10 tips for businesses starting out with Twitter

Posted by Ken Davis - under Writing 3 Comments

There’s been a lot of buzz about Twitter recently in the media, so its natural to want to know what all the fuss is about, and learn more about how Twitter might benefit you, both personally and in business.

I thought it might be a good idea, to put together a quick beginners guide to Twitter for our clients, and a list of my top 10 tips for using Twitter in business, to help you understand the basics of Twitter, and how you can use Twitter to help your business.

So what is Twitter?

Twitter is a social communication network that asks the question: “What are you doing now?” Users can answer via the Twitter website, sms, mobile phone application or a desktop application. Twitter updates (commonly referred to as ‘tweets’) have to be under 140 characters in length.

Its natural to think that you couldn’t possibly say anything meaningful in 140 characters, but the quality of communication is actually quite surprising, once you become familiar with using Twitter. Unlike writing a blog, Twitter is a great place to tell the world what you’re thinking before you’ve had a chance to even think about it.
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Tags: brand management, client, copy writing, online marketing, reputation management, Social Media, Social Networking, tips, Twitter

Agile Design - Quickly moving from Photoshop to CSS

Posted by Ken Davis - under Design 1 Comment

I recently read a post over at 37 signals about why the designers there skip Photoshop in the design process and I found myself agreeing with most of the conversation. There are some good reasons for designing this way, along with some good counterpoints.

The Photoshop mockup just isn’t a website.

A while back I used to always fully develop a design in Photoshop, with all the polish and finesse that could possibly fit into a flat two dimensional image and present the design to the client for approval.

This worked reasonably well when the only real interaction was the click of a hyperlink or perhaps a drop down menu. You could explain the functionality, describe the interaction and hope the client had the imagination to perceive the concept clearly enough to approve it.

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Tags: Design, Photoshop, SEO, tips

Managing your personal online reputation

Posted by James Beattie - under Writing 1 Comment

We recently recommended to a client that they set up a page on their website promoting themselves (and optimised for their name) so that people searching for them in Google would get this page as (hopefully) the first result.

The client expressed some concerns about putting themselves out on the web as a personal brand, and we thought some of the issues that were brought up were worth a mention here.

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Tags: brand management, online marketing, reputation management, search engines, tips

Writing copy for your new website

Posted by Ken Davis - under Writing 1 Comment

So, you’ve finally nailed down the design, production is underway, your new website is coming together just the way you planned.

And now you start thinking about the copy?

As web designers, we often find ourselves giving the same advice to our clients, so here is a list of our top tips for writing copy for the web. (more…)

Tags: copy writing, SEO, tips

Cloud computing in the modern office

Posted by James Beattie - under Jimmyweb 1 Comment

Someone recently said that cloud computing is like teenage sex - talked about more than actually done. And usually done badly.

Having recently set up our office in Sydney, we decided to do more than just talk about it (cloud computing that is). As a startup company, we need technology which is cost effective and requires very little ongoing maintenance.

In this vein, we implemented the following technologies for our office:

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Tags: cloud computing, gmail, skype, subversion, tips