Please click below to take the 10 second linked in poll:

http://tinyurl.com/dyfkv6

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Interesting article on a recent survey of FD’s:

 http://tinyurl.com/d463ze

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Had a great launch event for one of our clients last night at the Globe Theatre in London. The Balcony Room had amazing views of St Paul’s which was beautifully lit up at night!

The event kicked off with Champagne, followed by informal presentations to launch new products and a new website. After that guests were able to network and chat over champagne and canapes – everyone had a great time!

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We have been asked many times by our customers about developing Flashbased websites. There has been a trend, partly driven by fashion, tohave websites that whizz around and magically transform under yourmouse pointer, but there are some downsides:

1. The first and most significant is problems with search engines. Flash content cannot be indexed by the search engines and flash based websites deliver very little text content that the search engines can use thus reducing or eliminating your search ranking. Even sites that just use a flash based menu can reduce scoring on search engines as “real” links go towards a site’s score. Google have recently announced a partnership with Adobe that will allow them to read through Flash content but the success of this is still unknown and all the other major search engines, like MSN and Yahoo, won’t see the content.
2. Flash often breaks some important standards and features that users rely upon:
   

   1. You can’t copy and paste text
   2. The back-button won’t work
   3. Bookmarking of pages in flash sites often just takes you back to the home page or another page higher up in the navigational structure
   4. Browser features like zoom in/out and text resizing won’t work

3. Flash is not supported by all browsers so some users just won’t see anything. There has been a marked increase in the use of mobile browsers, which don’t support flash. There’s also the issue of flash versions – which version do you develop in? While most desktop users have flash installed there’s no guarantee that the end user will have the supported version installed or may even not be available – Linux users had to wait months for version 9 of the player to be released by Adobe leaving them unable to view the newer Flash 9 sites.Just to top it all there are some users that disable Flash in their browsers to avoid advertising and longer download times.
4. Then there’s the cost … Updating a flash website usually requires programming skills as there is very little content management support for flash sites. Normal HTML sites on the other hand have a huge variety of content management (CMS) platforms available from bespoke, to open source, to commercial. So if you want to make text changes to your flash site expect to hire a programmer!

OK it’s notall doom and gloom … Flash does have it’s place when used inmoderation. Flash can augment a site and add value by placing flashanimations in key places where dynamic functionality or “eye candy” areimportant, for instance an animation on a home page showcasing aproduct in action.

The daft thing is that the standardscompliant technologies (Javascript and HTML) can often achieve many ofthe effects that flash offers without loss of function for ordinaryusers, search engines or special needs users.

Microsoft haverecently launched “Silverlight” which is their equivalent to Flash inan attempt to get a slice of the Flash pie, but even this doesn’treally solve the problems and adds an extra one – does the user haveSilverlight installed as it’s an optional update from Microsoft?

So do use Flash, but with care.

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Thanks to the weather putting paid to our orginal event date we have re-scheduled to May 19th – send us an email to make sure you receive an invite!

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I was dubious – but yesterday attended a seminar on Social Networking for B2B – and am converted!

Greatpresentations – LinkedIn, Microsoft, Sun among others – showed how youcan use social networking to generate leads for B2B as well targetingconsumers.

One presentation discussed how the Obama campaignedleveraged Social Networking and created a huge following in arelatively short time – and how they used it to connect with voters inthe week leading up to the election.

What was particularlyinteresting was how you can build a reputation and awareness withouthaving to spend a huge amount (although the opportunities are there tospend!) which will be good news at the moment.

The overriding message was to be authentic – if you are selling say so, if you are advising – do it honestly.

Food for thought….

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Well we’ve done it at last … a blog just for us, our customers and anyone interested in the fields of Marketing, Technology, Events and Design.

Rather than focusing on "News" on our website we thought it would be far more interesting to everyone to have a blog that could cover industry news as well as topical items about what we’re up to.

For those that are really interested you’ll find RSS news feed links to this blog on this page as well.

Please feel free to add comments about our posts or even to suggest what you’d like to hear about.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy it!

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