We were extremely proud to be commissioned to build the website for the StreetChance supported by Barclays Spaces for Sports campaign recently; a partnership between Chance to shine, Barclays Spaces for Sports, Cricket for Change, Positive Futures and the Metropolitan Police Service. The initiative is a three year project, initially being delivered across ten London boroughs, using cricket to engage young people in areas affected by youth crime and anti-social behaviour.

But such a project means a press launch! At which time the website had to go live! So it was quite a nerve wracking few minutes as the seconds counted down to 10.00am on the morning in question. Everything was already to go - a simple ftp file-rename and it was all there… but I had visions of everyone at the official launch in London having their watches set a few minutes early, and turning to display the website to the national press… just to be greeted with a holding page.

But luckily that wasn’t the case at all! And since the launch the initiative and the website have received great feedback and compliments!

The entire site was put together in just under a week - which when images and content has to be sourced too, is quite a feat. Luckily the clients appreciated the tight deadline and the designers turned a great design around extremely quickly, giving us time to code it nice and neatly!

Our friends over at Wibfilm are leaving this Saturday to start their ambitious cycle ride round the coast of Ireland and in the process no doubt testing the theory that you can live off Guinness for 2 weeks!

The trip will be starting on the 11th of August 2008 and should take 14 days with on average of 87 miles a day, our intrepid explorers will be loading up their bicycles and doing their best to stay off the Guinness, whilst trying to raise the princely sum of £1500 for charity (NSPCC).

We think this sounds like a great trip and wish them all the best. If you’d like to show your support and help them reach their target, visit their sponsorship page here:
www.justgiving.com/theIrishring

Good luck guys, just remember to keep on pedalin’!

Wow! I absolutely love these new DELL computers! And I defy anyone not to think they look stunning and crave one for their desk!

Dell claim it’s their greenest, most “power-efficient consumer desktop”, as it uses 70% less power than a regular desktop and has an 87% efficient power supply. Meanwhile the packaging is made of 95% recyclable materials.

The one problem I can see though, is choosing between the 6 colour cases and the bamboo one…

Get yours here.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Friends Reunited had announced their site is now free for users - in an attempt to catch up with Facebook I presumed.

Well I’ve just seen a TV ad for the ‘new Friends Reunited’ website on ITV! Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this may be a first? A community site advertising on TV? Comparison sites have been doing it for ages, because there’s direct revenue available from visitors. However with community websites, whilst visitors = popularity = advertising revenue, there’s not the same direct correlation of clicks = pennies.

So are we in the middle of a user war between yesterday’s favourite site and the phenomenon that is Facebook? Or is there no war, and just desperation on the part of FR?

Personally I think, whilst they may be able to pull back some market share, they’ve left their comeback a bit late - about 12 - 18 months too late. Every day people from classes at school are sending me friend requests on FB. Even when I think ‘that’s it, surely there’s no one else from school that’s yet to join here’ someone else will pop up. Meanwhile I’ve had about one message sent to me on FR ever. So I think FB is the place to find old friends, whilst socialising with your current ones - 2 birds with one stone (although FB messages annoy me - send me an email! Then I can ‘reply to all’ without having to log in anywhere). A quick look at the new FR home page shows quick links to ‘RAF friends’ and ‘Navy friends’, which is instantly a way to appeal to a large number of people… but I bet these people have communities on FB already.

One point that must be mentioned that whilst FR are running an ad campaign on ITV - they are owned by the TV station - so I bet they got a good rate

Has Firefox Set the Guinness Record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period? That was the aim for the latest release of their ever popular browser; Firefox 3. Millions of people logged into the official site to grab a copy of the browser, infact according to the Download Day website the final number was more than 8 million. Which is pretty impressive. The total as of writing this is closer to 16 million with users from all over the globe. It just goes to show the importance of the browser as a serious contender to IE’s Internet Explorer and how important it is that people make their websites support it.

The latest figures suggest that the browser market still belongs to IE, but there’s a sizeable shift towards Firefox, clearly helped a huge amount by the massive amounts of money Google are able to pour into the small team of developers behind it. At the moment it’s certainly the browser of choice for many of the tech savy geeks behind much of what we see and use on the Internet, and the geeks choice of today is often the average users choice of tomorrow. That’s what happened with Google.

So the bottom line is; make sure your website works in Firefox! If it doesn’t, why not!? Do something to fix it now and if you can’t get your friendly web developer to fix it for you.

View the download live counter here.

Who else found an email in their inbox this morning, announcing FriendsReunited has gone completely free? The email says “[w]ith over 19 million members, we’re still the best place to find your old friends”. Hint of desperation there? Trying to remind us that there was a world before Facebook?

What with even Vodaphone launching a TV and billboard advertising campaign about free broadband so you “don’t get left in the dark” without access to Facebook, FriendsReunited obviously thought it was time to act - and who wants to pay to send messages to old friends when they can do it for free on another site? However - I’m shocked it’s taken them this long! FriendsReunited could have gone free a year ago, and still raked in a profit from advertising sales. Instead they’ve held out - maybe waiting for the Facebook bubble to burst, or maybe just too fond of their subscription based site. I hope for their sake they haven’t left it too late…

Axminster based salon BOLTS hair and body came to us for a website to match their new image. The company, formerly BOLTS hair design, added a beauty salon to pamper the senses, with holistic treatments such as Hot Stones Therapy, Indian Head Massage and Reflexology, along side more traditional body treatments such as massage, waxing and tanning. There’s also a special something for men who fancy a bit of TLC!

And now, celebrity client Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, is set to feature the salon in his TV show River Cottage Spring next week. Salon regular Hugh, visits the salon in the episode being aired next Wednesday, to have his hair cut, before taking Mandy Bolt and her team fishing!

My roots are in South Somerset, close to the Devon/Somerset border and my Mum lives very near River Cottage, so I’ll be tuning in to catch a glimpse of home! See the show on Wednesday 18th at 9pm on Channel 4.

You don’t have to be a fan of the thunderbirds to appreciate how brilliant this ad campaign is. Using a combination of highly skilled puppeteers following choreography and clever computer work converting a digitally scanned real dancer into the image of Brains. I really love this ad; it makes me smile every time I see it. Choosing the nineties anthem “Rhythm is a Dancer” as the sound track was also a stroke of genuis!

It could well be the memorable advert of 2008 and with the imminent return of Big Brother *sigh* it’s great to see an advert which is better than most of the programs surrounding it!

We’ve touched on mobile web development in the past couple of posts. It’s an exciting new area which offers a huge potential for growth as more people get online with their mobile phones. Well rather than just talk about it, we thought we’d give it a go, and Pricecheck.at is the result.

Imagine the scenario…

You’re on your way back from work when you happen to walk past a window with a big sign that says, ‘Sale today only! Nintendo Wii Console just £190!’. The shop is closing in 20 minutes so you don’t have chance to get home and check the latest prices available online. Luckily you have an Internet enabled mobile phone, so you quickly call up pricecheck.at, enter ‘Nintendo Wii Console’, and with the single click of a button you get a list of prices for the Nintendo Wii, and where it’s available online. It’s a good job you did too, as it turns out that you can in fact get a brand new console online from game.co.uk for just £179.99.

You are in PC World and you want to buy a brand new digital camera. You’d checked prices on the Internet before you left, but the sales assistant recommends a model you hadn’t considered. You think it seems perfect, but you don’t want to buy it from the first place you find, and would rather check the price available online first. The problem is PC World is about 10 miles from your house, so going home first is a bit of a mission, especially with the price of petrol these days. So you call up pricecheck.at, enter ‘Canon IXUS 75 Digital Camera’ and click ‘Check Price’. You’re then presented with 12 different prices for where the same model is available online. As it happens the price available from PC World is the same as the cheapest price available elsewhere, in this case either Curry’s or Amazon Marketplace, all three offering the camera for £129.99. But had you been in Jessops this service would have been invaluable, as they list the camera for £159. So you would have saved yourself £30 + a lot of trouble finding out.

People have been benefiting from price comparision services on their PC’s for years, with sites such as Kelkoo and Pricerunner becoming incredibly popular, but the Pricecheck.at service packages up all this functionality and makes it available to users on their mobile phones when they are actually out and about shopping in the real world as a last check to do before buying anything in a shop.

Another great example of when the Pricecheck service could really come into it’s own is in the huge market of mobile phones themselves!

A friend of mine just got stung when he mistakenly signed up for an 18 month mobile phone contract which it turned out he didn’t want. Despite taking the phone back to the shop just 3 hours after he bought it, they wouldn’t let him get out of his contract and he was completely committed to paying off the 18 months contract! There is apparently NO cooling off period when buying a mobile phone in store which I was very surprised about… However this makes a service like Pricecheck.at incredibly useful.

A quick search on Pricecheck.at for the ‘Sony ericsson K850i on the O2 Network’ reveals an incredible 163 prices, with mobiles.co.uk being the cheapest at just £15! Now presumably this is a contract arrangement, but still it gives you a good indication of what’s available online, and may just stop you signing up to a cast iron instore contract, when you can get it cheaper online.

These are just a few of the scenarios that sprung to mind, but I’m sure there are plenty of other situations where being able to access a price comparision service, while on the move, could prove to be immensely useful.

Pricecheck.at also offers a mobile friendly web directory, which is a list of sites that are particularly aimed at working well on mobile devices. You’d be surprised how much on the Internet simply isn’t accessible from a mobile device. You can also browse the site for products and prices.

The site is currently just a basic service, but if it proves popular we plan to expand and improve the browsing and shopping service to make it more user friendly and useful for mobile shoppers. It’s a tricky balancing act between attractive design, and accessibility on as wide a range of platforms as possible.

I’d welcome any feedback or comments about the site and the ethos behind it. Also if you have an Internet enabled mobile phone, let me know how Pricecheck.at looks on your phone.

We’ve all done it - well, those of us who have accounts with affiliate marketing networks. Set up an account, put a few banners on a site, and then get tied down with the next project, forget exactly who we joined/what we linked to and just delete each merchant email as they come flooding through.

But STOP! Take your merchants seriously! You bothered to take the time to set up the site in the first place, so make the most of the offers and promotions offered to you. Admittedly, on a Friday afternoon when you’ve had your 4th AffiliateWindow email from Comet about £10 off a particular washing machine you can start to glaze over and just think it’s too much to keep up with. But from the point of view of your visitor - that might be just what they need! And £10 off just what they need, is worth having!

So take notice of each email and act on at least some of the offers thrown your way. Code your website in such a way that it’s easy for you to add the latest offers - if it’s quick and simple you’re more likely to. Plus
you may want to build a mailing list / newsletter system so you’ve got a base of users to promote your latest deals to. (And of course, if you need a hand with any of this, you know where we are )