It’s that time of year where we seem to always end up doing a number of exhibitions, seminars, presentations etc – and if anything – this year we’re doing even more than normal…

This week we’re down in Ayrshire – exhibiting at the North Ayrshire Council’s e-Biz Expo taking place on Wednesday at the Menzies Hotel in Irvine.  The seminars (aimed at small and growing businesses) at this event include ecommerce, SEO and social media, so we’re looking forward to chatting with the audience on all these matters!

Then on Friday and Saturday we’re once again doing the “New Start Scotland” exhibition at the SECC – Scotland’s biggest event aimed at new-start businesses (although it attracts many established businesses too!) with a wealth of exhibitors, seminars, workshops and business advice clinics.

I’m actually delivering our popular “Embrace the Space” seminar as part of the New-Start Program, so please drop by if you’re in the area and want to hear me on the subject of positive business use of Twitter etc.   More info on this, as well as times can be found at our Social Networking page.

Then next week, we’re in Edinburgh with a short pitch at the TTOM Innovation Partnering Event followed by a talk to the Students at Abertay in Dundee about starting a creative business (always good fun!)…

If you spot any of us as we take this show on the road, then please come and say hello!!

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In case you were not lucky enough to spot Kenny (our Business Development Manager) and his full-page photo in the Evening Times a while back, I thought I’d post the interview here on the blog.

In fact, we’ve decided to use this to start a “meet the team” series of blog posts, so you can get to know us all a little better!  So without further ado – meet Kenny!

Name:

Kenny Roy

Position:

Business Development Manager for NSDesign Ltd

Describe your workplace:

Modern office, hive of activity, kettle boiling regularly

Is there a dress code?

No dress code rules. Given that we are part of the creative industries with a relatively young workforce ( ok I’m the oldest !) we try and create a culture that’s conducive to innovative ideas and work methods.

What hours do you work?

Although I cover typical office hours I also regularly cover evenings to support  the web-hosting side of the business

Qualifications?

HNC in Electronic Engineering, Diploma in Professional Management and an MBA from the University of Glasgow

What was your first job?

My first job was an apprentice equipment technician back in the days when Scotland had a semiconductor industry

Career Highlight?

Thankfully I’ve had plenty of good ones but most recently we got to redesign the Greenock Morton Football Club website and as a lifelong ‘Ton fan it was great to work with all the team at Cappielow.

Any low points?

Being made redundant due to the demise of aforementioned semiconductor industry

What skills or qualities do you need?

In my current role I think the important skills and qualities you need are firstly a good understanding of how web technology can assist businesses to maximise their potential and also to be able to communicate that in a manner that doesn’t alienate the customer with techno babble. The biggest key skill is being able to listen to what the customers issues are that they’re trying to address and providing practical, cost effective solutions.

Where do you see yourself in the future?

Hopefully continuing the progress we’ve made at NSDesign in recent years. We won the “Outstanding Business” Award at last years Renfrewshire Chamber of Commerce Awards which was a major achievement for us and we’re now looking to build on that and grow our client portfolio over the coming years.

Any advice for those seeking a similar career? 

I think people are now far more aware of what the web is capable of from a business perspective and for anyone seeking a similar career I would say try and understand the technology but be able to explain and demonstrate in simple terms the business benefits of using internet technologies to further your clients business.

What would your dream job be?

As a huge golf fan it would be great to get involved with something like the websites for the Open Championship or the Ryder Cup.

Which celebrity would you like to work beside?

I think working with Led Zeppelin would make for a really interesting working day !

What do you do to unwind after work?

If you haven’t already guessed I play a bit ( ok a lot ) of golf during the summer months and during the dark winter nights I play a bit of guitar although purely for fun.

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We’ve been fortunate to have Sean Forsyth with us this week – on work experience from Gryffe High School.

I asked Sean to sum up his week with us, and am delighted he’s letting me share it on the Blog:

I have really enjoyed my week of work experience here at NSDesign even though at first I was not sure what to expect. I feel like now I have a greater knowledge of the web design business and would like to follow it as a career path, although I still have a lot of learning to do before I can do anything that all the staff here can. Also I am very interested in other parts of the business too like ‘Embrace the Space’ and never realised how Social Networking sites could be used for business purposes and so effectively. Everyone at the office has been very helpful in getting me started and making sure I get the most out of my week. I thank everyone here for making the effort to give me the chance to work here as I’ve had a great experience!

On behalf of the team, I’d like to offer a big thanks to Sean for all his efforts this week, and we hope to keep in close contact as he continues his career.

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The article below was featured in the January 8th Edition of the Drum Magazine. 
Please consider downloading the full PDF version (and admire the beautiful artwork from Paul which accompanied it) .

One of Glasgow’s original ‘digital’ agencies, NSDesign is predicting 300% growth in coming years

Now in its 11th year, NSDesign is one of Glasgow’s longest standing digital design agencies. 

Founded by Gary Ennis in 1999, the company has three distinct, but overlapping service divisions Design & Development, Domain Registration & Web Hosting, and Consultancy & Training – setting it aside from others in the industry.

Managing Director Ennis said:

“Each of the services we provide benefits the others. We know that if we exceed the expectations of a £25 hosting client, then we’ll be their first choice for the redesign of their website, or to provide their business with social media consultancy etc.”

With close to 10,000 web hosting clients – including some well respected industry figureheads like Bruce Lawson from Opera – and over 60 new design clients this year alone the company has proved it can last the distance.

NSDesign also benefit from partnering with many of their so called “competitiors” – providing the likes of web hosting to other web design companies, and bespoke design and development to other design agencies – particularly those without an in-house digital division.

Ennis said:

“We get to work on some really fun and challenging projects – we recently worked with the Guardian Media Group to design and build their dedicated web portal for the Download Music Festival, and for the past two years have built the bespoke booking system for Santa at Braehead!”

While their order book includes some big names such as Highland Spring, GMG, Greenock Morton and the Glasgow Rocks Pro Basketball team, it is with their smaller clients that NSDesign feel they make the biggest difference:

Ennis continued:

“There’s no better feeling than helping a new-start business take an idea and turn it into an online revenue-generating business, helping them grow, and providing the full range of services they need along the way.

“We’re proud to still have our very first ever customer, at the time a small one-man band but who has now grown to be a successful organisation – something we like to think we helped play a part in. He came to us originally based on a recommendation, and we’ve not once let him down 11 years later.”

For many of the websites that NSDesign build, their clients are given full control through their acclaimed “NSBuilder” CMS and Site Builder software which was a finalist in the Scottish Software awards in both 2007 and 2008. The fi rm was also named “Most Outstanding Small Business in Renfrewshire” in 2008.

Ennis said:

“The most important achievement and the one that ensures you continue to win new business is 100% client satisfaction. That is what we strive for, and we’re getting close!! Our last annual customer survey resulted in a confirmed 98% satisfaction rating – levels almost unheard of in this industry. Outstanding personal service and support is the one item above all others that we prioritise. Anybody can deliver a good product or outstanding design – but it’s the people behind it that ensure the long term relationship with the client, and the repeat business that comes as a result”.

NSDesign is showing no sign of a slow-down, and is predicting growth of 300% over the next few years. The company is confident the combination of a strong repeat-revenue customer base and new business development will ensure this continues in the months ahead.

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For the second year running, we were delighted with the results from our “Work for Free” day, which we carried out just before Christmas (December 21st 2009).

Following on from last year, the NSDesign team enjoyed a great day helping just over 20 small businesses, with free consultancy on the likes of SEO, Social Media, and web design.    Like last year, we weren’t without our detractors for the initiative, with the DBA again giving us a little “dig” on twitter… (although thankfully, nothing on the scale of last year!)… and a few industry players that like to moan about “de-valuing” design, without truly understanding what the day is actually about.

However, like last year, all we really care about is the feedback from clients, which has been 100% positive.

We were also lucky enough to get some great publicity on the day, mainly from a BBC Radio Scotland interview which went on to look at the value and benefit of providing free time and consultancy, and the history of working for free!  Listen to the full radio interview here.

Will we repeat the work for free initiative next year?  What do you think…

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Over the last few months I have been following developments regarding the use of the @font-face feature of CSS3. As we have recently been involved in a project where I saw both an opportunity and a benefit to using @font-face, I have gathered together some information that I think helps clarify how best to use it.

Licencing and Support
Font licensing is a pretty big issue surrounding @font-face, even free fonts, which may stipulate that they are only used on non-commercial sites or have a link back to the author. Some new resources which offer a solution to the licensing issue are appearing, notably Typekit. As they put it its “Simple, bulletproof, standards compliant, accessible, and totally legal.”

At the moment @font-face is best supported by Firefox 3.5, Chrome 3, Safari 3.1, Opera 10 and IE8. The two most commonly used font formats you will see today are .otf (opentype) and .ttf (truetype). To embed a font using these formats you use the following css in your head or an external css file:

@font-face

{
font-family: 'Philosopher';
src: local('Philosopher'),
url("Philosopher.otf") format('opentype');
}

h2
{
font-family: ‘Philosopher’;
font-size: 20px;
}

You could argue that embedding specific fonts is superficial and that all it does is add to the overall aesthetic of the site rather that provide any benefit in terms of accessibility or usability. And if this is the case why bother trying to support older browsers? I guess that’s true but our job as web designers to at least try to provide the richest possible user experience to as many people as possible so why not give it a bash!

EOT (Embedded Opentype)
The font format supported by previous versions of IE is .eot (embedded opentype). You can add a line to your css to include this format with the others. To create the .eot version you first need a .ttf version of your font. If you have this I’ll explain how you you convert to .eot it in a minute but if you only have an .otf then you need to convert it to .ttf first. After a bit of digging I found a hard way and an easy way to do this. The harder way is to install Fontforge and the easy way is Online Font Convertor The Online Font Convertor works but seems to slightly distort some of the characters(at least when I tried it.)

Fontforge and Sygwin
If you want to install Fontforge on a windows machine you first need to install Sygwin which provides a Linux-like environment for Windows which is required to run Fontforge. I found it a bit tricky but this Installing Fontforge article is a good tutorial which explains exactly how to do this.

TTF to EOT
Once you have your .ttf font file you need to convert this to an .eot. Once again I found a few ways to do this. One is using the Microsoft tool WEFT. A lot of people have said WEFT is quite tricky to use but I found this tutorial and it wasn’t too bad. The only problem is that it doesn’t always play nice with every font. When you load in the font you wish to convert it will indicate whether or not it can be converted with a green, yellow or red icon. If it is green or yellow you’re in luck and you can create your .eot file. If it’s red (which I encountered) go to TTF2EOT Online. This tool is great and once it converts your font it even provides the css and instructions on how to embed the font in your page.

Once you have an .otf or a .ttf font aswell as your .eot version you can now embed the font using the following css:


@font-face
{
font-family: 'Philosopher';
src: url("Philosopher.eot");
src: local('Philosopher'),
url("Philosopher.otf") format('opentype');
}

h2
{
font-family: 'Philosopher';
font-size: 20px;
}


Early Chrome Support – SVG
You can improve browser support further by adding an SVG version of the font to the css. This format allows the embedded font to be viewed in Chrome 0.3+. This can be created again using Fontforge from one of your other formats or using a tool called Batik. I found good online tool created by Martin Saulis which he has built using Fontforge and TTF2EOT. The problem with SVG fonts is that they have a fairly large file size but by opening the font in any text editor you can delete the unnessessary characters from the font, greatly reducing the file size. The main elements to delete are the glyph-name=”null” and the hkern elements. By doing this it will reduce the file size with minimal effect to the font.

There are a couple of small issues that have to be considered once you have your SVG file. The SVG must be assigned an id which will be used in the css and html to reference it. This can be done by again opening the SVG file in a text editor and editing the tag and adding an id to it. Another issue is the requirement of an SVG namespace to the file. This also must be added for the font to work and can be added in the svg element in the file.

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We’ve been running some great Social Media Workshops lately, introducing the business benefits of the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube and Twitter.  Of them all, it’s Twitter that most companies want to discuss, with many businesses unaware of the true power of Twitter, thinking it’s just a hyped-up instant messenger type utility which generates a lot of “noise”.

And to be honest – they’re right – Twitter is full of useless noise – much of it fun and amusing noise, but noise nonetheless, and certainly not the most obvious resource for “proper” business use.  But with a little knowledge on how to get the best from Twitter, it’s possible to filter out that noise, and get easy access to powerful information about what your clients are saying – about you, your brand, your competitors, their wishes, desires, likes, dislikes and more.  With gazillions of people worldwide already on Twitter, and unheard of growth rates, surely even the most skeptical business owner can see the value of tapping into this mind-set.

If Google is a search engine to people’s websites – then think of Twitter as a search engine to their thoughts.  And knowing what people are thinking is one serious business advantage. 

So give it a try – Follow the 7 steps below and get tweeting (sorry – but I didn’t make up the stupid terminology).

1 – Signup

Ok – fairly obvious really, but head over to www.twitter.comand signup – it takes seconds.  Choose a suitable username related to your business name, but don’t stress to much over this – it can be changed later.

2 – Customise

Before you do anything – add a little customisation to your Profile page.  Why?  Because if you don’t, you’re just another faceless twitter account – similar to the countless spammers, con-men, phishers and idiots (sorry – but they do exist) that sign up to Twitter just to cause problems for the rest of us. 

Be proud of who you are – add your name, your biography, your logo (avatar) and customise the background.  Stand out from the crowd, and have a profile that gives people reason to trust you – understand who you are, and maybe they’ll find value in following you.

3 – Post a few Tweets

Next you’ll want to post a few tweets, to let the world know you’re alive…  again, do this before announcing your twitter page to the masses, and before you start following anyone…  it’ll help establish you as a credible (albeit new) twitter user, and with a few posts to read, then any potential follower will know what to expect should they choose to follow you.

4 – Follow Others

Start by Following other people you know that use Twitter..  search for them via Twitter’s  ”Find People” function,  and click the Follow Button.  Easy as that…  now browse to the people they follow, or browse their other followers.  Recognise any of them?  Worth following them too?  You can also use Twitter search to discover other users of similar interests etc, or people talking about certain subjects.

Don’t follow everyone for the sake of it – there’s no value in this whatsoever, and you’ll appear like a twitter spammer simply building up a target list!  Choose suitable people that are related to your business… your clients, your suppliers, your competitors (yes – they WILL know you are following them) etc. 

5 – Attract Followers!

Ultimately, you want people following you, otherwise you’re marketing to nobody!  Some methods to gain followers (other than many of the people you follow, following you back) include:

• Announce it to your clients via your online newsletter, your email footers and your website.  Take any opportunity to tell people your Twitter URL.
• Encourage people to “retweet” your tweets
• Flag up important keywords with the hashtag – makes it easier for people to find it – see here for help understanding what a twitter hashtag is
• Use it, but don’t overuse it – don’t be one of those Twitter users that floods my tweet-stream with 100’s of pointless tweets. 
• Consider using an image in your tweet – statistically, tweets containing a link to an image are re-tweeted more than most other tweets.

6 – Get Serious

 After you’ve used Twitter for a while, and are following a few people, the limitations of the Twitter.com website become clear – which is why anyone who’s serious about twitter ignores the twitter website, and actually uses one of the many 3rd party Twitter tools.  And the one I’d recommend is Tweet Deck.

WIthout giving a full tutorial on the many excellent features of TweetDeck, suffice to say that it makes it possible to filter out all the noise in Twitter, and allows you to easily and quickly find all the important tweets posted by your followers, as well as datamine the thoughts of the twitter masses, search for relevant business information, exploit potential sales leads, and much more…  Need more help? – Give us a shout, or come to one of the workshops and we’ll spend time showing you really how powerful a tool this is…

7 – Monitor and Evaluate

Like any form of Marketing, knowing your return on investment is vital to help understand the impact it’s making.  I’m confident that after a short time, Twitter will certainly be a “fun” elemnt in your marketing strategy – but is it actually delivering for you?

Monitorring your activity and success on Twitter isn’t difficult, but depends on “what” you want to measure.  For example :

• How many “Followers” (and the growth of new followers).  – http://twittercounter.com
• How many clicks back to your website – you can use your own web hosting statistics (assuming they provide you stats), or, even easier, you can use a service like www.bit.lywhich is built into tweetdeck
• How many of your Tweets are being “re-tweeted”
• Are your images engaging your followers?
• Understand why people “stop” following you – “was it something I said” ?

Follow these 7-steps, and let us know how Twitter works for your business..  It’s not a silver bullet – it won’t magically turn your product or service into this year’s must have (especially if it was poor to begin with!), but used properly – Twitter can improve your customer service, your PR, your repeat business and your word of mouth, not forgetting the business benefit that comes from reading the minds of millions!  Have fun!

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There’s one particular UK webhost that’s investing heavily in advertising right now, with a campaign claiming that server speed directly impacts your website’s effectiveness in Google, to the extent that Google actually penalises slow loading websites.

Personally, I’m not 100% convinced, and even if Google does pay attention to speed of the server (load speed of the page is another matter) then I’m sure it’s significance is minor compared to many other things I’d consider first if my SEO needed improving.

That said…  a fast loading website (helped by a fast server) is clearly an important thing – moreso for users looking to minimise the time they spend hunting down info or browsing for products/services to buy online. 

At NSDesign, we had a hunch that our servers were among the fatest in the UK, especially since we’re what you might call a “budget host” (at £25 for a standard shared linux host – we’re certainly in the “budget” price range), so we did a little research…

Independant “performance benchmarking” site www.webperf.net lists 170 UK Webhosts, and regularly tests their performance (measuring the Mean Rate in K/Sec – ie: the speed!).  We’re currently at a respectable position 16, well ahead of many of the major Hosting “giants” (the ones you see advertising full page in .NET magazine).  A quick check of the 15 hosts above us, and it’s no surprise that on average, most of these companies charge considerably more than us, with a few just specialising in providing high-end dedicated servers (no end-user hosting at all).

Something to proud of for certain, but how do we compare to the uk host that’s claiming to be so fast that even google prefers them?  Well – unfortunately they don’t list themselves in Webperf, so we resorted to a quick a simple speed test of their own website homepage using www.alertra.com and also did the exact same on the NSDesign.co.uk homepage.

Once we’ve removed the duplicate test locations, the above results show that on average (across the globe), we’re over 60% faster, and when tested in the UK (the London test), our access was over 40% quicker.  FORTY PERCENT quicker than (if we believe the hype) one of the UK’s fastest hosting companies.  Not bad for a little webhost from Glasgow.  Maybe helps explain why our own Google Search listings are so highly placed….  page1, position1 for keywords such as “Web Hosting Glasgow”, and “Linux Hosting Scotland”.  Server speed, or just damn fine SEO?  You can decide, but no matter the conclusion, well done us

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They are like buses…  you wait for ever for some decent “geek” events to come to your hometown, and then 2 arrive at once… 

So, if you’re into your web design, twitter, technology, etc.. and live in the Glasgow area, then I’d strongly suggest the following 2 events coming up in the very near future.

Glasgow Twestival

Held at the Living Room on St Vincent Street, the Glasgow leg of the popular Twitter Festival (or Twestival – sorry..  but I don’t make us these terms!) looks to be a good one!  Hosted by our good friend and Radio Clyde DJ Colin Kelly, the night will involve a mix of fun, networking, tweeting, live music, charity raffle and auction. 

It’s all for a good cause, with a nominated charity (voted for by the “tweegies” themselves) benefiting from the entry fee (just £10 – although some early bird tickets still available) as well as all funds made on the night.  Get along and say hi… and make sure you also add us to twitter – www.twitter.com/nsdesign in the meantime!

More at: http://glasgow.twestival.com/

Future of Web Design – Glasgow

Run by Ryan Carson (he’ll be the American in the hat) and the carsonified team, the popular FOWD event comes to Glasgow (a welcome first!) for a days worth of hard-core web design seminars, featuring the likes of Drew McLellan and (NSDesign client) Patrick Lauke.

Held on the 14th September at the Glasgow Film Theatre on Rose Street, it’s a must for anyone involved in the web design industry with tickets still available at £67.85.  A few of the NSDesign team will be there, so make sure you say hello… 

More at: http://events.carsonified.com/fowd/2009/tour

Lets hope this is a sign of things to come, and we see more big name events for this industry in Scotland soon. 

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It’s been a busy few weeks on the web, with a number of promised “killer apps” released or announced.  There’s certainly some exciting new sites to play with, but is that all we’ll end up doing – “playing” with them, or will they actually live up to their hype, and change the way we use the web today.  You decide…

Google Wave
Launching later this year, Google Wave could potentially bring about one of the most significant chanages to the way we communicate online since email.  Yes – it really is big news!!  As Lars Rasumussen (Google Wave developer) put it, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”

If you can find the time (1 hour and 20 mins!), I urge you to watch the video at http://wave.google.com/ and let Google themselves explain it, but essentially Wave is a hybrid communication and collaboration tool, combining email, instant messaging, live chat, wikis, social networking and project management, all in one simple (lets hope so) browser based application.  Head over to the Mashable website for a much more detailed explaination and a summary of all the features.

While it’s not yet live, Google Wave has already been met with a wave (sorry) of enthusiasm from the web community – from designers, developers, users, and industry experts alike.  Let’s hope that when released to the masses (expected to be towards the end of the year) it doesn’t fail to live up to it’s high expectations

Bing
Bing is the new Search Engine from Microsoft, and unlike previous efforts, this one might actually take a slice from the Google pie. So what does the self proclaimed “decision engine” claim to do that’s different from the norm:

• Instant Answers: finds specific answers to informational queries, e.g. “What is 55F in Celsius” offers rich media and structured data and a general search term like “weather” yields a 5-day forecast for your location.
• Preview: enables searchers to find out more information about a site by previewing individual results on the results page to reduce back-and-forth searching.
• Best Match: delivers results with deep links and highly relevant information to help searchers to get the right information faster. 

For webmasters, you can access the Google-like “webmaster tools“, to help better understand how Bing sees your site, and allows you to view stats and submit sitemaps etc.

Early indications are that Bing is being pretty well received by the web search community, although what impact it will have on Google will not be seen for some time yet, but given that they’re reportedly spending $100 million on promoting it, clearly Microsoft are taking this seriously and boast that Bing is just the “first step in a long journey” for their search plans (Qi Lu – Head of Microsoft’s online services).

Wolfram Alpha
It’s own first paragraph explains this new “Computational Knowledge Engine” as “the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”.  In a nutshell – it claims to provide answers to questions that other search engines (ie: Google) will not provide.

As I test, I used a fairly simple question: “how far is it from Glasgow to London”, and it promptly told me it was 344 miles and showed a nice little map.  Like the examples on their homepage, this is fairly basic stuff, but the simplicity of asking a question in plain English, and receiving one definative answer (instead of the 578,000 results Google gave me) is pretty significant.  To be honest – it’s a different beast to Google altogether, and where it will excel is in “computing” things, not “searching” for websites containing your search terms.

Check out http://www.semanticuniverse.com/blogs-i-was-positively-impressed-wolfram-alpha.html for a good (and suitable geeky) review.

Google Squared
A direct challenger to the Wolfram Alpha site, Google’s been quick to release their own
Unlike typical search, Google Squared extracts data from other web sites, and presents the results as “squares” within what can only be described as an online spreadsheet.  A quick example searching for “Glasgow Web Design” presented me with a nice table of just that – Web Design companies in Glasgow (with NSDesign thankfully within the first page of results!)..

The primary difference between Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha, is that the latter searches only it’s own Databases (currently holding approx 10TB of information), while Google Squared attempts to search the entire data on the web.  How much we’ll all use such a tool on a day to day basis is difficult to predict, but it’s certainly a great start at strcutured searching, with everything is neatly labeled and categorised.
So – Killer Apps, or pleasast distractions from a busy day in the office…?  Time will tell.

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