My good friend Rob Hope created a really interesting niche CSS gallery submission site called One Page Love which only lists CSS design based single page websites. It was featured on Six Revisions this week, and is a great place to get landing page inspiration from.
Segmenting Data for E-mail Targeting - the latest Email Marketing Manual featured an interview where I discuss the successul results I’ve experienced lately using advanced segmention in email campaigns in 2008.
Have a read. Enjoy.
I’ve been doing a substantial amount of work on the St Christopher’s Paris Hostel landing page today. The Paris search market is slightly different than normal as it’s filled by decade old site networks and really aggressive affiliate resellers due to the undersupply of Paris beds at any given time. So providing a new bed supply brings in high numbers of unsolicited backlinks making Paris a very profitable city to set up in for link juice.
What this also means is that St Christopher’s Paris has an inflated traffic-to-bed ratio giving me the perfect opportunity to focus on the sales cycle. Hopefully I’ll be able to trawl right down the funnel and find some improvement that I can take forward to other cities soon.
Hello! So it’s time to update this portfolio to 2008 standards. After working for nearly 2 years inhouse I’ve become complacent with the development of my own brand and portfolio.
So, here’s the plan kick starting Brand Empire. Firstly I’m going to relook at some of the CSS on the site and get rid of some of the WP bugs that are annoying me. Then I’m going to put up all the design and web work I’ve done over the past two years. Finally, I’m going to add two new sections to cover some of the marketing, strategy and search successes I’ve experienced since coming to London.
I look forward to getting back to building the Empire. Thanks for reading, and, get ready.
A huge thank you to CSS Mania, CSS Bloom, 8CSS, CSS Galleries, Daily Slurp, NewsHutch, Most Inspired and NetVibes for hooking up Brand Empire on various galleries. So radical to be acknowledged like that and looking forward to getting more online as soon as possible.
Keep a lookout for the craziest Christmas campaign for Interpub. I’m sure it will blow a few fuses.
I know. I know. I know. Robot.txt is not much of a hassle to create as it’s really just two or three lines of code placed in a .txt file.
Most web administrators want to allows robots to crawl their site in its entirety so the .txt file would like mine.
1 CommentUser-agent: * Disallow: Download my robots.txt text file here if you want Google to search through your
entire site – you have nothing to hide from the internet community and are
confident in your site’s security measures (Note: if you use cgi for mission
critical websites I’d be safe and hide my cgi directory from hackers – just to
be safe).
For others that may want to keep a few of their files and directories from the prying eyes of search engines free help is at hand from Mcanerin.
Don’t be put off by the company’s poor logo, their Robot Control Code Generation Tool is a great little way of sorting out complicated robots.txt documents on the fly. Have a look through and bookmark it if it is helpful.
Sick of testing your site on every platform you can find? Tired of looking for old units to see if your css will degrade well? Borrowing your girlfriend’s mac to see if safari eats your newest design alive?
Well no more thanks to BrowserShots.org who are bringing a really great service to the web design community.
Now by submitting your URL, BrowserShots takes screenshots of your site as it appears in every platform imaginable. And it’s all or free.
Thanks BrowserShots.
I found a small treasure chest. Well, not really. But I came across three generations of the same website, which gives a seriously interesting case study of how things have changed in web design and basic communication online. What are the main differences between how the same content has been represented on the screen?
Interesting question.
I was commissioned to do a CSS redesign for The Project Office, which is a global management consultancy company. And as I was uploading the new website I found all the older revisions of the site since 1999. As I browsed over the crazy framesets, browser compatibility hacks, weird javascript-like browser plugins and all the rest it dawned on me that there have been some serious improvements in the way we code.
So this is my redesign. It’s all CSS tableless design, validating XHTML and section 408 complaint. Sure the design process is slowed down by this kind of development, but it does legally comply with the UK public laws and should work well in the accompanying SEO campaign. Basically it uses the best arsenal I have to make a working website that will get the results for client that they are looking for.
The Project Office Now
(0 Errors)
Here’s a screenshot (2006), launch the site here.
If you are reading this, it probably means one of two things. One, you are one of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances that knew that I had been developing my portfolio for what seemed like forever. Two, you are here by fate.
Whatever the case may be, welcome to my portfolio slash blog slash homepage for the time being. It’s all very smartly coded ( you know, the whole CSS XHTML WC3 tip ) and essentially consists of one seriously seriously dissected and recompiled Wordpress 2.0.2. A little PHP here and a little there and ‘hey presto’, after 3 or 4 months I’m finally making my way into the internet and blogosphere.
Brand Empire? Well, it was between Brand Empire and Communication Empire as they were the only two .coms left on the entire planet. I’m certainly no empire yet, but a little patience never hurt anyone.
This site is where I’m putting up all my work from 2006 to document my journey through London and out the other side. It’s my calling card and bragging point and most probably the only way I’ll ever get a permanent design post in the UK. Why? Saffa. That’s Why.
So what can you do for me? Well, I’d be really appreciative if you could spread the word about Brand Empire and me in general – if you could post me all over town (in town I mean the internet), like a crazy sticker campaign, I’d be really amped.
Also, come back everyday and have a look at what I’m thinking, analysing and doing with my life. I can assure you that things will be pretty interesting around here.
So for the first time - thanks for reading.
Duncan
New Web Project Launch:
We over at Interpub just launched Famous Hostels on the Mysource Matrix platform.