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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One of the important concerns to web designers is striking a balance between the creative aspect of a website in terms of style and media and being able to implement the design into an accessible and standards compliant site which can be read by search engines. Web technologies have come a long way in a short time in helping to achieve this with xhtml, css and javascript providing a more flexible way of realising ideas while maintaining clean, structured code and accessibility standards. More recently newer developments are becoming available which are pushing the possibilities of the web and raising the bar in the flexibility designers and developers have. As long as the ideas keep flowing on what we would like to achieve on the web, the technology will continue to advance inorder to match this.

CSS3

Css3 has been in development for a few years but is now beginning have some of its features supported better. There a number of interesting features which have been developed to meet design trends, so as to make the implementation of these stylings easier, though many of them are still currently unsupported by browsers, especially Internet Explorer. Some of the features include:

- Multi column allows the developer to position blocks of text in several columns similar to print.

- Rounded corners can be achieved on elements by setting a radius on the corner.

- Border images allow the developer to create custom shaped elements by setting graphics for each corner and sides of an element.These 3 features are only currently supported in Firefox and Safari 3.

- Border color allows gradient borders to be used though are currently only supported by Firefox.

- HSL colors have been introduced, which aswell as setting the colour also allows you to set the hue, saturation and lightness of colours, providing a lot more flexibility in colour schemes. So far this is supported by Opera 9.5, Safari 3, Konqueror and Mozilla.

- One of the most popular features of css3 is opacity. This can be set on different elements allowing a gradient effect to be achieved. This is supported by most browsers except Internet Explorer.

- Box sizing is an interesting one as previously padding and borders were always added to the width of an element but now can be added inside a div. Firefox and Safari support this with the prefix -moz- and -webkit- respectively though Opera simply works with box-sizing.

- Font-face was included in css2 but was only supported by Internet Explorer if an .eot font format was used but Safari 3.1 now allows Truetype or Opentype font to be implemented in designs.

Flash accessibility.

Flash has always been a blessing and curse to both developers and users. It can achieve unique interactive experiences for users and bring a site to life but with search engines unable to extract text or links from the file, it has made flash sites often inaccessible and difficult to index. In the last 6 months it was announced by Google and Adobe that the algorithm Google uses is dramatically changing which will allow text and links from flash files to be read and allow sites to be indexed better in search results. Adobe is developing a flash reader for search engines which will allows the files to be read. Another technology which employs Flash and provides developers with more flexibility in terms of typefaces on the web in Sifr. This is a type replacement technology which allows any typeface to be employed in a website. Its fully accessible with all major browsers and can be read by screen readers.

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So Amazon has finally launched their new MP3 music store, giving christmas bargain hunters a serious alternative to iTunes for their music.

Unlike iTunes, the majority of singles are 20p cheaper at 59p, with full Albums from £3.00, and more importantly – the big selling point from Amazon is that all downloads are DRM Free.  Until recently, the Amazon service was only available in the US, and for a while there was some serious doubt if the UK and Europe would ever see it (DRM arguments with record lables etc).  Follow this link for a more detailed explanation of DRM and the implications of removing it, but in short – it’s a good thing for consumers, and one that should see Amazon make a big dent in the profits of Apple iTunes.

Finally…  just a wee reminder to regular NSDesign Blog readers, that if you’re a fan of the latest gadgets etc, then get yourself 10% of any sale at www.iwoot.com by using the promo code nsdesign at checkout.

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With very little fanfare, Google has added a feature to their Search Engine that could have a big impact on how people use and “influence” the results.

Searchwiki is a new feature available to logged in Google users, which allows you to add, remove and “promote” any of the returned results from a specific search.  You can also add notes to any of the results, allowing you to leave little reminders about what you think of the site.

To see this in action:

Sign into your Google account (you’ll have one if you use GMail, Adwords, Google Calendar, or any of the online Google tools that require a login).  Then on the Google search page, do a search for “Glasgow Web Design“…  Then scroll right to the bottom, and click “See all notes for this SearchWiki” 

What you should see is our “notes” that we left for our own site, and confirmation that we “promoted” our link under this search term. 

Only you (while logged in) see the results re-organised the way you’ve specified, but other Google users DO get to see your comments, and also get to see which sites have been promoted or removed by other users.  Which brings up some concerns… 

What if someone writes a nasty (or libelous) note tagged to your site.  Eg: “don’t use these mechanics – they ripped us off”…  How does the owner of that garage reply, or ask Google to remove these comments?  What if he doesn’t even know such comments exist?  Will the volume of visitors slowly decrease until Google sends him no traffic?

If Google’s SearchWiki is indeed a wiki, then where are the methods to complain about a note, or request that factually incorrect notes be taken down.  Personally I think this new feature may do more harm than good…  and it’ll be interesting to see how Google deal with the barrage of complaints that they’re sure to get! 

Also – how long before the organic results (those that everybody sees on Google) actually start being influenced by “promoters” of sites?  If we get all our customers to “promote” the NSDesign website under the search term “web design”, will the fact that 1000’s of people have gone out of their way to tell google it’s a better site than the rest actually see Google move it up the organic results?  They say NO, but for how long…?

Read Google’s own announcement of SearchWiki at the Google Blog.

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Having recently celebrated it’s 10th birthday (watch this space for details of NSDesign’s 10th birthday early next  year), Google continues to be busy on the development front, releasing a number of new products and services recently.

Two of my favourites so far – Google Chrome – their new web browser, and Mail Googles, a fun addition to their GMail platform that might save a few people from sending the occasional dodgy email late on a Friday night while under the influence…

Chrome is big news in the web world – 1) Because it’s a new browser from Google, and 2) Because it brings with it the possibility of another browser war, with Google’s rivalry with Microsoft stronger than ever.

We’ll post our own review of Chrome soon, but for now, suffice to say that Google’s first effort into the world of browsers does a decent job, and most importantly, seems to be pretty much standards-compliant (being based on the Webkit engine which powers Apple’s Safari) which should save a few headaches from a design/development point of view.  Read Bruce Lawson’s “On Google Chrome” for a more detailed evaluation and opinion.

A million miles from the “strategic move” that is Chrome, Google also announced Mail Googles.  Had it been April 1st I’d have thought it a joke, but think about it a little deeper, and it’s really not a bad idea!..  We’ve had many a domain order, placed at 3am (you know who you are!) from customers returning from the pub…  Many of which are on the phone next day trying to ask for their money back…  “Can I get a refund for ScottyKingofBeer.com please?  I don’t really remember ordering it…  Maybe we’ll follow Google and introduce something similar…  then again….

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I have to say that I am a proud and happy user of Firefox, I keep it open all the time while I’m at work developing web sites, at home I never betray it with other when surfing the net, and I never miss the occasion to advice a friend to download it and start to use it.

Today, after one year and a half from the last mayor version,  Firefox 3 has been released promising substantial improvements.

Memory Leak issue
Probably the most well known negative aspect of Firefox is that after a while that the browser is running, it starts using excessively memory, this is know as memory leak. Fortunately in this new release the way how Firefox manages the memory has been improved and now it’s noticeable a huge difference in terms of overall speed.

User interface
A lot of work has been also done to improve the user experience adding new functionalities. It is more easy to access the bookmarks thanks to a new system of star rating, tagging and search functionality. The address bar is now a lot more flexible allowing users to use it not only to type in URLs but also to search websites already visited or search for bookmarks. The zoom re-sizes all elements of a viewed website (not only the text as it was in previous versions) this improves user experience for those with particular accessibility needs as it renders, scaled up or down, pixel perfectly, all websites independently from how they are developed.

Offline web applications
Switching Firefox 3 to “work offline” it is possible to use web applications without connection, data will be saved on the computer to be later synchronized on the server once an Internet connection has been detected. This is a new way how to use web applications and it is still in process of standardization within HTML 5 specifications.

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