http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giEmoZkGPB4

Whilst we are still enjoying our new Camatasia software, we thought we would make a little video of some of our recent web work.  Please follow the link above, we put together a little 5 min vid showcasing some of our recent web designs.

The great thing about Camtasia is that we can make virtual ‘walk-throughs’, meaning that the viewer can see each site in context, with the mouse on screen flicking through the navigation.

We’ve set it to music with the addition of a bangin techno wizzy house type song – we truly are down with the kids.

Check it out, we’re rather pleased with it!!!

We’ve just got our shiny new copy of Camtasia for Mac and it is a great piece of kit.

Camtasia is (in our opinion) the best software for producing on screen walk through video files.  These are a great way of making visual tutorials in how to use a program, application or providing on screen help.  Over the past few years we’ve done a fair few of these for various companies, they seem to be really popular of late.

The only downside was that Camtasia was never available for Mac, as hardened Mac users it was always a major pain to fire up the old p.c’s to produce Camtasia projects, to be plunged back into the bad old days of screen freezes, crashed, long winded proceedures URGHHHH!.

Now we can still use our lovely shiny RELIABLE mac pro’s when producing Camtasia projects.  It works perfectly with the Mac and has loads of really cool editing features.

www.jcpeters.co.uk

For the past few months we have been working on a new product called ‘imail’, imail is a great way to set up your own perosnalised email address without the hassle. for example yourname@yourname.co.uk. We have now launched the website: www.my-imail.co.uk

Historically, if you just needed an email address, you had to set up a Googlemail or Hotmail email account, whilst these are free you are of course advertising another business.  If you are a tradesman for example and have you email address on the side of your van, it is hardly ideal.

The other route was to buy a domain name, pay for a full hosting agreement each month and set it all up yourself.  This is of course not the most cost effective method if all you need is an email address.

With imail you only pay for what you need > an email address.  Packages start from £1.49 per month, you can then select your desired name (yourname@yourname.info).  You susbscribe for as long as you need the address, it is great if you want a business email address – or a family name.

Imail works great with all of the major email client applications, such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail.  You also get access to a unique Webmail address, meaning you can log in to your account online for any p.c connected to the net. It also works with any email enabled mobile, suck as Blackberry or iPhone.

Please visit the site to find out more, or to claim your email address: www.my-imail.co.uk.

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So Microsoft are going to launch internet explorer 9, apparently it will ship with the new Windows 7 in three weeks time.  Internet explorer 8 has only been out for a few months, why yet another browser.  Microsoft seem to go through a cycle of releasing lots and lots of half baked products that don’t work properly – rather than the obvious route of make one product, for one application and make it work!.  Do we really need yet another browser?

As a web designer, we have to test each site in every different browser, which in Firefox, Safari & Opera this is never normally an issue.  Then we get to the dreaded I.E test, we test in I.E 5.5 through to 8 (currently), normally we need a different style sheet for every version of I.E, which is a major pain, as without it, sites would look completely different in every different(I.E) web browser.

So now, we have yet another I.E browser to format websites for – no doubt this means yet another bug test and style sheet to add to the list.  Rumor has it that I.E will be using the coding from Mozilla Firefox (one of the best browsers IMHO) – is this a final admission from Microsoft that they cannot write a decent browser?

If it does use the Firefox guts then this would be great > it makes our life much easier.  If it doesn’t then no doubt it will be yet another bug riddled half baked Microsoft product.  Well done Microsoft.

Use a Mac…….don’t over  pollute your lovely Apple machine with dirty Microsoft rubbish!

In any industry there are always a percentage of people that exist purely to rip people off, whether they know it or not.  This small minority of people and businesses are the blight of every sphere of business.  The web design industry is of course no different.

Yesterday I a colleague told me of an experience with another company’s shoddy web design work, the client (site owner) had asked if their site could be repaired as it did not show properly in several of the main web browsers (this is a common issue), the client had paid a considerable four figure sum for what should have been a quality piece of work.

Upon investigation it was discovered that the original site had been designed using iWeb – which is the apple ‘drag & drop’ program for building websites, there is no coding knowledge or any expertise required to use it.  It is designed to be for people that want a quick and easy site and have no prior knowledge of how to write one.  The whole site would have taken an afternoon to piece together using iWeb, whilst this is fine for a ‘quick and dirty’ web solution for people that just require a basic presence, it is truly staggering that someone would see this as a commercial skill that could be invoiced!.

We’ve been using Twitter for a while, but does it really serve any useful purpose as a business marketing tool?  Our experiences of it are pretty good on the whole, though it is hard to find some decent to announce every day other than blatant marketing messages.

First of all I felt it was not really of any use to use as a business, as most people seemed to use it as a social networking tool, but over the past three months or so we have religiously twittered something every day (mainly), we generally used it to announce the launch of new websites that we have designed, or welcoming new clients onboard.

Has it worked……….. well it depends on how you measure success, has it generated extra revenue…no…has it raised awareness of us as a business…yes.  Looking at our webstats, everytime we make an announcement of a new site, over the course of the following days we generally do see a spike in the webstats.

On that basis I think it is well worthwhile – as it really has improved our own web traffic.  We haven’t had any additional web desing leads as a direct result – but web traffic is a fair bit up.

I think the quality of ‘tweets’ is worth looking at – we’ve tried to make sure that we go for quality rather than quantity and this definitely helps, if the subject matter is fairly engaging then generally these are the tweets that provide the largest spike in our web traffic.

I’d be interested to hear other peoples experiences of Twitter; using as a marketing tool for business.

www.jcpeters.co.uk

After having more years than I would like to admit to designing websites using tables, over the last year we made the leap to switching to CSS (Cascading style sheets).

For years and years websites were designed using tables, these are a set of structures for organising the way in which your browser displays the content and styling of your website.  As a designer you really rely on being able to process some key elements of site design very quickly, such as setting up the basic layout and tables were the way of doing this.

First of all it was a bit daunting having to ditch an old friend in favor of a new technique, but learning new techniques is a major part of staying up with the pack in the web design industry.

My first thoughts were it seemed very long winded and it was taking far too long to work out how to perfom simple tasks like creating a three column floating layout.  After nearly 10 months of exclusively designing in CSS now……what a breath of fresh air, I can see what all the fuss is about, it is so much easier to create really good looking layouts and most importantly the code content is very light and neat.  This makes it so much easier to work on a large site with masses of content.

So, I eagerly await the arrival of the next ‘big thing’ that will prompt me to re-focus and start all over again.  CSS has with the benefit of hindsight been a real leap forward.  I’d be interested to hear peoples views on making the leap to CSS.

The team at JC Peters would like to welcome onboard Fairnet Commercial Services as a new client.  We have been tasked with providing the design for their new website.  The website will link to their main admin database.

We are very pleased with our initial proofs, the design is clean and modern.  The site will convey allot of information and text, so it needs to be very easy on the eye and easy to scan read quickly.  We have hand created a selection of central images using Adobe Illustrator, these will work with the client’s corporate colours of green & charcoal.  We feel that they will really bring a defined visual element to the site and will compliment the text & statistical based info well.

We had a very productive meeting with the client at our offices just outside Northampton, we have a very clear direction that the site will take and look forward to producing a great piece of design.  Watch this space for some more news as the project progresses