Those of you following me on twitter know I tend to spend a bit of time every couple of days in finding new extensions for FireFox (and sometimes Thunderbird) which are making my life as an Information Architect, Web Designer or Project Development Manager easier. These extensions may be some all of us have been using for ages but never really realised we had them installed, or some we really wanted to see or use for some time, but never really spent the time researching whether these extensions are actually available. This is the list of February…
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Alexander Rehm
Alexander Rehm is a web designer, information architect and usability & accessibility auditor. He's currently working as a Director of Live Operations and has extensive experience of developing large-scale architecture and frameworks for online services, catering for millions of users concurrently. In his blog, Alex shares his musings on all things internet, usability, accessibility and gaming.
RisingStarGames.com is live!
The new website of Rising Star Games, the Japanese publisher with European roots, has just been put live.
The website features a lot of new content, from news, game profiles and blogs over to forums, user profiles, members exclusive content and more! Plus, the sushi bar concept is working really nicely and displays latest information from the blog, the forum, news and upcoming releases
The website was designed and developed by Melon Design & Marketing on their in-house CMS Engine.
Visit RisingStarGames.com
Happy days!!! 😀
Top tips for working with developers
Working in a busy office is one of the best parts of being a designer or information architect – you can bounce off ideas, discuss projects with others and get their input, and you can generally have a good laugh.
That is until the time comes where a new project is being started or requirements are being updated. Usually then some sort of “rivalry” will ensue, and in 90% of the cases it will be between a designer or information architect and a developer or development coordinator. Scope was not fully explained or defined, the design is too complicated to build, or data is not coming from the sources it was meant to.
In those times frustration can quickly result in stress and lack of commitment to a project. Let’s see what we would do to remedy that…
Google Earth goes for a dive – Google Ocean has been released
Google Earth’s latest update – Google Ocean – adds a plethora of underwater maps for users to take a dive beneath the water surface and explore the 3D terrain (no more 2D relief maps!) of the world’s sea floors, completely with underwater elevations. Users will be able to explore underwater volcanoes and shipwrecks, and even video footage from the most famous diving spots across the world.
And to make sure you have plenty to look at Google added 20 content layers containing information from the world’s leading underwater researchers, ocean explorers and scientists.
The virtual earth is coming more and more alive…and new layers for travel websites are already in development!
Selling SEO effectively
Today I closed my 11th SEO proposal. This may not sound very impressive (and it isn’t a high profile client either), but it does to me, not only because it adds a few more numbers for the account handlers, but because it means that my sales strategy works (11 out of 11 closed) and that the data I am showing and preparing is useful.
One of my followers on twitter asked me what my trick is, so I thought I’d write down what is helping me close a sale, in the hopes it might prove useful for some of you.
WhatwasIthinking.co.uk – relaunched!
Whatwasithinking.co.uk has been around for almost a year, and in time for its first birthday I thought I’d take the opportunity and rethink what I actually want to do with it. So I chose to make two drastic changes:
- Add SEO as a category – because I am now working a lot more with SEO consultants and do a bit of SEO for clients myself (which is working out really well already) this just needed to happen sooner or later
- Rethink the design – the previous theme I based on a theme by C.Frazier worked well, but it turned out to be very limiting, especially with WordPress 2.7 having added a lot more commenting functions and a very functional interface
So in the end I chose to go for a theme by Vladimir Prelovac. The theme is very modern, has a wonderful layout and after a bit of hacking it tracks pingbacks and tweetbacks successfully. If you want to know more about the theme or Vladimir then please click here (and if you want to follow him, click here).
Please let me know what you think about the theme 🙂
Firefox extensions for usability, accessibility and SEO experts
My day to day work consists of a lot of time spending on the internet, looking at web presences of current clients, prospective clients and their (and our) competition. My tool of the trade being FireFox 3 (especially considering that IE seems to have a little problem). I am using a number of addons which really help my work-flow in the fields of usability, accessibility, SEO and occasionally information architecture.
I was asked by a couple of fellow twitter users to divulge my plugin list, and since I keep track of them myself at times I thought this post would come in handy for everyone.