BUILDING AN ONLINE BRAND

By Ben Gross, Senior Designer at www.i-com.net

Background

One of our clients Ski +Trek approached us with the ambition of becoming the top online retailer for outdoor & adventure clothing. We sat down and discussed their business and noticed two key problems. Their brand and profile was outdated, causing them to reach a plateau in their sales. Also, the platform on which the original website was developed was restrictive and inflexible, causing problems with the site’s search friendliness and making it difficult for them to update the site with promotions and offers they were running. Previous brand imagery shown below…

Research

Through in-depth research, we discovered the personality of the brand was modern, exciting, sophisticated, community-centric and uniquely enthusiastic about the products they sell. Ski + Trek’s proposition is to sell premium goods at fair prices. The market the firm is in is very competitive, which means going up against established brands such as Helly Hansen & Snow + Rock, so it needed an identity that would be striking, helping it stand out from its competitors. The website, which would be the main sales tool, needed to be robust, efficient and convey the brand’s values.

When we talk about web browsers, whatever your allegiances are, there can be few more enduring than Internet Explorer. For the vast majority of people it represents their initial forays onto the internet, that little blue ‘e’ logo synonymous with a generation of Windows PCs that still dominate the market. However, that sprawling ubiquity came with a heavy price, where increased virus threats and security scrutiny attributed to being number one culminated with anti-competition lawsuits to stoke up a backlash. Independent and open-source rivals snuck in to offer effective alternatives at a time when many felt Microsoft had become complacent, slow to react to what users and designers demanded.

For a long time IE was known in the developer community as being pretty dismissive of the kind of HTML and CSS standards that were critical in unifying a progressive web experience within every browser, irrespective of brand or version. The famous workarounds and lines of detection code used to make pages optimised between even the various incarnations of IE became an embarrassing source of derision. Recently this problem has been highlighted by an increasing call for browser consistency as the desktop web has migrated to more capable mobile devices and smartphones. The clamour for open specifications and Apple’s distrust towards third-party plug-ins has put further emphasis on emerging technologies like HTML5 and CSS3, prompting a real opportunity for influential players to grasp the nettle. Some pretty prickly ingers for Microsoft and IE9 then, if the beta version is any indication.

The message behind this latest version couldn’t be more standards obsessed, placing interoperability and record-high ACID scores at the heart of all the marketing rhetoric we’ve heard so far. But does anyone care, is it too late or will IE’s ninth and possibly final life really herald a new dawn for modern browsing that none of us can ignore? This month we’ll take a close look at some of the most significant aspects and analyse what influence Internet Explorer can still have on the contemporary browser landscape.

Microsoft Bing’s Jeff Henshaw highlights how HTML5 features within the search engine offer a richer, more dynamic experience

Courting new standards

For anyone close to the web trade, 2010 has probably been the most standards-aware year for a long time. The tech news blogs have been full of it, although it hasn’t necessarily been for the best reasons. Excitement levels for HTML5 and CSS3 have been palpable but largely fired up by influential corporate protagonists following diferent agendas. Many feel that these emerging specifications have been kind of pimped out and in some cases distorted into a wholly diferent beast. Apple did quite a bit here to create an almost mythical, fairytale image of HTML5 to provide the ideal foil against Adobe’s Flash player. Why would the iPhone and iPad entertain harbouring such evil when a ready-made knight in shining armour was at the gates? Slightly dramatic, but you get the gist.

The new IE9 user interface is crisp and clear, stepping back and letting page design and layout speak for itself

The point is it pushed lightweight web technologies to the fore again and it therefore doesn’t feel too shocking to ind Microsoft joining the party. One of the prominent marketing lines for IE9 is “unleash a more beautiful web”, which relates directly to progressive support for the new markup languages perhaps more than anything else. On the face of it we should rejoice at the benchmarking scores attributed to the beta, and they are mightily impressive, however can this approach do more than just make IE relevant again? Thankfully the next wave of desktop browsers all seem to be treading the same path, with the likes of Opera 11 Alpha, Firefox 4 beta, and the irst-look for Chrome 9 all suggesting comprehensive HTML5 hijinks. Inevitably each of the variants will have their own interpretation based on the layout engines deployed, so as always developers will probably need to rely on workarounds to achieve consistency.

Hardware acceleration

This is the real buzz concept in the trade right now for modern browser technology, not just as far as IE9 is concerned. Many see this as the golden frontier for the next-generation of browsers, with all brands introducing hardware acceleration into forthcoming incarnations. But what is it, what are its advantages? Well, we know that the web is getting multimedia assets like sound, video, sophisticated graphics etc. Throw in the hunger for HD and 3D and you place some hefty demands on the presentation layer. More of this responsibility is being shifted over towards the browser than ever before, with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript reclaiming power from the traditional third-party solutions of the past. What this means is that browser engineers need a way of allocating more resources to the rendering engines the software uses, not only making our content more vivid but also faster. In basic terms hardware acceleration takes this kind processing strain away from the general purpose CPU and allocates this to more dedicated hardware, in this instance the GPU.

Test Drive demos showcase the hardware acceleration afforded to the HTML5 capabilities

Where Microsoft has certain advantages as far as the IE9 beta is concerned is in the tight integration with Windows 7. As the manufacturer of the operating system it also has deepest access to APIs and frameworks like DirectX that again can have a huge impact on accelerated performance. This is a doubleedged sword of course, and many users and developers have conveyed dismay at the limited platform base for testing the browser. More universally it also throws open a debate about how much we really should envisage a web that relies too heavily on this kind of hardware-dependant architecture. Arguably we run the risk of opening a door to content and experiences that simply are too intensive for the hardware and browsers of small devices to handle. Perhaps an Internet Explorer 9 version speciically rewritten for Windows 7 Mobile is part of the longterm gameplan. Similarly, do we really want a situation where content stipulates “viewing on Windows 7 and IE9” for best results? Maybe the future row over interoperability won’t be about standards support, but the ability for browsers to guzzle up hardware resources so critical to next-gen web delivery.

DELIVERING A MODERN BROWSER

Simon Bisson examines Microsoft’s evolution of Internet Explorer 9 and explains how the tight Windows 7 integration can be utilised by designers

Way back in the dawn of the web, there were the browser wars. Developers all over the world tried to put their spin on the HTML speciications, a war that left designers and developers struggling to deliver sites that worked on any screen. “Designed for Netscape” buttons were everywhere, as sites tried to push users to their favoured tools. Things couldn’t last, and the wars ended in legal action and the seemingly endless rule of Internet Explorer 6.

But the story didn’t end there. Netscape became Firefox and started to eat away at Microsoft’s market share. Designers and developers agitated for more standards support and the W3C was caught on the wrong foot, with the informal WHATWG taking control of the direction of HTML5. With Chrome and Safari joining Firefox on the road to HTML5, Microsoft’s IE7 looked as though it was being left behind. But things had changed in Redmond, and a commitment to standards support meant that Microsoft’s browser had to change. Internet Explorer 8 was the irst sign of that change, forcing developers and designers to move away from supporting the aging IE6’s quirks and limited CSS. Even so it wasn’t enough, failing to meet Google’s deinition of a “modern browser” with only limited HTML5 support. A year ago, at its Professional Developers Conference in LA, Microsoft gave the world a sneak peek at its next browser. It wasn’t much, just a look at a graphically accelerated rendering engine that smoothly animated text and map images, but it showed that something was happening.

Platform previewed

March 2010, and Microsoft invited a small group of journalists to its Redmond campus to meet the Internet Explorer 9 team and to see the work they were doing. There Microsoft unveiled what was to be IE9’s new rendering engine – an HTML5, CSS3 browser using GPU-based rendering with support for inline SVG graphics. It wasn’t the only new piece of IE9, as the team also showed of a new JavaScript engine, based around a multi-core just-in-time compiler that would run JavaScript using a traditional interpreter, compiling in the background and switch seamlessly to the compiled code as soon as it was ready. The combination was fast, and ready for the latest web standards. Microsoft was quite clearly back in the game, with what even Google had to acknowledge was a modern browser.

All through the Platform Preview programme, where updated versions of the IE9 core engines were released for developers to use to test against HTML5 content and to develop new content, Microsoft was talking about the concept of “same markup”. That meant that sites written for IE9 should look the same in Chrome 6 or Firefox 4 or Safari 5. But IE9 couldn’t do that on its own, and without a common test suite beyond tools like ACID3 and SunSpider, there’s little hope of a common web, as each browser interprets the W3C’s speciications slightly diferently. Each new Platform Preview release increased IE9’s ACID3 score, and also submitted new tests for HTML5 and CSS3 to the W3C’s browser test suite. The ive Platform Previews let Microsoft collect bug reports, performance metrics, and information about how its new browser would interact with real-world websites. It also put the new IE rendering engine in the hands of developers and designers, helping them get ready for a standards-compliant IE.

A very public beta

Now Microsoft has unveiled the beta version of IE9, the irst widely available version, and the irst with a new simpliied user interface. It’s still got the performance improvements and HTML5 support of the Platform Previews, with good SunSpider and the Platform Previews, with good SunSpider and ACID3 scores. This time, though, it’s ready for end users, and with 2 million downloads in the irst few days, there are a lot of users ready for it. The new UI is the most obvious feature of Microsoft’s latest browser. Not as radical as some pundits hoped, it’s still a big change. It’s not surprising that IE9 has a similar look and feel to other modern browsers, like Chrome and Firefox 4. Like today’s computersimulation designed cars, browser design is now driven by the numbers, emphasising features that are used regularly over those that aren’t. The result is a browser that Microsoft describes as being “a stage for the web”, where the browser is meant to disappear into the background. That means there’s no space for a favourites bar, and bookmarks are relegated to a simple drop-down. Instead there’s a single combined search and address bar, and space for a set of tabs. But IE9’s new features don’t stop at a new UI and a set of new rendering engines. It’s a Windows browser at heart, and Microsoft is making sure that it’s the Windows browser of choice for consumers and for businesses by tying it closely to the Windows 7 user experience. With hardware acceleration requiring Vista or later, Windows XP users are being left behind, and Microsoft is able to use the latest desktop features without worrying about backward compatibility.

Utilising the Windows 7 integration

It’s this Windows 7 integration that’s the real UI innovation in IE9. Where Google’s Chrome lets you drag tabs into new windows and save webpages as applications, IE9 goes further, letting you drag and “pin” a site’s favicon to the Windows 7 task bar. There’s a nice touch in IE9’s application mode too, where the browser window gets a colour tint from the browser’s icon. It’s a useful trick, and one that will mean designers paying more attention to the favicons they use. Adding this Windows 7 functionality to a site is easy enough. Much of what you need to do can be added using simple metatags, like this:

<meta name=”application-name” content=”Your Site Mode Application”/>
<meta name=”msapplication-tooltip” content=”Open Site Mode”/>
<meta name=”msapplication-starturl” content=”http://mysite.com/firstpage.html”/>
<meta name=”msapplication-window” content=”width=800;height=600”/>
<meta name=”msapplication-navbutton-color” content=”blue”/>

You can deine tooltips for icons, application names, and even the size of the initial window, as well as the URL of the page that opens in the application window. Windows 7 jumplists give quick access to speciic
application functions, and they can do the same for your web applications. All you need is a list of the pages that support the functions you want, along with appropriate icons. IE9 supports up to ive diferent
jumplist tasks, and again, all you need to do is add them as a set of metatags. The sample code here adds two jumplist items to a pinned site’s taskbar icon, along with their associated icons:

001 <META name=”msapplication-task” content=”name=Listitem1;action-uri=http://mysite.com/firstpage.html;icon-uri=http://mysite.com/icon1.ico”/>
002 <META name=”msapplication-task” content=”name=LIstitem2;action-uri=http://mysite.com/secondpage.html;iconuri=http://mysite.com/icon2.ico”/>

IE9’s jumplists let you add additional items as categories. These can be used to give contextual notiications, carrying over information from session to session. You’ll need to use JavaScript to manage category items, being careful to clear used items from the list when they’re completed. You can use a similar technique to add overlays to the taskbar icon, using them to show information like the number of unread messages on a webmail service. Again you’ll need to be careful managing overlays, as your site needs to control what’s displayed and when. Designers will ind IE9’s commitment to HTML5 and CSS3 critical in developing the next generation of the web. IE is still the mass market browser, and in making a stand for standards support in the next release, Microsoft has inally made the commitment to tomorrow’s web that designers have been asking for. It’s a big step forward – and one that will beneit the web as a whole, not just Internet Explorer users.

Web Designer’s HOT 100 2011 online preview: Part 4

Our annual roundup of great things within web and digital design is back for the New Year and we thought we give you a sneak preview before the magazine goes on sale in January

Yes, Happy New Year everybody and with this being the fourth day of January we thought we’d offer a really cool treat to get you in the mood for issue 179′s very special cover feature. The HOT 100 is our way of bringing together the hottest tips for what will surely be hot to watch over the coming year, covering Trends, Talent, Technology, Events, Websites and Products. As per usual we’ve opened the floodgates for a barrage of insider tips from some of the most influential people within the community, resulting in a bumper 12 pages bursting with superb content.

Inevitably therefore, we’ve had a few tips that didn’t quite make it in print but STILL worthy of inclusion so we’re adding a special 4-part series to this very blog! Perfect for leading up to the release of issue 179 on January 13th…

8 ) Mobile data disappears

“For years pundits were predicting that the next year would be the year of mobile data. We’re way past that point now. In fact, the next year is likely to see mobile data “disappear” – it will just be assumed that it is available.”
CREDITED TO
Benjamin Dyer, Actinic / www.actinic.co.uk

9) Location-based mobile ads

“2011 looks set to be the year that locally targeted advertising takes off on mobile phones.  With the explosive growth in mobile usage and GPS-enabled devices, advertising messages that appear on mobile sites or applications can be tailored to key geographic audiences. Adfonic’s self-service tools (http://adfonic.com/) enable advertisers to create and manage campaigns at the city level in the UK and at state or designated marketing area (DMA) level in the US.”
CREDITED TO
http://adfonic.com

10) Year of Social E-Commerce

“Oh, there’s a big trend on the web right now all right, it’s social e-commerce. Just look at all the shopping start-ups getting investment left and right. It’s a multi-billion dollar market that hasn’t fully been tapped yet. We’re just now seeing bits and pieces of it’s potential. That’s why I created WUNTED.com, a social shopping site launching soon that empowers the ability of users shopping online together.”

CREDITED TO
Dann Petty, http://dannpetty.com/

Web Designer’s HOT 100 2011 online preview: Part 3

Our annual roundup of great things within web and digital design is back for the New Year and we thought we give you a sneak preview before the magazine goes on sale in January

Yes, Happy New Year everybody and with this being the third day of January we thought we’d offer a really cool treat to get you in the mood for issue 179′s very special cover feature. The HOT 100 is our way of bringing together the hottest tips for what will surely be hot to watch over the coming year, covering Trends, Talent, Technology, Events, Websites and Products. As per usual we’ve opened the floodgates for a barrage of insider tips from some of the most influential people within the community, resulting in a bumper 12 pages bursting with superb content.

Inevitably therefore, we’ve had a few tips that didn’t quite make it in print but STILL worthy of inclusion so we’re adding a special 4-part series to this very blog over the next four days! Perfect for leading up to the release of issue 179 on January 13th…

5) Increased physicality

“The web and web content is often seen as this detached virtual world that lives in data centres and is delivered through flat panels. 2011 will see a massive blurring of the physical and virtual channels as more physical actions are driven from services on the web. Taking ecommerce as an example, we all expect to buy online but pick up or return goods to a physical shop, I expect this model to extend to other areas. Geolocation apps are leading this trend, but 2011 will be the year it becomes mainstream.”
CREDITED TO
Benjamin Dyer, Actinic / www.actinic.co.uk

6) Font-face Text Therapy

With typographic design to explode in 2011, browsers too are having to handle the new switch to non-system fonts. Services like as Typekit and Google are spawning various APIs and hacks to avoid rendering problems, such as this one for avoiding that awkward loading delay in Firefox. This handy slither of code from Github.com uses the WebFont Loader API to eradicate that jarring moment of unstyled page text within Firefox

CREDITED TO
https://github.com/typekit/webfontloader

<script src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1/webfont.js”></script>
<script>
WebFont.load({
google: {
families: ['Droid Sans']
}
});
</script>
<style>
h1 {
font-family: ‘Droid Sans’;
visibility: hidden;
}
.wf-active h1 {
visibility: visible;
}
</style>

7) Tablet market share growth

“The iPad launch seems a long time ago, but the competition is still in catch up mode. The plethora of tablet devices hitting the market, including an early 2011 release for the iPad 2, is pointing to an increased market share for these devices. The challenge designers will face is that they now have another set of products to test against, with the complication of the new and unique user interface aspects of tablet devices.”
CREDITED TO
Benjamin Dyer, Actinic / www.actinic.co.uk

Web Designer’s HOT 100 2011 online preview: Part 2

Our annual roundup of great things within web and digital design is back for the New Year and we thought we give you a sneak preview before the magazine goes on sale in January

Yes, Happy New Year everybody and with this being the second day of January we thought we’d offer a really cool treat to get you in the mood for issue 179′s very special cover feature. The HOT 100 is our way of bringing together the hottest tips for what will surely be hot to watch over the coming year, covering Trends, Talent, Technology, Events, Websites and Products. As per usual we’ve opened the floodgates for a barrage of insider tips from some of the most influential people within the community, resulting in a bumper 12 pages bursting with superb content.

Inevitably therefore, we’ve had a few tips that didn’t quite make it in print but STILL worthy of inclusion so we’re adding a special 4-part series to this very blog over the next four days! Perfect for leading up to the release of issue 179 on January 13th…

3) Social  Network Optimisation

“If I was in the seat reclining in my Aeron chair at the Googlepex right now, I would be worrying. Google has seen massive dominance for so long it seems almost insane that anyone could rival them. However, after a number of quite high profile disasters (e.g. Google Wave) I think 2011 is going to be a difficult year for the search engine giant. The growing trend for next year will be a massive growth in people getting their information via recommendation rather than search, and this is where the social networks dominate. The challenge for designers will be one of optimisation; we need a new paradigm: what makes your content optimised for social network channels?”
CREDITED TO
Benjamin Dyer, Actinic / www.actinic.co.uk

4) Multimedia Comics

Comic books featuring music first came to light in 2007 with the digital release of Nicholas Da Silva’s HITLESS series (#143). He’s now taking it to a whole new level with the introduction of QR and AR technology by creating a virtual playlist on the inside cover of issue #5 for fans to experience and download. There’s also an iPad and RIA version to watch out for in 2011…
CREDITED TO
Nicholas Da Silva, ZOOLOOK / www.zoolook.com

Web Designer’s HOT 100 2011 online preview: Part 1

Our annual roundup of great things within web and digital design is back for the New Year and we thought we give you a sneak preview before the magazine goes on sale in January

Yes, Happy New Year everybody and with this being the first day of January we thought we’d offer a really cool treat to get you in the mood for issue 179′s very special cover feature. The HOT 100 is our way of bringing together the hottest tips for what will surely be hot to watch over the coming year, covering Trends, Talent, Technology, Events, Websites and Products. As per usual we’ve opened the floodgates for a barrage of insider tips from some of the most influential people within the community, resulting in a bumper 12 pages bursting with superb content.

Inevitably therefore, we’ve had a few tips that didn’t quite make it in print but STILL worthy of inclusion so we’re adding a special 4-part series to this very blog over the next four days! Perfect for leading up to the release of issue 179 on January 13th…

1) Small screens come first

Could 2011 be the year where the mobile web starts taking priority over the traditional desktop web counterparts? Conference speaker and designer Sarah Parmenter seems to think so…
“With the influx of iPhones, iPads and various notebooks I’m sure we’ll see designs optimised for smaller screens first rather than the wider desktop versions taking priority. I think the use of Media Queries and specific websites just tailored to mobile devices will be more widespread, allowing for greater control within our designs but undoubtedly, more work on our part.”
CREDITED TO
Sarah Parmenter, YouKnowWhoDesign.com

2) Designing for touch

“2011 is likely to see a fairly dramatic shift in the devices and style of interactivity that we design for.  Few people/companies have fully grasped the potential of the touch screen experience for menu and UI design (me included), so as the technology grows, so will our thinking. Fully Illustrated’s first creative iPad App will be launching in February 2011, so keep your eyes peeled!”
CREDITED TO
Michael Heald, www.fullyillustrated.com

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to read much of the IT press these days without coming across an article about Twitter, how it’s going to save the world, and how it isn’t. I don’t want to add to that discussion here (except maybe I already have) but its soaring popularity got me thinking about how easy it is to get one’s voice heard on the web these days. Twitter is a special case – technically it’s micro-blogging – and it is typically used to provide short updates on what people are doing there and then. But it is a form of blogging, micro or not, and it is blogging in general I think I have a problem with. Wikipedia defines a blog as “A type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.” A blog can be further defined by its extremely low barrier to entry. Prior to blogging it was perfectly possible to set up a website and publish you own content, but it wasn’t always that easy. At worst coding skills were required, at best an in-depth knowledge of one of the many web authoring tools was needed to get a site up and running and looking professional. Blogs played a significant role in changing this. Outfits like Blogger and WordPress went further than offering free webspace or cheap hosting. They offered ready-made templates, advanced CMS functionality, and a range of web 2.0 features. Suddenly anyone could create a site for free, and update it with ease. Not only could anyone create a blog, but so many people have. WordPress has over 200,000 active blogs on its books, with over 50,000,000 words being published a day. That is just a drop in the ocean. The total number of blogs is difficult to calculate but tens of millions isn’t a fantasy figure. Add in the number of Twitter posts and these numbers swell even further.

So it seems blogs have opened the floodgates, allowing almost anyone to create and publish whatever they desire, whenever they desire. There are blogs out there covering every topic under the Sun, offering views from all sides of every debate. Of course there are many excellent blogs and bloggers, but is this seemingly runaway success story all it is cracked up to be? Aren’t we missing something here? It seems to me that the rise of blogging has coincided with a significant fall in the quality of writing on the web. Blogging is producing a generation of bad writing. There are two key issues at play. At a basic level the fundamentals of writing are suffering. Spelling and grammar are increasingly being marginalised. Text speak, where words are abbreviated to be as short as possible, is creeping in from the mobile phone industry. While this helps authors generate speedy output and circumnavigate character limits, it does little for the quality or integrity of the writing. The slipping of these standards is compounded by the lack of an important quality control mechanism – good editing.

Blogging, by its very nature, is self regulated. Rarely is there anyone sub-editing the work, let alone checking for clarity. Of course many bloggers are very capable writers, with the highest regard for language and its numerous rules. But the very nature of blogging means these people will always be outnumbered by the mass of casual, average writers generating poor quality work. The second major issue with blogging is that it seems to have created some kind of online feeding frenzy, where the speed of updates and the volume of words are the driving forces, not the actual content being posted. Martyn Perks, director of thinking apart Ltd – a management and communications consultancy – sums up the problem. “One outcome of the ‘journalism of now’ culture is immediacy overrides the need for detective work to uncover the facts behind the story. The influence of blogging has meant the urge to report immediately is harder to resist. An ‘always-on’ culture means the most important part of the story – namely the facts – get lost in the battle to be first.”

In all types of blogging it is this ‘always-on’ culture that is diluting the quality of the writing, the veracity of the statement, or the reasoning of the comment. It is now all about posting first, and posting regularly. Facts can always be checked later, often pointed out by readers in the comments section. Posts can then be revised or updated as required, providing yet more material to upload. This speed and volume of publication seems to flame the often ferocious nature of a lot blogs, something that does little to boost the credibility or respectability of their material. Peter Gilheany, director of Forster – a PR agency specialising in social media and ethical marketing – has noticed this inherent lack of reasonableness online. “[Blogging is] an area that attracts fevered debate, passionate diatribes and not a little mud-slinging. Immerse yourself in this strange, self reverential world of one-upmanship, and you could emerge believing that the government’s driving desire is to penalise the middle classes, climate change is a crock, car drivers are the most persecuted minority in the UK today and anyone vaguely working class is an illiterate, semi-feral benefits sponge. This may be no different from the letters pages of old. The difference now is speed and scale.” Traditional media, more accurately traditional methods, are different. There is an audience and an editorial team.

That editorial team create and source content specifically for their audience. The content is checked, verified and subject to quality control measures. All this is done to set deadlines, that while strict, support the quality of the output. It’s not perfect, no system ever is, and obviously mistakes can happen. But the basic mechanisms are in place. Blogging has almost none of this. Blogging is content being created then looking for an audience. No one has checked it, it’s simply produced on mass. Some sticks, much doesn’t. For every blog that is a success, there are hundreds, if not thousands, that no one is reading and are destined to be abandoned. We’re not suggesting blogging is without merit. There are a huge number of very successful blogs out there, producing excellent content that more traditional outlets cannot compete with. Look at the recent successes of some political blogs in breaking major stories well before the broadsheets caught up as cases in point. The technology sector is another area that is particularity well served with a number of first class bloggers. In the fast moving world of new software releases, trade shows, and product launches, blogging can really flex its strengths. However, the point remains; there is a wealth of badly conceived, poorly written, and frankly unwanted material out there. Blogs have a significant role to play in how material is distributed and consumed on the web. But let us not forget that the core activity, writing, is a profession like any other. It is a skill some have a gift for, while others have had to work hard to perfect and hone their talents. Just because the technology lets us side-step traditional barriers, doesn’t mean it is advisable to always do so.

URL: WWW.CARSONIFIED.COM
AUTHOR: MIKE KUS
DATE LAUNCHED: 9 JULY 2009
TECHNOLOGIES USED: PENCIL,
PEN, PAPER, SCANNER,
PHOTOSHOP, HTML, CSS

“Carsonified is a web company based in Bath, UK. We produce events/workshops for web professionals and write about the web on our blog Think Vitamin. The new Carsonified site was redesigned to clearly communicate what we do, to express our passion for the industry we work in and to reflect our company’s fun loving personality. The redesign was a tough job not least due to the simple fact it was our own site and as you know that in itself puts the pressure on. The solution is a simple two colour per page approach with hand-drawn illustrations to create a bold and colourful site that hopefully packs a punch. The layout is clean and simple so the CSS is minimal. Notable points though are the use of negative margins to enable certain illustrations to sit outside of the main content area and the styling of the email/ Twitter links on the team pages which use CSS3 rounded corners and dashed borders to great effect.”

DESIGN TIP
ROUNDED CORNER DASHED BORDER LINK
“One of the challenges of this site design was working
in one colour on top of the background colour. On
the team pages there is an Email and Twitter link for
each member of the team which I wanted to highlight
without using an underline. I also needed a hover state
that didn’t require a change of colour. I could have done
this in a number of ways but the solution I opted for
was to create a dashed one pixel border around the link
and using CSS3 I gave it round corners. On hover state
I simply changed the border to make it solid. There’s
nothing complicated about this but it’s a simple and
effective way of highlighting the link without using an
underline or changing the colour on hover.
The great thing about CSS is there are always new
things you can do with it. It’s really only your imagination
that limits you.”

SQUARESPACE

One of the coolest new kids on the blogging scene is this very design-conscious publishing service. We see what all the fuss is about and hear from the man behind it…

It’s fair to say that one of the drawbacks for popular blog publishing platforms is in achieving enough uniqueness as far as design identity. Many promise accessibility and ease for maintaining content but prove more complex when engineering bespoke template styles – encouraging a reworking of existing examples that can be quite formulaic. This is specifically where Squarespace pitches its service and offers a very graphically rich approach to building ready-hosted site solutions. A slick but very stripped-down IDE lets users literally build up their blogs from a growing selection of preformatted sites that can be tweaked on the fly. Intuitive controls then enable users to dig deeper into the CSS to make more advanced changes, with instant previews allowing you to see live changes as they happen. All the dashboard tools hover above the current page viewing area and enable edits to occur without moving away from the published page. New pages and default sections can be inserted with equal ease to widen site structure without the hassle of re-engineering everything.
Once you’re happy with the initial incarnation of your site it is published within the Squarespace community via the chosen hosting package. All sites must be served this way although subscriptions above the basic level offer custom domain-mapped URLs and varying levels of support. Prices start at $8 (just over £5) per month and extend to $50 (around £33) for the premium Community option, with key differentials being bandwidth, storage space and audience capabilities. Where applicable, the latter allows you to set up groups of registered subscribers to your site and deliver a customised experience while allowing a group of editors or contributers to submit content to the site.
One of the most useful extras are the built-in capabilities for monitoring site performance and tracking the average amount of page views, unique visitors and hits that have been accumulated daily. This information is presented in a digestible way and could be critical to commercial webmasters when making design decisions that could impact on the way their sites are employed. www.squarespace.com

THE SQUARESPACE DESIGN CYCLE:

1) Page text
The text that inhabits the default pages of the site can be stripped away or edited on the fly to reflect the content that you wish to add. You can then view any changes instantly

This month, Nominet’s director of marketing and communications, Phil Kingsland, talks us through choosing the right web-hosting company

Setting up a website that successfully reflects your brand can play a vital role in growing your business and gaining competitive advantage. There are two important components of setting up a website: the first is choosing the right domain name, and the second is choosing the right web-hosting company.
Phil Kingsland, director of marketing and communications at Nominet (www.nominet.org.uk), the registry for .uk domain names, looks at the process of setting up a domain name, talks about how to choose the right web-hosting company and offers some advice on how to protect your brand online.

What domain name?
Choosing the right domain name is an important event in any fledgling or established company’s life. Domain names ending with .uk are currently being registered at a rate of one every 20 seconds, and are allocated on a first-registered, first-served basis. With over seven million domain names registered in total, it’s worth thinking creatively when choosing a domain name for your business, as your first choice may already have been registered by someone else. A domain brand can be reliant on what names are still on offer.
It’s not a bad idea to register several similar domain names. You could also register your full company name in addition to a shorter, easy-to-remember version, or consider a hyphenated version if your company name has two or more words. The shorter the name, the better; however, just about any four or five-letter domain will have already been registered.
Setting up a domain name is a straightforward process. You can register a domain name through a registrar (ISP or registration agent), who will act as your agent and submit a domain name application to Nominet – or another international registry – on your behalf.

Top tips for choosing a web-hosting company
Once you have registered your domain name, the next step is choosing a web-hosting company. With so much emphasis on brand identity, there is a very real need to make sure that the web-hosting service you go with meets all the potential needs of your business for the long term.
Choosing a web-hosting company is a personal decision based on your own unique needs as a business. Switching web-hosting companies can be time-consuming and costly, so it is worth investing the time to get it right the first time. It’s important to choose a company that not only meets your needs today, but can also grow with you as your needs change.
Here follows some tips and advice to help you choose the right web-hosting company for your requirements.

Check the costs
When comparing different companies, a key question must be how much the hosting will cost. It may seem an obvious question, but the different fees and costs may not be that obvious. For example, check whether there is a set-up fee. Are there extra fees for secure transactions? What does it cost to host multiple URLs and email addresses? In other words, it is important to establish what is included in the cost and what is extra.

Check the contract
It’s also a good idea to read the contract and terms and conditions carefully before you sign up. Some companies charge an additional fee for terminating your agreement if you wish to change to another provider. It’s worth finding out how much this is and if there are any specific restrictions on moving your account.

Choose the level of service to suit your needs
Different companies offer different levels of service. Take the time to decide what your minimum requirements are, particularly in respect of technical support. Check whether the hosting company can guarantee service levels that meet your requirements. For instance, is its phone number on the website? What kind of out-of-hours support does it offer? Are its support telephone numbers free or do you have to call a premium-rate number?

Check what else they can offer
Although you are keen to get things up and running, it’s important to think about your long-term needs as well as your immediate requirements. Does the hosting company have the flexibility and capacity you will need as your business expands? In addition, most web-hosting companies provide monthly/daily usage reports. It’s worth asking to see these to assess how useful they are, as the layout and what is included can vary considerably from one company to another.