Once you’ve created your website, you want to make sure as many people as possible can see it. There are several technical steps you can take to ensure your website is attracting the attention it deserves.

Make sure it’s browser compatible: Check your website in as many browsers as possible. Every browser has different ways of reading things which means that something which shows perfectly in Internet Explorer may not display properly in Firefox. Making sure your website design can be seen across the widest variety of browsers will ultimately gain you more visitors.

Set up a test server: You should never edit a website live, or throw something up online which hasn’t been tested. Once your website goes live, everything can be seen online, including any mistakes in the draft. A mistake-free site is one of the easiest ways to impress customers, attract search engine attention and gain rankings.

Back up your site: You never know when your site will be the victim of a server outage, or a hacker. Both occasions can, in their most extreme circumstances, result in the need to re-establish the site. It’s rare that this happens, but if it does, back-up is essential to get the site online again quickly, to minimise disruption and avoid missing out on lost business.

Be wary of Flash: Although Flash is popular now, it’s never a good idea to base your entire site design on its usage as it does cut out a proportion of visitors. A substantial number of people don’t have Flash – and they won’t download it just to access your site!

If you’re looking for help with accessible website design, contact NS Design for a free no-obligation consultation.

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The iPhone4 is the latest must-have gadget, but if you didn’t manage to get one in last week’s feeding frenzy, then you may face a long wait! By last Friday almost every iPhone4 in the country had been sold, with nearly every mobile phone provider running a waiting list only. Only one major provider claimed to have any left in stock, and they were only made available to existing customers.

This frenzy has peaked despite the swift emergence of an annoying, and rather basic, design flaw. When held in a certain way, the iPhone4 loses signal and drops calls. Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs has openly admitted the fault and the company is working to create a band which will help prevent the problem.

The issue has arose due to the steel band casing of the iPhone4, which also acts as its antenna, making it more susceptible to drop outs when the phone is held in a certain way. It’s an unusual episode for Apple, whose signature is usually impeccable, functional design, but a speedy response from the behemoth, including the personal interest taken by CEO Steve Jobs means it has done very little to dent the ever growing popularity of the i-brand.

Of course its ongoing popularity is possibly also a result of almost unanimously positive reviews; according to those lucky enough to get one the iPhone4’s new design marks a departure for Apple that results in a practical design that captures a luxury feel. It also has image, hardware and battery life improvements galore, making the new iPhone one to get excited about while opening up a whole world of possibilities for social media and apps that will also internet designers to have some fun with their digital mobile marketing.

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It’s music to our ears to hear that social media sites are creating more election buzz amongst young people than ever before.

A study published today by Lightspeed Research on behalf of New Media Age showed that 46% of 18-21 year olds are more interested in the election as a direct result of the increased political activity on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

The study also showed that 60% of 18-25 year olds look favourably on political parties who communicate with the electorate through social media and blog sites.

It remains to be seen whether this increased rapport with the young actually results in more votes being cast. The traditional campaign tools – i.e. party political broadcasts on TV and leaflet dropping – are still going strong. In fact, the Lightspeed/ NMA study showed that, notwithstanding the positive reaction to the parties’ campaigning on social media platforms, young people still regarding the traditional TV party political broadcast as the most trustworthy source of information.

Nevertheless, we like to take a glass-half-full approach here at NSDesign and we think it’s fantastic that, for the first time in living memory, young people have a platform on which they can get involved in the debate and discussion that surrounds the forthcoming General Election. Go Twitter!

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Given the various problems that I’m currently having with BT and moving Broadband to a new house (follow the saga on Twitter – I’m regularly moaning about it there!), maybe I should follow the example from the residents of a village in Rutland, who have raised £37,000 to install a super-fast broadband network after BT decided it wouldn’t be cost-effective to do so.

Lyddington’s local residents clubbed together to raise enough money to set up their own telecoms company, Rutland Telecom. The next step was to team up with a local firm reselling BT’s broadband in order to install the network, which is the fastest of all rural broadband networks in the UK. The residents of Lyddington, who had previously not even been able to access broadband speeds of 2Mbps because of network infrastructure issues, are now enjoying broadband with speeds of up to 40Mbps.

Rutland Telecom’s managing director, Dr. David Lewis, told the BBC: “We found that any company could do, on a smaller scale, what Carphone Warehouse has done and take over BT’s network … we could utilise parts of BT’s existing infrastructure and supply next generation broadband services via community funded projects.”

Rutland Telecom says it has already been approached by 40 other rural community groups to help assess whether a similar solution is possible in their area, with projects elsewhere in the Midlands and Wales reportedly in the pipeline.

The Government has pledged to provide all UK homes with a minimum broadband connection speed of 2Mbps by 2012, and at least 24Mbps by 2020. If Lyddington’s case is anything to go by, it looks as though community solutions are the key to making this happen, given that BT and Virgin Media are still taking the position that installing fibre networks in rural areas is not profitable.

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On the 6^th April, AOL publically announced it was looking for a buyer for Bebo, hinting it would be closed down if one wasn’t found. Or in their words, they are: “currently evaluating strategic alternatives, which could include a sale or shutdown of Bebo in 2010”.

The mentions of Bebo on Twitter that day and night came in fast and furious, with the majority of them from Bebo users, angry about the rumours of immediate closure (there seemed to be a belief it was closing that night).  Many of them stated that they were planning on jumping ship to Facebook in advance of any termination of their BEBO accounts.

Having personally never been a Bebo user myself, I signed up!  We’ll see how long it remains live!

Some Background Info

Bebo has a massively different demographic to the likes of LinkedIn and even Facebook.  Bebo has (or had) the biggest share of the under 17 year old market, and was the 2^nd largest social network in the UK (with an equally strong following in Australia).

But globally, and more specifically in the US, Bebo is, and has been lagging behind for some time – at it’s peak it had approx 40 million users, compare that to over 400 million active facebook accounts.

Up until early 2007, BEBO and Myspace had almost equal share of the social media market, but in the summer of that year Facebook almost came out of nowhere and established itself as the top dog.  Ever since, Bebo’s numbers have been falling…  and for a business that’s solely making money from advertising spend based on users and eyeballs, AOL has finally decided that enough’s enough.

 
Why did it fail?

I think Bebo’s problem was that it simply didn’t innovate.  It started out as almost a carbon-copy of Myspace, and didn’t adapt when it needed to.  Like Myspace even now, it’s a bit slow, a bit clunky, and still looks like one of the early social networking sites.  In the meantime, along comes Facebook, with a real buzz about it globally, and it brings a a fresh approach to social networking with it’s focus on status updates and live news feeds.  The result is a truly mainstream social resource, used not just by the schoolkids, but by everyone.

Which all leads to the question – why didn’t it evolve?  I personally think that Bebo’s decline wasn’t helped by it’s acquisition by AOL (Time Warner).  I think they were just too big, with too many fingers in too many pies, and Bebo was just something else for them to play with.  They used their financial clout to jump on the social media bandwagon without the real investment and understanding of making it a long term success.

Look at other examples such as MySpace -acquired by traditional news man Rupert Murdoch (News Corp) in 2005 for $580million (now valued at next to nothing), and also Friends Reunited – one of the UK’s first social networking sites before any of us knew what social networking was.  It was purchased by ITV for £175million in 2005, and recently sold for a mere £25million following a massive downturn in usage (although it does appear to have found some momentum again).

It’s no coincidence that the other big names in social media which ARE still performing – Networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – are all still under the original ownership of the then small startup companies whose passion and drive made them the successes they were and still are today.   Unlike Bebo’s current owners, they included evolution in their strategies. 

Future:

Despite everything, surely for someone, Bebo can be a success – it’s still the 4^th most popular Social networking site, and 31^st most popular website in general! (globally) – according to recent webstats from Hitwise.   Just like the other main players, I don’t believe that Bebo should be written off just yet, and if your business or organisation wants to engage with a younger market, then Bebo is still (for now) a main player. 

Unfortunately, I think the announcement regarding Bebo being up for sale, and the rumours that followed of immediate closure won’t help the decline in usage, which in turn doesn’t help the likelihood of a suitable buyer stepping forward.

I’m sure Bebo will find a buyer, and maybe even a UK one (given its popularity here), but certainly AOL will struggle to recoup anything close to the $850 million they paid just 2 years ago, and by the sounds of it – they’ll settle for almost anything.  Quite tempted myself..

More over at Scotland on Sunday – Why Bebo lost its bounce

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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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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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The mobile web has been the subject of debate for a few years with predications of its growth and usage, but this year looks set to be the year where the it finally becomes mainstream. The technologies required to display websites on mobiles are now here and as they become more varied and affordable, the way in which we search and use the web is surely going to change.

With the emergence of devices like the iphone and Blackberry which use direct user manipulation with the screen, this has allowed screen sizes to be maximised, allowing users to see a lot more data. This is a big advantage for designers. The way in which people appear to be using the mobile web seems to be based very much more on practical functionality, communication, and accessing data/carrying out tasks quickly on the move. In this respect and with the challenge of designing for a smaller screen, its clear that mobile interfaces must be designed with content and usability at the forefront, whilst still conveying a companies branding and image successfully. Some mobile sites which demonstrate successful examples of this stripped down design, content focused approach are Amazon and Twitter.

The interface possibilities associated with phones also open new opportunities for designing the best user experience. Built in features like touchscreen, the mobile keypad, accelerator keys, the iphones motion detection and even vibrate could be used to maximise the efficiency of accessing mobile data. The type of sites that have proved most popular among web users support this idea of a more functionality and content focused web. News, weather and sports sites, email, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and of course search engines all rank very highly.

The statistics for mobile use in Britain are also interesting with Britain making up 20% of worldwide mobile web usage, second only to America. The number of mobile internet users grew from 5.8 million to 7.3 million is the third quarter of 2008 according to research from Neilson Online, meaning the mobile web is growing 8 times faster than desktop. The result of this rapid increase in mobile web usage has taken many businesses by surprise and are unaware that a large amount of their potential market are now surfing the web via mobile. In 2009 I think that many companies will start to see the advantage of having a mobile version of their site – not as a replacement but as a peripheral part of their overall brand strategy, allowing them to maximise their exposure to their markets.

As mentioned, social networking and the ability to update accounts like Twitter, Facebook and blogs, on the move and improve communication plays a big part in the mobile web and web in general. At a seminar we attended last week, one of the speakers Joe Hughes from Yomego suggested the theory that in the future social networking will take a more focuses approach where users in certain communities will have their own social networking and communication sites to discuss their interests, hence allowing advertisers to be more focuses aswell. Whether or not this happens to the extent he suggested is debatable, but the web definitely looks set to continue to embrace this social and community aspect of communication and generating content and the role the mobile web plays in this will continue to increase.

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Many people take advantage of “email forwarding” – the ability to easily forward email from your domain onto for example your hotmail or gmail home address.

Sounds a perfectly good thing to do, and what harm can it possible cause?  In actual fact – a LOT of harm, to you and any other people hosted on the same server as you!

Lets say your name is dave, and you have the domain poundshop.com.  You setup an email forwarder for dave@poundshop.com to forward to your dave1296@hotmail.com, and all your email arrives very conveniently for you at Hotmail for you to read, and process in the normal way.

But ANYTHING sent to dave@poundshop.com is forwarded on – including all the spam that you’ve been getting lately.  This causes 2 main problems:

1) Some ISPs (such as Hotmail and AOL) don’t recognise the true source of the spam, seeing it as originating from the last “hop” in the delivery route – ie: your poundshop.com domain, and our server.

2) Some ISPs have spam filters in place based on the volume of incoming email, and if you suddenly get a lot of spam email, or – more likely – a lot of “bounced emails” caused by someone spoofing your dave@poundshop.com address, then there’s the potential for a serious volume of email to all be forwarded onto your chosen destination. 

Both scenarios above have the same result – YOU are seen as the spammer, and as a result – the reputation of your domain, and the entire server (with all the other customers hosted on it) is decreased, leading to increased risk of your email being considered spam, or worst case scenario – being totally blacklisted by an ISP or major blacklist provider.

The situation increases exponentially when you setup “catch-all” email forwarding, when EVERYTHING@poundshop.com is forwarded on.  Imagine a spam attack where the spammer sends literally millions of emails to any_word_or_phrase@poundshop.com – all of which are forwarded on, and all of which result in you “spamming” yourself. 

Our advice – NEVER use catch-all email forwarding (in fact never use catch-all email full stop), and only consider email forwarding of any sort if you 100% really have to.  Personally I cannot see any valid reason for needing to forward email.  Some people say that forwarding to Hotmail is convenient as it allows them to pickup their mail from anywhere.  These people don’t realise we provide a perfectly good webmail system to do just that.  Others say it allows them to collect all their various emails into one handy account, and therefore not login to multiple email boxes – this is fine – but forward them all to an address on your domain – NOT an external one.

Many web hosts are now banning email forwarding, removing the capability all together.  And the result for these hosts is a serious decrease in spam complaints against their servers.  We’re not planning on removing email forwarding just yet, but in the long run, it might be inevitable for anyone running a mailserver to come to the conclusion that forwarding email externally is just too much trouble, and the benefits to everyone by turning it off, far outweigh any benefits of having this so called “feature”.

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