Embracing Twitter as a Business Tool  ¹

Posted by Kuljit to General on May 22nd, 2009  

I’ve always been skeptical about social networking sites.  Out of my colleagues and friends I was last to get a MySpace page (now gone) and the last to get a Facebook page. Neither really captured my imagination. I’ve only recently joined Twitter and really really enjoy it, it’s a great way to keep in touch with friends and family as most people already know. I use Twitter a lot more than I do Facebook and MySpace. Funnily enough Facebook have also introduced a micro-blogging tool in their interface to try and steal some of the action from Twitter.

It’s also great for business. Twitter’s growth statistics speak for themselves. Nielsen Online reported recently that in the past 12 months Twitter grew by 1,689% from February 2008 to February 2009. That’s an amazing amount. To go from 100,000 users to 1.78 million speaks volumes. The visitor stats make compelling reading. In less than 3 years they've become the third most visited social networking site in the United States of America. I remember not so long ago there were stories on the internet of disgruntled staff leaving Twitter for a variety of reasons. Some might remember Blaine Cook departed because of service reliability issues. That was big news back then and it looked certain that Twitter was going to implode.

Yes I know, this is another blog post on the interweb about Twitter but instead of me telling you how good it is and why everyone should be using it, I’m going to describe something that happened to me over Twitter recently which left me impressed, surprised and slightly confused at the same time. Continue reading

Digital Marketing in the UAE  ⁰

Posted by hoss to UX on December 12th, 2008  

We've just started working on projects in the UAE, with our first commission being in Abu Dhabi and although it's clearly a different culture to what we are used to in the west, some things have really taken me by surprise.

The biggest shock was that, when it comes to researching property purchases, people tend not to spend a lot of time looking at websites. Our experience, backed up by expat anecdotes, is that internet connectivity leaves a lot to be desired in the Emirates, something that has to be a contributory factor when most marketing sites these days would have had a 'broadband only' warning if made 5 years ago.

To add to this there is much less of a reliance on email, with text messaging being the electronic text platform of choice. One of the most significant influences behind this is emails not being considered legal documents, something that keeps fax machine sales buoyant here.

These two factors force us to rethink our traiditional strategies when it comes to property marketing with a much higher reliance on deliverables that enhance face to face marketing. This has actually played to our strengths as our most innovative digital marketing has been desktop application based which suits the kiosk environment and the exhibition take away well.

Background downloading—making use of idle connections allows us to deliver broadband-like experiences in territories with less than optimal ISP offerings. We're taking an infrastructure limitation and using it to diffferentiate our offering. It's easy to get used to superfast internet connections and an internet savvy audience, but although it may feel like we live in a global village, we must adapt our offering to stay relevant to disparate markets.

This is true innovation at its best.

Feedcreator creates feeds  ⁰

Posted by Michael to PHP on October 9th, 2008  

It aint exactly new, but Feedcreator is a light-weight PHP class that is used for, well, creating feeds (automagically, of course). We just put it to good use creating an RSS feed for our mothership site.

::thumbs up::

Zipcar. An IT and marketing company.  ²

Posted by hoss to UX on September 11th, 2008  

Imagine presenting a business plan that sets out the task of persuading Americans to get rid of their cars. Sounds crazy doesn't it? But Zipcar appear to have done just that, and the best bit is that their success comes from them focusing on user experience above all else. In the words of their CEO, Scott Griffith, "at core we're an IT and marketing company - we just happen to have a lot of cars".

Image courtesy of flickr user jm3

Griffith explains that they looked honestly at a candid list of all negative aspects of car hire, and fixed every single one. Continue reading

Sprinkles – making a good website great  ⁵

Posted by James to Design, UX on September 1st, 2008  

The web already has a few food related terms, cookies, breadcrumbs, spam... I'd like to talk about another one... sprinkles.

What is a sprinkle?

Well, hopefully you always take the trouble to put some icing on your cake. But how do you make your cake even better, even tastier? In a word, sprinkles.

Sprinkles are additions to a website that take it up a notch, from 'good' to 'great'. Something that enhances the user experience, whether in terms of aesthetics or functionality. Sites might work perfectly well without them, but with sprinkles they becomes unique and memorable. We've started keeping a prioritised list of potential sprinkles when working on a project, so that we know what to come back to if there's some spare time at the end of it.

A few examples.

Firstly Yay Hooray's custom smileys, affectionately known as pinkies.

skinnyCorp specialise in creating online communities (maybe you know a tshirt site called Threadless), and these cute graphics emphasise the exclusive/fun/designer vibe of the Yay Hooray forum in a way that default smileys couldn't:

Yay Hooray's smiley set

Continue reading

A Little Piece of Mind  ⁰

Posted by John to Project Launches on August 29th, 2008  

A Little Piece of Mind homepage

The site is is made up of one page containing many smaller boxes (or "patches") of content. Clicking on a patch brings it to the foreground. As the project grows & develops, more patches of text, images, etc. will be added.

Currently, the site has several patches explaining the project, a form to add yourself to the project mailing list, and a shadowbox form for submitting work to the project. To add a touch of dynamism to an otherwise static page, the background fades in/out three different patterns.

The javascript heavy-lifting is done using jQuery & Shadowbox, while the page generation and forms use PHP & MySQL.

Lee Mawdsley  ⁰

Posted by John to Project Launches on August 28th, 2008  

Its previous incarnation had a few significant usability issues. Firstly, the entire site (and all the content) was stored in a swf. Secondly, it opened in a tiny 710 x 567px pop up window (full size screen shot).

So, Lee needed a clean, image-rich space to display his photography to prospective clients. It had to have large images that could be dragged onto a viewer's desktop. He also wanted visitors to be able to browse through collections using the full screen (as opposed to the full browser window). The final requirement was a robust, yet easy to use content management system to keep his site up to date.

The new homepage

Given the site's simple, portfolio structure, we decided to use Indexhibit as the CMS. It didn't take very long to write a few plug-ins to customize look and feel of homepage & gallery pages. There was also a wee bit of tweaking to the config files, but that was to be expected. To address the browse-images-in-full-screen-mode issue we used Marque's very own SWF Lightbox. All of the javascript animation was taken care of by script.aculo.us.

Screenshot of SWF Lightbox in action.

You have 1 items.  ¹

Posted by hoss to UX on August 27th, 2008  

"Why bother? Nobody else does. And besides it wouldn't make that much difference if we did it anyway."

This is a statement sought out by organisations focused on customer service as it is often an X marked on a treasure map of opportunity to differentiate their offering.

There was a time when most online stores had a line of code along the lines of this for a basket summary.

summary = 'You have ' + nItems + ' items in your basket.';

Nice and neat. A single line of code, the smallest piece of additive logic. But it means that when I add a £2500 television, my purchase is summarised with "You have 1 items in your basket." 1 items? Imagine this in a physical store. I'm about to hand over two and a half grand for a telly and you're not even taking the time to acknowledge I'm buying one item instead of many. Why not go the whole hog and call me Sir/Madam? Continue reading

N.E.R.T.F.M.  ¹

Posted by hoss to UX on August 27th, 2008  

Nobody ever reads the manual. Video games worked this out years ago, and it's now standard to begin a game with limited features/functionality/ability and for the full gamut of buttons presses to be revealed in contextual narrative form during Level 1. It was a very simple step to achieve - it only required two changes to be made.

1. Introduce the game's narrative in the Tutorial
2. Rename the Tutorial to Level 1.

By calling the tutorial Level 1 it takes on a new importance from it's new mandatory state underscoring the importance of delivering as compelling an experience here as in the rest of the game. The reason N.E.R.T.F.M. is because the main event is far more compelling, which is why making the manual part of the main event is a great solution. Continue reading

Monitor Remote Error Logs with WebTail  ⁰

Posted by John to PHP on August 25th, 2008  

WebTail is a tool that mimics the Unix 'tail -f' command through a web interface.

The problem: A webhost generates log files filled with useful debugging information. Unfortunately if you don't have shell access to the server, in order to read the logs you have to download the entire log via FTP, then open it on your local machine. This process has a lot of overhead, especially if you just want to monitor the last few lines of the log (where the most recent messages live).

The solution: WebTail. Just upload the WebTail folder to your remote server, navigate to http://yourdomain/path/to/WebTail/, type in the URI to your error log, and hit 'Restart log'.

Head over to the WebTail download page to get v1.0, and see the full instructions.

WebTail was originally made by Marque to view PHP error logs on our Mosso hosted server. Therefore, it has only been tested in a few environments.