Can social networking add value to your website?

June 28th, 2010

Social networking seems to be one of the biggest buzz words at the moment and with good reason. Web sites like Facebook and Twitter have changed the way we interact with each other and how we share information.

These sites are all very good from a social aspect but how can they be used to add value to your companies website?

Let me use my own companies site as an example. When I was re-developing the site a few months ago I wanted to achieve several thing:

1. Provide clear information about my company and make that information easy to find.

2. Give the site a personal feel but keep it professional.

3. Show that we know what we are doing and that we are keeping on top of the latest developments in our field.

The first point is covered by the basic site itself and I won’t go into details here of how I went about achieving that but the 2nd and 3rd points could not have been easily achieved without the use of social networking.

To add a personal feel I make regular blog posts and add new Tweets whenever I can. This shows that Austin Media isn’t just a company but there is someone behind it, a real person doing real things! I could update the content of my site every few days but that would be time consuming and quite inconvenient so I built a small control to consume my Twitter feed and display it on the Austin Media site. So I can now update the site in 3 seconds flat from anywhere in the world!

Just make sure your Tweets are relevant. I am pretty sure that potential clients don’t want to know what you had for breakfast or what you think about the England team been knocked out of the World Cup so early.

To demonstrate my companies knowledge we also have the blog. This also adds to making the site more personal but the main function is to talk about current web, iPhone, iPad, Apple etc developments. This (hopefully!) demonstrates that we know about my area of expertise and that we are abreast of the latest technologies. So having the blog allows us to show potential clients that we know what we are doing before they even speak to us.

It’s also worth mentioning another very useful function of using social networking on web sites. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Sites that are regularly updated rank far higher in search engines and just think about all those lovely keywords in your blog posts and Tweets! Have a read through this post and see how many I have put in…

So should you integrate social networking into your site? Will it add value? Yes and yes, just make sure it’s relevant and that you use it as intended, to keep potential clients or customers informed about you and what you do.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Web development | No Comments »

Alternatives to Flash on iPhone and iPad

June 21st, 2010

In a previous post I discussed how I agreed with Apple’s move to not support Flash on it’s mobile platforms. So what are the alternatives?

HTML5 – These new features to HTML add support, amongst others, for animation and video. The video tag in particular is very powerful and allows different version of the same video be be played on different devices. The animation has to be done in code as opposed to using design software and at the moment is quite slow on the iPhone.

This technology is very much in it’s infancy and although support on the iPhone and iPad is good you will often have to tailor sites specifically for devices which is a time consuming task.

Silverlight – Microsoft’s Flash alternative has been around for about 3 years now and seems to be far more robust than Flash. Take up of it has been very slow and support limited to only desktop computers at the moment though.

There has been no direct speculation about Silverlight appearing on the Apple devices but there has been talk of Visual Studio 2010 offering the ability to develop iPhone apps and I recently saw a very impressive demo of a video streamed using IIS7 Media Services directly to the iPhone.

So which technology do I think will be a viable alternative for Flash?

I would like to think Apple and Microsoft could work together and get Silverlight running on the Apple devices but I feel this is unlikely and the support for HTML5 in Safari is already probably the best of any browser so I think that will be the one that Apple backs.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Opinion | 2 Comments »

iPad…3 weeks on

June 14th, 2010

I succumbed to the hype and bought my iPad the day after the release. It’s a 64GB 3G one and rather nice it looks too.

The usual reactions when you mention the iPad are:

“what does it do?”

“is it just a big iPhone?”

“is it just a small laptop?”

So is it a big iPhone? Well in a way it is. It certainly looks like one but you can’t make phone calls in it. The functionality is the same as the iPhone so if you already have one of those you feel instantly at home.

Is it a small laptop? Again, in a way it is. You can have similar software to a laptop although I wouldn’t want to spend all day working on one. It’s certainly more portable than a laptop though and I like the fact that to turn it on you just press and button, swipe the screen and it’s there ready to be used. No booting up or having to lug power packs around.

So, what does it do then? Well I find that a hard one to explain as like a laptop it is just a vessel for the applications and that’s what will make or break the iPad. You can browse the internet, check your emails but how you use the iPad after that is totally up to you.

So if all you want to do is browse the internet and watch videos of cats falling over then it will do that. If you want to use it to to edit document on the go then it will do that too. Or if you just want to play games then it can also do that.

So to answer the questions as to what it does…well it can pretty much do (or be) whatever you want it to be!

But that’s not to say it’s perfect…

The software (Based on OS 3.1) need updating to use multi-tasking. This will be remedied soon with a free update.

Most apps aren’t written explicitly for the iPad either so look quite poor. Some of those apps that do support the device look good (you tube and right move are good examples) and you can immediately see the advantages that the larger screen brings.

I think it’s going to be a while before people really “get” the iPad but it’s open architecture means it’s up to people like me, the developers, to make best use of it. In 12 months it might be a big white elephant or the device that changes the game. Apple have done their part in producing the iPad and now…it’s now up to us to make best use of it…

Tags: ,
Posted in Opinion | No Comments »

Apple vs Adobe…I’m with Steve

May 27th, 2010

The altercation between Apple and Adobe regarding the support for Flash on Apple’s mobile devices has been going on for some months now with Apple showing no sign backing down. Despite most people backing Adobe and critising Apple, I totally agree with Apple’s decision and think the iPhone/iPad/iTouch devices are better off without it!

My job is to design and build applications to be used over the Internet. The most important thing to me is giving the users the ability to use these applications easily and get whatever information they want quickly. To me aesthetics are far less important than functionality and usability.

If you look up “Flash” in the dictionary, one of the definitions is:

“superficial, meretricious, or vulgar showiness; ostentatious display.”

Flash does not improve functionality, it does not improve usability and certainly doesn’t help speed up the users ability to get at information (quite the opposite in fact!). If you go back 10 years the internet was full of sites with Flash intro’s and fancy menus, none of these things added to the experience they were just novelties. This seems to have died down but it still goes on.

But it’s not all bad in the world of Flash and what it does well is allow you to embed animations and video into your site. These can be used to good effect and in some cases can actually add quality content to a site. But even this has it’s problem!

The Flash framework itself seems to suffer from memory leaks and quite often I have seen Flash content continue playing the background after the browser has been closed. Some of these issues may have been caused by the code running inside the framework but even so it should be the frameworks job to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Some of these issues will not bother most desktop or laptop users due to the power of modern machines. On a mobile device you just can’t have these issues as the devices have limited resources and will make them look sluggish and appear that the device is at fault when in fact sloppy code in the part of Adobe is the cause.

So whats the solution?

HTML5 looks promising but it’s still very much in it’s infancy.

There is however another option that at first seems quite unlikely but after some recent news and working demonstrations I’ve seen I wouldn’t’ bet against it no matter how far fetched it might initially seem…but I will save that theory for another post…

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Opinion | No Comments »