We have been writing our free eguides, one every month for the last 6 months.
These have proved to be popular with colleagues and clients alike. Why? Perhaps as we are sharing what we think is the latest trends, advice and best web services and applications out there.
We aim to continue to write guides about topics which affect how we work and make web sites work harder for you on the web. If you have any questions, or have a suggestion about one you would like to see get in touch.
Feel free to share the PDF eguides with your contacts and clients, they are published using a creative commons licence.
See for yourself at our eguides page, or download them directly here:
Following on from our recent post about cloud computing, we want to explain how as an every day user of the internet based services, ‘the cloud’ can improve your productivity when working away from the traditional fixed office, which is increasing due to the current offerings of flexible web applications
If you can access the same files remotely (when away from your permanent office) no matter where you are is a relief. Even more so: access to those files and docs regardless of the device you’re using is possible too.
If you get a new computer, and already use cloud services for storing your image, documents, music files, or email, you will be surprised to find out that there are barely any files you’ll have to transfer.
Heres our selection of the best cloud based services:
What we used 6 months ago, are different to what I have recommended here. I’m looking forward to seeing what services we’re going to be using in the next few months!
Wow, another year over.. And an almighty decade of web technology that has changed the way we all live and work on the web.
2009 completed a decade on a downturn, which for some companies was their first recession. It has been a learning time for all of us, with forecasters simply not knowing how far reaching or long the downturn would last for.
At this time of year we like to do a review to tell you all about our business practices and successes this year. Here’s our reviews from 2007 and 2008.
Needless to say, it’s been a interesting ride for all businesses this year, some leading agencies in London were closing on a weekly basis, with others in Brighton unfortunately doing the same due to lack of new and existing client work.
Here’s what we have been doing this year with a month by month review
To move and respond quickly to clients needs and requirements, embracing new technology, whilst keeping costs low – one of the main benefits of being a small web design and development agency.
Thank you to all our colleagues, friends, and customers for your inspiration, involvement and business over the last year. Merry Christmas and see you in 2010!
Finally, you ask what does the future hold check this out – one of the funniest geek videos of the year was an April fools video from Opera Face Gestures
A lot of very popular sites are run on clouds networks. OK, explain that to me in English..
This post will answer your questions whether you want to start using the service as a developer, or you are intrigued as how it can save you costs as a project manager or director
Put simply, cloud computing means that your computing resources live outside of your computer or computer room.
The Cloud is being touted as the key driver behind a new emerging economy based on lower costs and higher productivity than before: an economy holding great potential for smaller, agile businesses
Cloud Architectures address key difficulties surrounding large-scale data processing:
In traditional data processing it is difficult to get as many machines as an application needs.
It is difficult to get the machines when one needs them.
It is difficult to distribute and co-ordinate a large-scale job on different machines, run
processes on them, and provision another machine to recover if one machine fails.
It is difficult to auto- scale up and down based on dynamic workloads.
It is difficult to get rid of all those machines when the job is done
Cloud Architectures solve such difficulties
Applications built on Cloud Architectures run in-the-cloud where the physical location of the infrastructure is determined by the provider.
They take advantage of simple APIs of Internet-accessible services that scale on-demand, that are industrial-strength, where the complex reliability and scalability logic of the underlying services remains implemented and hidden inside-the-cloud.
Business Benefits of Cloud Architectures
There are some clear business benefits to building applications using Cloud Architectures:
Almost zero upfront infrastructure investment: If you have to build a large-scale system it may cost a fortune to invest in real estate, hardware (racks, machines, routers, backup power supplies), hardware management (power management, cooling), and operations personnel. Because of the upfront costs, it would typically need several rounds of management approvals before the project could even get started. Now, with utility-style computing, there is no fixed cost or startup cost.
Just-in-time Infrastructure: In the past, if you got famous and your systems or your infrastructure did not scale you became a victim of your own success. Conversely, if you invested heavily and did not get famous, you became a victim of your failure. By deploying applications in-the-cloud with dynamic capacity management software architects do not have to worry about pre-procuring capacity for large- scale systems. Thesolutions are low risk because you scale only as you grow. Cloud Architectures can relinquish infrastructure as quickly as you got them in the first place (in minutes).
More efficient resource utilization: System administrators usually worry about hardware procuring (when they run out of capacity) and better infrastructure utilization (when they have excess and idle capacity). With Cloud Architectures they can manage resources more effectively and efficiently by having the applications request and relinquish resources only what they need (on-demand).
Usage-based costing: Utility-style pricing allows billing the customer only for the infrastructure that has been used. The customer is not liable for the entire infrastructure that may be in place. This is a subtle difference between desktop applications and web applications. A desktop application or a traditional client-server application runs on customer’s own infrastructure (PC or server), whereas in a Cloud Architectures application, the customer uses a third party infrastructure and gets billed only for the fraction of it that was used.
Potential for shrinking the processing time: Parallelization is the one of the great ways to speed up processing. If one compute-intensive or data- intensive job that can be run in parallel takes 500 hours to process on one machine, with Cloud Architectures, it would be possible to spawn and launch 500 instances and process the same job in 1 hour. Having available an elastic infrastructure provides the application with the ability to exploit parallelization in a cost-effective manner reducing the total processing time.
Examples of Cloud Architectures
There are plenty of examples of applications that could utilize the power of Cloud Architectures. These range from back-office bulk processing systems to web applications. Some are listed below:
Document processing – Convert hundreds of thousands of documents from Microsoft Word to PDF, OCR millions of pages/images into raw searchable text
Image processing – Create thumbnails or low resolution variants of an image, resize millions of images
Video encoding
Create an index of web crawl data
Data mining – Perform search over millions of records
Back-office applications (in financial, insurance or retail sectors)
Log analysis -Analyze and generate daily/weekly reports
Perform nightly automated builds of source code repository every night in parallel
Automated Unit Testing and Deployment Testing
Testing (functional, load, quality) on different deployment configurations every night
Websites for conferences or events (Super Bowl, sports tournaments)
Promotion, Viral or Seasonal Websites – websites that only run at a certain time of year
We went walking yesterday on the south downs, near to where we live and found a balloon.
It had travelled from Birmingham, all the way unaided to land in a National Nature Reserve called ‘Castle Hill‘. (If I was a balloon, that’s the sort of place I would want to land in).
A school girl called Raju, had sent this up into the sky in the Midlands not knowing of whether she would hear from her balloon again,
It was this interaction if she had not done it, that would not have affected us either way, but because we did it lifted our spirits on a cold winters day and got us thinking about the smile on her face when she learns about the adventures of her balloon.
It has travelled approximately 180 miles. Some made it across the channel to France, how ever her’s decided to land on the footpath we were walking down a day or two later.
We wrote to the school to tell them that we had found the balloon, along with the two photos below of Fiona and the landing site.
Interaction with users in real life, much like social networks where people who wouldn’t normally connect have the chance to share experiences and captivate their lives as well as others around them.
After moving house, comes the inevitable trip to IKEA.
My wife mentioned something that she noticed from the many different types of shoppers that IKEA welcomes each day.
That not everyone is a DIY guru. However it’s very empowering that a person can pick up a IKEA instruction booklet, and by following a few steps they can get a good feeling about making their own furniture.
It allows you to be more adventurous, and creates a feeling like they have achieved something that they may not have thought they could do before.
This was also the example for a client who created the MTV2 network branding, back in the late 90’s. When an employee learnt how easy Ikea instructions were to follow – he chose to label a web interface the same way, so the visitor’s attention could be drawn to focus on specific areas of the message one part at a time.
This is the technique that some user experience designers use for web interfaces. For example, managing profiles like your Facebook, Flickr, or MySpace account, and even sending emails to friends.
Thankfully, as more web companies realise the need for user centered design – by fulfilling the needs and requirements of users when online, web sites have become more task or function orientated, and less flash splash pages – so 1990’s!
As a company our sole focus is to merge the requirements of users needs and business goals to seamlessly ‘make things work’. What is actually making the web site work is not important to users, thats just magic.. but the main goal is to empower users is creating something for themselves – This is something Ikea and the popular social networking sites do today.
We’re excited to have a second office in the heart of Soho, in central London, adding to our Brighton office.
Why expand in a downturn?
This allows us to be at the cutting edge of new developments in the capital, as well as collaborate with our friends, colleagues and other agencies on exciting digital projects.
It also allows us to attend fantastic networking events like open coffee, minibar and a wide range of regular and one-off ‘web-tech’ events that give us the opportunity to meet new colleagues and clients, talk to people about our work and look for new products to perhaps sell in the future.
As well as go after the larger range of work that is available in London.
We feel this will give us the advantage to learn, collaborate and deliver higher quality than before.
If you are based in London, or even if you are not and want to come to visit us and see the new office. Or meet up for a coffee, and an informal chat feel free to contact us.
Likewise, if you are looking for meeting roooms, permanent or hot-desking office space check out eoffice. Tell them we sent you!
