We’ve been offering Search Engine Optimization to our clients for more than 12 months now, with some pretty good results (e.g. ‘holiday accommodation in Sitges’ for Outlet4Spain). So Simon and I thought it was about time we applied some of our new-found SEO mojo to our own site. And that’s where the trouble started, because there’s no easy way to optimize for ‘joined up thinking’. Let me explain…

When a client comes to us for help with SEO, we ask about their business. Once we know what they do, it’s usually pretty easy for us to build a list of key words and phrases to target. But, when we started keyword analysis for our own business it became pretty obvious things weren’t so clear cut.

In the olden days (somewhere about 1995) it would have been easy – we would have been optimized our site for the search term ‘web designers’. But the explosive growth of the sector and the desire for companies to carve out their own niche within it  has muddied the waters immensely.

Whilst we still call ourselves ‘web designers’, optimizing for the term increasingly seems to be bringing in the sub-£2000 first-time site brigade. It also misses the core of what we do – working with a company to shape, build, maintain and develop their web presence over the long term. We’re web strategists, we’re user-experience experts, we’re SEO specialists, email marketeers and UNIX hosting gurus. Optimizing for any one of these dilutes the  big picture – and devalues the ‘one stop shop’ approach we believe is so vitally important to making the most out of the web.

So, if anyone knows how to optimize for ‘joined up thinking in web development’ we’d love to hear from you. Until then we’ll just have to press on with the keyword-rich blog entries

Twitter is one of the those internet trends that bitterly divides those with nothing better to than comment on internet trends. Is it really just a “chorus of minutiae from morons” or is it “the next killer-app” . In all probability it’s neither, but it could it have positive uses for business? And what exactly is Twitter anyway?

Twitter is a service that lets the world know what you’re doing (via short messages of less than 160 characters) , and lets you ‘follow’ what other people are up. Depending on whether you’re generation Y or generation z, you can think of it as either broadcast SMS or your Facebook status on steroids. Some 6 million people now  tweet – among them Stephen Fry, Britney Spears, and John Cleese.

At first glance, tweeting and business don’t seem to offer each other much. But hold on a moment. That’s exactly what people used to say about blogging and business. But numerous companies and senior employees are now using blogs as a very efficient way to inform and interact with customers (a trend we first noted a couple of years ago).

While we’re still not convinced tweeting will be as revolutionary, we’ll be adding it to our site as part of our upcoming redesign. We already see it offering some benefits and hope we’ll uncover some unexpected postives as well. In the short term we’ll be using it for:

• Publishing system status updates that don’t merit a global email alert (e.g. a small percentage of client sites running slowly due to transient technical issue) 
• Communicating our availability (e.g we’re all on company training today – call our mobiles)
• Alerting clients to general internet / tech developments that don’t merit a whole blog entry
• Letting clients know about promotions / discounts in a way that less intrusive than a mass email 
• Showing first time visitors that our site is something we care enough about to update regularly 

We’ll let you know how we get along with twitter once the new site is launched. Until then we’ll be tweeting at http://www.twitter.com/osbornebrook

I guess it’s true for a lot of businesses, but it’s a sad fact that the busier we are (and the more we have to tell you about) – the less time we get to add blog entries.

We’ve just finished up a couple of big new sites, My Wish Wand and Complete Models and effects in Merb.

Geeks like Merb because it’s an “agile, platform agnostic MVC framework that plays nicely with Ruby” (as Simon and Rob will explain in altogether too much detail if I ever let them out of the back room). But developing sites in Merb also results in huge benefits for our clients.Using Merb drives costs down and slashes development timescales.   So how does it do this? (And why should you care?).

A lot of it comes from the MVC approach used by Merb. MVC stands for Model (the end-user data we’re interested in using on the sites), View (how the data should be displayed) and Control (the actions we perform on both). This means that Simon (Mr. Model), myself (Mr. View) and Robert (Mr. Controller), can all work simultaneously on a section of a site without constantly getting in each other’s way or (thanks to our recent adoption of Git) overwriting each other’s files.

Merb is also much leaner and more flexible than Ruby on Rails (our previous MVC framework of choice). Merb 1.0 has only been out a couple of weeks, so it hasn’t hit the mainstream web design community yet. This gives us (and our clients) a real competitive edge.

It really is Merbaceous!

Well the last couple of months has been a roller-coaster ride. Previously we had only used Merb for small admin sites, but on October 2nd we launched a massive site “MyWishWand” (www.mywishwand.co.uk) written entirely using merb. (using nginx + thin). As the merb developers were reaching the 1.0 milestone and code changes were flying in and out of the git repository (and rubygems too) this was nail-biting stuff. But it was worth it.

From a programming perspective this has to have been one of the most satisfying projects I have ever worked on. It’s all in there – we’re sending out automated emails based on additions / changes to the model, we’re extending classes (adding .uk method to Date for example), we’re pushing Data Mapper through it’s paces (loads of many-to-many resources) and, my personal favourite, doing routing voodoo – which I want to share now…

The challenge

MyWishWand is a wish-list hosting site that lets people keep a wish-list (typically for their children) online. Once created the wish-list can be emailed to people or added to a party invitation so that friends and familty can easily come and grant wishes. With respect to the party invitation we wanted a way to let the individual users create a nice url. Obviously this had to be unique across all wish-lists and all users. To that end we decided to make the url use the username as the first part of the domain and then the unique name for the wishlist as the end. (e.g. http://simon.mywishwand.co.uk/birthday) First we created the * A record on the DNS server for the domain. Then we had to think about how to route any number of usernames to the same controller. For about 2 minutes!

Merb::Router.prepare do |r|

r.match(’/:niceref’).defer_to :controller => “grant” do |request, params|
unless request.subdomains.empty? || %w(www dev 192 127 mywishwand).include?(request.subdomains.first)
params.merge({:action => ‘take_niceref’, :user_name => request.subdomains.first})
end
end

…
end

As you may know from previous posts, we’re loving jQuery. However, the other day I previewed a site over Vodaphone’s 3.5G mobile broadband and it all went horribly wrong. Vodafone seem to be compressing data in such a way that jQuery simply doesn’t load. The site appears just fine over T-Mobile’s network, so clearly not all carriers are doing the same thing.The solution? Thankfully it didn’t take to long to find (unlike our ongoing battle with IE7 over PNG transparency). Use the compressed version of jQuery and all is suddenly right with the world.

Over the last few years, air travellers have got used to ‘demand-led’ pricing. If your dates and flexible, and you book far enough in advance, you can get some insanely cheap flights. Putting to one side the fact that entire countries are being evacuated because of global warming and sea-level rise, it’s a win-win situation for both travellers and the airlines.

The great success of this model has led to companies in other sectors trying the same techniques – with mixed success. The train operating companies seem to love it, but customers – sensing the death of the ‘turn-up-and-go’ railway - are less enamoured.

One area that hasn’t yet seen this model widely implemented is the training industry. But, as with airlines, the model is a win-win scenario for training companies and their customers. In fact, we’ve just implemented the system for anew training company web site (launching very soon now).

The pricing matrix provides generous discounts, depending on how far in advance a course is booked, and how many places have been sold.The system gives real benefits to both the training company and their clients. The training company benefits because more advance bookings allow them to confirm events earlier (since they know they have at least enough participants to break-even). Clients benefit because if they commit to training far enough in advance the can save 75% on standard course prices.

Easy!

It was only a matter of time, but I have actually written my first plugin for the fantastic jquery framework. There was a time when I thought that coding in javascript was a bit of a chore, having to write whole chunks of code to achieve simple things, but then came jquery. At first it seems like alot to get your head around, but when the penny drops you wonder how you ever did without it. I am now often heard saying “hey check out what I just did in one line of code” (and the designers even feign interest ). An example:

$('.hideme').hide();

The above line finds all of the elements on the page with the (pseudo) class “hideme” and, yes, hides them. This is especially good for accessibility, since when the page loads they are visible. It gets better:

$('#feed).load('feeds.php #headlines li');

That uses ajax to load just the list elements of the container ‘headlines’ from the page ‘feeds.php’ into the element with the id “feed”. (it’s actually easier to read the script than say it in English!)

Anyway, while building a page I found myself using very similar code in 3 different places, so the obvious thought arose – “how do I make this more modular”. A quick read of the plugin documentation for jquery was all it took to produce something that, in one line of code, enables me to have the selection from one select box (drop down) change the options in another. Being juery though, this action is not limited to just one select box, but any select box that matches the jquery selector. Lovely!

 Feel free to take a look at the code

Simon and I have been in web design in one way or another since 1992 (remember Mosaic 1.0 and its revolutionary ‘image viewer’?). In the intervening fifteen years only one thing has remained constant – change. The web is constantly evolving as new technologies become available and users find new (and often unexpected) ways of using them.

At the moment we’re in the process of rebranding ‘Small Fry’ as ‘Osborne-Brook’. As part of the process we’re completely rebuilding our site – something we last did 2005. Since then there have been significant advances web technologies and we’re looking forward to the chance to cut loose and incorporate some funky features with Ajax.

However, what strikes us most about the last couple of years are the cultural changes that have taken place. Although these may have been enabled by the rise of web 2.0 technologies, they are primarily the result of a quantum shift in how businesses perceive the web.

Web applications (such as LinkedIn and Salesforce†) are becoming an integral part of many businesses and a significant proportion are trying to colonize (and monetize) social networking sites such as Facebook. Whether this change is for the good or not, it’s the ‘brave new web’ in which we all have to compete.

These changes show the value of continually assessing your web strategy. This goes for us as well!

In 2005 we dismissed a company blog as largely irrelevant; in 2007 it’s the first part of our new site to go live. That’s why we like working in this industry – challenges and change are all around us.

Don’t forget to drop back to see our whizzy new site in a couple of weeks!

† or Salesfarce as we like to call it when we have to try to integrate client’s sites with it!