Treliddon Farm 2010 site published
July 11, 2010 by Hew
For several months now the Broad family at Treliddon Farm in Downderry, South East Cornwall have been converting a barn to provide self catering accommodation to add to their established farm house bed and breakfast.
So much time and effort have been put into the converted barn, the website has been relaunched to incorporate the new services.
If you are looking for friendly, home from home farmhouse bed & breakfast, or a self catering base from which to explore Cornwall, please visit Treliddon Farm B&B and the Old Wagon House.
World Cup 2010 Twitter replay
June 21, 2010 by Hew
In the midst of heavy Surveylab workload, and Fullscope battling to get the American’s website launched at the start of July, the World Cup is proving an engaging, if frequently frustrating, diversion. Dan picked up a great link from The Guardian’s website which animates a record of Twitter traffic across World Cup games. Very clever.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/world-cup-match-replay
Sweet Lyons Wedding Site Launched
June 3, 2010 by Hew
Julia Sweet and David Lyon’s wedding photography site was launched today – www.sweetlyonsweddings.co.uk. Partnering with David, they have now have a new site to promote their recommended wedding photography services across South East London, the UK and Europe. The site was originally planned to use WordPress, however a lighter, more managable site was more appropriate for the specific look and feel they wanted to reflect their business.
Julia has been busy in recent weeks and already has a WordPress site for Julia Sweet Photography.
Visit Sweet Lyons Weddings
Updated Wordle on Fullscope
May 5, 2010 by Hew
The always popular Wordle.net reviews content of websites to create visually impressive ‘word clouds’. By enabling a small Java app you can play around with colours layout and now remove specific words you dont find relevent.
Click on the image below for a closer look!
Also found a funky portfolio site worth visiting. Very simple, very obvious and it works – 41six.com
Steve Holt Carpentry updated and relaunched
April 21, 2010 by Hew
Steve Holt is a carpenter specialising in custom carpentry, kitchen and bedroom installations and a range of joinery, flooring, conference installations. Holt Carpentry provides its services around the South East of London and across to UK. Steve’s site was launched over a year ago, and he felt a need to revise his services page, add a testimonial and update the gallery of development and completed work.
The updates were duly applied but the expansion of the services from a single link listing information, to separate services pages meant a revised upper section of the page. A jQuery menu was dropped into the site providing a subtle stylish menu that can easily be expanded and new content introduced. The gallery was converted from JS Lightbox to a revised jQuery version to avoid a common conflict preventing the old version working.
Visit Steve Holt Carpentry
Ashwood Home Interiors website launched
April 19, 2010 by Hew
The new website for Ashwood Home Interiors was published today. Ashwood Home Interiors provide home, kitchen and bedroom, design and installation services across Birmingham, Wolverhampton and the West Midlands. A single webpage, the site was specified to follow marketing material published by them – strictly white! I used a number of client provided images in a simply jQuery slideshow presentation, and composed the site to promote the brand, copy and of course ensure the telephone number is very clear. The site is a sister-service to the Ashwood Office Interiors business.
Visit Ashwood Home Interiors
New offices for Surveylab – The Old Church Wimbledon
April 8, 2010 by Hew
Thursday 1st April was officially marked as ‘moving day’ for Surveylab’s new offices to The Old Church, in Quicks Road, Wimbledon Sw19. However the inevitable workload meant time slipped away from me, and as I hauled my office ‘bumph’ over to the car for a trip down the road to Wimbledon, I saw a had a flat tyre courtesy of a 3 inch lump of metal sticking out of the tyre. Changed the wheel with some help from the AA man (very nice man) but had to ask John to pick up the keys, postponing moving day to the first day after the Easter weekend. 1st April indeed, felt like a Friday 13th!
So today, 6th April, was the actual moving in day and the sun is shining, router setup, Internet working ok, IP’s all sorted … Surveylab has landed in SW19!
Customer Care Measurement & Consulting (CCMC) Logo
March 30, 2010 by Hew
As part of a rebranding project, the Customer Care Measurement & Consulting (CCMC) logo has been signed off. CCMC is a consumer satisfaction and loyalty research and consultancy business based in Alexandria, just outside of Washington DC.
The website in its final stages of development, before the last marketing and PowerPoint deliverables are finalised.
The brandwas developed over 8 weeks, with various graphic elements and forms proposed and discussed. I learnt a number of lessons – not least that a final design I pushed for turned out to be suspiciously similar to the new AT&T logo!
At time of posting, the new website has not been published – visit again soon for the new site. In the meantime, please visit the Customer Care Measurement & Consulting (CCMC) website.
How to Write an Amazing Article – Six Revisions
March 19, 2010 by Hew
With so much information on the Internet, there are always a shortlist of sites that you find yourself returning to time and time again. BBC News and BBC Sport are permanent bookmarks for me, and in terms of design, Smashing Magazine and SixRevisions sit loud and proud as RSS feeds on my Firefox browser.
SixRevisons published a very nice article on the 17th March 2010 about writing articles for the web.
How to Write an Amazing Article by James Costa summarises a number of key features of a sucessful post and is an example of the points he raises.
‘Content is king’, ‘know your audience’ and writing with an engaging style are all common sense principles that are all too easy to forget. Similarly, I’ve posted before about keeping things short, sweet and punchy and never to assume people will read your posts if you write essays rather than posts or articles.
An excellent resource, I encourage all to read this and enjoy the SixRevisons website.
Website Content: Don’t assume people read what you write
February 3, 2010 by Hew
I’ve been meaning to write a quick blog post about email newsletters and website content. The danger in crafting website content be it on pages, email newsletters and blog posts is simply assuming people will read it.
In 1997, Jakob Neilson was writing on his UseIT.com site saying quite simply, that people don’t read webpages. He has since said that people read email newsletters even less….
People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (Update: a newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.) (Source: UseIt.com, October 1997 – 13 years ago)
I am a big fan of Jakob Neilson. He goes on with more imperical research…
On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely. (Source: UseIt.com, May 2008)
Facebook invites, Twitter rubbish, old marketing emails from the sportshop you bought a t-shirt from a year ago… our Inboxes are being bombarded with information and demands for attention. Despite striving to have an empty Inbox it just never happens. So when a newsletter pops up, my decision to read or click is usually made up very quickly.
Yes, context plays an important role… you can hope that email newsletters being sent to a subscribed list will be a ‘warm’ audience. Blog posts should be punchy and engaging. Web page content should be prioritised, specific and abbreviated. (/cheer bullet points!)
Ideas for newsletters:
- Brand newsletters with your logo, slogan, and contact details (checking compatibility when images are not displayed)
- Break up content with images
- Subtle use of colour (but do use colour)
- Lead with an engaging newsletter title
- Provide a synopsis at the top of the content
- Topics should be in the form of extracts – avoid lengthy subjects
- Consider using a 3rd party service to provide a template, manage email lists (sign ups and unsubscribes)
- ALWAYS remember the objective of a newsletter
- The objective of a newsletter is to inform, capture attention and drive people to your website. The newsletter should be part of your online offering enouraging people to click to the site.
- Therefore, avoid writing tombs of newsletter-specific content, only to have curious readers find a static site of different information
- Why not focus efforts on site updates and blog posts and simply use the newsletter to summarise whats been posted in the last month… its the best use of your time.
- Search engine ratings focus on site content not stand alone newsletters – putting the effort into the site makes for a more specific newsletter and boost the opportunities to people to find you
Just a few ideas. Ensuring you avoid the pitfalls of having your newsletter go straight into Junk boxes, is another area of concern. However, I’ll put some more information soon; I found a very good book over Christmas which will lead on from the rambling above!
