What did I do before starting The Floating Frog?

Well in summary I’ve been lucky enough to serve the last 10 years in 2 great digital agencies after training for 4 years in Graphic Design. My first role was in a start-up web design company called Save9 who was founded by two fine gentlemen. I was originally offered a temporary summer work placement that would take me up to the start of my top-up degree but with the ever growing success of the business and the opportunity I saw developing for me I decided to stay. Save9 branched out into 9 core product and service offers and more role became extremely diverse and exciting. Some of these offerings included VoIP systems, Bluetooth marketing, cinema touch-screen systems, data mining, eCommerce websites, mobile solutions and more. We were invited to the grand opening of Apollo Cinemas flagship cinema outlet which opened in London’s Piccadilly Circus and attended by a hat full of celebrities and the Countess of Wessex. Apollo Cinemas were the first privately owned cinema chain to go full non poster based advertising in their outlets and we were responsible to installing all the technical hardware plus delivering the rich media. We also traveled to the Cine Expo in Amsterdam to sell the concept to companies like Kodak and Coca Cola.

After nearly 5 years at Save9, I moved to Harrogate and became Senior Web Designer at 9xb, a full service digital agency. This role enabled me to specialise in online solutions and consolidate me UI/UX design skills while delivering bespoke solutions to clients that maximised their ROI and helped them engage with their customers better. I worked directly with some big brands yet gained more pleasure when I had the chance to work on new start-up projects as I could help turn a clients new vision into reality, rather than simply completing a to-do list for a worker bee at a larger company.

I have now gone full time freelance and work closely with a group of highly trained and experienced freelancers. In the 3 monthly since, we have already created an impact and are gaining a great reputation with the clients with have served. We have also worked with a few other agencies who outsource a lot of their work to us so I’m glad we can deliver such a service.

Plans for The Floating Frog

Primarily The Floating Frog will act like a shop window for our services, our work and our blog. We’ll use it to advertise our services straight to the end client and slowly cut down on the agency work as we get more established. One of our core strengths is our WordPress expertise. We seem to be getting a lot of job offers from agencies who have won a WordPress job but don’t have the skills to do it. I’d say 70% of our work at the moment is connected in some way to WordPress so there is obviously a real demand for it. It’s also important to educate both clients and agencies about the pro’s and con’s of WordPress and to help eliminate the dated persona that WordPress isn’t a via CMS and is just an insecure, low featured blogging platform.

We don’t just work with WordPress, but if a project is geared up to use it then I’d recommend it every time. For eCommerce sites and larger projects that require for of a bespoke solution then we work with the client and scope out the entire project and advise from there.

FrogsThemes.com

We have also started a premium WordPress themes company called FrogsThemes.com. This is where we develop off the shelf WordPress themes that are priced at the entry level market. So far it’s been a great success and we’ll soon be hitting the 1,000 premium WordPress themes download mark which is fantastic news. We also offer a lite version of the themes to give users the change to try before they buy. These lite versions are the same as the premium versions but without a few advanced features and support. These are very popular and we’ve already exceeded 20,000 downloads of those themes, amazing to think.

Core service offerings

These are still to be decided but in essence we all agree that we want to offer the full service to our clients so we can maximise their potential impact and growth after launch while gaining a good return on their investment. We already know the market is saturated with companies claiming to offer a full service but it’s important for us not to follow but more to specialise and be innovators in what we do best.

New Logo

This is potentially just an initial idea of the logo but we all agree it works pretty well for us. The pixelated frog (digital) in the center of the speech bubble (discussion and consultancy) with the name and tagline “Handcrafted websites”. Principally we’ll be focusing on websites, user interfaces, with great semantic and cosmetic builds that are positioned with SEO in mind. We’ll be cutting out the middleman and the bullshit most clients have to deal with when hiring an agency and focusing our efforts on delivering an end product that full filling the clients objectives, meeting timescales and budgets and ultimately is a pleasure to work on, for both the team and the client.

What do you think of the logo? It has potential to adopt colour and animation on hover and in other mediums but as a basis it’s good to see it stripped right back.

So hold tight, and come back soon. We are aiming to have the new site designed, built and setup in the next month or so. If you have any suggestions, comments, advice or spare staplers we’d love to hear from you….. oh L00k, we have comments enabled below

P.S. I haven’t checked for grammar or spelling mistakes in this blog post so please pull me up on any you see, I know you’re dying too!

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Bill Murray

So let’s pretend I’m Bill Murray, the legend that is (this guy has a direct line to my funny bone). I want to know which TLD‘s for www.billmurray. are available and which social sites I can register as billmurray.

Crap, no usernames are available for the top 10 social sites but there are both trademarks and domains available. Now, what can I do with the domain name www.billmurray.tv? Is he still on TV? Has he ever been? Films yes but TV? Sorry I’m meandering off the point.

The point is – whether you’re a Joe Blogg‘s or a business you can use ud.com to check and protect your online identity, all with one quick search.

Know of a better tool for the job?

Then let us know in the comments belooooooow.

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Now, I’m not new to Twitter applications. I’ve used various desktop and iphone clients and I normally change them every so often because I need some functionality they just don’t offer. One of the big things for me is being able to sort people I follow into different groups so they’re easier to manage. Tweasier has loads of pre-set groups so this is easy. In fact, the whole aim of Tweasier seems to be to make things easy. The interface is really clean and tidy, and all your information is laid out at a glance.

There’s a Twitter client just like you’d expect, so you can tweet from within the application. You can search for users based on whatever criteria you like, and your searches are saved so you don’t have to perform them again – this is really cool and helps you find new people without really having to look. One thing I really like is the ability to see conversations between users, so there’s no more trawling through profiles to find out who said what to whom.

So it’s slick and useable – so far so good. Where Tweasier actually stands out for me is the analytics package. There are built in analytics that tell you pretty neat things like who your most influential friends and followers are (great if you want to get into a conversation but you’re not sure where to direct your attention). Okay, so ordinary people might not care so much about statistics, but imagine you’re a business and you need to report on these things. I think the future of the app is with businesses and agencies – people who literally “manage” Twitter accounts and need to report on them.

So far, Tweasier is just in beta and improvements are still being made, but a Pro version looks like it will be available soon. This will probably include things like more elaborate reports and be aimed at agencies. At the moment the cost looks to be under £10 a month, and for those kinds of reports I think it’s well worth it.

Walk through video

Tweasier – The Walk through video from Tweasier on Vimeo.

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The Google Font API provides a simple, cross-browser method for using any font in the Google Font Directory on your web page. The fonts have all the advantages of normal text: in addition to being richer visually, text styled in web fonts is still searchable, scales crisply when zoomed, and is accessible to users using screen readers.

The interesting part of the subject of baking fonts into images and using font replacement scripts is actually how ‘searchable’ they are. Now with Google Font API you should be more comfortable in the fact that if Google have developed this, they ‘must’ be search engine friendly… right?

How to integrate the Google Font API

Getting started using the Google Font API is easy. Just add a couple lines of HTML:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine'
rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

body { font-family: 'Tangerine', serif; }

Google explains more

The Google Font API hides a lot of complexity behind the scenes. Google’s serving infrastructure takes care of converting the font into a format compatible with any modern browser (including Internet Explorer 6 and up), sends just the styles and weights you select, and the font files and CSS are tuned and optimized for web serving. For example, cache headers are set to maximize the likelihood that the fonts will be served from the browser’s cache with no need for a network roundtrip, even when the same font is linked from different websites.

These fonts also work well with CSS3 and HTML5 styling, including drop shadows, rotation, etc. In addition, selecting these fonts in your CSS works just the same as for locally installed fonts, facilitating clean separation of content and presentation.

The fonts in the Google Font Directory come from a diverse array of designers, including open source developers and highly regarded type designers, and also include the highly acclaimed Droid Sans and Droid Serif fonts, designed by Ascender Corporation as a custom font for Android. We invite you to browse through the directory and get to know the fonts and designers better. Since all the fonts are open source, you can use them any way you like. We also have a separate project hosted on Google Code for downloading the original font files. Since they’re open source, they can be used for just about any purpose, including for print.

We’re hoping designers will contribute many more fonts in coming months to the Google Font Directory. If you’re a designer and are interested in contributing your font, get in touch with us by completing this form.

To showcase the Google Font API, Smashing Magazine has relaunched their site using the open source Droid font hosted by Google. We’re excited about the potential for integrating the Google Font API into many types of publications and web applications. For example, the new themes for Google Spreadsheet forms are a great example of a rich visual experience using web fonts.

This is just the beginning for web fonts. Today, we’re only supporting Western European languages (Latin-1), and we expect to support a number of diverse languages shortly.

Google Font Directory

A seemingly small number of fonts currently available, but we’re sure it won’t be long until that grows.

Font page

As we have come to expect from Google, the font page is simply laid out. A font summary followed by four tabbed areas, Specimen, Character Set, Description and Get the code.

Useful Links

• Google Font Directory
• Getting started with Google Font API
• Google Font API FAQs

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Impact of Icelandic Volcano seen on live air traffic

Twitter buzz

Follow the hashtag #ashtag on Twitter to see the current buzz surrounding this event.

Pictures of Iceland Volcano Eyjafjallajökull

This Flickr set of Eyjafjallajökull shows the velocity of the eruption.

Click image to view the Flickr set.

Videos of Iceland Volcano Eyjafjallajökull

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Official App description

Get a fast, cost-efficient Web browsing experience. Use our powerful servers to compress data by up to 90% before sending it to your iPhone, so page-loads are lightning fast. Opera Mini is a breeze to use, and can synchronize data between your phone and computer.

Final words: Hell yeah!

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The second you launch your brand new, painstakingly thought-out and designed website onto the World Wide Web, you’re instantly global – anyone in the world (with a web connection) can and may stumble upon your site. It’s worth considering, then, that 78% of the 1.8 billion current web users do not speak English as a first language (Internetworldstats.com).

So if your website is designed solely with an English-speaking, western audience in mind, that’s less than a quarter of your potential online audience who’ll be interested in visiting your site. Crucially, for those sites with business in mind, research also shows that 85% of consumers will not buy from a website if they can’t read about the product in their own first language (Common Sense Advisory, 2006).

There’s more to designing a website that can successfully transcend borders than just offering automatic language translations, though. Extensive academic research into the topic of cross-cultural communication, especially as it applies to the online realm, concludes that different cultures can have very different ways of communicating.

High Context vs Low Context

Theorist Edward Hall posited that cultures can be defined as either ‘High Context’ or ‘Low Context’, High Context cultures being ones where communication is often implicit and governed by societal rules, such as in Japan or the Middle East, while Low Context cultures (such as Germany) communicate explicitly – the meaning is in the message, not in the body language or the social relationship between speakers.

What this means for website designers is that different cultures will have different preferences in design and content, in terms of what they perceive as credible and reliable. There is no one simple rule for design across all cultures – it’s a matter of studying similar competitors in each target market to establish what the rules are.

Practical Issues

Beyond the purely theoretical realm, though, there are also practical issues to consider when designing sites for several different cultural audiences, which should be considered before even undertaking the first stage of design, to avoid hassle further down the line.

Navigation

For instance, working with different languages will mean different line lengths and widths, not to mention the navigation issues raised by switching between left-to-right and right-to-left languages. Keeping your navigation bars horizontal should keep those navigation issues to a minimum.

CSS

On a technical level, using CSS will allow you to switch your content’s language between sites without redesigning each page from scratch, as you can keep your content separate from page design. Similarly, Unicode UTF-8 is highly recommended for character encoding, as it can handle the scripts of over 90 languages.

Colours

Colour is another important consideration, as different colours can mean vastly different things between cultures. Black or white text and  green or blue backgrounds have been found to be the most universally appealing, but you may want to look into the cultural connotations of your chosen colours in each target market before launching the site, for instance, orange in Northern Ireland (Protestantism) or green in the Middle East/Africa/Asia (holy colour of Islam).

Content

When it comes to the content itself, it’s important to ensure that the copy for each language and cultural group is researched and written with that specific audience in mind, and not simply a direct translation of the English version. You don’t want to inadvertently offend any potential readers with your tone, choice of language or, especially, a dodgy translation.

Translation and cultural background

The potential for confusing translations is huge – that’s why it’s crucial to use a professional translator working into their own language, to make sure you capture the correct local idiom and phrasing. You don’t want to end up like baby food manufacturer Gerber, who can’t sell their product in France or French Canada, since ‘gerber’ is the French word for ‘vomiting’.

Language translation isn’t the only area for potential confusion or embarrassment, though – the cultural, social, economic and political climate of each market should be taken into account as well. Take, for example, the mess that Pepsi got into in 2004 when it was sued over an advertising campaign by the Indian city of Hyderabad. The advert featured the Indian cricket team celebrating a win while being served Pepsi by a young boy; it may seem innocuous to a western observer, but to the Indian audience it blatantly glorified child labour.

By thinking of your potential global audience before starting the design of your site, you can devise a basic template that is innovative and has strong branding but is also flexible enough for you to copy it across a range of localised domains and tweak each one to the language and preferred colour scheme, imagery and design of each market. Why restrict your online presence to just the 22% of native English-speakers when you could be truly global?

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The Missing Piece

When Apple first announced the iPad, they promised to fill the lonely, pathetic void that laptops and cellphones leave in your life. Steve was quick to point out how much of an idiot you had to be to own a netbook, and wanted to make you feel better about yourself for making the stupid, moronic mistake of investing in a cheap, underpowered laptop. The solution to your complete incompetence was the iPad.

Now that I’ve had my hands on an iPad, I can confidently say that I live a much more fulfilling life. I read books again. I can grow a fuller mustache. I was able to kick my pesky skittles addiction. All of this, thanks to the iPad.

Apps, Apps, Apps!

While the nay sayers have been saying nay since the iPad was announced, calling it a big iPhone, I have been pretty confident in the potential of a beefed up device with a big screen. My god, was I so totally right! The apps that I previewed are absolutely mind blowing. While I’m still under embargo (and contractual obligation to mention how delicious a Rita’s Misto Shake is when you combine chocolate mint water ice with chocolate custard) from several app developers, I can say one thing: 3D is coming, and it’s going to be huge.

First Impressions

When I first opened the box, I was surprised at how brown it was. In all the pictures and videos you see circulating on the internets, it looks like the iPad’s back is made of aluminum and the bezel is black. It turns out that everything is brown. Very brown. It takes a little while to get used to, but after about 20 minutes, I can confidently say that brown is my new favorite color and Apple made a brilliant design choice.

Once I got comfortable with how brown the iPad was, my attention turned to the weight. The walk-through videos that Apple has posted on their site show people easily lifting the iPad with one hand. I have no idea how they can do this. Before I installed any apps, it easily weighed 30-40 pounds. After I got a few apps installed, it weighed upwards of 90 pounds. If you plan on taking this tablet on the road, you may want to invest in a gait belt or a wheeled suitcase.

After spending 10 minutes trying to find the power button, the iPad turned on almost magically. It turns out the applause from a studio audience on tv was loud enough to activate the Clapper which is embedded in the upper left of bezel, just like the ambient light sensor on the iPhone/iPod Touch. Technology sure has come a long way and I’m glad to be a part of it.

Final Thoughts

We have come to always look forward to the next big thing that will change the way we work, play, dance, and work. I can confidently say after the time that I’ve spent putting the iPad through it’s (again, completely made up) paces, the iPad is that next big thing. That is, of course, until Apple makes the device that fills that void between the iPad and the iPhone, which my sources tell me will be called the iPhad.

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The IE 9 Platform Preview doesn’t include the IE 9 user interface; instead, it is the plumbing, specifically the new Microsoft JavaScript engine (which is codenamed “Chakra”) and the new graphics subsystem, coupled with a home page full of test sites. There’s no back button and no built-in security. It’s basically the IE 9 rendering engine and early developer tools.

HTML5

HTML5 is basically the talk of the town right now, assuming your town is populated exclusively by web developers and Apple apologists. It’s magic! It’s going to save the internet! It’s going to kill Flash! Etc. But really, it’s more subtle than that: It’s the next version of the entire language that underlies the web—HTML—and it supports a lot of interesting features, which will make websites behave more like apps. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera have pretty much left Microsoft in the dust in terms for HTML5 support. Until now! Here are the HTML5 features Microsoft says IE9 will support:

• h.264 video: When people talk about HTML5 killing Flash, this is what they’re talking about. Some video sites, like YouTube and Vimeo, have been experimenting with video playback that doesn’t require a plugin to play. h.264 is the format standard the big sites have chosen to go with, and now Internet Explorer will support it.

• Embedded Audio: Just as the video tag allows for video to be embedded directly into a page without a plugin, the audio tag allows audio files to be embedded straight into the page. IE9 supports MP3/AAC codecs.

• Scalable Vector Graphics: Scalable vector graphics allow for the creation of certain types of graphics that scale perfectly—because they’re drawn as vectors, not plain images. It can also allow for rudimentary, Flash-style animations.

• CSS3: CSS is essentially what the web is formatted with, and Internet Explorer’s various CSS compatibilities have been maddening since, well, forever. IE9 supports more standards-based CSS3—including Selectors, Namespaces, Color, Values, Backgrounds and Borders and fonts—and should support more before launch. They’re finally trying, is the point.

For a more detailed overview of IE9 visit Gizmodo.

Sorry XP user!

According to an article written by Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet, IE9 will NOT support the Windows XP OS.

OS market share

According to W3Schools OS Platform Statistics Windows XP has 50%+ of the OS market share.

Your thoughts?

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