Future of Web Design London 2012 : Day 2 thoughts and summary

Following on from my post about day one of FOWD, i’ve put together this quick post which hopefully summarises my thoughts from day two and the event as a whole.

Once again, there were two tracks of seminars on the day, all of which were filmed so none of the attendees should miss out when they are made available in the next few weeks. Here’s the path I took:

 - You are a Channel (The Standardistas)
- A Responsive Process (Steve Fisher)
- Code Literacy for Designers (Jonathan Berger)
- Designing for Flexible Web (Laura Kalbag)
- The Future of Beautiful iOS Design (Sarah Parmenter)
- HTML5 and Human Interaction (Martin Beeby)
- Failing and Doing it Well (Mark Boulton)

The keynote of the day being the Standardista’s ‘You are a Channel’ which focussed on the way we as Designers deal with the research and development stage of design, with some interesting tips on how we absorb information and digest it.… Read more

Cookies – What you should be doing.

You may have seen a new popout button on the Athernet website. This is to help us to comply with the new law on Cookies which being enforced from the end of May 2012 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Although the law came into force on 26th May 2011, the ICO announced that it was allowing a 12 month grace period before enforcing it. The strict enforcement would mean that websites would need “informed consent” before placing any cookies on a user’s machine or mobile device.… Read more

Future of Web Design London 2012 : Day 1 thoughts

This year Athernet decided to attend the well renowned Future of Web Design (#FOWD) London conference. It’s  a two day event hosted by the magnificent Carsonified where the world’s best web designers, developers and project managers congregate to listen to inspirational seminars and debates where we can all share our thoughts and experiences of, well, the future of web design.

I’ve followed previous FOWD events with great interest so naturally I was delighted to be attending this year. I’ll likely be posting more detailed thoughts on the individual seminars so in this post i’ll give a quick run-down of my findings from day 1.… Read more

‘It all comes down to the brand’

Yesterday, Ajay and I attended the ‘Men are from Mars’ business lunch hosted by the MPA. The keynote of the event being a debate and Q&A session from the following well respected publication editors:

Dylan Jones – editor of British GQ
Charlie Turner – editor of Top Gear
Dominic Smith – editor of Nuts magazine
Phil Hilton – editor of Shortlist magazine

It was a very inspiring session, with a great insight into the world of magazine editors with some very funny tales to boot – including an anecdote about a shoot with Daniel Radcliffe portraying him in a different light to his well-known wizard persona was pulled following a focus group in which the audience likened him to Jedward.… Read more

BBC Connected Studio

Last Friday, we were lucky enough to be invited along to the first in a series of new BBC initiatives for collaborative work – Connected Studio, held at their new studios at MediaCity UK, Salford Quays.

Daniel and I were, slightly embarrassingly, first to turn up (contrary to our plan of turning up fashionably late). We were greeted by John, a member of the Connected Studio team who led us up to the fifth floor where the studio was to be held, offered us our introductory packs and the much-coveted meal vouchers.… Read more

Back to the future for search engine optimisation

At a recent conference the sentiment was that the future of digital marketing seems to be based on the past. Gone are the days when search engine optimisation (SEO) was more like a dark art. These days most digital marketing professionals are talking about many of the methods that have been used in public relations for many years.

Inbound links to websites are still important but the way these are obtained is now under more scrutiny from the search engines. Following Google’s Panda update in 2011 low quality links are now being penalised so digital marketing professionals are looking to higher quality sources to promote their sites.… Read more

A night to remember

Although we at Athernet are all guilty of working incredibly hard on a daily basis to continually satisfy our clients, every so often we like to shut down our PCs (and Macs) and head into town for a good knees up. We like to see it as an opportunity to brainstorm new ideas and catch up on the progression of some of our projects, but those are just thinly veiled excuses to go out and have a fantastic meal, a few drinks and a laugh at each other as we try to catch little potato discs thrown at us by the chefs.… Read more

Reflections from ionSearch 2012

Last week myself and Ajay took the short journey across the Pennines to go to the ionSearch conference in Leeds for the day.

I always enjoy going to conferences, they provide valuable time out of the office to reflect, see what the rest of the industry is doing and talk about the latest trends.  It was good to chew the fat with other search engine experts, including some of the speakers from USA and elsewhere in Europe.

There was lots of talk and reflection on Google’s continuing algorithm changes around filtering out websites out of the search results.… Read more

Award for Athernet Development

A website developed by Athernet has won a prestigious Travel Promotion/Innovation award beating off competition from Virgin Holidays and Co-operative travel amongst others. The site, iCruiseConcierge.com was developed for Cruise118, part of one of the world’s largest holiday groups, World Travel Holdings.

The concept was the brainchild of Darryl Victory who sadly passed away in October 2011 at the age of just 39. His widow, Clair Victory and his sister Melanie Hancock collected the award at a travel industry ceremony at the Lancaster Hotel in London.… Read more

Legal requirements for your website

There are a number of legal requirements surrounding websites. Although it varies according to your business sector and whether you sell online you should consider the following for an ecommerce site:

When someone buys goods on your site you should not take an order. It should be an offer to purchase which will be followed by an order confirmation from you. This may not be needed if you are confident about your stock control and processing system.

Make sure your customers accept your terms and conditions.… Read more