Andrew Martin

Microsoft does the Pepsi challenge

Andrew Martin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:35:00 GMT

Microsoft have launched a site called the Mojave Experience and the views on it have been quite wide ranging.

From comparing it to the Milgram experiments in the 60's.
To being critical of people who aren't tech savvy enough to use Vista
To what if Apple had done it
To why did they use Flash for it rather than Silverlight
and a whole load in between

On the whole I think that the Microsoft marketing team were trying to do a good thing and demonstrate that a lot of the feelings about Vista were based on hearsay rather than experience of using it.

Yes I agree that you can make a number of things look better than they actually are in a demo, just ask most start ups, but they have included some videos of people who picked that what they were looking at was Vista.

Personally I'm a Vista user and find it OK. As with most OS's there are some good and some bad bits my team enjoy nothing more than watching me struggle with one of our Linux or OS X test boxes. I don't complain about it I see them as other operating systems in the market that as web professionals we need to be aware of and build solutions which work well on them. I just don't use them every day so will always be a little slower on them and not know all the things they can do. I'm sure that if somebody showed me a top notch demo of Vista I'd hardly recognise some of it either.

Maybe Microsoft should go the whole hog and provide a copy of Vista and a video camera to 100 people and get them to record what they think of their first month of using Vista. I doubt they will.

Full disclosure Microsoft is a client.

Tags: Mojave Experiment , Microsoft , Flash , Silverlight , Vista

The survey for people who make websites

Andrew Martin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:28:00 GMT

After the success of last year's survey where almost 33,000 web professionals took the List Apart survey they're running it again.

Take it here.

Tags: A List Apart

If fonts were people

Andrew Martin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:15:00 GMT

Via Digg

For all you designers out there

10 Downing Street is getting a new website

Andrew Martin — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:25:00 GMT

Hat tip to Puffbox that 10 Downing Street is soon to be releasing a new website, looks like a big improvement.

You can read their post here but in short

Wordpress based
More video
Streamlined navigation
no go live date as of yet

Tags: 10 Downing Street , Puffbox , Wordpress

The 10 Commandments of Web Design

Andrew Martin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:22:00 GMT

Business week has an interesting article titled The 10 Commandments of Web Design.

It lists these as

Thou shalt not abuse Flash
Thou shalt not hide content
Thou shalt not clutter
Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections
Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels
Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography
Thou shalt create immersive experiences
Thou shalt be social
Thou shalt embrace proven technologies
Thou shalt make content king

Interesting that Amazon and YouTube feature in both their best and worst list.

I agree with most of them but their description for Number 9 : Thou shalt embrace proven technologies is

"Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and their cohorts have become a part of daily life. Sites that can incorporate these elements into their design will connect with users in a meaningful way by providing functionality and an interface with which they're already familiar."

Surely they can't describe Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook as technologies. What does that make .NET, PHP, XML, JavaScript, and their cohorts?

Surprising there was nothing in there about accessibilty or web standards.

Tags: Business Week , Web Technologies , Web Design

It's the little things that count in web development

Andrew Martin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:04:00 GMT

I often listen to the radio through the BBC's excellent iPlayer while working but the link in my browser was to the older version. Now that they seem to have stopped publishing all the shows to it I had to update the link, I didn't actually know there was a newer version otherwise I would have updated it a lot quicker.

Check out the volume, its a great little touch which puts a smile on your face every time you want to change the volume.

More web designers should add this kind of feature/detail into sites.

Tags: iPlayer , BBC

New Balance the Marmite of the sports world

Andrew Martin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:58:00 GMT

I saw an ad recently for New Balance's Love/Hate advertising campagin and rather than me wanting to go and buy a pair, it normally doesn't take too much encoragement for me to buy a new pair of shoes, all I could think of was Marmite.

There's a slight difference in their adverting style

Maybe its a British thing.

Tags: New Balance, Marmite

Creating delightful experiences

Andrew Martin — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:59:00 GMT

Once again Reboot was very enjoyable but due to some hardware issues I wasn't able to get online, I think this may have made it more enjoyable it certainly meant I paid more attention to what people were saying.

This year seemed to be the year of white writing on black backgrounds as most presentations seemed to have this.

One of the most enjoyable was Andy Budd's packed out presentation on Designing the User Experience Curve.

You can check out the whole presentation on Slideshare.

Tags: Andy Budd, Reboot

Check out the Virgin Eye

Andrew Martin — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:02:00 GMT

Virgin have launched what they're calling the Virgin Eye.

Check it out here

It shows which stories are being written about Virgin companies in a nice graphical manner. My favorite is when you have Beautify on and you see new stories arriving.

The one thing that seems to be missing is displaying stories about itself.

Tags: Virgin Eye, Virgin, Data Visualization

Time for the yearly Reboot

Andrew Martin — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:06:00 GMT

Reboot is coming up again soon, definitely my favourite conference (if you can call it that) of the year.

I'd fully recommend people going.

Ever wondered what the milky way looks like?

Andrew Martin — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:25:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft launched it's Worldwide Telescope which is really cool. I was playing about with it with my kids and they thought it was great.

For those of you who wonder the center of the milky way looks like this

Yesterday Google kept up the pressure and launched it's Google Earth API at it's I/O conference in San Francisco.

Another really cool app even though there seem to be a couple of issues with the page when in Firefox.

Tags: Google Earth API Microsoft Worldwide Telescope

Silverlight resources

Andrew Martin — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:46:00 GMT

I was writing some text for a page on our website about Silverlight development and asked some of my team members for any resources that they use.

These are the ones that they find most useful

Silverlight.net
MSDN
Scott Guthrie’s blog
UK Silverlight designer and developer community
Design with Silverlight
Silverlight 2 video tutorials
Silverlight tutorials
Channel 9
MIX sessions
OPML of Silverlight blogs from Jamie Rodriguez
Online Training

I'll add to it as I find more.

Tags: Silverlight

Is SEO worth it?

Andrew Martin — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:20:00 GMT

Recently I've met with two people who are responsible for their corporate website marketing. One was from a pure play online financial brokerage company the other from a car rental company where most of their sales come through their website.

They had very different strategies on SEO with one having just let go of their SEO team and the other currently hiring a number of people to add to theirs.

Which is right? They both work in similar roles for similar types of companies and they're making these decisions based on information that they have about the performance of SEO on their website.

One area to consider is the type of service that their customers are looking for. If you're wanting to buy life insurance then you want to make sure that it covers you for all the areas that you need if you're looking to hire a car for your holiday in Spain then it needs to be able to fit x number of people and their bags. In the first scenarios you buy on features in the second on price. This would suggest that SEO strategies can produce a large volume of leads in a commodity market but of a very poor quality.

Why then do so many companies believe that any form of SEO strategy, no matter if it fits their business, is going to revolutionize their website performance.

Personally I much prefer the concept of findability as suggested by Peter Morville where if you build a site in the correct way and keep the information on there themed, relevant and up to date you will be naturally findable.

There is a great article on A List Apart, written by Aarron Walter,which I have just come across that all agency staff, including ours, should read.

If you think about and plan to build a findable website from the outset the benefits can be huge and at a much reduced cost than paying a company or building a team dedicated to SEO.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization, Findability, A List Apart, Peter Morville, Aaron Walter

Metia sign ID Manager Solution Partner agreement

Andrew Martin — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:17:00 GMT

It's not often that we post about what we do on a daily basis but sometimes there are things I just have to post about, they are also the things that normally that keep me from posting more regularly.

Over the last few months we've been working hard to extend the range of services that we offer. One area which seemed a natural progression, given our expertise in marketing and technology development, is Marketing Resource Management.

Rather than starting from scratch and building a solution from the ground up we have signed an agreement to become the first UK solution partner for Capital ID's ID Manager software platform.

Capital ID is a market leader in Europe for Marketing Resource Management systems based in Zwolle, The Netherlands, whose customer base includes Starbucks, Randstad Holding, ABN Amro and Rabobank. They were recently positioned by Gartner in their Marketing Resource Management magic quadrant.

All organisations are looking to drive efficiencies in their processes and make sure that they deliver the return on marketing investment required by their senior management. We have built a number of systems which have allowed companies to do this but none as feature rich and flexible as ID Manager. According to Gartner the MRM market is still immature compared with other CRM markets but is one which is gaining substantial growth.

We look forward to a productive partnership with Capital ID and to being able to offer these solutions to our customers.

Tags: Metia, Capital ID, ID Manager, Marketing Resource Management, Gartner

Penguins that can fly

Andrew Martin — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:39:00 GMT

The BBC has found a colony of Penguins that can fly. You can see the video on their iPlayer site

OK so this might be an April Fool.

The teams at Google/YouTube seem to have gone to town with a whole range of stories.

Search the future - http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/index.html
YouDigg - http://youtube.com/watch?v=vi9erdy7sz0
Rick Rolling features - http://uk.youtube.com/
Virgle the Virgin Google joint venture to Mars - http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html
The Google wake up kit - http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/new_wakeup.html
Google book search now smells better - http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2008/04/google-book-search-now-smells-better.html
Gmail Custom Time - http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html

You can see these and a big list of other online April Fools jokes here