NSDesign Blog

I always find it amusing when I come across the “Top 10 Tips for…” articles that seem to be everywhere.  Most of the time they’re full of very obvious suggestions and lack any real innovative ideas that actually help you.  Flick through any of the web magazines or popular blogs and you’ll find “Top 10 Design Mistakes“, “Top Ten Client Attraction Tips For A Feng Shui Website“, “Top 10 Blogging Fonts“, “Top 10 Tips for creating Top 10’s”…  The list goes on.

I was therefore delighted to find not just a Top 10, but a “TOP 75″ related to useful & different ways of promoting your web business.  Expecting just yet another uninspiring list, I was pleasantly surprised to find it fairly interesting, with some novel and innovative ideas - many of which I’m proud to say that NSDesign have already tried and found success with.

Starting with the pretty obvious first tip of “Write a Press Release” (which I know many companies still do NOT do), to tip 75 - “Sponsor a local roundabout”, there’s a range of good ideas that might prove beneficial to your own marketing of your website and business, and a few we’d advise against also!!

Some of the 75 Tips that we currently do:

11. Get signage for your car showing your web address, it’s amazing how many people you pass on a daily trip to your workplace that will be intrigued and go on your site later that day – even more effective if you commute on a motorway.

22. Try to get local radio stations to give you and your staff a mention. And ensure you get the domain name in there too. Not that many radio stations will read out the full domain, especially the nationals, but the locals and inner London ones generally do without any fuss.

40. Sponsor a local event or sports team – www.uksponsorship.com has a list of all the current opportunities on offer in the UK

50. Advertising in new mediums is often a great way to get in front of new audiences. There is a form of advertising now available on London buses.

 And a whole load more….  But there’s a few we don’t do, and wouldn’t recommend anyone consider - mainly in relation to buying links and link farms - things like:

25. Create a links page and exchange links using a programme such as…

48. Text Link ads are also a cheap way of getting people to your site. Companies such as text-link-ads give further information

All in all, some interesting reading, and I’m guessing at least a few of the ideas may strike a chord with even the most pro-active company and their marketing. Have fun!!

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Having recently interviewed a number of Graduates for a Web Development assistant position, my concerns over the formal teaching of web design in our Colleges and Universities have not exactly been alleviated.

While I’d fully expect to see some sort of “skills gap” between those candidates straight from university, and those with a little real-world experience, it is the size of that gap that continues to worry me.

I’d like to stress that all our recently graduated candidates were bright, intelligent and talented individuals, all with (or about to get) good degrees - they are not at fault - but I fear the institutions teaching them, and preparing them for a career in web design are letting them down.  

One or two actually hinted at being fully aware that what, and how they were taught was not “recent”, and that they knew they’d need to learn new skills immediately.  We had 1 guy interview who was entirely self taught, and said the only reason he did his university course was to get the bit of paper that  confirmed he could do it.  He then went on to say that he was actually worried that during the 3 years formal education he might actually “un-learn” all his good habits with the bad habits he was being shown.  By bad habits he was referring to things like table-based layouts, ignorance of semantic markup, and lack of standards or css.  All quite worrying stuff…

I recently did a lecture to the School of Computing and Creative Technologies within the University of Abertay, Dundee, to an audience of Computer Arts and Web Design Students.  At the time I was really encouraged by the enthusiasm and feedback from the lecture hall, which later spilled out into the café - the majority were genuinely interested, asked some great questions, and left me with a positive outlook on web design (and technology) education.  So clearly the passion is there, I just hope it’s backed up by the teaching of relevant skills. 

Personally - if I were a student considering my options for web design and development at University or College, I’d be damn keen to interview them - not the other way around.  Challenge their bold statements on their websites about “web standards” and “advanced web authoring” and get down to the detail about what you’re actually going to teach me.  Show me a <TABLE> and I’m gone.

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Starting next week, we’re running an intensive Radio advert campaign on Rock Radio 96.3FM and as a wee incentive to listen out for the ads, we’re giving away a Free NSDesign T-shirt to the first person who calls the office immediately after every advert has played for the week. 

Admit it….  you want one!! 

With 30 adverts running from Monday - Friday, there’s plenty chances to phone up and win.  Just call 0141 585 6390 and ask for Gary.

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NSDesign took full advantage of the recent Scottish Rocks basketball game, live on Setanta last month, using the opportunity for some brand infiltration on the tv!

As official web partner to the Rocks, we already benefit from some great courtside advertising and marketing opportunities, but we decided to really put in an effort for the first televised game of the season.

The above TV stills are just 2 quick examples of our logo clearly on display to the TV cameras.  Thanks to all our clients who came along to the game and for showing their support to NSDesign by wearing our T-shirts and caps etc…..

The stroke of genious that ensured maximum exposure, was handing our free “Thunderstix” to the crowd.  To explain what these are, and to highlight the effect they had - just check out the image below…

Nearly 2,500 fans, most with NSDesign adverts in their hands…  Just in case you’re interested in seeing the highlights of the game - View the 15 min video here.  Now…  I’m off to think about how we crash the next old-firm game….

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Since our announcement yesterday about our new “Go Green” initiative, we’ve received loads of feedback - mostly positive, but some negative. 

Nagative  - like the Blog post at Techworld.com which suggests that we’re using the initiative as a marketing exercise, with no real interest in improving the state of the environment, and that planting trees is pretty much a waste of time.

They failed to mention that in addition to this latest initiative, we’re also one of the few web design/hosting firms to voluntary offset our entire carbon footprint through the purchase of Kyoto-compliant carbon offsets - the only type of credits that meet the UK government’s offsetting code of practice.   Or that we host on carbon-neutral servers, or that we enforce a strict recycling policy in the office, or that we all use public transport or car-share…  (there’s even a vegetarian in the team but let’s stop there)..

Of course, on a serious note, planting trees won’t solve global warming, but it’s a start, and something everyone can do.  Trees promote biodiversity, create habitats and improve the environment for people.  Visit the Tree Appeal website for more on the benefits.
 

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Yesterday’s press announcement from the Scottish Nationalist Government regarding moves to introduce a Top Level Domain (TLD) for Scotland, has sparked some lively debate.  Despite the fact that this is nothing new (similar proposals have been around for many years), finance secretary John Swinney is backing the campaign for the new “.sco” suffix which will see Scotland have it’s own domain space.

My own opinion to the question - “should we bother” is featured in today’s The Scotsman newspaper (p 24), but in short - I seriously question the value in the .sco domain, and can’t help thinking it’s being used by the politicians to push their own agendas, and not the interests of the companies trading online from Scotland.  Shortbread and whisky anyone?

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No matter how often we warn against it, we keep seeing clients lose their domain names due to completely preventable reasons…

Things like…

• Changing email address but not telling us (so therefore not getting reminders)
• Ignoring email reminders until just after the due date
• Leaving it until after that holiday (and after the renewal date)

The expiry date on Domain names should always be considered too late…  ensure your domain is renewed in advance of that date, and make sure that you mark it clearly in your diary, and don’t rely on others to ensure it gets done.

Remember that .com domains (and other “global” domains such as .net and .org etc) WILL go offline the day after the renewal date if the registry hasn’t been paid.  And as a general rule of thumb, we (like every other company and registrar) won’t pay the registry until you pay us!  Leave it much longer than a day, and you risk going into “Redemption” - which starts geting costly.  Ignore it beyond that, and the chances are you WILL lose your domain to someone else - most likely a cybersquatter.

If your name is at all vital to your business, then SECURE IT, either via our own domain protection service, or simply by registering it for longer than 1 or 2 years at a time (.com can be registered for 10 years).  Don’t be one of the many who phone us with “help me - I’ve lost my domain”. 

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Microsoft presented the first public beta version of their new Internet Browser at the Mix’08 of Las Vegas: Internet Explorer 8.

Here at NSDesign we already started to give it a look and discovered many new interesting features. Apart from a few problems when opening up many tabs together, the browser seems to work pretty well, and the navigation interface, even with the addition of new functionalities, is simple to understand and doesn’t create so much confusion about how to use it.

Two functionalities that we found quite interesting are the crash recovery and the highlighting of the visited URL (to provide more security especially in the case of complex domain names that can trick the user).

These are not only the only new features, there are even more new features that developers can discover, in fact Microsoft, quite late (but never to late for something important like this), decided to pay more attention to the web standards making Explorer strictly standard compliant and other interesting features for developers.

Due to the fact that IE is the most used browser, this is a great news, in the future we are going to see more and more websites developed properly, providing completely accessible information contents. But not all good news come by their own, from another point of view a stricter browser can create some inconveniences to those people who own an old websites or those who have a website structured with not standard code, breaking their websites on the new browser. Explorer 8 offers versioning (backwards compatibility to make a website work like on older browsers versions, like Explorer 7, Explorer 6 and Explorer 5), it is an interesting functionality for a short term solution, but it doesn’t have to be considered a definitive solution to compatibility problems. The best way is always to use the correct standard codes, keeping separated content, structure and style.

Definitely the new Microsoft browser is optimum and can compete with other major ones like the new Firefox 3.

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On the 26th March, The Scottish Rocks will play the Milton Keynes Lions, Live on Setanta TV following an exclusive deal with the Basketball league. 

It’s a brilliant opportunity for both the team, and the sponsors, with everyone hoping for a record crowd to showcase the Rocks to the rest of the UK.

As an incentive, an “early booking” discount is available - From now through Monday 10 March only, you can book adult tickets for just £4 and child tickets for just £2! That’s more than half off the box office price.

These prices are valid only for on-line bookings and only through Monday 10 March for the Milton Keynes game (Wed 26 Mar) only.

http://www.scottishrocks.co.uk/Tickets/

I look forward to seeing you there, and if you’d like to support NSDesign (the Rocks Official Web Partner) at the game, please get in touch and I’ll send you out some very glamorous promotional T-shirts that I’m sure the TV cameras will love!

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It was a pleasure to be part of Scotland’s first Software as a Service (or SAAS as it’s known in the geek world) focus group yesterday, where a number of leading IT software and service leaders met up to discuss the state of the SAAS market.

For a quick summary of what SAAS actually is, check out Wikipedia, but essentially it’s the new (or not so new in some cases) trend of “renting” software via the web to customers, rather than the tradition sale of software as a physical product (a CD in a box) that the customer then owns.

The group has been brought together by STAC, whose remit is to support and encourage collaboration within the Scottish ICT and technology sector, and if the first meeting is any indication, the future of SAAS is bright. 

There’s clearly a lot already being done under the SAAS banner, and many companies (like ourselves with our NSBuilder and NSMail services) are currently deploying web-based software to the market with a high degree of success, however there’s lots to be done before SAAS truly competes with “traditional” sales and delivery of software, a fact that hasn’t gone unrecognised by Scottish Enterprise (also part of the focus group) who have at least pledged to support the concept of helping Scotland’s software developers thrive in the global SAAS markets - we’ll see.

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