The A-Z of Design Principles (B)
Bugs “Fix the small bugs. As far as user experience is concerned, the little things matter.” – Microsoft […]
Martin Dower
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Posts by Martin Dower
The PC is 30 years old
And that makes me feel old. I worked on the very first IBM PCs back in 1983, most folks at the time said they’d never catch on – all serious computing would be done on Mainframes or Mini-computers. This also means that I’m celebrating THIRTY YEARS in the computer industry this year. Where’s my gold […]
Welcome to March
Week 10 is now upon us as the year continues to motor along at a fair ol’ lick. Spring is just round the corner and the grim months of snow and ice are (hopefully) now behind us. February was kind to client support with no major problems or outages and a seamless upgrade to the […]
The A-Z of Design Principles (A)
Attention “Manage to focus users’ attention. Focusing users’ attention to specific areas of the site with a moderate use of visual elements can help your visitors to get from point A to point B without thinking of how it actually is supposed to be done. The less question marks visitors have, the better sense of […]
More mobile devices on Earth than people
This requires you to sit down and reflect. By the end of 2013, there will be more mobile devices on Earth than people. To put this into context; last year’s mobile data traffic was nearly twelve times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000 according to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data […]
Cutting the office strings, the first 60 days
Connected have been driving to a location-independent model over the last few years, the journey has had it’s ups and downs but we finally arrived there at the end of 2012. I thought I’d share some of things I’ve learned over the last 2 months, some of the things I’ve read and some of the […]
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Go mobile in quicker than 30 days
Going mobile is now easier than ever. This is good news for marketing departments and designers but sometimes we find ourselves just too busy. Recognise the feeling? Hire Connected and we’ll move you to mobile, everything from design, deploy, project management and testing. Contact us to get started. If this article is too short then […]
Integration + Simplification = Paradise
I recently picked up Evernote again after an extended absence and a came to reflect why that had happened. I was an early adopter of the cloud-based productivity tool and used it extensively across business and home life, it became very much a PA for me during 2010 and 2011 but I seemed to have […]
[infographic] The mobile connected consumer
By the end of last year smartphone penetration in the UK passed 50% and more than half the owners are accessing the web every day from their device, mobile has become deeply embedded in our daily lives. Whilst the growth of mobile might have shock and awed many marketing folks, consumers are engaging in a […]
Goodbye crummy EU cookie law
Introduced formally less than a year ago, the much hated EU cookie law has quietly slinked off into the night. Good riddance, it was ill-conceived, poorly communicated to consumers and another example of the EU messing with something it knows little about. Goodbye and good riddance Even the ICO have changed how they address cookies […]
The challenges of going “mobile first”
y far the most frequent question I’ve been asked about digital strategy over the last year is “how do we go mobile”. With predictions that mobile devices will outnumber PC and laptops during 2013 it’s a no-brainer really so why are so many web-sites still not optimised for mobile? Mobile is not, despite what people […]
Google focusses on mobile advertising
I’m not suggesting they have been avoiding mobile device but since their announcement in 2010 to be Mobile-First they have lagged behind in a few areas, most notably advertising. Adwords contributes nearly £30bn to the Google coffers so it was about time they properly dealt with the quickly-emerging mobile advertising space – unlike Facebook who are […]
Go mobile first, before it’s too late
obile is already big and it’s only going to grow in 2013. Every marketer knows that mobile is important but if your site still isn’t optimised for mobile or if there isn’t an ultra-short timeline to do so you may have missed the bus. It’s that serious. Connected have been building mobile-first since 2011, so […]
NoCode, the future of digital deployment
n the last 2 years there has been a quiet revolution brewing, one that is going to touch most of our lives. We’ve coined the term NoCode to try and encapsulate what this really means; the end of traditional programmers. The digital world brought programmers and developers out of the dark and thrust them centre-stage […]
Better web sign-up forms, simply [infographic]
ll of us, at some time, have been turned off by a website experience that is just too demanding of information and this occurs no more frequently than during the grim sign-up process. As a digital blokey I have sat in client meetings when they explain, at huge length, that the web sign-up form “simply must have […]
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Private social networks, a growing trend
xplosive growth of social networks over the last 5 years has changed the landscape of Internet usage; for a large percentage of 18-24 yr olds Facebook is the Internet and this presents huge problems for brands as they try to grapple with the ever shifting monster that is the Facebook revenue machine. The few have […]
January Client Support Summary
January was our first full month recording all client services touches and tracking progress (we use Zendesk) and it’s interesting to summarise the month. We’re still getting to grips with the system but anecdotally the clients’ perception of the level of support has gone up, we had 450 client touches. We’ve had only 3 major […]
Meet HAL, our first Hackathon
We’re open to new ideas and approaches and a client project around the social and community space has got us all excited about what we can offer. A whole fountain of ideas have exploded and rather than create a standard scope of works we’re trying something new and having a Hackathon on Wednesday to blast […]
The tale of the big bad media agency
nce upon a time there existed a media agency who really didn’t understand the digital space or care about their clients. They were so greedy they only cared about billings and making profits from their clients. Some said they had no respect for these hardworking clients and called them names like “dumb” and “gullible” behind […]
A snow day, New York stylee
by Martin Dower Our location-independent working model is a great solution when the weather turns inclement as we’re geared-up to continue working. Except, it’s quiet nice every now and again to declare a snow day and enjoy being out in the powder – it happens rarely enough and it’s a great opportunity to pretend we’re […]
