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”

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”

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”

As many of you have no doubt already heard by now, in the early hours of this morning Google posted to their blog stating that they are taking “A new approach to China”. It would appear that Google, amongst a significant number of large western companies, have been the victim of a co-ordinated and distributed attack with the aim of gaining access to private communication between Chinese dissidents.

Continue reading “Google vs. China: What’s your view?”

Zendesk's happy Buddah logo

The Cubeworks helpdesk service has always had very high client satisfaction levels. I used to work on a helpdesk for a software company about 10 years ago so I know how crucial it is to provide great support. Clients only tend to get in touch when they really need support – it’s not often they phone up the support team for a chat (though they’re most welcome to). I take great satisfaction that we’re good at providing support and it’s important to me that we can maintain this level of service as the company grows.

Increasing demands

In the past two years, the number of support tickets we handle has increased by over 200% due to the number of new projects we’ve taken on. Our development team – who deliver our helpdesk service – has  also increased from four people to eight. Unfortunately, under the increased load, our systems and processes have occasionally creaked at the seams. So it was time to think at how we could improve things.

Continue reading “Supporting clients better with Zendesk”

Here at Cubeworks, things are getting HOT. We feel like Expats in the Far East here in our offices by the seaside, so we have employed a cooling system that is convenient and cheap – the USB fan.

‘Its like being on the beach in New Zealand , with the wind blowing lightly in your face while you watch the calm seas and listen to the distant sounds of sheep. I feel right at home now I have the USB fan.’

Cubeworks endeavors to make its team happy, so they can keep you happy.

Get your own here...

Murphy’s Law is an old adage that states: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.

I was struck by the relevance of the many variants of Murphy’s Law to web project management the other day, during an excellent presentation by a colleague. So I dug a little bit deeper. After reading many people’s takes on the subject and a lot of appreciative nodding at my screen, I settled on my favourite five:

Continue reading “Five rules to better web project management”

The web is becoming a complex place and increasingly clients are wanting to make all their IT systems talk to their website. So, at Cubeworks, we decided that what we needed was someone with the skills and knowledge to simplify the ambitious projects that we are taking on these days.

Meet Natasha, the latest addition to the Cubeworks team, and our Senior Business Analyst. Natasha brings with her 10 years commercial experience working on software & web development projects, including two years at the Home Office.

“So what does a business analyst do?” I hear (most of) you say.

Continue reading “Meet Natasha – our newest face”

We are very proud of the team we have built at Cubeworks and there are a couple of things they have in abundance: skill and knowledge. So we decided it’s about time we gave them a platform to make themselves heard.

So, we introduce the Cubeworks blog. Stay tuned for:

• Latest thinking on digital marketing & the digital economy
• Our thoughts on the best digital campaigns of the moment
• Our design team’s opinions on design trends & innovations
• Our technical team’s thoughts on web apps and technologies

We look forward to you joining the debate.

Alex Cowell
Managing Director