Welcome to the Escape Blog

I like competition, and if this bunch are anything to go by, I like them even more - The Five Worst Web Designers in the World - my eyes are still hurting from the last one in the list… via Dean.

Our Blog was born in October 2005 and now has over 800 pages of posts. “So what” I hear you say.

Well a couple of weeks ago (and this is a point in itself) we changed the buttons that appear at the bottom of each post to make them show just the icon. You may have thought that this would not have a massive impact, but since that change, we have had four separate posts “stumbled”.

Here is where the first point kicks in:

• Stumbled on 26th Jan - Javascript post from 24th January 2008
• Stumbled on 26th Jan - Business Card design post from 13th June 2007
• Stumbled on 27th Jan - Reducing Website Friction post from 14th June 2007
• Stumbled on 3rd Feb - Three Ways to Get More From Your Printer post from 8th August 2007

Three of these articles are over six months old. It’s basically a seeding technique; creating assets that sit on the web, gaining authority over time.

Another thing worth noting is the close proximity between the second and third ’stumbles’, which indicates to me that someone saw the Business Card article, clicked to see the next post and thought that was worth stumbling too, perpetuating the effect.

Relate is a national charity that works to promote healthy relationships. With regional offices, we have recently launched a new site for the joint office of Basingstoke & Aldershot Relate.

The site is a simple static site with a news feed from Wordpress.

So, this week it emerges that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo and Google’s share price (independently) dropped 9% (FT). We may have a scrap on our hands for online domination. But, the key point here is the rise of the user - yes that’s you…

Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale talked about the fall and rise of social tribes nearly ten years ago in Funky Business. Today, we are obsessed with social networking - the Internet makes this very easy. We connect to people we want to, and talk about things we want to discuss, directly - no intermediaries and no matter how obscure the topic.

For instance, I want to buy a new TV this weekend. I went to the shop and got bombarded. So, I went online and read a number of reviews. Even the users reviews were voted on by other users so I could filter those out.

Around the same time business was getting funky, Seth Godin was talking about Permission marketing: The fact that we don’t actually want to be marketed to arbitrarily - and how we won’t have to as technology will enable personalised communication.
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Last year, I worked on about 20-30 web projects. All of them required an understanding of what the client is trying to achieve, who their market is, what their key selling points are, etc.

By using cross-project intelligence, we notice trends, features and ideas that will work across industries and product service offerings and advised accordingly. We used our expertise and stripped away the subjectivity, aiming for the lowest common point - if you could get one thing from your website, what would it be?

Any ideas which project last year was the hardest to work on?
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So, Microsoft want to buy Yahoo, who has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google.

Microsoft have also struggled to compete online with Google as the race for first-point domination continue to move towards Google maybe they’ve taken exception to Googles online Office killer.

In the UK, Google accounts for at least 75% of search, although Yahoo is the number one web property in the world (although not in the UK).

I have two takes on this news:
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I was looking for a mug manufacturer the other day, a manufacturer mind you, not a reseller, not a distributor. So I entered in my search criteria of “earthenware mug manufacturer” and up popped the list. The first one listed after the sponsored links was this useless site which quite amazingly does not contain a contact number, email address or form across the entire site.

What a waste of time.