Sk-etchbook

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.

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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."

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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/

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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