.

What may initially appear to be a hideous, evil and scary monster lurking in the darkened corner of your room turns out to be nothing more than teddy bear once viewed in the light.

Freaky little article here on Wired. Looks like in the future technology really will be getting under your skin.

Permalinks are them squiggly wiggly long strings of letters/numbers/characters which point to the informative tit-bit of which you peruse.

Anyway. More often than not they look like nonsense and drivel. Here is a bit more info on how to make Worpress links a tad more easy in the eye:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

Time to move on from them handy little HTML form generation apps and tools and learn what's involved in writing them myself.

Yes, indeedy-doo.

Creating the actual HTML form is the easy part. This can be done by any old bean with a pair of hands, it's pretty simple coding and even easier select-from-drop-menu simple if you use Dreamweaver.

The complicated part is collecting the data from the forms and doing something with it. Now I am still a PHP novice so this was also a learning experience on this level.

Here's some good tutorials on the subject:

The Site Wizard

PHP.net

w3schools

This is an extract sent out by leading recruitment acency Reed:

A recent study suggests that over 50% of employers think the jobs market is overrun by jobseekers with academic qualifications and 68% think not enough candidates have practical skills and vocational qualifications.

This research is supported by recruitment specialists who attended a recent debate on the state of the graduate market. One of the main outcomes was that may graduates lack soft skills and doing a year of traveling might be a better option then continuing in education and doing a masters degree.

There is an emphasis on both schools and employers to provide better training on soft skills like team working, leadership and social skills.

If you are looking to improve on your soft/practical skills then voluntary work is a great way to do so. Why not browse through reed.co.uk's 'benefits of volunteering' or start searching for voluntary jobs now on reed.co.uk.

Internships also provide a great opportunity to upgrade your skills and it has been recently announced that a host of Premier League clubs, including Chelsea, Everton and Sunderland, are on the look out for new interns.

Adobe recently announced that Flash CS5 will support the creation of iPhone applications.

Read more on this fromAdobe News or Labs.

Is this a good thing or will it create a flood of badly designed badly thought out, generally bad apps?

The iPhone experienced phenomenal success however, now the other communications companies are coming out with their own versions (copycats!) they do need to be evolve in some manner.

Is opening up the platform the best approach, will this lead to a greater amount of good quality, useful or entertaining apps. Are Apple hoping to generate a new interest in the iPhone and cling to their market share or are they ahead of the game, do they have something better up their sleeves.

It seems a logical move anyway whatever their motives. Be it to maintain market position or just that there's no longer any benefit to restricting the development environment.

The one thing I am sure of is that the overnight iPhone app millionaires are a thing of the past, well, at least to the same degree. I'm sure as with anything there is always the potential to make money however with a growing number of handhold platforms and easier ways to develop for them the competition has never been so tough.

I imagine Apple will need to take a look at the way apps are sold in iTunes if the number does grow exponentially. Just look at Youtube, a vast amount of media which is made useful because of the effective and intuitive search functionality. To date iPhone app search functionality is not the greatest.

This is pretty entertaining!

Until recently I belonged firmly to the camp of believers disillusioned that mobile phones could simply be targeted like so:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="styles.css">

Unfortunately this may have been true at one point, prior to the advent of smart phones, specifically iPhones. It seems as though the death of the handheld style sheet was forecast even before these little beauties hit the shelves. As far back as 2007 the matter is discussed here on Green Beast and also, giving more weight to CSS3 and Opera Mini here on Russel Beattie and Unintentionally Blank.

The issue has arisen due to the fact that the new smart phones aim to give users the full browsing experience. So no need for limiting the amount of images or layouts used, no need for a handheld style sheet.

Or is there?

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. The user may still have limited bandwidth or not gain anything from seeing scaled down versions of your pretty images. They may even have the browser set to mobile browsing.

So whats' the answer?

As usual, no sooner then one source is pronouncing the death another is declaring the return. There is a very good article here on A List Apart covering this very subject.

Hence the solution is yet again down to common sense. What is the site in question like, is it graphically rich, layout or Flash dependent. If so then it may be beneficial to offer a handheld style sheet for non-smart phones and devices or smart phones browsing in mobile-web mode.

However, problem not solved. Mobile browsers still aren't as fast at rendering as desktop versions, the user could be using 3G or using low bandwidth Wi-Fi. You may just think that zooming in on sections of your page destroys the aesthetics anyway so there is no point on serving up full screen versions to tiny little screens.

If this is the case then handheld style sheets are useless. iPhones and other smart phones ignore them.

Therefore, to target these devices you need to use CSS3 media queries.

The solution given on Code Cookbook is:

<!--[if !IE]>
<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"
    href="iPhone.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
<![endif]-->

However there are a few comments saying this technique does not work so you may want to try Googling it for yourself. Here is another article to start you off.

Just came across a nice little tip here.

Preloading images is an important factor in providing streamlined and enjoyable user experience. Avoid, waits, flickers of broken image links and general ugliness with this simple CSS:

#preloader {
   /* Images you want to preload*/
   background-image: url(image1.jpg);
   background-image: url(image2.jpg);
   background-image: url(image3.jpg);
   width: 0px;
   height: 0px;
   display: inline;
}

I'm looking into displaying twitter feeds. At present I can find how to do it in AS3, have found info about the twitter API but seem to be having cross domin problems.

http://actionscripter.co.uk/blog/?page_id=262

http://www.tgrworks.com/activeden/twitter/

I just stumbled across this list here. Some lovely names, makes me think mine's a bit dull. Think I'll go down the Deed Pol office to get mine changed. It's only a £10 apparently.

Barb Dwyer
Pearl Button
Hazel Nutt
Ray Gunn
Helen Back
Stan Still
Jo King
Lee King
Terry Bull
Mary Christmas
Max Power
Paige Turner
Sonny Day
Tim Burr
Teresa Green
Will Power
Anna Sasin
Chris Cross
Doug Hole
Justin Case
Barry Cade

I absolutely love Wired's November cover. The baby's expression is priceless, the posture is perfect and the lighting treatment gives it the perfect unnatural intensity bringing about subtle feelings of uncomfortable fear. The bold single word is also a terrific choice which takes ultimate control over the viewers train of thought.

One image that really says a thousand words.

I've just been writing a bio and this entertained me so I thought I would share.

What kind of world were you born into. What events, music, trends or fashions have played a part in shaping the person you are?

I was born in 1982, I've just been having a look at what was in the charts that year and they were some reet choons indeed! Funny thing is most of them are still reasonably well known and the majority of the number 1's spent 3-7 weeks at the top. I seriously doubt as much of the chart music out at the moment will be remembered twenty seven years down the road.

www.number-ones.co.uk

www.chartmagic.co.uk

According to these web sites my unholy arrival was accompanied by a bit of reggae from Musical Youth with their 'Pass the Dutchie' number closely followed by Culture Club's 'Do You Really Want to Hurt Me'.

Check out these videos...

I been getting invitations from Google to attend webinars for a while now. Previously I've not really paid much attention to these, however while thinking about marketing I thought I'd look iinto the format and content. There's some great material in some of the ones freely available online. Here's a list of just a few, check them out.

Adsense

Adwords

Web Design & Marketing Strategy

Web Design & Marketing

Wordpress

Trends

SEO

PHP

And 100's of other things

Bit pissed off.

I've spent a whole day sorting out issues caused by dodgy fonts. Free fonts may be easy on the pocket but you have to pay for them in other ways.
There are a ton of fonts on my system now which prevent scrolling in the Adobe Suite and cause me no end of bother.

A bit more on the matter:

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/aboutgraphics/a/fontoverload_2.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_management_software

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/better_font_management/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/05/25-font-management-tools-reviewed/

Today's problem is how to write an effective Bio? How do you condense a lifetime of experience and achievements into a few sentences. Whats more how do you write something which captivates the reader, summerises your (professional) persona and gets the message (that you are fantastic and they need you) across. Whats more how personal can you make it, surely the style and tone should also reflect your personality but as it is written for a purpose these aspects should not overshadow the desired outcome.

Hmmmm... Here's some reading (of varying usefulness, but a start).

How to Write a Bio

Brand-yourself.com

About.com

Ehow

Sitepoint

Fist off there are two types available here which shouldn't be confused. The meta tag and the link attribute.

"Nofollow" provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines "Don't follow links on this page" (the former) or "Don't follow this specific link" (the latter).

With the rise of social media and web 2.0 the link structure of the internet suddenly changed. As one of the measures of spam or link farming used by robots previously looked at the speed at which a website had gained links to it. The new forms of social media caused a problem as hundreds even thousands of links could appear in a day.

Here is Googles own page about nofollow and what it does.

However there seems to be some resistance towards it's use and it's practicality. Read more...

The question of whether meta tags (specifically keywords) are of any use at all any more all always seems to receive a mumbled response. They used to be important, but for a long while now they have played little to no part in search engine listings. My previous stance was that they have little or none influence on results but description should be used as this is seen in results and keywords are worth adding as they take no time and are good admin. This forum post reflects that: Digital Point

The most important ones you should be sure to use are;
keywords
description
distribution=global or us or uk...
index=follow all or no follow...index all or no index
author=personal name or business name

However I still thought I'd check to see if there was an official bottom line response out there. And here it is:

View the official response from Google's Matt Cutts or view a full post and video on the Google Web Master Blog.

Unfortunately Google is only one of the search engines and making catering to them all is like throwing a barbecue and inviting a vegetarian, a Muslim, a guy with a nut allergy, a woman allergic to fish, wheat and gluten and a man with no mouth. And then attempting to make them all happy.

Google does command between 60 to 80 per cent of market share in various locations across the world so it should be the most influential. However the next largest are Yahoo and Bing.

Here is a good post on Search Engine Land referring to Yahoo's announcement (Oct 09) that it is dropping support for keywords tag, closely followed up by another report contradicting this. This is supported by many other tests reveling that keywords "DO" affect Yahoo still. Assumable they still have a ghost in their machine.

The former article also discusses Bing. Apparently they don't support meta keywords, but they have a big guide on how to use them on their official blog. A great example of how as soon as something can increase search rankings it is manipulated (in this case blogs) and exploited at the expense of quality. Presumably written by outside paid blogger.

And after all this research where am I? Exactly where I was when I started!!!

Keywords have little to no SEO use but ya may as well stick 'em in there. Good for organization and admin purposes.

Time well spent!

http://demo.dinolatoga.com/imagepreloader/

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-5214317.html

URL revolution:

Nod for non-Latin web addresses

Dynamically replacing part of the content in a HTML page:

http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax/load#urldatacallback

Smooth Popups

http://yensdesign.com/2008/09/how-to-create-a-stunning-and-smooth-popup-using-jquery

Space.
On the web it's always at a premium.

So how do you show many big things in a small spaces? Furthermore how do you do this in a seamless way which is fast and avoids redirections or page reloads/refreshes.

Flash? A very good idea but it does decrese the all browser, all platform compatibility factor. Javascript then is looking like the way forward.

I've been looking at some of the off-ther-shelf options available for displaying images, specifically using Lightbox effects.

Here they are:

Lightbox 2
This is a popular option. Widely uses and also has a Wordpress plugin.

Fancybox
A popular option using jQuery.

Some a few good lookers here

Webstockbox
A listing of several options. Many of them are similar.

I've been doing some logo design training for the past week or so...

Now I can admittadly be a bit of a space cadet at times, living in my own little magic garden shed on top of an imaginary hill made of porridge oats.

But..

One of the logos referred to a few times is FedEx (quite a famous and well know logo). I'm currently on a chapter about the use of negative space and FedEx is again been used as and example.

I'm ashamed to say I'd never even noticed the uniquely inventive aspect of this logo before. And I've even worked in companies using FedEx, handling their branded document envelopes weekly even daily.

Now have I just been really dim here or has anyone else missed it too?

Ready?

OK, who can see the arrow? Or more importantly did you know it was there before it was pointed out?

I just stumbled accross this product. Ring and bracelet watches using e-paper. It still seems pretty cutting edge yet they have been out since 2007. Maybe t-shirts with downloadable designs are closer than we think.

Original article on Popgadget

More Info at www.seikowatches.com

I recently got asked to produce an email marketing campaign. I've been looking into some of the available software out there for client relations and mailing list management.

Opensource Newsletter & CRM Software
www.sugarcrm.com
www.vtiger.org
www.phplist.com
www.openemm.org

Paid Hosted CRM Service Comparison
Business Buy Guide

Free & Subscription Based Software
www.mailchimp.com
www.infusionsoft.com
www.sendblaster.com
www.sage.co.uk/software_and_services/customers/sage_crm.aspx

Reviews and Discussions
http://www.siteground.com/sugarcrm_vtiger.htm
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Search/email_marketing.html
http://email.about.com/od/windowsmarketingsoftware/Windows_Email_Marketing_Software.htm

Surveys
http://www.limesurvey.org/

Corners has always been an overly complicated subject as far a web design is concerened. Previously there was a need to faff around with small images for each corner or to run Javascript just to get a simple cross browser friendly corner!

It's good to see that CSS3 will bring with it a host of standard new features including rounded corners, drop shadows and other visual effects. Mozilla and Webkit browsers currently do have their own browser specific styles to apply corners unfortunately as usual it's IE thats letting the team down. Boooooo.

Read More

This is my first "official" approach to advertising my web design services. I posted on this on classified websites, where two years ago I would have expected a reasonable response. Unfortunately I've been occasionally posting ads over the past few years, testing the waters, and with the onset of the financial situation there has been a massive shift in the market.

At present it's a buyers market. Less spending is occurring, fewer businesses are flourishing and competitiveness has increased. The result being that free sources of advertising like Gumtree, Vivastreet and similar sites has become saturated. As businesses grow and develop there means increase as do their existing client base. The recession has caused a noticeable backlash. Now more established businesses seem to be listing on free sites battling it out for work along with the smaller guys and of course the usual spattering of bargain (as in cheap and crap) providers.

I'm still not satisfied with the look of PWD and functionality wise I've had to strip back on my initially planned offerings but I'd say it's better to start early and have some research built up along the way.

Results to follow...

Limited Time Offer

Primitive Web Design specialises in web, print and marketing for business startups and SME's.

Our aim is to take the stress and confusion out of the design and communication elements required of any business. We tailor make online or offline material to communicate the right message to the right target audience for your business, generating greater returns and building stronger relationships.

100% Satisfaction Guarantee
Up to 1 Hour Consultation & Briefing
Unlimited Revisions to Design Options
Search Engine Friendly & W3C Standards Compliant Design

Prices and offers as follows:

:::::::::: WEB DESIGN ::::::::::

Get online for just £50
(one page "business card" style website)

Up to 5 pages from only £150

Plus add one years hosting and domain registration for just £10

Larger projects, flash or dynamic sites by quotation.

:::::::::: PRINT & BRANDING ::::::::::

Logo design from £25

Corporate Identity, Flyers & Stationary design by quotation.

:::::::::: BUSINESS STARTUP PACK ::::::::::

Logo, Business Cards, Stationary, Website plus:

Flash Banner or Flyers or HTML Email all for the bargain price of £350
(printing costs vary depending on order size)

---------------------------------------------------------------------

SEO, marketing and consultation services can also be arranged.

Please get in touch for more information or to have an informal chat about your needs.

Here's a few examples of previous work:

http://www.shine-valeting.co.uk
http://www.upanotherlevel.co.uk
http://www.rhubarbrentals.co.uk

Regards
Shaun Knowles

A couple of useful links for aspiring students:

http://www.inspiringinterns.com

http://www.gurucareers.com/

I've recently been reading SEO Truth by Philip Midwinter. It's a short Ebook produced by a Leeds based SEO agency.

When discussing the subject of Page Rank he talks about Salton's Vector Space Model. I had not heard of this before. Now the mathematics behind it is a little complicated so I thought best not get obsessed trying to fully comprehend what is going on but apparently this is the basis originally used for information retrieval by Google and many other search engines.

Given the fact that search indexing has come along way in recent years and that Google keep their exact algorithms tight to their chest to outwit them pesky SEO execs this is not a 'holy grail' answer to understanding Page Rank. However it is a good basis. It's like meeting a man who once sold a dog to the man who made the holy grail!

Definitely worth looking into.

More Reading:
Google Directory Papers
www.2002.org
Stanford

Here are a few excellent tips from the guys at yahoo.

Yahoo Developers

It's mostly about optomizing and page load times. Interesting how its better practice to create fewer big images than more smaller ones and to inclued all javascripts in the same file.

Triboluminescence is a funny phenomenom. Things glowing. I saved these links a while ago so now I can't really remember why I thought it was intersting. But interesting al the same.



www.nature.com - Sticky tape X-rays

This is Ida.
Read more about her...

http://www.d-9.com/

This is an excellent movie. A highly recommended must see and a compleatly original take on the alien invasion genre.

I think what makes this film soo good is the fact that it is multifacited and speaks on many levels. You have a good (although there are a few minor holes in the consitency and reasoning) storyline, excellent special effects, good actors and believable characters which you can feel rapport with. However the film addresses very aptly and with varying degress of subtlety some of the darkest social issues and predudices of our time.

Anyway there's plenty of reviews out there which cover everything so I'm not gonna waste too much of my time.

10 stars, get ur asses on them seats if your still to see this film.

I was in London a few weeks back and a friend was talking about this restaurant with interactive menus projecting the dishes onto the tables. He said you could also interact further by placing orders via the interface and viewing webcams which were set up in different areas of the kitchen.

It stuck in my mind as Dally did a presentation last year about a similar concept. Check out the videos on the website, might just have to try it out for myself next time I'm in town.

Inamo
C4 Technology & Restaurants

Here is a really nice article covering 10 Principles Of Effective Web Design.

Topics Include:

How do users think?

Don’t make users think
Don’t squander users’ patience
Manage to focus users’ attention
Strive for feature exposure
Make use of effective writing
Strive for simplicity
Don’t be afraid of the white space
Communicate effectively with a “visible language”
Conventions are our friends
Test early, test often

Yes, my sentiments exactly!

The formula c=4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a sums up the potential factors that influence landing page conversion rates. This include everything from site design to what your potential customers had for lunch.

Developed by MarketingExperiments.com this “formula” is based on their own research encompassing many client web sites. It is not a true mathematical relationship in any formal sense, but it can help you understand which factors affect landing page conversion rates at a practical level.

C= The probability of conversion.

m= Motivation of the user. This is basically how badly they want what you have, and the reason they want it. This is the element you have the least control over.

v= Clarity of value proposition. This is probably the most important element because you do have control over it. I’ll be writing about this next month in detail.

i= Incentive to take action. What are you offering to stimulate a desired action.

f= Friction elements in the conversion process. Anything that impedes the visitor from taking action. Common friction causes are forms with too many fields, or confusing options/choices.

a= Anxiety about entering information. This could be things like testimonials, an award, Better Business Bureau logos, etc.

Sources

Marketing Experiments

Searchengineland

Ezinearticles

I just received an email from Microsoft. Apparently I'm a "valued partner in the webmaster and search community". Not sure where I signed up for that but never mind it's not the issue at the moment. What I did want to say was this is the logo for their new search engine Bing.

One thing to say about it. Errrrrrrrrrrrrgh!

I mean who chose it? When I look at it I think bank, insurance company or SAGA. I would also say whoever chose it has Google on the back of the mind, I can see the influence.

Can't see the name catching on either. Google's popularity rose it to verb status, Google it is a commonly said phrase now.

Bing it! That just sounds like a takeaway.

The #1 Conversion Killer in Your Copy
(And How to Beat It)

This is a good post relating to marketing and copywriting. The extract below I might add is pretty much what I put down as my company ideals in my brief:

"Trustworthiness, transparency, credible authority, lots of high-value content, and just plain old decency are your best weapons."

And this line sums it up well:

"There’s an old joke that a second marriage is the triumph of optimism over experience. In fact, that’s exactly what happens every time you make a sale, especially to someone who hasn’t done business with you before."

There is a good Buffet analogy used by Seth on his blog here.

He talks about how to expand your business and tap into additional shares of the market by either deepening or widening what you offer.

I've had this video flagged to watch for a while but every time I tried to watch it I got that bored I fell off my chair. Today I managed and after the first 5 minuted it is actually interesting. I had a rough idea of how a recession functions as part of the economic cycle but had never really investigated the difference between a recession and the credit crunch as they are two totally separate things.

A recession is usually defined as a general slowdown in economic activity over a sustained period of time, this is normally measured by a decrease in the GDP over two consecutive quarters.

More...

The credit crunch on the other hand has been caused by short-sightedness, bad management and greed. Banks and financial institutions put profits before risk and now it has come back to bite them on the ass. This means that any reserves that should be in place to brave the recession do not exist. Personally I think all the banks that needed bail outs should be seized by the government and owned by the state. Banks are bastards anyway I've spent 9 months out of the past 2 years having to sort out mistakes and issues with mine. They are very greedy and unethical especially since the reclaiming business began. Banks should not be ran as businesses as people are now totally dependent on them. They should be institutionalised and then when we come out of the recession the profits put towards repaying the government debt.

The government debt is also a big issue. Admittedly it is making matters better at present in terms of job losses, closures and preventing the market stagnating but at what cost? Massive tax rises for a long time coming. You would think trying to correct a debt problem by getting into more debt is a bit of a gamble especially when attempting to maintain what could be a false economy anyway. The housing market is another area where human needs have been over-capitalized on. The basic wage in the UK is (age 22) £5.73 so that's about £12,000 a year. This is the end of the housing market which needs stimulating, house prices just got too high for young people, first time buyers and low earners to buy. Banks then started lending larger mortgages as they could make money on them, fueling the market on via sales raising prices further. Eventually this had to collapse, there is a limit to how much people can and will pay for anything. The problem then is asset prices decrease, loans are no longer covered and securities are worthless the entire market is based upon money which doesn't really exist.

So finally is it better to keep throwing money at the problem or are we better off letting the market crash? Sure companies would fail, jobs would be lost and the better off would be grumbling about the value of their shares or interest on their savings but the new market would boom. People would have less but things would cost less, there would be increased equality and access to goods. Increased tourism, less outsourcing abroad and new companies will always start if the demand exists.

Think I've rambled on enough for now. Here is a comment about the effect the media has had on the situation - Don't even start me on that subject!
The Media Effect

I just had a play with the new Wolfram Alpha search engine. I can definitely see how it could be a very useful tool. It's in it's early stages so it doesn't give you much data but potentially it could be incredibly time-saving for professionals, researchers and students predominantly. I don't really get why people always have to hype things as the new or the replacement of? TV didn't replace radio and the intent didn't replace TV. You would think people would have learnt by now things can coexist. Wolfram Alpha meets a completely separate need from Google it provides data, statistics and facts opposed to Google's provision of relevance. Google is very bad at this, I've tried searching for charts and stats before and got a load of rubbish. As it stands it's not good enough to succeed, the data feeds are too limited yet the idea is solid and if the effort is put into the project it could quite easily become a common business tool.

"British search engine 'could rival Google'"

The next Google

Oh and check out Google's next big thing. Pretty impressive as a bystander, very impressive as a tech geek.

I have files allover the place for this project, I have handed the majority of them in but keep finding files and paper documents scattered around.

For ease of reading view on a mac as I have colour coded the folders:

Gray - Pre-existing, not part of the brief but relevant.
Green - Training, planning and research conducted as part of the brief.
Orange - Process files. The design, development, content creation and analysis parts of the brief.
Red - Marketing & guidelines, still under development.

As I am completing a slightly edited version of the brief here is what I am providing as the evidence requirements.

A - Live Website.
B - Social Networking Profiles, Marketing & advertising, portfolio to be built into site.
C - Blog & website.
E - Initial and revised calendars.

There is a version on the site on the disk but this only contains some of the folders, Dreamweaver didn't like it when I tried to copy the rest the CGI stuff off server. At present I think the News, Index and all the footer links are functional (except sitemap) the other pages need a part static, part dynamic structure I'm still working on. The search is a manual indexing script, it's rubbish so I'm looking to replace it, possibly with the Google API.

Here are some random notes I found from my old Media Studies GNVQ course. Old but still very true, it's a shame technology isn't the same. As soon as I seem to learn anything language or software wise it seems to be outdated!

Module - DTP

Considerations when planning a design project:

MARKET
BUDGET
MATERIALS
TYPE/FONT
SIZE
DEADLINE

Module - Media in Context

Find four examples of the functions of the mass media:
1. Entertain
2. Inform
3. Socialise - how to behave/who to be
4. Propaganda

Case study used: The Full Monty

Entertain - uses humor to tell a story.

Inform - Depicts working class life and how redundancy effected them.

Socialise - Nathan does not like has dad stripping. Gerald lies to his wife, says he has a job as he is under pressure to be well off and respected.

Propaganda - people are not accepted openly in uncommon roles ie. women welding and men hoovering. Weight and sex-appeal worries.

Living up to a stereotype causes issues when they are experiencing difficulty meeting these expectations. Illustrates how relationships function better when people are free to be themselves.

Painting the Mind

I watched this program called Painting the Mind the other day. Here is the description:

"When builder Tommy McHugh and chiropractor Jon Sarkin suffered massive brain traumas, they suddenly revealed a previously hidden talent: to create art that amazed critics and collectors."

I found it fascinating as I have studied quite a bit of philosophy, psychology and a little neurology over the past year relating to mind, brains and consciousness. Now I am wholeheartedly an idealist specifically a panpsychist. Einstien with his funky E = mc2 equation (energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared) showed mass is just a highly condensed form energy. Now our current understanding of the manifestations of energy is limited, my comprehension is that consciousness and matter are made of the same stuff. Now although this fundamental essence, personified through time into a soul or an afterlife does live on, in a way which is a hundred times more complicated and a thousand times more simple than we have made it to be, you as an individual do not.

This program is an incredible insight into the functioning of the brain and the fragility of higher consciousness. The questions raised are thought provoking, I can't even imagine just going for a number two, popping a vein and then being a different person.

It also covers some of the left/right issues which are prominent discussions relating to creativity and what separates some of the geniuses of the past apart from everyone else.

How to become a Savant

Usability/Experience
Ease of use
Simple navigation
User intentions / intuitive design
Element placement
Descriptive headers
"F" - eye tracking
Tracking / drop-offs
Feedback

Content Hierarchy
What should be most visible
Needs of the user
Wants of the user
Broad overview - details
Intuitive association
Don't clutter

SEO & Accessibility
Design semantic content first
Use header tags strategically
Give each service it's own page
Think about read/tab order
Labels & tool tips
PHP includes??? Good of bad fore SEO???

Meets Purpose
Sales platform
Promotional
Communication
Appropriate choice of images, text, positioning, usability
Testing
Analytics

Copy
Purpose/intent
Tone
Syntax/structure
Vocab
Flow
Hierarchy
Information Supply
Inference

The project as a whole has gone pretty well. I’m not yet at the final point however there has been an incredibly steep learning curve incorporated into this brief so even though I haven’t has time to finish all the assets I had planned or to organise the documents into a more consistent presentation I feel the time has been well spent.

Time Planning

I’ve done quite well in terms of diary management this time. The first month or so was devoted to researching, browsing, reading, scribbling down ideas and generally playing around. This wasn’t time planned but at Easter I spent a week refreshing and cementing my project management skills then went about drawing up a project timescale breaking everything down into segments. This plan was followed surprisingly well the main issues being caused by lack of experience or technical problems. Initially I had planned the time up until the end of the year, so I re-planned the time when I realised the deadline was sooner. The diary was then reassessed half way through May and amended to correct the deviations and meet the most urgent of needs first.

I did stray from the path a little in terms of unaccounted for requisites. The reseller account setup was much more time-consuming than anticipated, this has taken several days to configure, familiarize and integrate and is still a working progress. I spent a whole day setting up social networking accounts and have learnt a bit about Swift 3D and CS4 which I hadn’t planned. PHP was allocated nowhere near enough time, not because it is complicated, it is actually got a reasonably plain English simple structure but I had that many problems getting things to work locally I spent a day on that two days learning then had to backbench it. The main error on my part was due to unfamiliarity and learning new aspects as I completed the project. I most certainly underestimated the content (copy) creation as I do not normally do this part and as I had been learning SEO & marketing best practices on the fly I kept needing to re-write and change the flow/structure/wording and also had to increase the number of pages for SEO purposes. I do think I’ve done pretty well considering how many roles I’ve played, looking at the project with hindsight I would say I was optimistic with time planning, in a professional environment you would probably be looking at 2-4 weeks lead time for the just the finalized copy.

Strategy & Theory

When it comes to planning how to communicate a message, values or ideas I now seem to have an armoury of methods spanning the fields of design, marketing, psychology, usability and technologies. This is extremely good in some ways as I can look at a project as a whole, knowing how a design could be achieved with certain technologies and what needs to be done to avoid complications at later points. The problem is I have learnt a great deal over the past few years and they are in need of more application. At the moment it is like a box of puppies, raw knowledge yapping at me all at the same time. Now some of these yaps seem to contradict each other and conflicts arise. Should you create a strictly semantic document or should you rearrange it to suit SEO purposes? Should you place an important element on the page where people are going to look first or should you put it where it looks better? All these issues can only be resolved by personal judgement, there is no right or wrong answer and as I do not have much basis to reason myself out of the predicaments it is a case of guesswork and experimentation at the moment.

Design, Technology and Learning

Sometime I feel I’ve reached a puddle in the road. I stop for a moment and invent a bridge, a helicopter and a catapult to get me to the other side. Then I realize I can just step over it.

I do have a tendency to get bored fast and multitask things to death. Looking at the project planning I have a heap of notes and scribbles which all need consolidating, digitising and tidying up to make any sense. I did some of the design work, before finishing the planning and did the content at the same time. This seems very random but it works for me. I’ve read books on how to do things before, read a few chapters, got the gist and then guessed the rest. I think I apply this approach to projects too, enhanced tremendously by not having any external direction (client).

I shall annotate my design process more thoroughly in a separate post however it went something like this. After the planning and research it was a matter of playing to create various options and logos. I developed the “cube” route and then decided to favour a alternate route. I had drafted out a site and stationary but was missing that spark of inspiration. I like both the “cube” and the “basic blue” logos the latter needing some development. I decided to progress with a basic site design and to focus my attention on the structure and functionality after all a working site is more important as it can be easily re-skinned.

Technologically I’ve really tried to get myself involved, I’ve played with PHP, AJAX, JavaScript and CGI scripts. This was perhaps a little foolish but I think it is vital for me to have at least a basic grasp of PHP and JavaScript to compete at a professional level, the internet is getting more and more complex, customers want more functionality as standard so if there are timesaving ways meet demand you need to know them.

I've been looking into how the Wordpress platform can be manipulated and tweaked to give all manner of fantabulous results.

Wordpress is an extremely well build, well thought out and easily extensible platform. It has a rich history and the development has been a work of passion for many community members. However this is not a history lesson so briefly on to my point...

Wikipedia states, "WordPress is an open source blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL which can also be used for basic content management. It has many features including a user-friendly workflow, a rich plugin architecture, and an advanced templating system."

Or more simply it is database driven, meaning all the content or data is stored in one place. PHP commands tell the server what data to retrieve and where to put it.

This means Wordpress can be edited, inserted into HTML pages or completely rewritten to suit whatever the need is. You can create a full web site, add blogging functionality or even use as a basic CMS. Some very powerful and time saving functionality which also gives the client a ready made user friendly dashboard needed to edit the contents.

Branding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branding
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/layer?topicId=1073903636
http://www.bizhelp24.com/marketing/what-is-branding-.html
http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/en/About-Design/Business-Essentials/The-power-of-branding-a-practical-guide/

Corporate Identity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_identity

http://www.logodesign.co.uk/
http://www.fluidcreativity.co.uk/identity.asp
http://www.cogent-design.com/
http://www.graphicdesignblog.co.uk/corporate-identity-guidelines/

Equipment
http://www.graphicdesignblog.co.uk/equipment-for-a-graphic-designer/

Recently I've been looking at different ways of incorporating text or functionality from Wordpress into HTML pages. The possibilities offered by WP are endless and constantly expanding. Whole sites can effectively be built and templates easily created to make the blog engine look like regular web sites.

There are many benefits of doing things this way too. A lot less time needs to be spent by the developer (me) on coding and programming.

At the moment I'm just looking at ways of adding simple blog feeds to web pages. I still have a few questions re. SEO and PHP but can't find much online about this. Do robots crawl headers if they are added via php includes? Is text stored in a database indexed?

Here is a few few relevant bits and pieces.



"Technorati.com has been tracking the growth of the number of blogs for
four years. As of April 2007, Technorati was tracking over 70 million blogs
and seeing a growth of approximately 120,000 creates each day. Technorati’s
David Sifry estimates that approximately 1.4 blogs are created every second
of every day (see www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000493.html)."

Integrating WordPress with Your Website

I saw a episode of Click recently and they were reviewing Windows 7. After the previously over-hyped and subsequent flop that was Vista it looks like the guys at Microsoft have been busy. With the increasing popularity of Apple products and a dwindling market share it seems blatantly obvious that MS are frantically trying to shake both the clunky/crashy/ugly aspects of their products and the geeky/cheapy/boring image they have.

I can imagine it now. Many a heated meeting at Microsoft HQ, fat men in suits, people getting fired, hired and forcefully retired. Pitches & power words, "blue sky thinking", "outside the box" and similar phrases been said far to often. Big money been thrown at a big problem. Who do we know that's "cool", that's "hip"? Bring in the agencies, the advertisers and the marketers, the Trinny, Susannas and Goks to provide an extreme makeover to the ultimate nerd.

Did it work?

Well I must say the "I'm a PC" advertisement was a good move. The Apple commercials were a direct mockery of PC's with a slight hint of school ground bullying going on. The personalization of the product and the heightened emphasis been placed upon PC's commonality and user base within society boosts their credibility. The similar tone or inferred response to the "I'm a Mac" ads has an element of standing up to the bully along with displaying a sense of humor. Wise move also as it's damn near impossible to make a joke of someone if they're already laughing at themselves. So hats off on advertising, wouldn't say there would be any detrimental effect to Apple but PC's can walk away with their head held high.

OK, damage control sorted now the hard part.

After the issues with Vista MS need to ensure this launch is smooth as possible, technical bugs need to be a minimum, it needs to run fast and look good. Some of the major problems with Vista involved drivers not working so people could no longer use printers, cameras and other external devises. This was a problem which used to be quite apparent with Macs not supporting external devices however I have to say I have had a mac for about four years and everything has been supported or plug-in and play on the Mac. The PC has sometimes required installing programs, updating software, restarting several times, slapping my thigh and pulling a funny face. Yes I would have to admit my preference is towards Macs, I find the platform to be more stable, run faster, the file/GUI hierarchy makes more sense and the usability is more intuitive and efficient. Usability is something I believe Apple do extremely well, you can tell a lot of thought has gone in to every aspect. Apart from the stupid-one-button-mouse that is.

Anyway on that point Windows 7 and usability. My first thoughts are to say copycats! They have rejigged the start menu and quick launch menu to create something very similar to the dock. There are also added ways to navigate between window which are very similar to expose and command+tab. There is a built in touch navigation like you get on the iPhone and you can tell they trying to soup up their "we're cool" image by looking at the new selection of built in screen savers.

Image source & more info

The European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition is a new European forum dedicated to frontier research in future and emerging information technologies. More than 700 scientists, policy-makers, industry representatives and science journalists convened over 3 days to discuss today's frontier science, tomorrow's technologies and the impact of both on tomorrow's society.

Science Beyond Fiction

One of the tasks involved with getting the reseller account set up was configuring Hostpay, this is their inbuilt e-commerce system. Once you have specified the type of account, price and any add-ons or domains to offer then your customers can purchase online. Activation is done automatically by their robots.

You can use several different payment gatways. I have set up separate accounts with Google Checkout and PayPal, the latter I have used personally. I've never used Google Checkout before but I'm going to see how it goes, can't say I'm a big fan of PayPal, having a 5 day wait to transfer funds is a pain in the donkey.

Am probably going to look at replacing the Hostpay system with a custom buit cart when I get time but for speed it will do for now.

Here is a small sample of some of the categories and options which needed to be configured when setting up a reseller account. I was expecting a bit of effort to be involved but trawling through all these settings is verging on the ridiculous. I suppose I shall be grateful for the degree of customization available eventually but it is a trauma setting all the functionality and pricing for each hosting package never mind editing all the associated admin, management, accounting and branding involved.

There are a ton of templates, image libraries and bricabrac available to offer punters with the accounts but I think there a bit of a con. They look good on the obligatory comparison charts allowing you to have ticks against the incredible amount of services you offer but there not very good. In fact there hideous, I definitely wouldn't charge for any of the included templates.

The New New Economy: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity

The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

"Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort of communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream."

Fascinating articles resonating some of the issues I covered in my essay recently. The public awareness of false values instilled by industries persistent marketing tactics does seem to be on the rise. People are talking to each other, teaching themselves and working together. The availability of knowledge and technology made possible by the internet is an incredible advancement for humanity as a whole and is a formidable threat to big business. It is taken as gospel that in any highly competitive market whatever you offer eventually someone will find a way to offer the same thing for free. "Same" however is not the right word, similar is more appropriate and this is important. Open Source or free is no threat to any business so long as you are better in some form. Whatever you provide it must be effective, you must give people what they want and do it in the most streamlined way possible.

Looking at free products or Open Source software is great, it is free market research, just the same as looking at your competitors. You can see what the majority like, dislike and what is useful. This information is priceless, armed with this you then just need to look at your target audience, improve on the formula and tailor it to meet their specific needs. The free market is admittedly a large market but it is a separate entity from the premium market. If your product is worth paying for people will and whats more by specifically targeting this segment of the market you are also establishing a more stable cash flow. After all the free market consumers want to pay little or nothing for products and price is likely to be a bigger issue.

By targeting the people happy to pay extra for a better product you are tapping a much more reliable income, consumers willing to spend on luxury not necessity. Simple notion yet hard work. As previously mentioned people now talk, reviews and forums tell consumers who is good, bad and ugly in the market place. To compete you have to be good and stay good, listen to your customers and give them what they want. On a slight tangent you also need to remember who your targeting when you create your Brand, website and marketing. If you cover your web site and leaflets with "Call now for a FREE quote" or "FREE CONSULTATION" you may entice a few more leads but are they going to be the type of client you want? People with expendable income tend to place less emphasis on cost and expect not to pay for quotes or consultations anyway.

Why Brand your company?

Microsoft - What does your compant stand for?

A successful image is the foundation of every successful company

One of the most important assets you can develop for your business is a powerful brand

Brand Strategy

Branding Your Business

Why do I need a web site?

Get the right website for your business

Top Reasons to Get a website

Top 13 reasons to get a web site

Internet and Email marketing guide for web sites

18 reasons for having a web site

SEO & marketing outcomes

Why Use SEO?

Why use SEO?

The Benefits of SEO

What use is marketing?

Direct marketing: the basics

How to Use Marketing to Add Value to Your Company

Taken from Sqidspot