My history with Realmdigital spans back to the early days of Allchorn Design (2004/5) from where we have always looked at ways of combining skills to the benefit of both our companies and our clients. Until recently, the differences between our markets have been too vast which has meant that we had kept in touch but never physically combined forces.

With my newfound knowledge in the area of online commerce, I bring a new element to Realmdigital in the form of usability, user experience and conversion optimisation audits. Also hosting, analytics, technology and supply chain auditing and solutions architecture.

All in all, it is an exciting and challenging position and it is a great crowd of people to be working with now and into the future.

There is still a lot of content to be added, which is being written and loaded as it has been proof read and edited. I intend to offer a host of new information on this site and provide true value to my customers and whoever comes across it.

Active immediately we will be focusing on the following services

» Web Interface Design

If you require only the creative aspect of your web materials to be created, we offer you hand crafted designs that can be coded in-house from neatly layered PSD (Photoshop) files.

» Ecommerce Solutions

We will be providing comprehensive end-to-end ecommerce solutions. This will include strategy, design, development, security, maintenance and all you’ll need to effectively sell your products and services online.

» Information / Brochure Websites

For websites offering just information about a product or service, we can set you up with full content management abilities so you can edit the content yourselves or we can maintain it for you.

» Blogs

One of the easiest ways to broadcast your message, we provide you with professional design and setup using the industry leading blogging software (WordPress).

» Email Marketing

Still reputed to be the most cost effective means of online marketing, we offer the service of setup, design, list management and distribution of your email marketing messages.

» Website Maintenance

Keeping your website fresh with new content (news, photo galleries, content updates etc.) can take time and expertise you may not have. To free up yours or your team’s time to focus on your business, we can do it all for you.

» Social Media Solutions

Tying in with your overall online strategy, we offer the setup of various social media tools that will allow you to grow your audience and engage more effectively with your customers.

Keep your eyes peeled for a radical improvement on allchorn.com itself and a lot more activity on this blog.

Over the festive season, I’ll be translating the new look across the board. Our forms, questionnaires, quotes, invoices and this website will all take on a fresh new look. You can subscribe via RSS if you want to know when we go live.

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How to resize an image online from Ross Allchorn on Vimeo.

So many designers these days are producing “questionnaires” that ask your favourite colour, do you want a symbol in your logo, what type of font do you like? All of these things -sorry to say- are not up to the company owner. They’re not up to the designer to impart their opinion on either. These factors are established by research.

• Researching the the client’s company
• Researching the industry
• Researching the competition
• Researching the end user/customer

This is where you draw your conclusions from. Not from the company owner’s nor the designer’s “opinion”.

Design is about communication

Nothing more, and nothing less. I sometimes get irritated when people say things as obvious as that to me, and while you might agree and get back to your normal way of doing things; take a minute and think about it.

You’re designing to communicate a message “buy this”, “subscribe here”, “register now”, “enquire”, and if your design efforts are not focussed around those objectives, you might as well be putting lipstick on a pig.

“Don’t try to be original. Just try to be good.”
Paul Rand – 1914-1996

There are a lot of Paul Rand video clips and tributes going around the design community at the moment, and for sure, he deserves all the credit he can get.

There is one very important message I get from him where I can sense his frustration in trying to get his message across. It’s summed up in that quote above, and what it really comes down to is that people need to first become capable of the basics of communication before they can start innovating. Walk before you can run in other words.

According to Wikipedia:

“The end-of-life support for Internet Explorer 6 is July 13, 2010″

That alone tells me that it is an actively supported means of people accessing websites for at least another 10 months.

A lot of opinions seem to be around the lack of standards support by the browser and I don’t dispute this fact, but you also can’t look beyond the fact that there are still users out there that are stuck with it. Unfortunate, but true.

Just so you’re clear on my position on the matter; we will support IE6 until there is what I deem to be a sufficiently low enough percentage of visitors using it. There will be exceptions in cases where I know for a fact that the audience of the site/intranet is closed enough and mandated to use a newer or different browser, but by rule of thumb, we will support it.

My clients’ reputations are important to me!

According to w3schools, last month 13.6% of users were still on Internet Explorer 6.

For technology to cause their image to possibly be tarnished to approximately 13% odd of their visitors is simply unacceptable. Especially when those possible problems are avoidable through producing “gracefully degradable” sites where necessary and providing code hacks (a sad reality my geek friends) to have them rendered properly.

Really people… if you’re not in the web design and development industry, and you can’t update your browser, then you probably wouldn’t give a toss about anything besides the fact that you’re inconvenienced by a breaking website! In my eyes, thats not good business.

A good coder should make a site work in all required browsers

The discussion often pops up in forums I frequent, and it’s usually someone having a hard time getting something to render consistently. While I do empathise with them (I have been there too), you need to suck it up, figure it out and make it work… it is your job, do it properly!

Usually someone with a bit more experience will chime in that it’s not that hard when you know how. Those people -in my opinion- are the true professionals. Not the guys whining about it and trying to get everyone to stop supporting it.

Upgrading your browser is necessary

All the above being said, don’t get the impression that I think the www should stagnate and indefinitely be stuck with archaic systems like IE6. There is a world beyond simple browsing, and the likes of the Mozilla Foundation, Google, Opera, Apple and even Microsoft themselves have forged on and created some far more modern, more secure, more user friendly and just better browsers.

Here is a list of browsers I recommend:

• Mozilla Firefox (my choice)
• Opera
• Apple’s Safari (available for Windows machines too)
• Google Chrome
• Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8

Since we’re doing a lot more online marketing these days with our new offering and a lot of it involves the use of social media (Twitter, Facebook etc.), it’s interesting to note how things are ever changing. Email becoming old fashioned?! Who would ever have thought that hey?

Let me know what you think.

So instead of waxing lyrical about how to do this, and what not to do online, I thought I’d post a clip… so take a few minutes and check it out.

Personally, I found it so funny the way Dave refers to it as “the Twitter”.

You can add to Kevin’s eight hundred thousand followers and increase his swelling noggin by following him here.