Storm over an island

Massive Butterfly

Penguin Army

Clever cement advertisement

Crazy Soil erosion

Traffic deadlock in downtown hell hole

BIG wave coming

Weird Lego

Summit view

Massive Coconut Crab

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As a designer I can stand up tall and confidently say I have designed a lot of websites that have under performed (not lately of course ). Designs that have failed to fulfill the objective of the brief and work for the client. A successful design isn’t just made up of a few pretty graphics and a jazzy logo, it’s strategically planned to give the user exactly what they want. Within 5 seconds they need to know who you are and what you do. Secondly comes the every so important ‘Call to Action or CTA’.

JARGON BUSTER : CTA : Simply getting the user to do something specific, like signup or leave a comment.

Now the best way to see if your new design works is to do a very simple usability test. Five Second Test is a smart, yet simple online tool that lets you upload a design to be tested. It’s a simple process:

1. Upload a JPEG of your swanky new Badger Traps website.
2. Choose whether you want a Classic or Click Test
3. Sit back and wait for the results.

Classic Test: Testers have 5 seconds to name things they remember about the design they have just seen.
Click Test: Testers have 5 seconds to click on the design then describe what they clicked on.

So far over 17,000 tests have been completed (17,000 x 5 seconds is like…. a whole lot of time). If your new Badger Traps websites gets comments like:

“I have no idea what they sell” or “I think the name of the website was Cat Houses” then the design may need some work.

It’s so easy to use it’s worth a go. Spending 2 minutes to upload a design to ascertain these valuable comments could save you a lot of heart ache down the line.

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Goldie Lookin’ Chain, the legends behind the legendary “Guns don’t kill people rappers do” have created possibly the best/besteva/bestestever Trumps card game set.

Simply click on any thumbnail to see a full size, uncropped enlargement.

Even better, why not download the set and play Trumps with your nan, wickaaaard!

Best Trumps set eva innit!

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2. Too much Tango made me think I was a Ninja but I’m not. I’m just Gary.

While passing a bus stop the poster on the side read “Too much Tango made me think I was a Ninja but I’m not. I’m just Gary.”. I laughed, cos I’m immature you see. British humor never fails to capture it’s audience through advertising. The trick, or so I’ve heard, is to make a statement, ask a question and most importantly communicate that through to your target audience.

Maybe the statement is true, all those E-numbers can make a child go doo-lally!

Too much Tango will make your hair turn ginger. Yes those ones too.

Too much Tango makes your guffs smell like oranges

Too much Tango causes facial mince, gorilla jugs and cabbaging of the knee

Too much Tango causes hair loss and casual sexism

Too much Tango made me shave my nan. Innit.

Too much Tango made me suck a bull’s udder

Too much Tango made a friend of mine not be able to get a lob-on

Too much Tango will make you bite stuff like horses and that

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This is my traveling counterpart Zoe doing the modeling for us at Sunset while looking up at the moon. It was a special moment in a special place. How I wish I was still there…

Now we’re back we have big plans for The Floating Frog so stay tuned and watch this space

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Suggestoftheday.com just loves to mock! We find the strangest questions asked on Google (via the suggest feature) and plaster it here for your amusement. If you find any strange suggests yourself and feel we should be notified of it then please let us know.

There is a Suggest feature so if you stumble across a funny or shocking Google Suggest, let us know.

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IE8 has been out now for a short period and believe is now part of Windows update. The amount of IE8 users should now increase dramatically as users update. To coincide with this launch, Microsoft are tangling a carrot at users of other browsers with the aim of converting them to IE8. $10,000 is a very tempting but requires IE8 to participate. They follow up this tasty carrot by saying:

But you’ll never find it using old Firefox (so get rid of it, or get lost.)

A lawsuit in the happening?

To me this seems like anti-competitive behaviour. Microsoft got fined £680.9m in May 2008 by the European Commission and previously £194m in 2006 for a similar act. This isn’t in the same relms, but it’s still targetting it’s competitor Firefox with a monetory bribe.

The concept

Stripped down, this is a clever viral campaign. It engages both non-IE8 users and the ever growing Twitter community for a period of time. Personally I don’t have the time to digest it, but I’m sure others will embrace it.

Will you be taking part?

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<br clear="all"> is typically used by crap developers who hold no appreciation for web semantics nor accessibility. Ironically these culprits are usually the smart a**** that are the first to point out others mistakes, no matter how minor. They build websites that are both bloated, slow and unstable cross-browser. <br clear="all"> to me acts as the ultimate professional insult to those that have crafted for years, through changing technologies and user demands. <br clear="all"> is like a bird crapping on your freshly washed and polished hatchback, a minor little thing that really p***** me off when I encounter it.

Like the story ‘The Princess and the Pea’, no matter how much preparation and effort you put into something, all it takes is a stupid little pea to annoy you and reduce a potentially relaxing nights sleep to an unexpected search for the very thing that shouldn’t be there in the first place, the <br clear="all">.

Dear Website Developer,

If you need to clear a floated element, please don’t use <br clear="all">. As a last resort use a simple CSS class on the element you want clearing. In your bloated, unstructured CSS file, which more than likely will be inline, create a class:

.clear{
     clear:both;
}

and remember you can add multiple classes to an element, like:

<div class="className className clear">
I'm a clever little developer aren't I
</div>

As Borat would say, this is ‘unbelievable’!!!

<br clear="all">

<div class="className">
Hack hack hack
</div>

<br clear="all">

<div class="className">
Hack hack hack
</div>

So next time to quickly quack in <br clear=”all”>, think, you’re a dirty little bugger! One last thing, if you write <br clear="all">, it should be <br clear="all" />, but I guess you don’t care do you?

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Antivirus for WordPress is a useful plugin that will scan your templates and also can monitor it on a daily basis for malicious injections in the themes.

You can also setup the Antivirus plugin to run a check daily and send you a email if it finds anything wrong in your templates, definitely another good tool to keep your blog safe and secure.

Credit WebLogTools.

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Curiosity cat

Pictured is a miniature sculpture of the US President Barack Obama and his family

A big part in history, but scaled down in size…. Henry VIII and his six wives

The Incredible Hulk rips apart the head of the needle……

Former South African president Nelson Mandela perched in the eye of a needle….

Marilyn Monroe in a classic pose on a diamond…..

The prestigious Oscar statuette…..

Homer strangles Bart in a classic scene from the The Simpsons…..

A Dressage rider sits elegantly on top of a needle……

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No….. it’s Superman! A very small Superman that is…..

A detailed Statue of Liberty……

Dwarfed… Snow White and her Seven Dwarfs

The Last Supper…..

Dorothy and her friends on the yellow brick road in a scene from The Wizard of Oz..

Born in 1957 in Birmingham, Willard Wigan began his artistic life at a tender age. Suffering from dyslexia and learning difficulties, he struggled at school, finding solace in creating art of such minute proportions that it virtually could not be seen with the naked eye.

“It began when I was five years old,” says Willard. “I started making houses for ants because I thought they needed somewhere to live. Then I made them shoes and hats. It was a fantasy world I escaped to where my dyslexia didn’t hold me back and my teachers couldn’t criticise me. That’s how my career as a micro-sculptor began.”

Willard’s micro-sculptures have become so minute that they are only visible through a microscope. Each piece commonly sits within the eye of a needle, or on a pin head.

The personal sacrifice involved in creating such wondrous, yet scarcely believable, pieces is inconceivable to most. Willard enters a meditative state in which his heartbeat is slowed, allowing him to reduce hand tremors and sculpt between pulse beats. Even the reverberation caused by traffic outside can affect Willard’s work. He often works through the night when there is minimal disruption.

Willard’s work is described as “the eighth wonder of the world”. One of the specifically commissioned works includes the replica of the iconic Lloyds of London Building. This piece was later auctioned by Eric Knowles of Bonhams. Willard was subsequently honoured with receiving an MBE from HRH Prince Charles for his services to art.

Unsurprisingly, Willard’s life is now attracting significant attention from the literary and film industries alike, each eager to secure his life story.

You can see Willard Wigan’s work at 40a Museum Street, Bloomsbury, London, WC1A 1LU

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Highlights

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

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Estimates as to the number of Polish people in the UK range from half a million to over a million. Mass immigration from Central and Eastern Europe has led to a rush for the ‘Polish Pound’, with everyone from multinational banks to independent grocers getting in on the act. One of the great things about Hitwise is that we can use Internet data to illustrate changes such as these. As you can see from the chart below, UK Internet traffic to a Hitwise custom category consisting of the top 100 Polish language and community websites increased nine-fold between January 2006 and January 2008.

This year the wind has seemingly changed direction:

While statistics from the Home Office indicate that the number of Eastern European migrants has fallen since the economic downturn started to bite, it is less clear whether there has been a net reduction on the number of Polish and other ‘new Europe’ citizens living in the UK. Maybe Hitwise stats might provide some evidence: if Polish Internet usage in the UK increased during the period of net immigration, surely the opposite trend would imply net migration? Well, looking at the chart below, it’s certainly the case that Polish Internet usage is declining in the UK for the first time.

Top 10 Polish websites in the UK, ranked by market share of Internet visits to the Polish sites custom category during April 2009

1. Nasza Klasa (22.8%)
2. Google Poland (15.7%)
3. Onet.eu (14.3%)
4. Wirtualna Polska (9.8%)
5. Interia.pl (4.6%)
6. poczta.wp.pl (4.5%)
7. www.o2.pl (3.2%)
8. Polish Wikipedia (1.8%)
9. Peb (1.4%)
10. Wizz Air (1.3%)

Nasza Klasa, as highlighted in our recent post Top 20 Websites and Search Engines in the UK, in the 9th most popular Social Media website in the UK, above websites like Gumtree.com with a respectable 0.63% of the overall traffic.

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New Firebox website

Old Firebox website

Thoughts?

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Buy online

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Final thought, if I get laser eye treatment will I lose my creativity?

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A simple explanation of a retweet

Simply put, and not to go off the point too much, a retweet or RT is simply an action from a twitter user where they repeat another users Tweet with the initials RT before it. An example of this is shown in the image below where I RT another users tweet.

Typically people RT another users tweets because they give it value and they want to share it with their followers. These RT’s can be something funny or informative but most of the time they contain links, links to other websites. This RT culture has really started to catch on in the blogosphere where bloggers and content writers have started to use this as a powerful tool to drive traffic to their websites. If a tweet with a link in it to their website is picked up and retweeted by a few people, and a few of their followers retweet it, you can before you know it have hundreds of users spreading your link around twitter which could in turn drive major traffic to your website. This jewel however hasn’t passed the spammers eyes!

Twitter RT Spam

A recent example of Twitter spammers in action was when the ever popular social media guide website Mashable posted a tweet to one of their recent posts. I found the post when I spotted a Twitter Trend called ‘Twollars’ at the bottom of the list.

When clicked upon I noticed all the RT’s were referring to a Mashable post on Twollars (which turns out to be like Twitter currency… go figure :s ). Nothing strange here, surely it’s just a great post alot of people want to share? Maybe, but why are all the RT’s from users with identical Avatars and similar usernames? See below…

Ignoring the who’s and the why’s, this in our eyes is an example of Twitter Spam, bogus twitter accounts setup in there drones to clutter Twitter with Spam. These accounts will probably attempt to gain trust with Twitter by retweeting well trusted websites (like Mashable) then when the time is right, launch a retweet attack for one of their websites. This could also be, in this particular case, an SEO company positioning themselves to serve their paying clients to through traffic their way? It’s all just opinion but their is logic.

Twitter vs Digg

The rapid growth Twitters popularity has seen it shoot up the rankings and take a healthy bite of the social media pie. One popular social media website it has overtaken is Digg. As of January this year, Hitwise reported Twitters weekly share of visits overtook that of Diggs.

Now because of Twitters growing audience, Digg has tweaked an important feature on their website to lure over Twitter users.

Digg, and a recent change

Digg has been updated with several new features and modifications. One that has caught my eye is the update to the ’share’ feature. Before Digg users could share a story with their Digg friends, now however you can’t (at least not like before), instead you can either post to Facebook, post to Twitter or share by email, shown below…

Diggs problems of old

In summary, the current issue with Digg is that it’s controlled by a group of powerusers with a close knit group of friends that, at a drop of a hat, vote up that users story, gets it ranking highly on the website and typically getting it top of the results. These powerusers partly rely on the old share feature to quickly and easily share the article with their Digg friends. Now that this has been removed, could we start to see their dominance fade? If they can’t spam/control Digg then they’re going to look at other channels to do this. Digg are pointing them in Twitter and Facebook direction.

SPAM SPAM SPAM

My point here is simple, could a simple little change to Digg generate more spam on Twitter and Facebook. If Digg powerusers spammed Twitter like we’ve illustrated above would Digg become an asset to bloggers again? Is Digg’s intention to push their dominant users in Twitter and Facebooks direction?

It’s seems to us like there is a lot of thought and strategy that’s been put behind such a seemingly little tweak to a feature. Our concern is that by making Digg a place viable for bloggers to go again, Twitter and Facebook could be easy targets for spammers and these so called powerusers.

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Top 20 Websites

The following report shows websites for the industry ‘All Categories’, ranked by Visits for the week ending 23/05/2009.

Top Search Engines - Volume

The following report shows search engines for the industry ‘All Categories’, ranked by Volume of Searches for the 4 weeks ending 23/05/2009.

Top Search Engines - Visits

The following report shows websites for the industry ‘Computers and Internet - Search Engines’, ranked by Visits for the week ending 23/05/2009.

Top Social Networking Websites

The following report shows websites for the industry ‘Computers and Internet - Social Networking and Forums’, ranked by Visits for the week ending 23/05/2009.

Top Entertainment Websites

The following report shows websites for the industry ‘Entertainment’, ranked by Visits for the week ending 23/05/2009.

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The striking image was captured by a 16-year-old schoolgirl on a sunny afternoon as she tested out a new camera.

Jessica Wild was walking home with her school friends last Thursday when she was spotted the likeness in the skies above Droitwich around 5pm.

Hovering for little more than a minute before the union of the British isles broke up, she only had time to take a couple of shots.

She said: ‘I had to do a double take when I saw it, I thought that looks amazing.

‘It was just like a little map of Britain in the sky, with England, Scotland, Wales and even a bit at the side which looked like Ireland.

‘I couldn’t believe it and my friends really love the picture, I guess you could say I was on cloud nine when I got it.

‘My mum and dad had just bought me a new camera and I thought this was a great way to try it out because it’s quite hard to take pictures of the sky because of all the light.’

The budding photographer from Worcester, who is currently studying for her GCSEs at Droitwich Spa High School, Droitwich, always keeps her camera close by after being given the £500 present by her parents Julia, 49, and Paul, 51.

Her first shots have already impressed her family.

Her mother Julia, 49, said: ‘When I saw the photo I couldn’t believe it, I think it looks uncanny, it’s that good.

‘We are really proud of Jessica and her photography and we really think she has a great talent for it.’

Her father Paul, 51, who runs an engineering firm in Worcester, added: ‘With all the bad news about the recession at the moment in Britain perhaps this a sign something up high is still thinking about us all.’

News from www.dailymail.co.uk

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Included in the post are summaries of the following typographical terms:

• Typeface or font?
• Typeface classifications
• Anatomy
• Glyphs
• Kerning and Tracking
• Alignment
• Measure
• Leading
• Ligatures
• Hyphenation
• Hyphens, En-dashes and Em-dashes
• Grids
• Rag
• Widows and Orphans

The article has a few illustrations that clearly explain the jargon used to explain certain typographical elements, such as the anatomy of type shown below.

Full credit and copyright of images to PSDTuts, read full article here: Read more

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