In my previous blog post, Heavy Lifting (save money – don’t reinvent the wheel), I introduced the concept of Heavy Lifting – using tools provided by specialist websites to introduce functionality into your own as quickly and cheaply as possible.

It’s always easier to explain a concept with an example, so without further ado I present to you The Cubeworks Music Match Maker! Have a play around with it – enter a list of musicians/bands that you like (separated with commas) into the box, then click “match me up” to find the Cubeworks team members that have similar taste. Seeing as we’re a fickle bunch musically, I’ve added a list with a few suggestions in case you’re not getting many matches.

Continue reading “Building a music matchmaker with last.fm (aka Heavy Lifting Part 2)”

Google have recently launched a new tool which allows any user to add a comment to any page on your website. Yes, you heard that right… ANY user can comment on ANY page on your site and Google don’t give you an “off” button if you don’t like it.

It’s called Sidewiki and it is a plug-in for the Google Toolbar. On the Google blog, Sidewiki is promoted as a tool where all users can add “their knowledge along the way”. But it’s already clear that brands are not seeing things quite the same way…

Continue reading “Google’s new Sidewiki kicks up a storm”

In this post I’m going to explore the concept of ‘heavy lifting’ and demonstrate how collaborating with 3rd parties can increase user interaction with your site whilst reducing development costs.

Continue reading “Heavy Lifting (save money – don’t reinvent the wheel)”

Picture: col_adamson on Flickr

How do you update your website? If you have a content management system, it will probably have some kind of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor built-in that gives you a set of controls something like this:

The basic TinyMCE toolbar

Tools like this are good because they give you a lot of control over what your content looks like, but that control and freedom comes with an important trade-off: Unlike a more restrictive system (think of a stock management system, say), it can’t tell you when something has gone wrong. Content can be formatted in so many ways and still, to the human eye, remain meaningful. Look at the example below:

Continue reading “Seeing meaning with semantic markup”

Why should you care about web technologies?

The majority of our clients do not really care what web technologies we use – unless they are technical themselves – and indeed, why should they? We are the technical experts, that’s why they engage us.  Naturally, the most important thing for them is that their website is usable, reliable and enables them to hit (or, even better, exceed) their targets.

Modern websites can be complex beasts, often talking to several other IT systems. Committing to inappropriate technologies usually means an expensive rebuild much sooner than expected, so it’s more vital than ever that the underlying technology is appropriate for the job.

Continue reading “The costly perils of the wrong technologies”