Archive for December, 2009

Does Your Company Need Social Media?

Friday, December 18th, 2009

There are so many articles about social media all over the newspapers at the moment: companies personally addressing customer complaints, celebrities taking over Twitter, books being published in excerpts of 140 characters…but what does social media mean for your company? And do you need it?

If you’re considering social media, you should think carefully about what you want to achieve from using it. The primary reason to use it is to engage the customer; creating two-way communication shows you care about the customer and want to listen to them. Although their feedback may not always be positive, it’s important to handle the rough with the smooth and provides a valuable lesson in PR.

Timely and regular communication is expected in what has become an extremely fast-paced society. Ensuring you update at regular intervals means your community can begin to grow organically as more people find out about you. I’ve seen too many campaigns started without forward planning and abandoned after a couple of months. Key campaigns that are marked in the calendar should have social media planned into the list of activities surrounding them.

So what types of social media do you need? Let’s consider three of the most popular ones: blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.

(more…)

http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/digg_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/reddit_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/dzone_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/stumbleupon_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/delicious_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/facebook_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/twitter_24.png

Why You Should (Mostly) Use jQuery Over Flash

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

For a long time Flash has held the market when it comes to unique and interesting interactive experiences on the web. But now, with jQuery becoming ever more popular a shift has become evident, and for good reason too!

Flash is a very good tool and you can do some amazing things with it, however, some of the fundamental aspects of web design and development are drastically improved when using jQuery.

jQuery is a free open source JavaScript library that has been designed to aid interaction on the Web. With the help of frameworks such as MooTools and Prototype, it has become very easy for simple JavaScript animations to be implemented with ease, and without any dreaded browser cross-compatibility issues.

(more…)

http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/digg_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/reddit_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/dzone_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/stumbleupon_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/delicious_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/facebook_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/twitter_24.png

Create A Faultless HTML Email

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

In the world of email marketing, I think it’s fair to say, that far too many people fail to take into consideration the importance of good design and perfect cross-compatibility within email clients. I receive emails which ‘break’ in my chosen client, or have missing links much too frequently - a bad email has exactly the same impact as any other bad marketing; it lowers the values of that company in the eyes of the recipient.

A friend of mine started this blog recently titled Email Fail which perfectly illustrates the lack of attention-to-detail in this area.

In this post I’m not going to do a step-by-step guide to creating an email from scratch (it assumes you already have basic knowledge), instead I will give you a few pointers to overcome some of the most common and annoying problems that you face when designing and building for the most popular clients: Hotmail, Gmail, and Outlook 2007.

Hotmail, Gmail, Outlook Logos

Before we get started I’ll quickly outline the problems that each one of these clients cause:

  • Hotmail (or Windows Live as it’s now known) frequently ‘breaks’ the layout of image heavy emails, misaligning table cells and causing big gaps all over the place.
  • Gmail insists on removing all CSS from the <head> and hence you cannot style a:hover or anything similar. (Now as far as I know there isn’t actually a way to stop this, you simply have to cater for it).
  • Finally, Outlook 2007 ignores various styles such as line-height and uses the Microsoft Word rendering engine, rather than IE or any other option that might be considered logical.

So, what do we do to avoid these issues?

(more…)

http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/digg_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/reddit_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/dzone_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/stumbleupon_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/delicious_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/facebook_24.png http://www.whatcreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/plugins/sociofluid/images/twitter_24.png