Rather than just offering to tweet for people or set up a Facebook account, we’re going a bit deeper. We’re giving clients a choice of exactly how much they want us to do and then providing the training for them to do the rest – or even all of it.

What makes it more interesting is that there are funding packages available to allow clients to go down the social media marketing route. We can advise on how to get hold of this cash.

As well as the use of social media, we’ll look at overall strategies, specific campaigns and how it can fit in with your existing marketing efforts. We can also bring in search engine optimisation and emal marketing along the way.

We’ll keep you up to date here and on the Socialite page.

Junction Arts is recognised for high quality rurally-based participatory arts work that changes peoples lives, builds confidence and skills, increases communication and supports community and personal empowerment. The Derbyshire-based organisation’s vision is to increase and extend access to high quality arts through inspirational, innovative participatory arts programmes and projects via partnership and collaboration within rural areas of the East Midlands.

In a time where arts funding is a constant victim of cuts, Junction Arts needed to publicise the success and importance of their work and were finding their existing website was neither engaging its visitors or conforming to the styles defined in their recent rebranding excersise.

10th Planet were called in to provide a complete visual overhaul and to add several new levels of functionality and interactivity for the site’s visitors and Junction Arts themselves. These included:

• Full content management and control for Junction Arts
• Blog and news updates
• Project viewer
• Past projects archive
• Photo gallery
• Video area and YouTube integration
• Social media integration
• Viewer contributions and comments

We also consolidated the wide array of conflicting domain names, email addresses and hosting packages to all operate under a single name:

www.junctionarts.org

We’ve just launched the brand new Eazitools website.

A complete rebuild of our original design from three years ago, the site now uses a totally custom WordPress theme with an integrated ecommerce system to provide a shop, blogs, news, product photo galleries and social media integration.

eazitools.com

School for Startups is the brainchild of former Dragon’s Den dragon, serial entrepreneur and angel investor Doug Richard. It is the UK’s leading provider of business training for entrepreneurs, providing accelerated business training to help entrepreneurs launch more successful startups and run more successful businesses.

Their “Made in 48 Hours” bootcamps are being held around the country and aim to get businesses onto the web with convincing ecommerce and online identities…all from two days of intensive seminars and workshops.

10th Planet have been selected to provide post-event consulting support to the bootcamp attendees and to help turn their ideas and seedling projects created over the two days into reality.

Made in 48 Hours on the School for Startups website

Well done to us.

Sheffield: Shortlisted for UK City of Culture 2013

Sheffield, Derry, Birmingham and Norwich have made the shortlist to become the very first UK City of Culture in 2013. Sheffield is therefore on its way to achieving its ambition to be the most creative city in the UK by 2020.

Sheffield’s bid sets out to curate an amazing programme of events and activity in 2013 which will engage, not just those already involved with arts and culture but, everyone in the city by inspiring, nurturing and celebrating their creativity. The bid also highlights Sheffield’s international credentials as a city with strong cultural assets; a diverse community; a great place to live, visit and work; the capacity to deliver big; and an innovative approach.

UK City of Culture 2013 aims to build on the success of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture 2008, which had significant social and economic benefits for the city – including a total income of £130 million over six years.

The four shortlisted cities will be required to submit a final bid to DCMS on 21st May 2010 and the winner will be announced in early July.

Join in at www.sheffieldcityofculture.com

This has prompted us to make a decision which we have been agonising over for quite a while: by default we are not going to support it any longer.

Why? Well, in short it doesn’t really work. We have to do things to our websites that we’d rather not do to make them work in IE6 – things that often break the site in other browsers.

That’s an oversimplification, of course. IE6 was OK in its time. But its time has passed. Things we take for granted just didn’t exist in August 2001 when it was released. No PNG transparency, lack of proper CSS support, non-standard rendering of pages and bugs galore were not so much of a problem when there were no standards to stick to. However, times have changed and browser manufacturers – despite still arguing about details – are making an effort to standardise the way websites display and work in order to deliver a better user experience.

The Web 2.0 revolution that has happened since the release of IE6 depends on technologies that just don’t exist in that browser. Neither YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Google want anything to do with it any more because they don’t want to be held back. Other browsers allow them to move forward and innovate.

The biggest problem we have is that we are constantly told that “large corporations” still use IE6 because their IT departments insist upon it. We’ve never actually seen proof of this but we do come across clients who have shown their new site to somebody who is still using IE6 only to see it break or just look plain ugly. This, of course, makes us look incompetent. The hacks we need to do to avoid this often cause a huge amount of lost time as it involves actually finding out what the problem is first before embarking on a long quest around the internet to find a solution which doesn’t have the opposite effect on the other browsers. Then we have to actually implement that solution. Naturally the incompatibility is usually spotted at 4:45pm on Friday.

If we allow for this when quoting for work our prices will look expensive. If we don’t and take the chance everything will be OK, we’ll probably lose out. It’s always a dilemma.

We’ve read endless tirades against IE6 and why it should be killed off. Calls on discussion groups for militant action and rants and raves (which just usually end in general Microsoft-bashing), usually made in the early hours of the morning by web developers who are at the end of their tether trying to make their site work in a crappy, obsolete browser and not getting paid anything for it, whilst trying to explain to clients in simple terms what’s actually going wrong. We understand this – we’ve been there ourselves.

But mouthing off on the internet isn’t going to help, so we’ve decided to do something a bit less confrontational and, hopefully, helpful.

We’ve decided to make IE6 support an option with the websites we build. From now on our quotations for web work will have an “IE6 compliance” line which will detail the extra costs involved in making the site backwards-compatible for this browser. It’s not a way of charging extra…believe me, we’d really rather not have to bother supporting IE6 at all – life is just too short. But we can and we will if we have to. This way the client has the option. Long term, we hope if more web development companies calm down a bit and do the same IE6 will just become a ghost in the browser’s graveyard along with AOL, Netscape, Mosaic and CyberDog.

We’d like to hear people’s thoughts on this approach.

The visual style of the site is inspired by the work of Martin Bedford – a highly influential graphic designer and co-founder of the Leadmill in Sheffield. The Park Hill flats which dominate the Sheffield skyline are a powerful image and evoke unique memories for the people of Sheffield including many of the musicians participating in the film, so we decided they should be an ever-present part of the site. Bold contrasting colours and high-contrast imagery highlight the different areas of the site. You won’t find many clean lines and straight edges on this site.

Quotes from the film are pulled out and displayed randomly throughout your journey through the site. When clicked, you can watch the part of the film they were taken from.

As well as the video clips and screenings news and reviews, we have built a shop, a media area (including exclusive video, photos and a listening room where rare Sheffield tracks can be played) and a “Making Of” section. The site pulls together content hosted on Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter and makes full use of Facebook to complete the social media coverage – vital for a site like this.

Technically, the site it totally content managed by the film’s producers at every level.

www.thebeatisthelaw.com

He was asked by Jo and Nigel from the Sensoria Festival to help out on one of their training days. The festival is more than just a fortnight of music and film – it has an ongoing commitment to education throughout the year and is involved in the new Creative Diploma courses (an alternative to GCSEs).

Andy:”By chance, we have already had a work experience student from the same school and course on a two-week placement here and we are the designers for Sensoria, so it seemed obvious to continue the connection. The help I gave was mostly technical in the end – the creative skills were already there. I learnt a lot from them !”

We’ll be doing some more work with the school soon.

Labels: Abbeydale Grange, Creative Diploma, Red Tape Studios, Sensoria, Sheffield

A totally redesigned and reprogrammed ecommerce site, this update builds on our previous version which has made the Complete Runner one of the country’s top online sportswear retailers.

They’re having a sale to celebrate the relaunch. Why run over for a look…

www.completerunner-online.com