Cubeworks blog – digital opinion & insight

To give you a detailed picture of my time so far with Cubeworks I thought it might be best to start at the very beginning and explain how I came to be a Cubeworks intern and why I felt it was of benefit to go for an internship as opposed to looking for my first job within the digital marketing industry since graduating this year. I’m hoping this will give everyone a bit more an insight into me and what I hope to achieve at the end of the six week placement.
Continue reading “Guest Post: Meet Steph, our Digital Marketing Intern”

I’m delighted to announce the launch of the redesigned JISC Collections website!

The team has worked hard on this for 18 months and we’re excited to bring it to everyone’s attention, as it represents some of our finest work to date.

JISC Collections brings a great variety of digital content to the academic market. These resources are now sold in a marketplace that brings publishers and end-users together.

Here’s a brief list of highlights:

• A hugely improved and useable catalogue, with filters and sorting
• A very bespoke basket and checkout process
• Many business processes, invoicing and reporting brought online and integrated
• Customers can now manage their subscriptions and account online
• Categorised news and events and a smarter search
• A very powerful and flexible CMS in EPiServer

This project has certainly provided us with a challenge, but one I think we’ve met brilliantly. Here’s why…

Continue reading “New website launch: JISC Collections”

I attended the Local by Social event last week, which was inspired by a recent NESTA pamphlet of the same name. The event brought together people who work in local government and social innovators to discuss what impact social media and social networking can have in realising what has been dubbed public services 2.0.

I don’t work in local government, nor am I a social innovator, but I find the subject fascinating as both a citizen and someone who has worked in social media and digital service design for years. These are my reflections on the day.

Continue reading “Reflections on Local by Social and what needs to happen now”

There’s been significant buzz in the technology press in recent months regarding Adobe Flash and HTML 5, mostly on the back of Apple’s announcement that they wouldn’t be supporting Flash on iPad or the new iPhone 4. In this post I’m going to explain why you don’t need Flash on your website, and how you can achieve the same look and feel without it.

Continue reading “Why you should stop using Flash now”

It seems to be the perennial question for clients: should I reveal my budget?

My answer is a most definite YES, and here’s why.

Continue reading “Why clients should reveal their budgets”

A requirement that sometimes comes up at the beginning of a new project is that we should supply a text-only version of a website, often purportedly for improved accessibility. I thought I’d write a quick post to outline my thoughts on why this is a bad idea, and why we encourage our clients that it’s something best avoided.
Continue reading “Why you don’t want a text-only version of your website”

The two main political parties have both made use of digital media to launch their manifestos. Are we talking grade A gimmickry, or is something of value being added?
Continue reading “The digital manifestos reviewed”

We’ve got a number of user experience projects on at the moment and I came across this great cartoon below from StuffThatHappens.com that should serve as an inspiration to us and our clients.

Apple and Google define what the user experience is right now. Apple is all about simplicity and intuitiveness; Google is all about search and the serendipity that comes from their magical algorithms. Apple’s vision is driven by the singular ego of Steve Jobs and the genius of Jonathan Ive; Google’s by the raw power of the masses of data gathered from all our web searches.

What neither of them do is rely on a design by committee, lowest common denominator, let’s copy what our rival is doing approach. Neither should we.

Steve Mason, Senior Developer and hat wearer

Imagine Olympic 100m champion Usain Bolt winning an egg and spoon race: an expected result but an achievement nonetheless. That’s probably a bit how Senior Developer Steve Mason felt as he got himself certified as an EPiServer CMS developer.

Around the Cubeworks office Steve is known as ‘The Legend’ because of his vast knowledge and lightning speed in all things coding. Steve has already played a big part in developing EPiServer sites for Chichester College and Sanyo, so we felt confident he’d ace the test. And he did! Good to get the certificate up on the wall, especially as Cubeworks does more EPiServer sites for clients.

Steve is now in intensive training for the three-legged race.

Six by Tc7

For the uninitiated, Aggers is the nickname of Jonathan Agnew, a stalwart of Test Match Special on the Beeb. As a lover of test cricket and a long-suffering England fan, I have been enjoying following Aggers on Twitter (@aggerscricket) during the current winter series in South Africa. Not only does he keep me updated on the score, but he knows how to banter – a fine twitterer if ever there was one.

But what I particularly like is the instantaneousness that Twitter gives you of something you can’t get elsewhere. Take an Aggers tweet from this morning:

Strauss press conference. “Test won’t last 5 days” http://twitpic.com/xwfkg

Here we have it, the thoughts of the England captain and a photo from the press conference, published ahead of its appearance in other media, even in the age of 24 hour news.

Continue reading “Aggers offers real-time appeal”