Kyan Blog

Kyan Interviewed

piers@kyanmedia.com (Piers H Palmer) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:41:00 GMT

Recently an admirer from afar, Morocco in fact, got in touch for an interview to publish on their website cssbit.com. We thought it was worth posting the interview here in full english.

Incidently if you have a question you’d like us to answer feel free to get in touch at info@kyanmedia.com.

Who’s Kyan?

Kyan is a medium sized web design & development studio with 14 employees who all love the web. We build websites and web applications, including web based business flow tools with a focus on usability and design. We are all either designers, developers or by circumstance project managers.

What services does Kyan offer?

Website design
Web application development
Interface design
SEO

Describe your workplace

We have just moved to Guildford High Street in the South of England. We have 2 floors, one acts as the dedicated open plan engine room, where we all code and design together and the other floor dedicated to play. Big kitchen area, customised arcade machine – it still needs a fair bit of work but it’s fun getting there. Check out the Kyan Flickr account for piccies. Most of our production files are based in ‘the cloud’ so most of the infrastructure is based on our broadband connection. There are lots of Macs, a couple of PCs and even the odd Ubuntu desktop.

How do you get the new clients?

All our work comes by referral. It helps that we put our credits on the bottom of all our websites.

Why do you love Ruby?

We love Ruby, beacuse it is fast to develop in, has a strong community and has a buzz about it.

You work with PHP too, but you focus on Ruby.

We also use PHP. We are very much of the mindset that we choose the right tool for the right job. Sometimes PHP fits the bill, especially for smaller website projects.

What is the average time for a project?

Hard to put a time on this as we have some on-going developments over 3 years old, but as a rule for a new web application we like to allow 16 weeks and for a simple website with CMS around 6 weeks.

Do you have any tips for those who wish start a web 2.0 company?

Establish a reputation for quality and then hire people who are better than you. It is all about the people. Oh and have fun doing it.

Describe a typical day at Kyanmedia

Start between 8 or 10, drink some supa-strong coffee, fend some emails, create a playlist on the global company jukebox, shuffle some pixels for a couple of hours before heading off to the pub for lunch, or eating in front of your screen as you look through your Google Reader feeds, all whilst rating the music playing in the studio and slipping in a few retro games on the arcade emulator. Then back to the code and hopefully some doughnuts that one of your colleagues has genourously bought to share. If it’s a Friday we may slip out to the pub at 6 to unwind.

How do you price your services?

If we have a good understanding of the project and the client has provided a clear brief we are happy to quote a fixed cost based on our understanding on how long the project will take. Otherwise we charge an hourly rate and record all the job hours in our custom time recording/intranet system.

Do you use pencil and paper or any other tools?

Wireframing will usually start with a pencil and paper as will initial design investigations.

Is there a risk to work as a web company?

Risks may involve getting tired of keeping ontop of the technology, but that is also what makes it so much fun.

How do you spend your free time at Kyan?

There isn’t much! Although we do mix work and play, playing games, listening to music, Kyan film & curry club.

Do you choose your clients?

Sometimes. It will depend on how booked up we are. The busier we are the choosier we can be. As a company we want to be profitable and this often means taking pragmatic financial decisions.

Do you use Basecamp or any webapp to get projects done?

Yes we use Basecamp for general project management, Trac and Lighthouse for issue tracking and sometimes Mantis. Again the right tool for the right job and a client may even have their own preferences.

Cool new website for climate control specialists (and penguins)

piers@kyanmedia.com (Piers H Palmer) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:31:00 GMT

Quantum Cooling provide a range of equipment and services for the drinks dispense, refrigeration and air conditioning industries. They needed an appealing new site to explain their range of products/services to potential customers. Penguins would be a bonus!

We’ve built Quantum a bespoke content management system (CMS) to allow them to keep the site content fresh and relevant without them having to come back to us to make updates on their behalf. Whether it’s managing their product portfolio, writing news posts or adding happy stories about their clients, they can do it themsleves without the need for any web programming skills — it’s a cinch!

The new site is clearly laid out with a simple navigation system, a heavy dose of white space and allows Quantum’s unique service philosophy to shine through. Oh yes, and did I mention it’s got penguins?

http://www.quantumcooling.co.uk

Kyan vs. HTML5

robin@kyanmedia.com (Robin Whittleton) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:39:00 GMT

Here at Kyan we like to keep up to date, so new technologies regularly come under the spotlight. This week’s focus: HTML5. Jumping straight into an unknown is rarely a good idea for a client project, but with no such qualms about internal projects I elected to rework our intranet.

First off, it’s important to point out that a lot of the promise of HTML5 comes from new technologies: the canvas element, <video> and <audio>, and the new <input> types (previously known as Web Forms 2.0). For our intranet these either have no obvious applications (<canvas> & <video>) or aren’t implemented in the common browsers being used (for us that’s Safari, Chrome and Firefox). Where we can benefit currently is the extra semantic elements and the tidying up that comprises the majority of the specification.

So what specifically did we change?

Simplified the header. The new simpler <doctype> and <meta> elements remove a bunch of cruft, and I took the opportunity to simplify the linked CSS and Javascript.
Changed some of the in-page containers to their ‘added semantics’ versions. For example, where previously we were using a <div id="header"> we can now just use the HTML5 <header>.
Changed some of the text elements to be more semantic. For example, previously the <small> element was defined to mean ‘make this text smaller’. In HTML5 it’s gained a semantic meaning of ‘this text is smallprint’.
Ran the code through an HTML5 validator with some interesting results. There isn’t an official W3 HTML5 validator yet, but you can use their development version (which is based on Henri Sivonen’s validator.nu). This is capable of some validation that the older W3 validator couldn’t do: e.g. warning if the number of table cells in a row doesn’t match the number of table headers.

The results

All in all, a lot of the benefit of this exercise came from a thorough reading the HTML5 spec and blogs like HTML5 Doctor even if we can’t directly apply those technologies yet. It also gave me a chance to refactor some of the older parts of the system into a more modern markup style. This should stand us in good stead when we start to use these technologies on a public-facing website.

Yammer-Dama-Hang-On ... What did you just say?

phil@kyanmedia.com (Phil Balchin) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:03:00 GMT

As some of you may know, we use yammer here at Kyan. We’ve been using it for about a year now, and it’s still as popular now, as when we first started using it to blabbering on about pretty pointless bits’n’things.

The service really helped us out, when, during a particularly cold spell back in Feb’09, when most of England was hit by really wicked snow storm and the entire Kyan army couldn’t get to the office. Yammer allowed us to open our MacBooks at home, log in, and pretty much work like we were all in the same room still.

Again in March, when a small team from Kyan worked in one of our clients London offices for a few weeks, yammer ensured they were never left out of the loop

Other uses include, but are not limited to:

critiquing each others jukebox playlists
deciding what time to go to the pub
New project ideas
Insulting Prof Wake (he doesn’t use yammer much)
Announcing the presence of Doughnuts in the kitchen
Sharing Links
Polling the office opinion on things like best film? are remakes better than the original?
Coming up with amusing alternatives to song lyrics
Trying to figure out if Lady Gaga is ‘fit’?
Quoting Film scenes

I’ll leave you with some insightful quotes going back through our yammer history, about what life at Kyan is like:

Piers: i’ll slip one in

Gavin: Bake me a higher loaf?

Gareth: A family of cheeeeeeese monkeys

Paul: poo status achieved in record breaking time surely

Phil: Goonies!

Gavin: I do actually like the Golf Sale man

Peter: Its official. Jo hasn’t managed to find any cat cheese.

Piers: does anyone have any sweets?

Piers: cornish fudge in the kitchen for interested parties

Prof Wake: Deorbit burn in progress

Gavin: Eee-aww, Eee-aww

Gareth: Romeo is gayer than Stephen Fry?

Prof Wake: I’m starting to feel very hetro

Gavin: More cowbell

Piers: this number must be close to achieving ‘turd’ status…

Peter: Vodka Lollies?!

Paul: nice wobbly header

Phil: Is wakey in charge again?

Piers: class rhymes with arse

Gavin: crazy in the coconut

Piers: Larping

Gavin: A lime green mankini is obvious wardrobe choice for cheese rolling

Robin: Just caught Gav licking his Macbook

Google does not use the keywords meta tag

paul@kyanmedia.com (Paul Sturgess) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:43:00 GMT

The majority of the web industry had, over time, come to the consensus that the keywords meta tag is not used by Google in ranking web search results. However, we’d never heard it from Google itself; that is until now.

Recently on the official Google blog they posted an article on just this issue and clearly stated that they do not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.

It’s worth pointing out that while this is only Google and other search engines may well use the meta keyword tags, it only serves to enforce our own approach to search engine optimisation that meaningful content is key.

Mame Arcade Cabinet

jo@kyanmedia.com (Joel Richards) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:30:00 GMT

A recent lunchtime project of ours at Kyan has been refurbishing and upgrading an old Arcade Machine.

After finding an old and broken RM Video cabinet on eBay, originally running Football Champ, we removed the old components and put in some new controls attached to a Mini-PAC USB controller. Once the various cosmetic upgrades were finished, we attached the Mini-PAC to the Linux machine running MAME.

More photos can be found in the Arcade Machine Flickr Set.

You can follow @kyanarcade on twitter to see new highscores.

Antique browser still has 25% market share

gavin@kyanmedia.com (Gavin Shinfield) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:34:00 GMT

Unbeliveably, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6 — released August 2001) still has 25% market share according to Net Applications (via Mashable). Come on people, this thing is 8 years old, that’s antique in internet years.

Are you one of the refuseniks? Upgrades to good, Standards-compliant browsers are free and will greatly improve your online experience: Firefox 3 or Google chrome or IE8

How do you rate?

paul@kyanmedia.com (Paul Sturgess) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:34:00 GMT

I’ve posted recently about our office jukebox and the music we play on it. What I didn’t mention, however, is that the most hotly contested aspect surrounding it is not the music that gets played, but the way in which we can all vote on the tracks. Well if Pete’s going to be dropping Christmas covers in October then we all need to let him know it’s not right!

Recently I came across an article on the Youtube official blog that detailed some interesting insight into the way users vote for videos on their site. In a nutshell Youtube has a 1-5 rating system in which overwhelming majority of videos have a rating of 5 stars, some do get 1 star but there’s not much inbetween. Their conclusion…

“When it comes to ratings it’s pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference.”

We actually started off with a system much like the Youtube rating model, but we quickly found the same pattern emerged. So we dropped it for a simple thumbs up/down and we’ve never looked back.

It’s interesting debate though as rating systems are often contentious issues when building websites but when a site like Youtube, with that many users, publishes those kind of results you have to consider if it’s the definitive word on the matter.

No longer number one in Google but we are number 1 in Google.

paul@kyanmedia.com (Paul Sturgess) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:41:00 GMT

Strange how our SEO blog post that achieved number one in Google for that very search term has now dropped completely off the search results.

Certainly we’re not within the first 6 pages returned. It makes us wonder if the article has somehow been blacklisted for that particular term.

Even more strange is that we are number one for the term “number 1 in Google” – we didn’t even try to optimise for that search term. View screenshot.

Update (12/10/09)

It would appear that our article has been re-instated at the number one position. Amusingly above a new website that has appeared since I first wrote the original article with the domain name ‘numberoneingoogle.co.uk’

The Kyan soundtrack

paul@kyanmedia.com (Paul Sturgess) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:12:00 GMT

Like any office there are a wide variety of musical tastes represented amongst us here at Kyan.

Through our communal jukebox these tastes come together to form a musical backdrop to our time spent working in the office.

A few months back we created a last.fm account, hooked up the Jukebox with the last.fm api and now we are recording a full history of our playlist with some 10,000+ tracks ‘scrobbled’ so far.

Here’s the top 5 artists we’ve been playing the last few months…
1. Lone
2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3. Florence + The Machine
4. Little Dragon
5. Gorillaz

Our current top 5 artists of all time are…
1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
2. Lone
3. Mr Scruff
4. The Beatles
5. Röyksopp

That top 5 artists list changes quite regularly, but it’s an interesting snapshot.

Those artists have certainly been helping us drown out the constant drilling from the building work going on over the road from us on Guildford High Street.