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Design On The Fly
Shave Ice are at Northern Restaurant & Bar 2009 this week, a trade show for the hospitality industry. They are promoting their new CE certified ice shaving and blending machine to the bar and cocktail market. It was all a bit last minute but they needed a flier to hand out at the exhibition. The brief came in last Wednesday and we had artwork out of the door for Thursday afternoon.
The flier we designed for Shave Ice to promote the Hatsuyuki SB-20N at Northern Bar & Restaurant 2009.
The whole process went smoothly. In just 48 hours we produced initial visuals, sourced illustration and commissioned photography. Minimal art direction was required on the shoot and with a spot of post processing the images were dropped into final artwork and the files went off to print without a hitch.
Cool!
Moving In & Moving On
We’ve moved!
It feels as though the dust has only just settled since our last move from Hessle, and here we are on the move again. This time we’re just around the corner, so we’re still in Brough. I’ll update the contact page on the website shortly once we’ve got a GPS reference and decent shot of the outside of the building.
Moving Office from Jim Wardlaw on Vimeo.
We are now upstairs at The Picture Box on Station Road. Jim had the presence of mind to rig up his iPhone on coat stand and grab some time lapse footage of us setting up the gear on Thursday. The last few things were cleared out of the old place on Friday morning, and with no phone line in until this morning we were left at a loose end on Friday afternoon. Fortunately our new location is midway between (and a not even a stone’s throw from) two of Brough’s three hostelries, so we took the opportunity to give Dan a good send off. After seven years and at least as many beers we wish him all the best in his new job.
WordPress Schema
WordPress is a pretty cool blogging application, and the current version 2.7 is leap ahead from the old version I was used to using. It made sense to use the functionality provided by WordPress to drive the back end of the blog on our website, but in order to fully integrate it into the rest of the site we built the public-facing front end from scratch. During the development, the newer version of WordPress was released, so at the last minute prior to lanch we had to refactor the code to work with the revised database structure implemented in WordPress 2.7.
In order to make life simpler, and as an aid to getting my head around the project, I drew out the the WordPress database schema using OmniGraffle - a wonderful tool for producing elegant diagrams and flowcharts very quickly. Having the database schema laid out on a sheet of paper for reference during the development was a real help. The table and column names were always to hand and joining tables was breeze with all the relationships clearly identified.
You can download the PDF of the WordPress v2.7 schema diagram here.
SEO is the new double glazing
In the seventies hardly anybody had double glazing. Back then, just as now, the benefits were undeniable. The additional insulation it provided would cut energy bills while adding value to the property. A few handymen with DIY skills installed their own. Other forward-thinking homeowners paid local tradesmen to fit tailor-made secondary glazing. Despite the relatively high cost of these early solutions, the popularity of double glazing snowballed. The long term savings more than justified the installation costs. Double glazing was simply too good an investment to ignore.
It wasn’t long before the bandwagon began to roll. The greed-fuelled eighties arrived, bringing the armies of salesmen who were out for a quick buck. A whole new industry was born, driven by door to door canvassing, teatime telesales calls and direct mailing. The majority of double glazing companies were selling a mass-produced product, while some were still just honest tradesman providing a quality bespoke product as a bolt on to their existing services. Unfortunately a few were outright cowboys.
OK, not double glazing in the conventional sense, but the best glazing photograph I had. The Sage in Gateshead, Newcastle.
History is renowned for repeating itself. If you’re a business owner, or if you look after a website, then the chances are you’ve been on the receiving end of these same sales techniques as used by SEO companies. SEO – or search engine optimisation – is the process of modifying a website to enhance its search engine performance. Rarely do people look beyond the second or third page of search engine results, so the SEO holy grail is to get your website listed at the top of the first page. Barely a week goes by that I don’t answer the phone to a SEO salesperson promising to boost my website traffic. Of the spam the deluges my inbox daily, some will inevitably be offering to improve my search engine rankings. I even get the occasional flier sent through the good old fashioned post which purports to guarantee top ten positions based on my choice of keywords.
A website that ranks highly on Google or other popular search engines will inevitably receive more traffic than one that does not. Unless your potential customers already know the address of your website, the chances are that the only way they will find you is via a search engine. What is more, a survey by top search engine marketing company iProspect suggests that 33% of internet users attribute major brand status to companies appearing in the first few results of a search. It comes as no surprise then that SEO is the new must have enhancement for website owners who appreciate the benefits of having an effective web presence.
It also comes as no surprise that the demand for search engine optimisation has spawned another new industry. Like the double glazing specialists before them, SEO consultants come in all shapes and sizes. Some are very good, others are not so good. The worst will grossly overstate the possibilities, some will offer misleading guarantees which cannot be fulfilled and some use underhand methods to achieve short term results, jeopardising your website’s future ratings. In February 2006 Google famously banned BMW’s website from appearing in their search results after the German car manufacture used keyword heavy pages as “doorway” pages which automatically redirected visitors to other pages of their website.
Just like double glazing, good SEO is an investment. It takes time and money to put in place, and SEO will pay dividends in the long term. Just like double glazing, once the principles of SEO are understood they are fairly straightforward to implement. Just like double glazing, when good SEO practices are maintained on your website, it will continue to perform and give returns on your investment for years to come.
As with double glazing, there is a wide range of SEO companies to choose from. We recommend that you tune out the noise and concentrate on finding a reputable and knowledgeable supplier who can work with you to provide a solution that suits your requirements. The best time to implement SEO is before the development of the website begins. For keywords to perform most effectively they will inform both the content and structure of the site. The ideal SEO company will also be a website design company and web developer. Integrating these processes will ensure an effective synergy between the three. The result will be a more effective, more visible and ultimately more profitable website.
In the coming weeks I’ll be posting more about search engine optimisation, so if it’s something that floats your boat then subscribe to our RSS feed. We’ll shortly be adding a new SEO page to our website too.
Come back soon!
Does your website break the law?
In the UK and Europe there is a legal requirement for any business to publish full contact details and business registration information on their website. It’s no surprise that there are plenty of small business websites out there which do not comply with the regulations - we only put our own house in order recently when we launched our new website.
It is a year since the Companies Act of 1985 was updated to comply with European legislation, which dictates that a company’s website must state the address of their registered office, place of registration and registration number. Company websites should also comply with the Electronic Commerce Regulations which came into force in 2002. Contrary to popular belief the e-commerce directive applies to the majority of commercial websites, not just those selling online.
Summary of legal requirements
So if you have a commercial website then the minimum information you are required to publish is as follows
- The name, geographical address and email address of the business. Having a contact form is not sufficient, the full contact details of the business are required. Also the website must include the name of the organisation or person with whom the customer is entering into a contract.
- If the business is a company, then the address of its registered office must be included along with the company registration number and place of registration.
- If registered for VAT, the VAT registration number must be provided.
- If the business is a member of any trade associations or professional bodies, then details of membership including membership numbers should be given.
- Any prices which appear on the website must be clear and unambiguous. It should also be clear whether prices are inclusive of tax and delivery.
Remember these conditions do not just apply to sites selling directly from their website. If your business has an online presence, and the above conditions are not met then you could be risking a fine.
Legal issues aside, there are other benefits to a full and frank disclosure of business details on your website. Let’s face it, most customers like to know who they are dealing with, and the absence of any contact information is unlikely to inspire trust, in fact it looks downright dodgy!
Making the statutory changes should be a relatively simple job for any web designer or web development company. If your business is one of those who has yet to comply with the law then it’s time you got yourself back on the straight and narrow.
You know who you are…
Recursive tree-like patterns in Flash
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas my truelove said to me, “Take down the Christmas decorations!” So we did. Our Flash Christmas greeting has been replaced with something a little more experimental - a Flash application which draws a randomised tree-like pattern in response to a user-click. [Edit: The Flash application can now be found on the Labs page]
Whilst pondering what to post on our Home page once the festivities were over, I got to thinking about the Christmas tree element of the greeting. The tree comprised a sequence of simple timeline-based animations, which Dan created using the tweening tools built in to Flash. I thought it would be quite cool to have a tree that was generated programmatically, based on a few predetermined rules. I’ve been interested in Flash and generative art for a while, and this isn’t the first time I’ve thought about developing something to draw tree-like patterns, although I haven’t really followed it through until now.
Clicking anywhere on the canvas will “plant” a tree at the corresponding position. The trunk of the tree is a single branch, which self-generates additional branches as it approaches maturity. Each branch recursively calls the same code. As the number of branches increases, so does the number of calculations and screen updates required, and the Flash Player soon starts to labour under the load. In order to prevent the application from grinding to a halt, branches will only generate offshoots if their final length is above a certain threshold. I also set a limit to the number of generations permitted.
The parameters took a bit of tweaking to get something that didn’t look too dense, too spindly, too sparse or just plain freaky! On the whole I think the application does a pretty good job of rendering an organic-looking tree, despite the fact that it is all done with straight lines.
Oh, and here’s wishing you all a happy and prosperous New Year.
Eating, drinking and being merry
Thursday night saw us down at the Triton Inn in Brantingham for the “official” Art & Soul Christmas do. The Triton has just been named as the Hull Daily Mail’s Restaurant of the Year 2008, and deservedly so. The grub was tasty, and plenty of it too. An added bonus was the pair of real ales on hand pump at the bar. On the night, for me at least, the Wold Top Bitter from local microbrewers Wold Top Brewery had the edge over the Copper Dragon Brewery’s Best Bitter.
Danny suggested that someone take a camera along to record the event for posterity, and provide some material for the new blog. However when it came down to it there wasn’t much enthusiasm for taking photos – after a few initial snaps early on, the camera was put away for the evening. With at least two discerning photographers amongst us the lighting conditions were dismissed as inadequate, and attentions were turned to eating, drinking and being merry!
Put the camera down! (L - R) Dunc, Danny (J) and Vic.
(L - R) Dan (W), Louise, Roisha, Jim and Justine (halfway through her famous “alien-morph” party trick).
Despite Art & Soul picking up the tab for the evening, everyone conducted themselves with dignity and we all made it into work on Friday morning.
A step in the right direction
Turns out the MySQL database behind latest version of WordPress has a significantly altered table structure to our older test installation. The whole tags/categories/taxonomy thing looks a whole lot more elegant in WordPress v2.7, which is good news. The bad news is that it broke our custom front end, but after a bit of tinkering this morning the problems seem to be resolved, so we’re back on track.Hello world!
So the Art & Soul blog is finally up and running ready for the launch of our new web site. The test installation of WordPress has been replaced with a squeaky clean copy of the latest version. And all in time for Christmas too! < 1 2
Subscribe »Why Do We have A Blog?
There are several very good reasons why we have incorporated a blog into our web site. It’s relatively simple to do after all.
- A blog is great tool for quickly adding new content to a web site. We chose WordPress, and its ease of use means we are more likely to keep updating the site on a regular basis, whenever one of us has ten minutes to spare.
- Visitors like fresh content. Keeping the site updated will encourage people to come back again and again. It all helps when building an online presence and winning customer mindshare.
- Search engines like fresh content too. As long as we keep it relevant it all counts towards ratings.
- We’re creative types, and blogging is form of self-expression. When we’ve got something to say it won’t do to bottle it up.
- We’re good at what we do, and blogging about it is way of proving it to the world.
It all makes sense doesn’t it. Perhaps you should have a blog on your web site. Don’t think about it for too long though - give us a call…