Passionate about the web
My Neighbourhoods appeared in The Sunday Times Style Magazine on the barometer (’Going Up’) this week. It’s an excellent piece of publicity for the site. The mention has resulted in more members from all over the UK, which is good news as the site continues to grow.
You can view the press clipping on the My Neighbourhoods site.
My apologies if anyone has been trying to get in touch via email. Our hosts - 1 and 1 - are proving to be extremely inept this week. Their email servers have been experiencing problems for 4 days now. I’m seriously considering moving hosts once this fiasco is over.
In the meantime, it’s best to call if or skype me (dannybull55) if it’s urgent.
I’m delighted to be working with Danny Meadows-Klue at Digital Strategy Consulting. I worked for Danny at the Telegraph a number of years ago where we did some excellent work. I’ll be working with the team in a project management capacity and look forward to some very interesting projects.
We’ve just completed a design refresh for one of our clients, Vertica Risk Management. The site incorporates company information, job search, registration and easy job application. The facelift brings the company inline with brand identity and offline marketing.
I’m delighted to be working with the very nice people at ConnectMeAnywhere. The company’s premise: “You can make low cost calls to over 130 countries from your mobile or landlines.” The project involves updates to the company’s web site, specifically working with user data and the vCard format. It’s refreshing working with such a nice team who are passionate about what they do.
If you are interested in the ConnectMeAnywhere service, register for a free trial.
I attended the Internet People Mixer entrepreneurs networking event at the Adam Street Members Club last night and am very glad I did. There was a great mix of people and companies including Alex Tew (MillionDollarHomepage), YesNoMaybe, Mates Odds, QueensSpeech, ConnectMeAnywhere, Firebox, Yahoo! and Trusted Places to name a few. The most surreal part of the night had to be Alex Tew doing some very impressive human beatbox.
I would highly recommend attending one of these events or dinners. It’s an excellent way of seeing what’s happening in the UK web 2.0 and start-up scene as well meeting possible partners, clients or Venture Capitalists. Contact Robert Loch at Internet People or subscribe to their RSS feed.
I recently developed an HTML email for our friends over at Stephens Francis Whitson for their client, MORE TH>N. A common and affordable means of digital marketing, email campaigns can be an effective way of communicating directly with your customers. Previous clients I’ve worked with, Virgin Atlantic and Microsoft for example, put a great deal of time and money towards their email marketing efforts, with regularly impressive results.
For a developer, creating HTML emails that work across the many email clients, software and web-based applications (Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc) can be a frustrating process. CSS layout support is limited, stylesheets are often stripped out, background images don’t display and general images are often not displayed by default. Developers and designers differ in how they deal with these issues in order to create email designs that are consistent and that degrade well when support is limited.
My approach is to use tables for layout, using div tags sparingly. I avoid using deprecated font tags, opting instead for inline CSS for formatting and colours. Placing CSS classes in the head of a document is stripped out or replaced by some of the bigger web-based email clients and can seriously affect your design. Background images are also a no-go as the support is very limited and you can end up with a big chunk of your email design missing if you rely on them too much. Finally, I always make sure I have descriptive ALT tags where necessary - more and more computers or email clients don’t display images for security reasons, meaning users see a blank space. Having decent alternative text can be the difference between a customer deleting an email right away or switching on images to find out more.
The result is email communications that work across as many email clients as possible, a greater chance of making your customers read your message and, ultimately, click-through to your offering.
I recently took part in a 3 month long SharePoint re-brand for a large global resourcing company. The installation is being used worldwide, across many countries and, in addition to SharePoint portal; there are over 60 team sites. We went the whole distance, completely designing and re-branding the entire look and feel, including style sheets, imagery, functionality and templates.
Anyone who has re-branded a SharePoint installation will testify what a difficulty this can be. Microsoft has, once again, ignored important web standards, effective CSS rules (such as inheritance) and even the general principles of templates. Anything other than applying a new theme in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) - changing style sheets and basic imagery, for instance - is a sizeable task.
That said, the project turned out a huge success. The site looks amazing and is going down very well with its users. And what Microsoft lack in good coding and ease of use, they make up for in enhanced out-of-the-box functionality. SharePoint is a powerful (if sometimes daunting) enterprise-level intranet and extranet solution.
Digi Nut is proud to be working with Austin O’Brien on the development of their new web site. Austin O’Brien are a celebrity management and media PR company based in London. We’ll be launching the new site very soon.
Welcome to the Digi Nut blog. Having recently set up my own company and being passionate about the Internet - especially during an exciting time with the growth of Web 2.0 (though not everything launching is quality), social networking and smaller players making a big impact - I have also created the Digi Nut blog. Like other web-based businesses, I believe blogs are an excellent way of promoting a business, updating clients and educating potential clients. It can also prove to be an excellent outlet for commenting, discussing and analysing industry trends and standards.
Please feel free to leave your comments and get in touch about anything web related.
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