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:

• Online storage – Dropbox
• Email and documents – Google Apps
• Project Management – Basecamp
• Sharing photos online – Flickr
• Sharing thoughts online - Twitter
• Sharing bookmarks online – Delicious

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!

Attracting and keeping customers

• Attract – ‘what’s in it for me’ attitude to why people should visit your web site
• Engagement – search, copy, tools – creates awareness
• Motivate – the dance between the customer and owner, you can “entertain” your users by following these steps:
  • Popular – relevant content
  • Useful – an online tool to save them time and costs having to research elsewhere
  • Accessible – not hidden, integrated with other networks – feeds, etc
  • Social – interactive, changing daily, eg: reviews
• Commitment – show customer you care and you value your relationship with users
• Make any offers online easy to adopt and participate, make it distinctive so your site stands out

Social media increase

A recent Nielsen report in the last year alone, time spent on social networking sites has surged 73 percent.

More recently, stats show that Online video more popular than blogging and social networking

Brand new world

Andy Hobsbawm’s (Agency.com) Keynote

Be a verb not a noun – be about action rather than words. All about the ‘active principle’ at the centre,
eg: topshop at fashion week, podcasts, rss.

The way to multi task and handle information is the way brands will be managed in the future – easier to get info from social network – Twitter search. May become a superbrand, completely up for grabs. No right answer now.

Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories. These social networks allow us to tell our stories.

Unless you have a great product someone could ruin your product using social media. eg expensive acai berries, or organic pomegranite. Don’t always aim for a narrow slice of the shelf, or share of market. Compared to Tesco who manage all of these exotic fruit and much more.

Micro brands, enough people that buy them might make a business, but no right answer at the moment.

Media industry based on old costing model. DVD region 2. Publishing on Internet is next to nothing compared to costs of producing and marketing a advert on TV. Television at the moment is just another screen to display content.

Communication is what makes the world go round, and the essence of social media.

Why is link building important?

By getting carefully targeted traffic from related sites can lead to a natural, long-term increase in page impressions, with this comes increased conversions – where users either make a purchase or making contact with the company through the web site.

The result being increased awareness, visibility and credibility of your site. As well as link popularity and PageRank.

Extra links pointing to your site also obtains wider search engine exposure and helps the website get indexed by search engines.

Link building along with on site optimisation are the two factors which are vital to a
successful SEO campaign.

Tools for measuring the back links to your site

You will want to know how well your link building campaign is going, and how many links have been successful that you have submitted to other sites, and if your content is great other people would have blogged or posted links to your site as well.

With the tools below you can measure and adapt your link building campaign to work more successfully for you. Especially if you are paying for directory listings, you may find the low traffic you are getting from one site may be a complete waste of money.

• Google Analytics
• Google Link Operator – Where you type “link: www.yourwebsitename.com” to find out the number of links Google has found that are pointing to your site
• Yahoo Site Explorer Similar to Google Operator search, uses Yahoo’s cache instead – more comprehensive

Link building principles

• More inbound links (backlinks) to a page will increase your PageRank
• Link quality is important – one link from a high quality website may be better than 100 links from low quality ones
• Sites with on-page optimisation for a particular keyphrase are favoured by SEs

Use only ‘ethical’ search engine methods

When choosing a company to link building services make sure they use ethical techniques. As any ‘black hat’ or devious methods could violate Google’s Guidelines, Yahoo Guidelines or MSN’s Guidelines for search engine optimisation practices.

Link building Mind Map

The map below shows the methods you can use to build links to your site, as well as measure the success of them.

Instructions: Click and drag the map like a Google Map. You can expand or collapse the ‘nodes’ by clicking on the + or -, and also zoom in or out with the buttons at the bottom of the map.

Learn about our website promotion services.

Download this information a client eguide.

INTRODUCTION
easthampshire.org is a community site which features daily news updates and an extensive event listings of what’s happening in and around the the East Hampshire Area. Also interactive maps, and information on towns and villages in East Hampshire.

This is not the main portal site for EHDC as you may think, but a companion/sister site that has features that are useful for anyone wanting to learn more about the East Hampshire area.

You don’t have to live in East Hampshire to be able to appreciate that in a traditionally rural area so much is happening. Furthermore, you don’t have to register to enjoy the wealth of information constantly being added to the site, however, to get the customisable and personalised features that the site offers you can register for free.

COMMUNITY BASED SITE
EHDC want the site to be a hub for community information with free pages for groups, customisable profiles, and links to other local websites.

As you can visit the site and learn about the area, also the people that feature on the site. We hope it wil draw people closer together in this rural county. It features content generated by members on the site, as well as featuring social networking features such as member profiles, being able to comment on various sections of the site. As the site grows from visitors generating content as well as the EHDC team publishing content, it means that for the first time a two way dialogue on-line can be created on a local government site.

Visitors to the site can learn from a number of interesting sections on the site – news, events, towns and villages, and local groups. You can pinpoint the news for example down to street level – using geo-coding and Google maps on the interactive map, something that has not been done at this level before by a council run site.

All visitor’s to the site have the opportunity to submit their own news or event item, which is moderated by the EHDC team and then published on the site. As a group admin, a club secretary for a local club or group – for example, the Greatham Gardeners club group, they can add events automatically to the site, using a form that sends their details directly to Yahoo Upcoming. This information is then pulled back into the site, and featured on their group page. Allowing all visitors to learn about the group, and possibly attend the event.

As part of this ‘add event’ feature the person entering details into the form can geo-code the event, as well as ‘tag’ the event – meaning the event is shown on various parts of the site at the same time, as well as being featured on upcoming’s service.

For example view the event for “Plants and Gardens of the Italian Lakes at Greatham Village Hall” on easthampshire.org, listing detail, map detail and the same listing on upcoming.

SOCIAL FEATURES
The site is quite innovative in the way it uses already existing web services to do the work for us. Why create something that is already working and proven? We have integrated social elements in the site using the API’s of Yahoo’s upcoming, del.ico.us, and Google Maps. We also have geo-coded events and news items, so users can get driving directions for events, for example. And also find out where exactly that news item is referring to.

The events all feature hcalendar using microformats. With the correct coding we have structured the event listing so that that search engines and other aggregators can retrieve such events, automatically convert them to iCalendar, and use them in any iCalendar application or service, such Google calendar.

Although not a social feature, we have added OpenID to the site, so users don’t have to remember their username and password. With OpenID, it means that users can log on to different web sites using a single digital identity, single sign-on. This relates to data portability and means that you don’t have to remember all those different passwords for each website account.

CUSTOMISABLE FEATURES
The main aim is to let people be creative and pull their information from various sources on this site, as well as external sites.

By choosing which town or village you are interested about during registration, boxes featuring events and news based on your choice will automatically appear on your homepage.

There is a ‘netvibes’ style homepage where you can move the boxes around the page depending on your preference. You can also choose which boxes appear. As well as having your delicious bookmarks on your easthampshire homepage.

The RSS page means users can be updated by using their RSS reader on new details on any town or village in East Hampshire.

WHAT’S NEXT?
We’d love to hear your feedback either on here, or directly on the site. Is this the future for council sites that are embracing current and future web technologies?

We hope this will attract some attention from other community sites, and set new standards in how councils can communicate with member of the public.

The site is still in beta and we have more interesting features planned for the site planned, early 2009. Watch this space!

For more information checkout easthampshire.org’s brochure:

Whether you like it or not, HTML email marketing campaigns are a core requirement for any successful email marketing program.

An email campaign can boost a companies revenue by millions of pounds, for example over this Christmas period how many do you think you will receive from your favourite brands – electronics, music, etc?

Email marketing is a cheap and successful online marketing method. Cheap in relation to posting out printed flyers to every recipient. And successful by being able to measure the success of every email campaign, tracking every open time and read time for each email. HTML emails done correctly, offer a better conversion rate, and people choose HTML over plain text format more often.

So, here’s a list to help all email marketers and designers create the perfect email, and make sure it appears as you intended on your customers computers. If you feel I’ve missed any important ones, feel free to leave a comment.

Make no mistake, HTML email design and development is a complete minefield. There are very few rules that you can rely upon across all mail clients. Let’s do this:

1. USE INLINE CSS + TABLES
External and internal style sheets are ignored by a number of email clients. Back to the old school with tables too. Yes, it means going back to 1999 coding, and does make the code heavy, but it means you can guarantee locking down the styles to be correct in the ‘majority’ of email clients.

2. EMAIL TEMPLATES
Unless you have extensive personal experience to draw on,
you’re most likely going to want start with a template that gets most of the fundamentals right. Save yourself some time, get some inspiration and free templates here:

• carbon graffiti
• campaign monitor gallery

3. USE ABSOLUTE DIMENSIONS
In pixels for all measurements. For example, give images and tables exact pixel dimensions – so the browser knows exactly how to display it. Email clients are not as forgiving as web browsers.

4. THE DESIGN
The width of the email design to be no more than 600 pixels wide, so the full width of the email can be seen in the view port in email preview mode.

5. ACCESSIBILITY
Make sure it is readable, with images turned off does the email make sense? By default images are not displayed in most email clients (unless you have added the address to your contacts), also not creating the best look for your company.

Image of email in web-mail client (Gmail) – notice that the email doesn’t make much sense with the images turned off? This can be improved by adding copy to the ALT attribute in the html code:

• Use Alt attributes
• Use anchor link as well to take people to important subheadings in your email
• Last resort – have a prominent link to your web version of the same email

6. FANTASTIC COPYWRITING
Attention grabbing headlines that will make users want to read more and click through. The attention grabbing information should be already visible in the viewport area when the email loads, very few people will scroll – like on web pages unless they like the information, drawing them down the page.

Image of email in web-mail client (Thunderbird) – notice that even with the images turned off the email still reads well, with the headline drawing you into the main content of the email. Simple design, yet to the point and easy to read, effective.

7. CSS SUPPORT IN EMAIL CLIENTS
Enter The email standards project.

These guys have taken the email design issue by the scruff of the neck and are actually getting Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook to take notice of the need for Email standards compliance.

Currently we grade the email clients in the following way:

The Angel’s Choir:

Strong and generally reliable HTML rendering capabilities – Thunderbird, AppleMail, and Opera Mail
You can essentially treat these mail clients as if they are normal, modern browsers.

The Muddlers:

This group includes the majority of the remaining mail clients and includes Outlook 2003, Outlook Express, and Yahoo Mail.

While you’ll probably encounter some variability in their renderings — often in text size and margins/padding – the Muddlers will generally honour your page layout.

The Legion of Doom:

Each uses their own unique but evil super-powers to subvert and destroy your HTML
Outlook 2007, Gmail, Lotus notes – rewrite CSS, padding/margins, no positioning support, removes backgrounds.

8. TESTING
Use litmusapp.com which sends back how your email looks on the following email clients:

Web-based email clients

* AOL Web
* Comcast
* Earthlink
* Gmail
* Mail.com
* MSN Hotmail
* Windows Live Hotmail
* Yahoo! Classic
* Yahoo! Mail

Desktop email clients

* AOL 9
* Lotus Notes 6.5.4
* Outlook 2003
* Outlook 2007
* Outlook Express 6
* Outlook XP
* Thunderbird
* Windows Mail (actually, what is that?)

Mobile email clients

* Blackberry
* Windows Mobile 5
* Windows Mobile 6

9 . THE FUTURE
At various sites there are thousands of new subscribers to html newsletters every single month. And those subscribers still always choose HTML over plain text at a rate of 15-20 to 1. In short, while we might not like it, your clients probably prefer HTML email, and so does their audience.

10. STICK WITH IT
Use the templates, HTML formats are here to stay so remember to keep it simple as possible, and test early and often.

Need our help? We offer web design and development services that will take the stress away from your email marketing campaign. Contact us to find out how we can help you.

Disclaimer: This is someones individual opinion into current design on a variety of portfolio sites. We have not paid to be included!

However, we hope we have made it on because the copy is as eyecatching as the interface design. We are firm believers that if there is nothing to keep the visitor on your pages, then the site has failed, even though the design may have orginally caught their attention.

To keep the meme rolling, here’s 40 sites you should visit. Inspirational and Beautiful indeed!

Barcamp Brighton 3. We are helping to pay for the staffing for this event which is being held at Brighton University.

‘BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats”, Wikipedia.

The event is free, with the only condition is that everyone should have a presentation to show. This way the information exchange and conversations resulting from each presentation can be maximised on.

You never quite know what will be presented or discussed at each event, that is the beauty of it. A really good networking event to meet new colleagues and possible clients.

Add yourself to the Barcamp Wiki if you want to attend, the weekend of 6th – 7th September 2008.

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The second event we are sponsoring is Singularity 2008. This is a completely new event organised by local Brightonian Aral Balkan.

Singularity is a web conference with all of the traditional elements. They’ve a wonderful lineup of speakers, presentations, question and answer sections, and networking opportunities.

The twist is that the conference takes place everywhere — all over the world — and using the Internet to tie it all together.

Being environmentally friendly web conference is something that definately appeals to us: saving on thousands of flights and the resulting carbon emissions by having speakers and attendees interact with the conference locally over the web.

We look forward to participating, on October 24-26th 2008. Put it in your diary and see how the event unfolds online!

That is where our company can help, as well as complete rebranding with a web site redesign we have improved the message we are giving our new and existing clients. Making it easy for you to do business on the web, with our experience in web design and development often utilising new and emerging web technologies.

Our old site and logo was ‘oh so web 1.0′ which was created back in 2004 when the business was first launched. Often is the case with any online business, the content on the web site was too overwhelming to encourage a simple understanding of our services and background. We found this turned prospective customers off.

Today, it is our strategic aim to be transparent, open and clear about what how we can solve your customers tasks online, and create a memorable and satisfying experience at the same time. This is often something we can help you with even before the practical work begins.

The aims for our new web site

1. Clearer Company message
2. Improved branding
3. Increase effectiveness of the web site as a marketing channel
4. Users to spend more time on sites pages
5. Improved usability and signposting

How will we measure success? By consistently reviewing our web analytics data. The launch of any web site is the first step and sometimes the simplest. It’s the continual reviewing of the site content, architecture and ease of use that requires finetuning throughout a websites lifecycle.

In the case of our web site, we have removed much of the old content from the previous site to show our talent as a agency that listens, and then carefully crafts usable online applications that clients and customers love.

Being based here in Brighton, the community aspect with this redesign was encouraged from the start, with critique on logo and web layout. Such as the comments that feature on these flickr images. We found this very helpful giving insight into what our peers, colleagues and friends thought. All very positive I’m pleased to say.

Since going live two weeks ago, our daily traffic has tripled as a result of the redesign and recent coverage over at the following CSS Galleries:

1. csszone
2. cssmoon
3. cssstar
4. css-lounge
5. commandshift3
6. cssdrive
7. cssremix
8. csselite.com
9. webdesign-is-art.com
10. cssflash.com
11. cssclip.com

Please tell us what you think. We look forward to hearing from you.

The theme for the event focused on creative approaches for design:
The main ways for the speakers we by ‘changing your perspectives’ and ‘asking and collaborating with other people for ideas’.

Inspiration vs duplication – Often leads to designs being directly copied as its easier, but leads to abuse. How do we go about doing the right thing? By looking for elements that solve problems in intersting ways.

Inspiration. Takes practice and is never ending process. Lead to wealth of ideas that you can apply to web design

Future design trends:

• Softer colours – wordpress org
• Use of video – Ms Dewey
• Horizontal vs Vertical Scrolling – ie. Personal portfolio site site where you can push creativity

User experience vs brand identity – ‘The iceberg experience’

User Experience and successful websites are built upon the following values: Visual 10%, Interaction 90%.

• Top part of iceberg is amazing but underneath is terrible.
• Like code on some web pages. The main and rewarding part of experience is when they start interacting with the site.
• Looks do count but if not thought well the user can be left with shallow experience.
• Create good cohesive experiences, by paying more attention to whats underneath.

A great designer creates the tools to help a user achieve a task they need to accomplish. A user will validate the success of the designers work or design.

Inspired design: a usable design need not be a Safe design (back to horizontal scrolling? , as this is the way the limits of design can be pushed further online.

Hot Design Tips – from various speakers

• Make connections. Show your name, your company. Develop relationships. Build trust. – join communities
• Trust, passionate users, ambassadors, Enthisiasm – Be human
• Desire paths, don’t try to predict things – get the site out the door and see how people use it.
• Adapt to scale – its a great problem to have. Solve problems that you didn’t worry about before
• Subtraction is iteration too.
• Realign don’t redesign – users will lose their pathways if you remove/change important functions.
• Don’t panic – listen and learn carefully before reacting to latest release.

References to sites and books mentioned by the speakers:

• Society of Digital Agencies – Created best practices for our service industry.
• Ideas that spread are more likely to suceed. These are idea viruses. Best ones are by friends and recommendations. Purple Cow
• Designing for Interaction – New Riders
• Ways of saying hello – Business card book
• Juxtapoz.com
• Seedconference
• Revyyer.com
• Abriefmessage.com
• Shauninman.com
• Creativebits.org