Redswish - carefully crafted banter

Are you really this stupid?

Today I received 3 spam contact form results from nathanbeck.co.uk, my portfolio site that ties in with this site (click on contact at the top and you’ll see what I mean).

They were all ’selling’ the same thing, but just spewed different bullshit each time.

Here’s the best:

Hello,
How would you like getting a logo’s (or) icon’s (or) header (or)template (or) banner designed free of cost for your website. We are giving away these services as a promotional measure for free of cost. In return we need a link at your site for each services at home or internal page(Except link,resources,directory pages).So to get a new services all you got to do is mail us back with the confirmation of link and the page where the link added for our site. If not interested in any of these offer,and interested to do three-way link exchange,please feel free to mail me back.

Regards,
Rebheka.

I’m a freaking designer, it’s plastered all over my site and about 3 inches to the right of the contact form Rebheka filled in!

Perhaps she used an automated form-filling tool, perhaps Rebheka is actually a poorly paid Indian child slaving away for 13 hours a day posting and reposting the above email to hundreds of ignorantly selected sites. Perhaps I need to use a CAPTCHA, but I always liked the simplicity of my contact form.

We’ve seen it all before

I know, I’m sure you have. I just cannot get over the stupidity. I mean, you’d at least use correct English grammer. That email reads like it’s been processed by a cheap language translator.

I won’t post my response, yeah that’s right I responded! I’m sure you can assume the tone in which it was written. I just can’t believe anyone would possibly fall for such an email, it surely can’t be productive on ‘Rebheka’s’ behalf.

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Accessible web design – The Whats and Whys

What is this ‘accessibility’?

Aside from becoming a buzzword that designers love to throw around (”I’m a standards-aware, accessible web designer… therefore am superior to you.”), accessibility is about ensuring your site can be accessed and used well by all types of web users, including disabled or somehow impaired users.

This may not seem like a big deal to all the comfortable ‘typical’ web users reading this article right now. But you can be assured that a hefty portion of surfers on the net may be blind or visually impaired, motor impaired, paralysed or perhaps just using a particular web browser or operating system that doesn’t render websites like you would expect, or wish.

In fact, the net is the alternative that a lot of disabled users would rather turn to then trawling out to the shops to spend money, or to the library to learn. If you were in a wheelchair, would you prefer to make the arduous trip into town or roll over to your computer with a mug of coffee and The Beautiful South playing in your warm, cosy home?

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Guest Post – Creating Usable Website Navigation

Throwing a shout out to my latest post, however not on Redswish. My first (I think) guest post has been featured on ifoh designs blog.

The article covers, or at least attempts to cover all the bases to consider when designing usable website navigation. It looks at page quantity, hierarchy, design aspects, accessibility, consistency and navigation design on different types of websites.

Quick teaser quote:

Consistency is essential. Nothing is more confusing than traveling to another page on a website, only to loose the navigation, or find that it’s changed format or location. Ensure that your navigation, whatever layout and positioning it may take, remains in the same place on every page of your site – even if the color scheme or rest of the page layout changes.

A simple ‘Return to the main site’ style link will not suffice.

But hey, don’t take my word for it, it’s my article! Check out the full article here:

http://ifohdesigns.com/blog/web-design/creating-usable-website-navigation

Thanks to Matt Rossi for the opportunity. Leave feedback wherever you want!

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New Holiday Extras Viral!

Flame have just launched a new video viral campaign to promote our client Holiday Extras‘ airport parking service.

Check it out, it’s in the big purple box:

http://www.holidayextras.co.uk/airport-parking.html

Ben, our copywriting guru (I’m beginning to dislike that phrase), created a top script that caught their attention and made it through to the final cut with hardly any edits. Justin McArdle was brought in to steer the reigns and working with Flame Digital and actor Paul Kaye; produced the 90 second viral.

Let me know what you think. You can either comment here or find out more on the Flame blog article.

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The power of Wordpress Custom Fields

I can’t believe I’ve been playing with Wordpress for so long and never explored the Custom Fields feature. A website I’ve been working recently has required me to push the boundaries of Wordpress, or more appropriately my understanding and knowledge of it. In doing so I’ve bravely slipped deeper into the Advanced Options and lived to tell the tale – the tale of the Custom Fields…

The fundamental functionality of Custom Fields provides you with the ability to expand your posts and their content. They allow you to include extra information and features in your posts that the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t provide itself.

How it works.

When in your Write/Manage posts page, mooch down past Tags and Categories to the Advanced Options – ooh! Down here in these murky depths you’ll encounter the Custom Fields box. In here you’ll see 2 empty textareas labelled key and value.

The key is the name for your custom variable, and the value is, well, it’s value! When you create a custom field, you are creating new meta-data. You then insert a simple line of php into your Wordpress template where you want this extra data to appear in the theme and voila! You’re done.

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Increasing and maintaining blog traffic

Content is King

Without a doubt the most essential method of both bringing in and retaining high levels of traffic is through constant generation of high quality, unique content. Regardless of whatever search techniques are used to generate visitors to your site, if they’re not greeted by useful information and interesting articles they will leave and most probably not return.

It’s all too easy to take a step back and go to another site in a few mouse clicks, so it’s essential that you provide a service or a level of quality that keeps visitors at your site, and ensures their return. Blogs are one of the most dedicated methods of bringing in traffic, but the real aim is to retain visitors, obtain repeat custom, subscribers, recommendations, inbound links and build up a community where your site’s visitors are engaged and compelled to provide their own input.

Blog posts are unlike other forms of written literature. Web users scan pages, so it’s important that the useful points are easy to find. Keep paragraphs short, use bullet points and lists, blockquotes, close-captioning and other visual techniques to keep your copy interesting. Large blocks of boring copy will not get read.

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Google set to launch browser called Chrome

Well it was bound to happen at some point, but this was quite unexpected. A comic accidentally released yesterday tells the story of Chrome’s development and Google’s approach to creating the new Internet browser. It’s not a bad read really.

The Chrome beta is proposed to launch today, although I’m struggling to find it anywhere. Google have kept things pretty hush hush on this project, although have formally announced the launch of Chrome on their official blog.

Chrome is designed to be clean, well-tailored towards the user experience, fast and get this – it’s open source! The new browser, if successful, will help to aid Google’s development of online apps and technologies, as well providing a fresh perspective on how we use the internet.

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Different Blog Post Styles

It’s come to my attention just how many styles of blog posts there are. I normally categorise general blog articles into 3 or 4 obvious themes – Tutorials, Reviews, Rants and Lists. But if I think about it, there are far more different types of posts – most of which can actually be categorised within the aforementioned styles.

Please let me stress that this categorisation is my personal perception and creation, and surely other bloggers will see this from an entirely different angle – please feel free to comment on how you would approach this yourselves.

After some research and a few pages of scrawled notes and diagrams, I’ve broken my obvious categories into about 17 sub categories or more accurate styles, which fall under 4 main themes:

• Instructional
• Reviews / Editorial
• Opinion
• References

I’ve then arranged these different post types into a rather messy diagram:

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