Archive for March, 2009

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To Flash or Not to Flash

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

The debate over Flash and its role in search engine optimisation has waged for quite some time now, and it is no different in the office.

Yes

“I would say yes to Flash, it can do heaps to enhance a website branding after all once you have a customer to your site you want them to be impressed and spend time on it. But there are some conditions, splash pages are a big no no and websites that take an age to load up- not good. So for me just a few wee ‘flashy’ touches here and there can really bring site to life without too much impact on an SEO campaign.” Laura

“I think that it depends on what the purpose of your site is that can identify how much or how little Flash is appropriate. Mobile phone sites and car sites are a great example of how Flash can intensify user experience by simple giving users more in terms of style and information. The obvious drawback is the loading time, but I personally feel on the large that it is well worth waiting for. Flash can be so sleek and seamless and can add a touch of quality and professionalism that I feel the web sometimes lacks.” Pamela

No

“As Laura suggests, some Flash “touches here and there” can really help a websites visual appeal. There are some warnings to heed though, while Google has been working to improve it’s understanding of flash content, there are still  major issue’s with indexing Flash content. Further to the SEO implications, all flash designs tend to be fraught with usability & accessibility issues.

All in all, by all means use flash for design elements of a site but steer clear of over utilising it for primary content & navigation. Don’t let your web designer get too carried away in their Flash design, ultimately your website is there to drive your business. Not showcase the designers Flash skills.

As a matter of course, when considering Flash, first ask yourself two questions:

1)    Is Flash is the only technique available to achieve the desired effect?
2)    Is the use of Flash warranted for your target audience?

If the answer to either of those is “No”, then you might want to re-consider.” Andrew

Search Engine Optimization Technology Center

Adobe has certainly upped the ante with the launch of their Search Engine Optimisation Technology Centre in a bid to persuade us all that Flash isn’t so bad as we are (rightly or wrongly, we’ll let you decide) led to believe. The website aims to explain what the challenges of using Flash are, providing practical steps, examples, and best practices that you can follow to overcome them.

“Ensuring that search engines can crawl and index your rich Internet applications (RIAs)—so that your content can be found by others—is of critical importance to building and maintaining an online presence. While Adobe and the leading search engines are making significant strides in making SWF content more searchable, you can take additional steps now to improve your search ranking positions further.” Adobe

The website is chock a block full of content and useful articles aimed at providing guidance to developers looking to create some search engine friendly Flash. This is definatley a positive step towards making Flash more accessible, providing web developers take the time to follow the guidelines set out by Adobe and Google.

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Diary of the Twitter Newbies

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

Another week, another diary post. The past week has been fairly low key but with some good results, Tip #3 was to spruce up our profile. I (@LauraJDavis) went so far as to change my pic (somehow a pic of me a little worse for wear wasn’t working, check the new one below) and we both changed our profile bio’s. Whether this had any impact is hard to tell, but from a little snooping into our followers own bio’s we can see that they have similar interests as what we stated so we have came to the conclusion that there is something in it.

Also on the up this week has been the number of times we have been tweeting on a daily basis; we have really thrown ourselves into putting relevant (and on the rare occasion funny) tweets up, as a result we got a few @reply from some of our followers which caused a bit of excitement! (Yes we are sad, we know this already!) We are also starting to realise that talking, sorry twitting, about popular subjects or topics can be beneficial, for example @LauraJDavis and @PammyWeaver had a small(ish) chat about a certain teen vampire book turned box office smash movie (please refer to my earlier statement of us being sad and knowing it) and we both saw a jump in the number of visitors. On another occasion help was asked about a work related subject which reminds us that not only is Twitter a social marketing tool it can be resourceful and an excellent way to expand contacts in the local area.

Which leads us to…

Tip #4

This weeks tip comes from a fellow twitterer, @marcode who very kindly @reply both @PammyWeaver and @LauraJDavis and told us of an iPhone application that puts you in contact with twitterers in the local area. Not having an iPhone we are going to have to find a similar tool online and then find twitterers in our local area the aim being to increase our business contacts in the local area.

When we find said tool I will report back…

@laurajdavis

Followers 66 (+7)

Following 113

@Pammyweaver

Followers 70 (+6)

Following 120

Keep posted guys…

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Good design is good business

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Good design is good business, a famous quote by Thomas Watson Jr of IBM fame, and one which in these difficult times has become more relevant than ever.

Designing your business for success has the same properties as designing a new product for success; it must be functional, efficient and look good.

Putting aside aesthetics for the moment; functionality and efficiency are two fundamentals that support a strong brand. In this current climate your business needs to be functional more than ever. It needs to fulfill a need of the customer, businesses that will continue to thrive during this recession will be the ‘essential buys’; the bread and milks of the world, those indispensable items businesses and consumers cannot live without. However, this ‘essential buy’ must be efficient, it must deliver to the buyer’s expectation; quality for money is at the forefront of every buyers mind during a recession.

Like any product once developed you need branding to communicate, sell and persuade your target market. If functionality and efficiency are the script and props of your company then branding are the actors bringing it life, and during this recession branding has became more important than ever.

A report in March revealed that 64% of UK business owners saw successful rebranding as a route to gaining “a competitive edge in a downturn”. 56% of marketing directors of blue chip companies also believe that a downturn is the best time strategically to rebrand, with a new identity seen as a “bold embracing of change”.

Further to this the Design Council has revealed that British Businesses…

  • … are looking to design their way out of downturn. Over half (54%) of the firms in our survey thought design would contribute to a large or great extent in helping maintain their competitive edge in the current economic climate.
  • … think design is more important now. Similarly, 53% thought that design had become more important in helping the firm to achieve its business objectives over the last three years.
  • … think design is integral to the economic performance of the UK. The same number agreed or strongly agreed that design is integral to the country’s future economic performance.

This tells us that not only is design integral to coming out of the recession (relatively) unscathed but also that everyone else is in on the game, so how do you really gain a ‘competitive edge’ in the branding stakes when everyone else is sitting with a pencil and sketch book pondering the same thing?

  • Have clear direction; know where you are taking your product or services and position the company with a clear point of view. Use this point of view to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
  • Channel all effort on creating one solid brand, not numerous different brands which make up the one company.
  • Make consumers aware of what your business strengths are, focusing on quality and value.
  • Tell people about your green credentials and CSR.
  • As everyone else slashes their marketing budgets their brands voice will quieten- what should you do? Turn it up.
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Design Crush – edition 2

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

For the second post of the Design Crush series, we thought it apt to review the new online Zavvi (http://www.zavvi.co.uk) website. Since the high street chain went into administration last year, the online store has been re-launched and is now open for business as usual. As avid fans of buying DVD’s and CD’s online, we jumped at the chance to check out the website and pass our judgement.

There are plenty of sites out their all doing the same as Zavvi, such as Amazon (http://www.amazon.co.uk) and Play (http://www.play.com) so it faces stiff competition for established and popular sites. However, the Zavvi site feels a little fresher and slightly more straightforward than its more well known competition. This is largely due to the good use of colours and layout. The colour scheme is derived from the well recognised logo and it works well in creating an eye-catching and inviting theme that gives it strong personality and a bold statement to match.

One major element of the site that truly stands out is the lack of additional adverts that seem to cover the other entertainment retailing sites. Because of this, the website design seems to be clearer and gives the site a more welcoming feel instead of bombarding you with in-your-face advertising. This also makes it easy to work your way around the site, with an easy to use menu and clear product layouts.

We think that due to the websites clarity and bold design, Zavvi stands a good chance against its competition. We hope that Zavvi online sees more success than the stores did, but only time will tell.

What are your thoughts?

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PeriodicalUpdater for jQuery

Monday, March 9th, 2009

Here at 360innovate we’ve benefitted greatly from free and open source software.

Whether it’s the web server our sites run on or the operating system that runs the web server, free and open source software plays a huge part in the industry we work in.

And so, we present this jQuery plugin in an effort to give a little something back!

The Prototype javascript library features a very useful PeriodicalUpdater() function. This loads content at specified intervals, but if the content being pulled in doesn’t change, the interval gradually increases.

There are several benefits to this approach – it saves bandwidth, and can reduce the CPU usage on the client’s machine.

Unfortunately, there’s been no way to replicate this using jQuery…until now!

Let’s take a look at how it works.

Step 1 – Include the latest version of jQuery and the plugin.

<script src="jquery-1.3.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="jquery.periodicalupdater.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Step 2 – call the function with the necessary options and a callback function

$(document).ready(function(){
   $.PeriodicalUpdater({
      url : 'random.php'
   },
   function(data){
      var myHtml = 'The data returned from the server was: ' + data + '';
      $('#results').append(myHtml);
   });
})

Here’s a list of all the options you can set:

url
URL for the ajax request. (Required!)

method
Can be either get or post. (Or GET or POST!)

sendData
Array of values to be passed to the page – e.g. {name: “John”, greeting: “hello”}

minTimeout
Starting value for the timeout in milliseconds.

maxTimeout
Maximum length of time between requests.

multiplier
Sets the amount of decay between ajax requests. If this is set to 2, the length of time between each request will double while the response doesn’t change.

type
Response type – can be text, xml, json etc – as with jquery.get or jquery.post.

Step 3 – Stop the requests!

Finally, you might want to stop ajax requests from PeriodicalUpdater – you can do so like this (assuming you had a link with id stop):

$('a#stop').click(function(e){
   e.preventDefault();
   clearTimeout(PeriodicalTimer);
})

We hope you find this plugin useful. It’s dual licensed under the GPL and MIT licences (just like jQuery), so please read them before you use this plugin.

View the demonstration

Download the plugin

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Banana Day Bounces In

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Yes it finally here! Banana Day has landed in the 360innovate office!

On the menu;
banana & choc cookies
banana bread
banana & strawberry chocolate covered mini skewers
Banoffee pie

All Fairtrade of course!

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Serving up the La Vita website

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

360innovate are pleased to announce that the La Vita website has officially gone live.

The La Vita group run three Italian restaurants in Glasgow: Spuntini, La Vita Pizzeria City Centre and the La Vita Pizzeria Bishopsbriggs.

With our extensive experience within the restaurant industry the 360innovate team were more than excited to be creating websites for not just one but all three of the La Vita restaurants.

The project entailed building a bespoke content managed system with flash animation and some funky food graphics provided by Allan in the Graphic Web Design team.

Just looking at the website is making us hungry…

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Design Crush – edition 1

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

New to the 360innovate blog is the Design Crush series where we intend to talk about our latest likes and loves of design on the web.

Our design crush this week pays homage to British broadcasting as we admire the design of the Guardian site (http://www.guardian.co.uk/). Used by 12 million each month, the Guardian online is not only paving the way forward in terms of broadcasting and journalism through the web, but the websites design is unmatched and a pioneer in its industry. The first to embrace and combine quality design with online broadcasting, the Guardian.co.uk is a true example of how the line between online and offline design and marketing is becoming ever more faint.

Behind the Guardian’s online success is the editor-in-Chief Emily Bell, who has lead the way from the very beginning. Not only publishing the world’s number one podcast, Emily says there is a lot more to come with the next version of the site admitting that they have just “scratched the surface” of the possibilities.

But it is the design that we are really interested in. The site cleverly uses layout, typography and white space to create an ordered, modern and cutting edge feel. Although the site is primarily text based with heavy content, applying different colours to each section of the site enables ease of use and navigation as well as adding a quirky design element that we love. Strongly reliant on structure, the site is organised in a coherent manner, and with the addition of skilfully used typefaces, a contemporary look and feel has been created. The Guardian.co.uk is a perfect example of how traditional and online design can be combined to create a successful and contemporary website.

What do you think?

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Diary of the Twitter Newbies

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Time for Tip #3, but before we move on though lets have a quick look at Tip #2 and what exciting delights it brought us.

So Tip #2 was to interact with fellow Twitterers; this involved communicating with people following us (including the Smores), seeking out new people to follow using the search facility, and following those people who are following us.

The results were pretty insignificant, it is fair to say that a lot of people started following us but an almost equal amount stopped which meant there was no significant increase in followers.

It is fair to say that we found it hard interacting with our followers & those we were following; we just don’t have that much in common with them, and as for the celebs… well what do you Tweet to Demi Moore?! Effort will have to be made to seek out fellow Twitterers who share similar interests, so we can work on interacting.

The exercise wasn’t completely wasted, however, we did have a few replies from fellow Twitterers, obviously enamored with our fab chat, and on Friday @PammyWeaver got a boost when one of her followers recommended others to follow her. Which led to our discovery of the Follow Friday (they really should issue a handbook when you join), it took us 3 weeks to discover this fact but apparently on a Friday it is the ‘done thing’ to go out of your way to follow someone new.

“Instead of searching for people interested in the same topics as yourself #followfriday gives you the chance to find recommendations from friends who they think deserve your attention.” Makak Media

This has been duly noted and come next Friday we will be following and recommending like mad.

Moving swiftly onto our next tip.

Tip #3

We thought we would continue our ‘ interacting’ and use this weeks tip to look at our profile and what tips there are to spruce it up a bit. This weeks tip comes from Twittin Secrets, so sshh don’t tell anyone.

Optimize your 160 character “One Line Bio” which appears on the upper right of your Twitter profile page. In most cases the goal of the bio line is to get the reader to think you are “follow worthy.” Make it real, make it fun, make it interesting, make it YOU.

Make your personal picture (icon) a good one – in fact, make it great! Twitter is driven by personalities, so use a picture that expresses the “personality message” you want to get across. Logo’s, text, and images without humans or animals are often too business-like and negate the driving social force that propels Twitter.

Already I can see this tip being very helpful, am very much looking forward to scrapping my personal picture and replacing it with something a bit more professional. We will keep you posted on our progress.

See how well we did this week.

@laurajdavis

Followers 59 (+8)

Following 105

@Pammyweaver

Followers 64 (+4)

Following 111

Keep posted guys…

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Access All Areas

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Accessibility is a very important yet often disregarded area of web design. Accessibility authorities are few and far between, one of the main being the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), part of the W3C. The W3C works towards ensuring every person regardless of disability has equal access to information on the web.

More specifically, Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web.”

Having a website that is not accessible to everyone and anyone is not only unfair but from a business point of view it means that you are excluding potential customers. This means that having an accessible website is a concern not only for a web designer it should be something every business should consider when commissioning a corporate website.

There are several different components that can alter the accessibility of a website; content, and assistive technology are the main areas which this post will touch upon, however, accessibility has many different facets and issues which will not be discussed. For further information on this subject visit the W3C website.

Content and assisted technology
The content of a website is what the users interacts with; it is,

“the information in a Web page or Web application, including:
natural information such as text, images, and sounds
code or markup that defines structure, presentation, etc.”

It is a very important factor of web accessibility, after all information should be available to everyone; but if a website does not take into consideration who will be accessing the website and the difficulties they may encounter then there will be an unequal access to the information.

There is no defined list of disabilities that would have trouble accessing the internet, however, the most generalised are: visual impairments, audio impairments and physical impairments. This is of course a very small selection of disabilities, for a more comprehensive list visit the W3C website.

Visual Impairments
Blindness, partial sight and colour blindness are all visual impairments that may impede access to a website. To access the internet users suffering from a visual impairment such as blindness may rely upon assistive technology such as a screen reader, a screen reader reads out either selected elements of what is being displayed on the monitor (helpful for users with reading or learning difficulties), or it can read out everything that is happening on the computer (used by blind and vision impaired users). The screen reader will use the alt tag of an image to describe what it is so ensure all images and graphics have accurate Alt tags; don’t go overboard with the description give a clear and concise sentence about what the image is. Although the alt tag does say what an image is, try to avoid using images and graphics instead of text. As a screen reader is reading out the text on the website it is important to ensure that sentence structure and spelling in spot on, this is basic common sense.

Users with low vision may have difficulty reading or viewing a website and may use a screen reader or alternatively a screen enhancement system to enlarge the text and images on the website. Websites that offer alternative style sheets enable users to customise the website enlarging the text and adjusting the background colour as required.

Able Magazine displayed in the large text option

Able Magazine displayed in the large text option

Colour blindness is a lack of sensitivity to certain colours. Common forms of colour blindness include difficulty distinguishing between red and green, or between yellow and blue. Sometimes colour blindness results in the inability to perceive any colour. This can be problematic if for example text does not adequately contrast with the background, to alleviate this problem a website can offer a high contrast style sheet.

BBC's Ouch website displayed in high contrast

Hearing Difficulties
This may not be the first disability people would associate with accessibility issues; however, individuals who suffer from deafness may not be able to read written language fluently. The primary way to overcome this is to use clear and simple language, which many critics consider to be the best way to write for the web, Jakob Nielsen is one of the leading scholars on the matter.

Audio files pose an obstacle to those with hearing difficulties and will rely upon captions to access the information on the audio file. For this to be successful webmasters placing an audio file on their website must ensure that there is a full transcript of the audio file available.

Physical Difficulties

Motor disabilities, joint problems or missing limbs can affect the hands and arms, as well as other parts of the body. Specialised controllers, keyboards, pointing devices or mouth pointers are available to those with difficulty using standard input devices.

To aid those who do use a standard mouse give them the functionality to increase the font size and make onsite links big making it easier for those with precision difficulties to click the link.
In conclusion web accessibility is not only an important factor for those suffering from a disability; it is an issue that will no doubt affect most people at one point in their life. It is the responsibility of a web master to ensure that their website is accessible in as many different ways as possible; not only to ensure equal access to information but to ensure that you are getting the maximum amount of traffic to your website. For those online retailers who have not provided alternative style sheets or additional functionality for users with disabilities you are essentially turning customers away.

References

BBC Ouch

WAI

Able Magazine

Web Accessibility Checker

Jakob Nielsen

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