It has been said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, and as far as search engine positioning goes, that’s not bad advice. If you can come up with the next hot buzzword or key phrase in a particular industry – or even amongst a targeted search group – then it should be pretty easy for you to grab the top spots on Google and the other major engines before anyone else can.
Accomplishing this can be easier than it sounds. All you have to do is choose a target market, find out what the industry leaders are talking about (or will be in a few months), and either get there, in an SEO sense, before any of your competitors do. Or, if your site is popular enough already, you can use new content to tilt the conversation in the direction you want to see it go. Before you know it, you’ll have a steady stream of visitors that you pulled out of thin air.
Creating the future in search is a great way to put yourself at the front of the pack. Here are a few more steps to get started.
Focus. Just as you can’t be all things to all people, neither can most of us dominate large numbers of search terms and phrases at once. Try to pick one or two that you think are likely to become more popular – and profitable – and use those as a starting point.
Be consistent. When it comes to building traffic, treat your new SEO efforts as you would any other. That means articles, links, and a steady stream of fresh content for search engine spiders to find.
Define yourself as an authority. Make sure that what you write and post isn’t just filled with new keywords, but positions you as the authority on the matter. “Buyers” are always preferable to “visitors,” and people like to buy from experts.
If you see a trend coming, don’t be content to spot it and move out of the way. Start optimizing your site for search engines now – you’ll be in prime position when the rest of the world catches up.
For all the talk and theories about how to take advantage of the YouTube explosion – few can agree whether the billion-hits-a-day site is mostly Internet TV, search engine, digital university, or social media – it might be that answer has been with us all along. That’s because, rather than thinking about YouTube as a marketing medium, it’s better to see it the way users do: as a series of channels and clips.
Some viewers go to YouTube for entertainment; others to learn, or to stay in touch with their favorite teams, shows, and characters. But what makes them so great isn’t that they are uniform (they aren’t), but that they’re self selecting.
In other words, as with Google or Yahoo, users will tell you what they’re looking for by entering in a search term or visiting a certain channel. But on YouTube, because they’re searching videos, rather than web pages, you can even more closely guess at what they’re hoping to find… and then give it to them.
If the people who are likely to find your videos seem to be searching for an informational resource, provide them with one. If they seem to want to be entertained, wrap your marketing message in something silly and light. But no matter what you do, don’t treat titles and descriptions as tools to simply reel them in. You need hits to gain attention, but you need to hold that attention before you can persuade anyone to do anything.
YouTube works best as a marketing tool when it’s treated with the same common sense as any other online medium. Remember that attention leads to action, and then make a point to give people just what they want … along with a taste of your marketing message – they’ll reward you by not changing the channel.
For years, as online marketers have watched Facebook explode in popularity, we've been forced to advise a "soft sell" approach to working on the site. In other words, it was hard to promote your company or products outright, but what you could do was make important connections, describe enough about yourself or your business that people might want to work with you, and let prospective clients see behind the curtain a bit and build your brand in that way.
Now, with Facebook opening its virtual doors to advertisers earlier this year, the path to promotion and profits is being well-beaten... or is it?
Advertising on Facebook is far from a sure thing, if only because it's new. There isn't much of a track record of companies, big or small, making any money on the site through paid ads. What's more, as the most "social" of the social networking sites, it's a place that people go to in order to have fun and mix with friends and relatives – not necessarily find marketing messages.
So what does it all mean? Is Facebook advertising actually worth spending on? Here are a few questions to help you sort out the right answer for your company:
Do you sell directly to consumers? If so, you might be in luck. While Facebook is likely to remain a poor business-to-business advertising venue, it does seem to offer some hope for those who sell directly to consumers.
How specific do you need your audience to be? While new options are being added quickly, Facebook still lacks many of the customization tools you'd find on a more popular platforms, like Google Adwords. What that basically means is that you might have to settle for marketing to broad groups – like women or students, for example – as opposed to more targeted demographics, at least for now.
Do you have room in your budget to take the chance? Like other forms of pay per click advertising, it doesn't take much to get started on Facebook. But, as a new platform, it makes sense to test the system out and see whether the results will pan out in the bottom line. And as with any test, be prepared in case you get back less than expected... or even nothing at all.
As Facebook advertising grows, marketers will undoubtedly figure out which strategies, prices, and types of products can reliably succeed. For the time being, however, the concept is like a lot of things that have to do with social networking – fun, interesting, and a little unproven.
When I read about the rise of social network marketing, I’m always reminded of those old kung fu movies, where a masked warrior moves silently through the shadows to defeat dozens of enemy samurai. Why? Because today’s marketers, like the old-time ninjas of the silver screen, need to rely on stealth to reach their goal and turn contacts into customers.
The problem isn't a new one... either to life or this blog. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are filled to the brim with buyers; at the same time, they don't come to any of these virtual destinations to be sold. That can create what seems like an unwinnable dilemma – come on too strong, and people will ignore you; fail to market it all and you'll be making lots of friends who will never buy anything. As much fun as it might be, that's not anyone's idea of a good business plan.
And so, your social networking marketing plan has to hide under the cloak of darkness. Here are three quick tips to help you forge a decisive attack:
Show, don't tell. It's bad form to tweet that people can save money by working with you, for instance, but perfectly all right to congratulate a client for improving their bottom line as a result of your services.
Hide everything behind humor and entertainment. There's always room online for something that makes people laugh, or at least gives them a momentary break from their day-to-day lives. Try to think of ways to embed your marketing message into a format that accomplishes one of those things.
Strike decisively. In the rare event that you do advertise or broadcast an offer via social networking, make it so strong and compelling that people can't help but have a look. You aren't going to get many opportunities to ask for business outright, so make every one count.
As we noted a few weeks ago, YouTube is currently gathering more than 1 billion hits a day, effectively making it the world's second largest search engine (behind Google), and a hot destination for online marketers looking to spread their message virally.
Like a lot of things in life, however, marketing on YouTube is a lot easier to talk about than it is to actually accomplish. That's because viewers go there looking to learn or be entertained... but rarely to be sold to.
For that reason, the marketing message has to be wrapped up in something more interesting – like medicine that tastes like candy, it needs to be fun before it can be effective. You can only take this idea so far, though; videos of your employees falling down the stairs might get lots of hits, but they aren't going to bring many sales.
With that in mind, here are the five items on your YouTube marketing checklist. Don't upload a video without them:
A crisp, relevant, and interesting topic. The most impactful videos are short and to the point. They should show off your expertise while teaching the viewer something special they can use in their work or home lives.
A script. A lot of marketers are tempted to “wing it” and produce their videos without any script or rehearsal, but it’s not something we would recommend. While you don’t want your clip to be so practiced that it seems unnatural, it’s a good idea to at least run through your thoughts a few times before you shoot the final version.
A catchy opening. If the first 5 or 10 seconds of your video are boring, no one is going to bother watching the rest. Aim to capture attention quickly.
Good production. Shooting quick videos with a handheld cam is a great way to save money… except that it usually costs you future customers. If you don’t have the equipment to produce and edit sharp-looking video, find a creative partner who does.
Contact information and a call to action. Invite viewers to visit your website, download a free report, or take some other action. Otherwise, they may click away to the next video and never return.
Recently, we posted an article pointing out that YouTube – with more than a billion daily hits – had effectively become the world's second-largest search engine. But as much as we'd love to take sole credit for the idea, it seems that we aren't the only ones who noticed.
It’s difficult to find solid numbers, but estimates suggest that users are adding more than 200,000 new videos every single day, or about 13 hours worth each minute. While lots of those undoubtedly involve house pets dancing to modern hits, many of the new additions are coming from savvy online marketers just like you... and the trend is only gaining strength.
Here at Blue Beetle, it reminds us of something.
It wasn't that long ago that regular old search engine optimization was the hot new thing. Companies had just started figuring out that fresh content was the key to working your way to the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now Bing), and so they got into a mad rush to add articles to their websites. In many cases, this was a great thing, because it brought valuable information to the Internet. But just as often that meant marketers who were trying to make a quick buck posted poorly-written collections of key words they called articles, making it difficult for searchers to actually find the useful pages they were looking for.
The same thing is beginning to happen on YouTube. For all of the wonderful advice and entertainment that has already been uploaded, we are starting to see badly-produced videos coming from marketers looking to take shortcuts. A few of them might find a way to make money from this strategy, but it's bound to fail in the long term because people don't go online looking for junk—they're searching for quality advice and insight.
With that in mind, we are going to tell you something you probably already know: the goal of your video marketing campaign shouldn't be to have the most YouTube videos, but the most effective. Post material that educates and entertains, not clips that take up a few minutes while parroting your sales message again and again.
One good video on YouTube can bring you millions of views and thousands of new customers, but a badly done piece only costs everyone time and aggravation.
New website for Coastal Mountain Excavations (CME), a Whistler based heavy construction company is live. The inspiration for the design was drawn from the companies awesome location and with some funky Google Maps integration we delivered a website that showcases their projects and expertise quite effectively, even if we do say so ourselves.
If television and movies have taught us anything about history, it's that the old American West was a place "without law." Drinking, gambling, and gun fights in the street were the symptoms of towns that seemed to have sprung up from nothing – the result of a mad gold rush that attracted entrepreneurial types from all over the world.
While the idea of saloons full of marshals, cowboys, and horse thieves might be overplayed for entertainment value, the concept of places being built from nothing actually gives us an interesting parallel to the development of the online business community. In the first days, there were sparse settlers setting up shops in camps at any URL they could find. Over time, though, areas have become crowded, complex communities have formed, and yes, laws are coming.
In this case, we aren't talking about political laws, but accepted standards of the way sites should be designed and arranged. The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), an international group of designers and consultants, is moving towards a set of universal guidelines that would serve as a kind of guide to best practices in layout and coding.
This might seem like a bit of a reach, given that the online community can be ferociously independent, but it actually represents change in a good way.
Just as laws and standards eventually came as a relief to the American West – few people enjoyed the prospect of being shot in Cheyenne or Abilene – uniform standards on the web will make pages safer and more accessible for everyone. By creating a handful of common tools, they mean that pages from all parts of the world will become easier to find and use by anyone, regardless of their hardware, operating system, or local provider.
Why should you care? Because usability is a close cousin of profitability; the more people who can view and navigate your site, the more potential buyers you can reach effectively. As more and more communities go online, and next-generation mobile devices spread like wildfire, WC3 standards are going to help smart marketers expand their reach.
The "law" might not be coming to the web, but standards are. Making your site work within them might not be mandatory, but it is going to be a good business decision.
Social networking is every online marketer’s favorite new toy, and that’s a good thing… mostly. After all, anything that lets you find new customers, improve your search engine positioning, and possibly even spread your message virally is going to be a useful tool. And really, that’s why it’s at the top of so many experts’ “must try” lists for 2010.
It’s that last bit that gets us in trouble.
The second the majority of us brand any idea as something you need to try, there’s a temptation to feel like you… well, need to try it. While that’s the wrong idea to approach to take to any marketing effort, it’s especially true with social networking.
The beauty of working with blogs, as well as sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others, is that they allow for a kind of informal give-and-take. In other words, they let you reach behind the curtain a little bit and engage your customers in a friendlier way.
The quickest way to ruin that is by coming at them with something that's boring – or worse, overtly commercial. And yet, that's exactly what tends to happen once you start to treat social networking like just another item on your "to do" list. Your posts and ideas become more and more stale, until all that's left is a steady stream of fluff that few people would actually take the time to read.
With that in mind, think of social media the right way: as a tool for engaging customers in spreading the word about your company in a semi-personal way. Don't treat it like an ongoing press release or just another piece of business communication – the moment it becomes uninteresting to you, you'll start giving that impression off to the buyers you're trying to attract.
Search engine optimization, like any facet of online marketing, is a little bit harder than it looks. Just when your company has gotten its site to the top of Google for one of your most important keywords, a Malaysian pop star decides to use a similar phrase as the title of her newest album and pushes you back down, or a competitor gets hit with a lawsuit that makes you want to scrub the term as quickly as possible.
In other words, it's not easy and the game is always changing.
For that reason, a lot of businesses get a little bit desperate when it comes to SEO. What starts as a mission to improve online business quickly becomes an obsession with RSS feeds, embedded tags, and long-tail key phrases. And really, there's nothing much that's wrong with that... so long as it doesn't interfere with a core marketing strategy.
There should be a reason you're trying to improve your search engine position, and one that goes a bit deeper than "trying to get more hits." Having some sort of established plan can keep you grounded in moving forward, even in the face of inevitable distractions and setbacks.
There's no way around it: good search engine optimization takes time. Looking for shortcuts, or just moving things around to stay busy, isn't just a waste – it’s counterproductive. That's why it's so important that you have a good idea of where your best clients are coming from, and how you can find more of them through Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
This is a small step, but one that's critically important, because without it you'll find yourself constantly chasing the latest fads and trends. There certainly is a time and place for working the details and staying ahead of the curve, but it's only after you've covered the basics.
Search engine optimization is a complicated topic, and that's why so easy to "miss the forest for the trees," so to speak. Have an online marketing plan, stick to it, and then examine your progress from time to time. It might not be as exciting as frantically updating pages, but it's going to be a lot better for your bottom line in the long term.
As Google continues its well-documented run as the world's most popular search tool (garnering an 85%+ share, according to some estimates), many in the Internet marketing industry are left to wonder whether the recent merging of Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing will allow them to ever catch up… or at least gain some ground among searchers. Or could it be that people really do prefer all Google, all the time?
It turns out, the question is flawed. That's because there is already a strong second-place search engine, and one that's doing just great – YouTube.
While it's true that most people wouldn't classify YouTube is a search engine, and it might not technically count as one, the lines begin to blur a bit as you take a step back. After all, with more than one billion hits a day, it's obvious that people are turning to its short videos to find and learn, and they're doing it far more often than they are turning to non-Google search engines.
This highlights an important fact for online marketers: if you aren't getting your message out on YouTube, then you're missing a big piece of the market share. It isn't all cats jumping through hoops or lonely kids acting out movie scripts; any company can produce a video that has the potential to go "viral," or at least enhance their marketing message by adding a new format.
YouTube isn't a new phenomenon anymore, but it is one that lots of companies are just beginning to take advantage of. In future articles, we'll take a look at some ways you can use YouTube to increase sales. For now, though, just ask yourself this: with billions of people tuning in every week, why are they finding your business?
Marketing is all about results. One of the quickest ways to destroy the profitability of your campaigns, whether they are online or off-line, is to keep feeding a process that isn't making any money. Managers and business owners have to be ruthless in cutting off ads and promotions that aren't working – or even those that aren't working well enough to justify the costs.
Sometimes, though, the desire to be efficient can cause us to give up just a little bit too soon, especially when the conventional wisdom is that some tactic or idea is "dead." Since everyone knows it doesn't work, why keep putting time and money into it?
I think that's what's happened to e-mail marketing. Even though there are plenty of businesses still working profitable campaigns, many companies have given up on it for fear of the impression that they're spamming their customers. The reality, however, is that they are missing out on sales and profits that they could get with just a little bit of effort.
Here are four ways to make your e-mail campaigns work:
Start with the right list. To have a successful e-mail campaign, you need working addresses of people who want to hear from you. The best way to get those is from your existing customers or prospects. Have them opt in to receive some small promotional item or coupon – you’ll end up with a list that's both valid and interested in what you sell.
Keep things to the point. Don't send long e-mails with complicated ideas. If you can't communicate everything you need to a few hundred words or less, save part of it for the next message. It's better to have people interested in reading small bits at a time than it is to go straight into their trash folder.
Be consistent… not annoying. Few companies can get away with sending an e-mail newsletter every day, or even every week. It might take some trial and error, but try to find out how often your customers want to hear from you and then stick to that schedule.
Track and optimize. It's not enough to send out e-mails and hope for the best. Use state-of-the-art tracking software to find out which links, products, articles your customers are clicking on responding to. Then, you can use that information to optimize your future marketing messages and make them even more profitable.
Just a few years ago, websites with Flash introductions were the latest-and-greatest thing, and for good reason: they just looked so cutting-edge. If visitors couldn’t figure out how cool your company was from the flowing animation and sound… well, that was between them and Internet Explorer 4.
Recently though, having a Flash intro has become the web equivalent of sporting a Britney Spears world tour tee shirt: a little bit annoying, and a sign that you’re not really keeping up with what’s going on in the world. Here are a few reasons to ditch your site’s animated and outdated opening:
It’s no longer impressive. Flash isn’t a new thing, so it’s not going to impress your clients or colleagues. There was a time when people genuinely thought they were cool, but now they’re just in the way of the information they’re trying to find.
It’s annoying. How many people do you know who actually watch these things, much less leave the sound on? The answer you’re looking for is zero. No one has enough time in the day to finish the things they actually need to accomplish, so don’t think they’re going to waste it watching your opening shots.
It’s bad for usability. Flash intros are almost unique amongst web features for the way it’s completely cosmetic. It doesn’t help anyone find, do, or buy anything. That isn’t to say there aren’t great places to use Flash on your site – because there definitely are – but a 15 second opening isn’t helping your visitors.
It’s costing you money. Beyond eating small amounts of bandwidth and bigger chunks of your customers’ patience, Flash intros cost you money because they can reduce the amount of time your visitors are willing to spend on your site. By hiding your content behind a screen of video and sound, they make it harder for the people who are searching for your product or service to find you… and that’s never good for the bottom line.
Flash intros were a cool idea once, but that time has come and gone. If you’re serious about building a business website, ditch the annoying openings and introduce your visitors to a quality home page.
We’re gold sponsors at one of the hottest Digital Marketing events of the year – DigiMedia.me.
Discover what’s what in Digital Marketing at this new Digital Media Conference to be held in Dubai 5th and 6th of May 2010. This two-day summit is designed for marketing professionals who want to better understand today’s fast-paced digital developments and take advantage of tomorrow’s online marketing channels.
Learn from the pro’s on how best to leverage SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, online PR and more for your business all for an unbelievable price of AED800!
Four websites gone live is quick succession and more to come soon. It appears that things are picking up; we’re getting busier by the day!
It has to be said the companies and people in general are still cautious, waiting to see how 2010 pans out but if recent activity is anything to go by we believe business is on the up. It appears that clients are finally beginning to understand the full potential of the internet and how much harder their marketing dollar can work for them in this digital domain over traditional marketing. The concept has been very slow on the take here in the Middle East but that seems to be changing.
The three new sites are:
- www.thediamonddubai.com - Luxury furnished apartments in Dubai Sport City
- www.dohamums.com - Community site for mums and their toddles in Doha - Qatar
- www.contrastpros.com - Community of photographers
- www.filini.com - Web shop of funky design and cool gifts
We’ve been asked to be part of the panel of judges over at CSS Awards for 2010. It’s a real honour to be a part of an awesome panel of judges and great opportunity to keep up to date with what’s hot on the web and we are thrilled to be a part of it.
The Css Awards was born out of the idea to give artists and designers a way to showcase their work, be evaluated by top specialists and have the possibility to win some cool awards. It’s basically a gallery of the most prestigious websites in the world created using CSS. The panel of judges literally span the entire globe, have a look here for 2010 jury list.
Websites are selected for the Site of the Day and Site of the Month using a strict valuation system. Winners of the awards receive cash prizes, hardware, and most importantly, high-level exposure of their work through a vast network of blogs, collaborators, directories and international forums related to web design and creativity.
So go on, what are you waiting for? If your think your site rocks, submit it for evaluation!
We've just launched the new website for Roya International. Just as their slogan "Total Hospitality Solutions" says, it's a leading specialist hospitality consultancy firm offering expertise to the hospitality, leisure, tourism and real estate industries.
While Lighthouse developed their brand and printed collateral we had free rein on the website with an arsenal of great images to work with. We’re particularly happy with the end result as its very much in line with the less is more style we enjoy exploring.
Check it out: www.royainternational.com
Woopie-do, another website by Blue Beetle has just gone live. It’s for a company called PeopleFirst, a human recourses company based in Dubai.
PeopleFirst is an HR Consulting practice which works in partnership with clients to help unlock value and realise strategic goals through effective people policies and processes.
They’ve got an impressive client list all singing their praises (see the testimonials on the website) so PeopleFirst obviously know what they are doing. Check them out...
Need some ideas for Xmas presies? Like the image of the cows on our contact page?
If the answer to either for these questions is yes, you got to check out this link. Our good friend Doug Lapsley has started selling his work on eBay. He’s got some fantastic shots for sale and as a final run up to Christmas he's reduced the price on all prints to £15 including free worldwide shipping!
stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/Doug-Lapsley-Landscape-photography
If you like what you see check our his website: www.frozen-light.co.uk
Oh and BTW, if you're into photography, check out the kit he uses and try not to drool all over your keyboard!
We've just launched another website that we are very proud of. Yes it's another real estate website but not just any real estate website. LIH Group needed a website that would complement their internal set up and asked us to develop a full website and listing content management system (CMS). As a result we build a real estate module into the BB CMS from the ground up.
The website has some very cool features like Google Maps integration and other property related functionality not yet implemented. This is version 1.0, watch this space for more to come!
Not that we're big on bigging ourselves up but getting a mention on Smashing Magazine is pretty cool, so we're gonna give it a mention. They posted a blog last Thursday with the title of "69 Sexy Portfolio Designs To Inspire You" and our site is amongst the list. As a result we got over 2000 hits on our site directly from this article!
Besides the fact that we got a mention (did I mention that already?) the blog is a great inspiration showcasing some very cool websites. I have not gone through the whole list yet but I think we’re the only web design company from Dubai mentioned.
Anyway, a big kiss and thank you to Smashing Magazine for the nod :-)
Update: Here's another couple collections we're been listed in.
spyrestudios.com/awesome-submissions-css-awards/
www.instantshift.com/70-creative-and-inspirational-website-designs/
We’ve just launched a temporary website for a new web shop that will be launching in the not too distant future. The site will allow you to customize and order classic and contemporary Arabic sandals and have them delivered right to your door. This temporary website is pretty funky though, it’s our first attempt at integrating Facebook.
Basically if you register your interest you get a 10% discount and once you’ve done that you’re enticed to share the website link on your Facebook account for an additional 10% discount. Simply by clicking on the Facebook link you’re presented with a call to action which when sent will appear on your Facebook wall.
The lovely people over at www.thecssawards.com awarded our website "Site of the Day" last Thursday (05/11/2009). This is great news because these awards are "given to the best CSS websites in the world from the top designers, agencies and bloggers working today", so we're very happy to be included in this prestigious list.
If you have not checked out the site yet, you must. The websites listed there are a big inspiration for everything that is great about web design. Each website is rated by an international panel of judges on 4 main criteria (design, creativity, usability and content).
Here you can see how we did:
- Design – 6.75
- Creativity – 7.75
- Usability – 6.88
- Content – 6.5
Overall we scored 6.98 so not bad but plenty of room for improvement. We'll be heading back to the drawing board to see if we can knock this up a bit further.
Stefan Sagmeister has got it right; can you imagine taking a year sabbatical every seven years? His line of work lends itself very well to this sort of break; I don’t think our clients would appreciate it if we said “don’t bother us for the next twelve months please”. It makes a lot of sense what he does though and the work that comes out of it is phenomenal – in his case anyway.
If you're into branding, check out the work he did for Casa Da Musica. Very cool indeed and breaking away from the belief that everything has to be the same, “sameness is overrated” as he says.
Besides all the obvious benefits of producing standards complaint websites in XHTML & CSS, here is another one - your site can then be listed in the numerous CSS galleries out there which in turn is great for search engine optimization (SEO) and general spreading of the love. We’ve been lucky enough to be listed on a few (see list below) and via the use of Google Analytics I can see that they generate a fair amount of traffic. It’s definitely worth it so if I was you I’d submit your site to as many galleries you can find. Start with the list below, and while you’re there, why not vote on ours ;-)
www.csswow.com
www.rgbgarden.com
cssbased.com
cssfury.com
www.styleprone.com
www.css-design-yorkshire.com
wowcss.com
www.cssstyle.me
cssillustrated.com/agency/blue-beetle/
101bestwebsites.com
www.bestcssgallery.com
www.cssmoon.com
www.bestcssvault.com
www.cssevo.com/2009/blue-beetle/
www.cssgarden.co.uk/profile/781
www.cssluxury.com/2009/09/blue-beetle-2/
www.inspiracaoweb.com.br
www.csscutie.com
www.csspose.com
www.website-gallery.com
TIP: If you're too busy to visit the plethora of gallaries out there, this site is a great time saver: www.thecssgallerylist.com.
We've just launched the new website for BackLite, the best outdoor media company for strategic advertising in Dubai.
The website has been coded in XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS2 and is fully manageable by the BB Content Management System (CMS). It also makes use of our funky Dubai interactive map which is used to illustrate the location of the BackLite’s various signs located around Dubai to great effect.
BackLite have been pioneers in the business of outdoor advertising for over ten years and have the reputation for having the most impressive and elegantly designed signs in the best locations available. Check it out.
I need to share another TED I saw recently which has made quite an impression on me, for a couple reasons. One is how effective at communicating good data can be when applied in the right way and two about the revelations and dispelling of common myths that can come about when analysed in the way that Hans Rosling does so well.
Hans Rosling is professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and here he unveils new data visuals that untangle the complex risk factors of one of the world's deadliest (and most misunderstood) diseases: HIV. He argues that preventing transmissions (not drug treatments) is the key to ending the epidemic.
Guaranteed: You've never seen data presented like this.
Finally our new website is live! Due to client commitments it’s taken a little longer than anticipated to complete but we’re very happy with the result. We’re particularly happy with the way we have been able to fuse XHTML /CSS and Flash. The site is 100% web standards complaint (XHTML 1.0 Strict - CSS 2.0) and via the integration of Flash in the background we've created a platform whereby we can really let our creative juices flow without compromising on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), web standards compliancy, easy of maintenance and loading speed. The beauty of it is that as time goes on we can refresh the backgrounds and thereby refresh the look and feel of the website without having to re-design or re-code the templates.
To celebrate we've crafted a motion graphics piece illustrating the Blue Beetle's journey.
Our good friend Douglas Lapsley produces a pretty unique podcast which we liked so much that we asked if we could use one of his videos on our website seeing as it fits our theme so nicely. You can see it on the contact page.
If you like it, you can subscribe to his podcast for free from iTunes. It’s called “Peaceful Landscapes in HD” and can be found in the Places & Travel category. In Doug’s own words he describes the podcast as:
“Moments of peace from beautiful locations around the world. Just take a moment to relax. You deserve to. Each podcast is 1.5 minutes of HD. No music or voiceover, just natural surroundings. Designed to give you a few moments of peace in your day. Travel with us and be free”.
Doug is pretty much “living the dream” in our opinion. He and his family live, work and travel the world in their campervan, resting in some of the most beautiful spots imaginable. With a satellite dish on the roof he can pretty much go anywhere he wants while staying connected to the world. How cool is that?!
Being a big fan of TED I thought it would be fitting to mention a talk done early this year by Tim Berners-Lee – the inventor of the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video. Have a look, the possibilities seem endless!
Every website on the internet is hosted on a web server which is switched on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. These machines process large amounts of data and consume a constant stream of electricity whilst functioning. The production of this electricity, which is generated in power plants, results in large amounts of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas held responsible for global warming, being released into the atmosphere.
Websites can seem like quite abstract, ethereal entities that live 'somewhere in cyberspace', but like pretty much everything we do in modern life, they create carbon emissions. Which is why we signed up with COCO2 to offset our website carbon emissions. What does this mean? Carbon Offsetting is the method by which you can minimise your impact on the environment through global warming. For every one ton of CO2 your activities produce, you can enable one ton to be saved somewhere else in the world.
This is done through projects such as planting trees, creating wind farms or investing in renewable energy projects throughout the world. For example, if your website needs electricity that emits half a ton of CO2 per year, then COCO2 could plant trees that offset that effect by taking half a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
As a business we are nowhere near to being carbon neutral, but we’ve working on it. Here are some handy tips on what you can do to reduce your impact at home.
Deciding on the new logo for Blue Beetle was no quick and simple matter. We went through several (40 odd I think) logos and months of deliberation before narrowing it down to two possible directions which were very different from each other. Internally we referred to them and the “Grass” version and the “Ted Burton” version.
I personally liked the Ted Burton version as did Mladjan (our lead designer) but it appeared that we were the only ones. So for a bit of fun we decided to put it to the vote and create a poll on our temporary holding site. To be honest we knew what the result of the poll would be but what I didn’t know was that it would be such a landslide. Actually landslide is a bit of an understatement. It was more like a tornado on speed.
The grass version won by an overwhelming 87% of the vote. It seemed that not only did the majority prefer the Grass version but most actually had negative comments about the Ted Burton version which in hind sight was valuable feedback actually. Therefore we chose to go the Grass route and developed the logo further until we were happy, which we are :)
