After a long time, I’ve updated my site to use the The Unstandard 1.2.1 theme by Derek Punsalan as a base. There’s work to do, but it’s modern-retro looks are giving me a great foundation to grow my site from.

I’m at that point where my blogging has calmed right down. I used to write several blogs a week, either for work or for myself.

But of late, I’ve been struggling to get the inspiration and I’m not sure why. To defend myself on how slack I’ve been, I love writing, as you can probably tell by the way I’m waffling now. I always have enjoyed writing, and I also love helping people review things they’ve written to help them target their audience better. Be it for a client, internal procedures, technical explanations or even personal documents like CVs.

That’s just the way I am, and I enjoy it. So what happened?

I’m using Twitter a lot, and talking to people getting links, re-tweeting and sharing dialogues with people. Maybe that’s the problem. I also still have my large number of feeds attaches to my Newsgator account – I check that on my work machine, home machine and my iPhone. Maybe I have too many feeds and am overloading myself and can’t focus on things.

At Amnesia Razorfish, I’m a project manager, but have involved myself in a lot of other projects. This has seen me moving away from my technical role, where I was quite a pioneer in researching and documenting things for the various companines I work for.

In my personal life, I’ve not been travelling much of late, and I like to keep my more personal adventures to my close friends on Facebook - I’m sure a lot of people understand where I’m coming from with that.

So what’s happened? What’s gone wrong? Maybe I just don’t have time anymore. My trip to work is now a walk, so I’m missing out on that hour of travelling a day that used to let me watch numerous podcasts.

I just don’t know, and I feel like a part of me has gone.

But then on re-reading this blog, maybe I just need to start writing again… Just sit down with a computer, see what happened on the day and write. Maybe that’s what a good personal blog is all about.

So it’s not quite perfect yet. I still need to finish updating a few bits of it – like the left nav and the archive.

But this blog is to give a big shout to the guys at NCL Hosting! Transfering my site across, and moving the domain proved a little problematic due to my domain being near to expiry, and some communication trouble with the old hosts.

Their patience was exemplary, and now my site’s up and running faster than ever. If you’re looking for a new host, I recommend NCL Hosting!

Have you heard of this legend? Very few have seen it, but apparently it appears only during fits of uncontrollable laughter. It was first reported in the.

There’s just so much I want to write, and but sometimes I just can’t get the inspiration. does anyone else find that? You spend so long work, with your friends, and reading everyone else’s Blog that it’s hard to find the time to indulge in life’s little pleasure of writing for fun for yourself.

I’m a project manager at the moment, and that sees my day filled up with organising people, writing technical documents and ensuring that projects make money.

Tech writing is fun and challenging, coming up with solutions and describing them in a way everyone else on the project will both understand and find useful, whilst still solving the problem. But, it’s for work, and good as it is to get positive feedback, it’s just not yours…

I mean it is yours as far as you researched it, you decided what it should do and you wrote it. But, most of the time, it didn’t come from something you read or did that inspired you. If it did, that’s a good feeling, but a lot of the time it doesn’t given the satisfaction of just writing because you want to.

Now Blogs are a different story. They’re usually based on something that really pipped your interest. Perhaps something you read, or an encounter that got you thinking. Perhaps something on telly or in the news. You know it when it hits you, and you know you have to write it.

Next question. When do you do it? That’s the real trick. My best time seems to be sitting in front of the telly in the evening. That sounds odd, but it gives me the time to just drift dreamily in and out of what I write.

It’s strange, but the background noise and distraction seems to help me focus. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the comfort and familiarity of the surroundings. Maybe the telly gives off some kind of weird aura. I don’t know.

But I know I enjoy it when and I do it, and I really need to do it more. Both at home and at work. With the internet as my inspiration, I don’t really have an excuse not to, do I!

I’ll start by saying that I’m not an expert in this area (yet), so everything you read hear is a combination of my broad range of experience and knowledge, combined with my enthusiasm for online success. I’m currently filtering these ideas into my work, and evolving my skills to help better myself, my company and most importantly, my customers.

There’s more to driving your site to succeed online than just adding a blog and content syndication to your site. You need to market it, and in turn your brand (often yourself). With the birth of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, it has become common practice to think that a site will succeed purely by bolting on a blog, and sticking up some photos and regularly updating the content.

At to that the social phenomenon, people started adding send to a friend links and social network tags, such as Digg and Facebook. Those are great tools, as long as your users click on them and share your message. You could do it yourself, or ask your friends to do it, but it starts to look a little bit obvious and also reduces your rating on those sites if you continually push your own content in. You need to come up with ways to connect with them and make them want to do it. If you’re really good, and connect well, you don’t even need these tools – look at how well Apple does if you need proof.

This is where the advertising industry has one up on web development companies, and where they should learn from each other. Part of their mission is to connect with the customer – in this case, your site’s user – and make them feel you know them and that they’re special. Rather than relying on you to try and work out what to do and write, they aim to deliver elements that appeal to a broad audience, and bring them in by going a few steps further.

1. Know the brand’s customers. OK, for a new brand, this is where the brand and marketing guys come in, and it’s a little more tricky to get right first time, but what I’m going to say in this blog covers that (think competitors). But what does knowing the customer mean? It means start by looking at who your loyal customers are. The ones that have been with you a while, and will stay with you. I’ll say for example to be generic, that might be the 30-50 age group who grew up with your brand and stayed with it. Then look at the ones around that. How can you market to them without alienating the ones you already do so well with? Read what they read. Watch what they watch. It’s tricky, and something that takes a lot to get just right – I’m about to start doing this for one of my clients and I’m can’t wait to start!

2. Get to know the brand’s rivals. This is a bit of a no-brainer if you think about it. We all know it makes perfect sense, but we also know it’s an easy thing to forget or skim over. What are they doing? When are they doing? And most importantly, what do we do better than them that could boost our market share? Then ask if there’s anything they do better that we need to steer clear of – that’s not to that if they really do do it better, you can’t use it, but make sure it won’t come back to have a detrimental effect on what you’re trying to achieve.

3. Know the brand’s products. Does this sound like an extension of the last points in a way? It shouldn’t! If you don’t know everything about the products you’re trying to sell, how can you do a better job of selling them to people who know nothing about it? Know the strengths. Know the weaknesses (but don’t tell the client). Live and breath their products if you can – or find someone that does.

4. Stay in touch with your users. In the day and age of database this, and database that, it’s easy to slap a ‘Stay in touch’ box on a website. But ask yourself what that actually means? Does it mean a monthly, or bi-annual newsletter perhaps? Perhaps it never gets used. I don’t know. All I know is that when I see that box, and I see it not used to it’s best effect, I get upset. That box means that someone has looked at your site, and thinks that you have something that others don’t, and they want to make sure you tell them what you’re doing. If you don’t talk to them, you’re missing a real opportunity and at the same time letting them down! But then, why not go one step further if the product permits. Why not encourage your users to turn that email address into a user account on your site? One that lets them enter competitions periodically? One that actively encourages them to come back, and also gives you the chance to make their experience that little bit more personal? Make them realise that you really connect with them, and want to ensure they get even more from you than they already have.

5. Get to know them better. When users register for a site, you general collect the basic information. Collecting more than that is difficult, but why not ask them anyway? If you can find out that a large chunk of your sites users actually fall into a category that you want to target in point 1, then you know you’re on the right track or have succeeded. Why not ask them how old they are, what they do, how they found you, would they recommend you, and what they think of you. That’s all information you can potentially use later on to do an email or other promotion to them to help make them feel special and that the brand connects with them. OK, so some of those questions are a little sensitive, and they don’t need to be mandatory, but you could give them an incentive to tell you – and that might encourage them to tell their friends too… Suddenly for that one person, you might have 10-20 more customers just for asking more questions to sell to them.

6. Now work out how to deliver. This is a huge topic, and something that I couldn’t possibly cover here. What sites to advertise on. What sites to contribute to. What will appeal to the online community? Should you be thinking about a viral campaign or a competition? Would a Facebook application or Facebook group work well for you? Perhaps a blog would be enough… Ultimately, it boils down to your client’s budget, but you also need to make them aware of what can be done to give them the best return on their investment.

So that’s 6 points. There’s a lot more than that I could write, but that’s a brief take on what I see as a basic strategy to beginning to succeed online. There’s more to come that feeds off that, like viral marketing, banners, offline to online. The list goes on, but you can see where my head is. I’m in the position of moving from being the Technical Director in charge of delivering sites, to being someone more strategic who comes up with the ideas.

I see the web as a world of opportunity. And damn I’m excited by the direction I’m moving in! Please let me know if I’ve said anything you disagree or perhaps really like. And if you want to give me some words of encouragement that I’m going in exactly the right direction, I always welcome and encourage any feedback.

I was tagged by Cheb 2.0 to write 8 little things about me. The meme is basically defined with the following rules: Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Following on from my recent post, My concerns about Web Developer’s skill sets since asp.NET came to be, I thought I would justify why I think developers need to know more than just how to code a part of a website.

Lets start with coding itself. A lot of back end (ASP.NET for example) developers don’t care about front-end (presentation layer) code because they believe it is below them for some reason. Unfortunately, what they fail to understand is that knowing the basic principals of how to code the presentation layer can actually be influenced how you do certain things on the back end. It’s OK to rely on the built in controls, they work, that’s why Microsoft put them in, but they also put a lot in to give you that choice and flexibility!

Think about that for a second. Is there a chance that they are too generic and slightly bulky? Is there a chance that one may be quicker to implement, but another will actually give you far more control over the aesthetics of the site (the presentation layer). If you can control that, it will allow the designer to express themselves better, and the client to be more impressed.

The same goes for front-end code. Would making an element a user control or list speed things up, or frustrate the developer that’s got to plug-in the code that will integrate the presentation code with the CMS back end?

But, why stop there? Why not think about how those objects will then affect the performance of the site in terms of speed, longevity and marketing (SEO, SEM, analytics, campaigns, viral, RSS, etc.). If you construct a page in a certain way, you can maximise how Bots for example, index the site. If you build forms and databases in a certain way, you can collect data in a way that makes utilising it for profiling and targeting emails.

OK, so the data collection bit comes under a different area of the process, but it’s a very useful skill to know! If you look at a site, and see a missed opportunity, how good will that make you look? That idea to collect an additional piece of data, or make the user profiling module that bit more flexible suddenly opens the site up to a whole new world of selling back into the client, and in turn, maximising their return, and future spend! You’ve made you company money with an idea, that will hopefully ultimately see you rewarded!

Then there’s SEO and analytics. 2 very broad topics that I will only touch on, but 2 very important ones! If you have some down time, go and have a look at the stats, and see if you can spot anything unusual or useful. Perhaps a page isn’t appearing that you’re sure should be there. Has something happened that could be making that page less favourable to the search engines? Is there a page or particular area of a page that’s performing better than expected? Is there an opportunity to leverage that to drive more people to key information?

And one that amazes me, is how many people in the web industry still don’t know what a blog is, and how an RSS feed should actually work including ‘pinging’. For anyone that wants to work for me, there’s a very good hint as to one of my favourite interview questions!

You can see that there’s more to just coding a website for it to work. It is an area the web is still learning, and it’s only those web site developers that go to the effort of learning above and beyond one area of code, that will ever be a true legend on the web and let them make a name for themselves.

I love reading about what’s happening and as a result, have subscribed to a lot of RSS Feeds. Be it about Web Development, or around the World News. Some are focused on SEO, some on marketing. There’s ones that are fun such as Dilbert. Several about one of my passions, cars and photography.

But, I have far too many. I’ve recently swapped over to NewsGator’s tools for both mac and PC, and one of them has a curious feature, and one I’ve found myself using far too much. A “Panic Button“. What does it do? Well, when you have too many unread articles, it offers to go through and mark anything that is more than 48hrs old, and unread as read.

It sounds like a trivial thing, but it made me realise that I’d accumulated so many feeds over the years that I rally needed to do some house cleaning. I think in doing that, I’ve probably removed about half the sites I was subscribed to.

Am I sad about doing that? Not really. I think in the long run, the feeds I have left are much more focused, and given time, I’ll probably thin them out a little more.

If, like me, you find you have too many to read, do this little exercise and I think you’ll feel much better about yourself – and be able to find much more time to read them.

In a future blog I’ll be outlining some of my 10 favourite RSS Feeds and why I think they are som

I’ve been thinking about it for a while. It’s been weighing heavily on me. I was one of those people lucky enough to have been at the original Macworld show in London when Apple unveiled the original 5gb iPod, and I was instantly hooked. There was something about the way it looked, the way it sounded, and how easy it was to use. I just couldn’t resist buying an iPhone. I’m just surprised it was so low-ley event.

But anyway, the iPhone. What can I say that hasn’t already been said? Nothing really. Everyone’s talked about how easy to use they are. How intuitive the interface is. What a joy it is to use, and it’s problems. Well, I hate to sound boring, but I’ve come to the same conclusion.

It does have some problems. Like I can no longer type a text message while I walk – nothing major, just takes me 30 seconds of standing still. There’s the fact that the headphone socket is recessed so you can only use Apple headphones – got an adaptor for that. The polished good looks that you’re worried will get scratched – got a case. The GPRS was slow, did a bit of reading and found that Vodafone have 2 networks – one’s fast! And I did manage to get it to crash once – hold down 2 buttons and it restarts just fine. But that’s it really. Nothing else really lets it down.

So, the good stuff… Well, the most obvious thing is the interface. There’s just not enough you can say about it. Everything just flows. The way if you flick your finger list keep going, but if you slide it, the list stays with your finger. Each touch somehow does what you expect. A flick side-to-side takes you through the applications. Browse a web page, use two fingers, spread them and the page zooms in. Feels like that seen in Minority Report.

Then you start using the applications – all through touch. They all have that brilliant Apple simplicity. Your SMS’ keep track of each other – well near enough – like a conversation in iChat. The keyboard is very good, and even with my fat fingers, it manages to correct most mistyped words, but does miss some. Just slide your finger back over the text and a magnifying glass appears showing you which point in the text you’re over. Easy.

Emails, calls, you name it, all easy. OK, so I did like the feature on my Nokia where I could start typing a name and it would move to that point in the list, but I’m getting better at the flick and the jump to feature. Call reception is excellent, and I can now make calls anywhere in the flat now.

Wifi works well – although I did have to reconfigure my Wireless network to get it to work at home. Now it’s setup, it works perfectly at home. And now I have a network sniffer on it, I can pretty much get fast access anywhere. But now, after a little reading, I now have faster GPRS too – fast enough for Google maps. On that note, it shouldn’t but does work most of the time, and can tell you where you are – although sometimes only to within 100m, but better than nothing!

Oh, and it has the iPod functionality. That works as well as iPods always have. Only this time I get full screen video. Videos off the web play perfectly – not looked into playing other formats yet. And as everyone knows, when you turn the iPhone on it’s side, you get the video full screen – same with the web browser.

iTunes integration is as ever seamless, and my contacts are now much better organised through the use of Apple’s Contact application groups – not tried Exchange synchronisation. My calender is back on there courtesy of iCal – something that didn’t worked so well with my Nokia 6500 Classic. Podcasts, music, et al go on very easily.

With the iPhone Apple’s not really made anything new, all they’ve done is take some good things and made them great! And I love it! I just wish I’d got one sooner – and no, I’m not bothered by the 3G iPhone rumours as my Tariff won’t expire for a while yet, and I still think it’ll be 6 months till the new ones are out.

What I am really looking forward to is the iPhone version 2 software that makes your phone into a bit more of a mobile office through support for Cisco VPN and Microsoft Exchange. Having those on your iPhone will be interesting. Lets see what happens. I think Apple’s only just begun waking up the mobile industry from it’s sleep!