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We are pleased to announce the launch of a new site produced to Mars, the FLAVIA Distributor Consumer site. The Energy Cell team have worked closely with the Mars Drinks to create a new site to support the marketing efforts of a network of hundreds of distribution partners servicing thousands of customers across the USA.
Our design and technical teams worked with FLAVIA’s US marketing department on the design, build and implementation of content management tools. Needless to say, the site is built encompassing the latest web technologies and passes all WC3 Strict XHTML and accessibilty guidlines with flying colours.
Visit the site now and take a look for yourself, please let us know what you think…
Microsoft has announced that it intends on supporting it’s ageing IE6 browser till 2014, 4 years later than it’s original deadline!
I’m absolutely over the moon about this and I intend to organise a celebration, and invite all my web professional peers, where we can dance through the streets and rejoice! ;-).
Obviously…I won’t be doing this. What I will be doing is spending hours of my time adjusting and tweaking my clean, semantic XHMTL code, inserting hacks and filters to accommodate this prehistoric browser.
Over time I have conditioned myself in constructing my sites in a way that I tend not to need any hacks and filters for my sites to work in IE6. I’ve learnt what not to do and which is the best way to achieve, visually, what I want. However as web technology continues to progress and new functionality becomes available such as jQuery and CSS3 techniques, this is where my time is lost trying to crowbar these features in to an IE6 environment.
I understand that IE6 is core to some large businesses and corporations and the upgrade to a more recent browser would be a large operation. But it seems Microsoft aren’t doing enough to encourage users to upgrade to at least IE7 and possibly IE8. The recent announcement reinforces my feelings.
I’ve being using FireFox for my primary browser since V1, and it seems, judging by the browsers increasing market share currently at 22%, many more people are doing the same.
Let’s all contribute to retiring this browser and utilise our power of choice. Try out these alternative browsers…you’ll never go back.
I have just discovered one of the best websites I have seen so far in my long search to make life just a little easier – www.picnik.com is a great site that allows you to edit, resize, crop, rotate, flip and just about anything else you would like to do to your images for FREE!
Upload photo’s from your own files or from various other resources such Facebook, Flickr and MySpace. All the basic tools are free, although you can upgrade to Premium for just $4.95 per month. The basic freebie package is full of loads of great stuff though and will be perfect for most people wanting to re-size images for work or to improve family holiday snaps. For photos there’s an auto fix function, red eye fix, exposure correction tool, colour adjust and many more extensions of these functions to help you get your photos just right.
The best thing about it is most of the tools are one click wonders, simplicity in itself – this means even the most novice photo editor can achieve great results without hassle or cost. Oh and the other best thing is once you have ‘fixed’ your photo or cropped your image – you can email it to your friends, family and work colleagues ready for them to use, just use the ‘Save & Share’ function.
This really is a great site and i’m sure if you use it once you will definately be back for more picniks!
see www.picnik.com
Over the last few months we have added MailChimp to our carefully chosen list of Email Marketing broadcast tools we use. The solution is great for our smaller retail customers, yet we have found it surprising useful for some of our larger clients. It has an interface that is incredibly easy to use with the options for integrating existing mailing lists is also being a breeze.
All this adds up to a great tool for our online marketing team to help add more value to client projects quickly and efficiently – ultimately driving down the overall cost of email marketing campaigns.
You can create your mailing lists by importing email addresses and names and then add as much detail as you wish, town, jobs (all the essentials and as much as you need) to give you extra segmential data to analyse in the impressive reporting tools. You can aslo import your contacts from HighRise
The website is well designed, easy to use and contains loads of resources to guide you through setting up your first campaign. You can choose from pre-tested email templates but we prefer to insert our own html which was also very easy to implement. For any email marketing beginners out there – there is also a handy tick box which will convert any rogue CSS to inline styles, we all know how email clients love inline styles!
The feature I liked most was the ability to view how your email would look in all the major email clients. We all know how difficult it is to get your mail looking how you want.
We’ve found MailChimp ticks most of our boxes and it is reasonably priced. Try it…it’s top banana!