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Web Videos - Free video hosting or Paid?

As video production gets more affordable and broadband connections become the norm, embedding video on your website becomes a viable option.

Video has impact - and with all your competitors only just a click away - can be an ideal way to retain attention and ensure that your website gets over your message.

Web video applications

• Product demonstrations - Dyson commercials have been very successful
• Talking heads - sales pitches in the Cillit Bang approach
• Walk-throughs and virtual tours - popular with estate agents and property developers
• Infommercials - you know, the hard sell DVDs they have in department stores
• Web adverts - or webverts, as some people are calling them

The historical problem has been the expense, videos take a tremendous amount of bandwidth and hard disc space on the server.

One quick and easy solution is upload your video to a free video sharing service, such as YouTube, Google Video or Vimeo.

Although these companies offer free hosting, there are some compromises that have to be paid for: poor quality video resolution and sound, the fact that it is open to the public, and that the video branded and has a link that takes customers away from your website.

With Paid Video Hosting you have improved audio and visual quality, the choice of screen size, resolution, opening frame and other customization.

Dedicated video hosting at Northstar starts from as little as £10 per month. Check out our video production page for further information.

OGC Logo - yet another government cock up

Shortly after the UK government announced £27 billion lost in failed IT projects another minor embarrassment was revealed, this time for the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), whose website proudly states: “Helping Government deliver best value from its spending.”

The logo cost £14,000 to create, and was intended to signify the bold ambition of the OGC of “improving value for money by driving up standards and capability in procurement.”

You can imagine how many meetings, hefty documents, PowerPoint presentations and endless focus groups had to be held to rack up £14,000 in fees while this logo was deliberated - and yet for all this contemplation they missed the glaringly obvious.

According to insiders, the graphic was already proudly etched on mousemats and pens before it was unveiled for employees, who spotted the clanger within seconds.

Just tilt your head to the left.

A spokesman for OGC said: “It is true that it caused a few titters among some staff when viewed on its side, but on consideration we concluded that the effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters OGC - and it is not inappropriate to an organisation that’s looking to have a firm grip on Government spend.”

A firm grip indeed.

Which is the best computer?

I’ve been a Apple Mac user since the early 1990s so obviously I am biased - the same as anyone is, whatever computer you are used to has to be the best.

However, since I got involved in web design about 10 years ago, I’ve had to run a PC to test my sites and make sure everything is working across all platforms. This has given me dual view or running a PC and Mac side by side to compare the two operating systems.

What I have always loved about Macs is that they just work, in simple terms that you can intuitively understand - you’ve got a Hard Drive, so it’s called a Hard Drive - there’s no messing about with b / c / or d drives? You want to move a file from one place to another, you just click and drag it there.

Keep it simple stupid

Macs work from your perspective, making things simple, not technical. They boot up faster, they are more stable, the type is clearer, and graphics are better. You get everything you need in a box, rather than loading and registering software from dozens of different companies.

I think they have always been a winner because virtually the whole interface is image / icon based, rather than file sub directories and root folders. Plus, there is the added benefit that you can customize virtually every aspect of how you computer looks and behaves - I know this sounds daunting to most users, but it’s nice to have the option if you want it.

Mac’s reliability and stability have also come on leaps and bounds, and since the launch of OS X I haven’t had a single crash in 3 years.

While I’m getting into this, you also have to take into account the usual Mac hype about no viruses. Now this is true, it’s something that no Mac user has to worry about because we are such a minority (less than 10% of the market) that no self respecting juvenile hacker would want to bother us.

So I don’t have to worry about subscribing to Norton or some other software program and there are no annoying pop up windows that just tick me off. It just works they way you want it to.

Change happens

When I have gone on about Macs to my PC friends, they have come back with two arguments: that you can’t run PC software on a Mac and that the machines are too expensive. Wrong on both counts.

It’s easy to run your current PC software on a Mac, and for all those hard nosed business people looking for quality, value for money and reliability - this is an independent survey carried out the highly respected Which?:

Laptop Best Buys

Model	Price	Score
Apple MacBook	£799	75%
Apple MacBook Pro	£850	73%
Samsung Q320	£666	71%
Dell Studio XPS	£799	70%
Dell Studio 1555	£749	70%
Acer Aspire 77352	£414	70%
Dell Studio 17	£699	70%

Desktop PC Best Buys

Results of survey carried out by Which? magazine:

Apple

Apple gets an impressive 94% in our customer satisfaction measure. It’s also rated highly for support, earning a good overall rating. Apple computers are reliable too, with an above average reliability rating.

Sony

The Sony range is rather limited and priced at the luxury end of the market, but they’re well regarded, as is reflected by its customer score of 80%. There isn’t enough data for Sony to get a reliability rating, it receives a disappointingly poor rating for support.

Novatech
Novatech is popular with customers, achieving a satisfaction score of 79%. There isn’t enough data to get a rating for reliability or support.

Owners’ verdicts - At a glance: the brands rated most highly by Which? subscribers.

Model	Score
Apple	94%
Sony	80%
Novatech	79%
Dell	75%
Asus	75%
Medion	72%
Hewlett-Packard	71%
Acer	65%
Compaq	63%

Information courtesy of Which?

Website redesign for clothes shop

The Ilkley Dress Agency approached Northstar to re-design their website so that it reflected the quality of their stock; they sell high quality, new and pre-owned fashions, including clothing, accessories, jewellery and footwear.

The thinking behind the design was simple: if you’re selling fashion, the site needs to look fashionable. The big headline, colour scheme and layout was taken from the style of women’s fashion magazines.

In this market imagery is vitally important, however, because of the high turnover of stock no existing products could be used. The solution was to use Royalty Free imagery from Shutterstock and iStockphoto. By using an image of an undressed woman the photograph becomes seasonless and reinforces the message “For fashion - we’ve got you covered from head to toe.”

Although the budget was limited a certain amount of SEO was carried out to target the search phrases “Clothes Shops Ilkley” and “Shopping Ilkley.”

Before

After

Visit website »

Retail web design case study

Facebook and Nielsen become friends

Last week Facebook announced that it had surpassed 300 million users, and now the company has announced a strategic partnership with the Nielsen Company. This partnership is aimed at helping marketers better use the web for developing and marketing new products.

“Nielsen is the leader in measurement and is an excellent partner for us as we look to provide marketers with richer ad effectiveness data,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. “The combination of our unique ability to quickly and effectively poll a sample of our more than 300 million users and Nielsen’s expertise in data analysis will give marketers access to powerful data they can use to understand and improve current and future campaigns.”

The companies have already announced a new product called Nielsen BrandLift, which is designed to provide marketers with “effectiveness measurement” for Facebook advertising. The product will launch in the US with select test partners this week. It is expected to roll out to all Facebook advertisers within the next few months.

BrandLift will take the form of opt-in polls on Facebook’s homepage, which will let advertisers know more of what makes consumers tick, by the sound of it. It is described in the announcement: “Nielsen BrandLift measures aided awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability and purchase consideration via a set of short, specially designed one or two question surveys.” The surveys will appear on Facebook’s homepage where ads normally appear.

“Facebook is an increasingly vital link between consumers and brands,” said John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen’s online division. “We will now be able to add deep knowledge of this important social network to our unmatched media measurement and consumer insight across all three screens.”

“Together we will be able to provide the missing elements to clients seeking better understanding of how Web content and online advertising affect consumer behavior,” added Burbank.

Nielsen will be conducting hundreds of BrandLift tests over the next few months. Last month, Facebook had the 4th largest unique audience in the US among all web brands.

Source: webpronews.com

Twitter worth a $billion

Halko: Construction Web Design

A new website has been launched today by Northstar, for Halko the timber construction company.

Northstar was approached by Dorrington Construction to create a website for their timber buildings created in partnership with Finlammelli of Finland.

The project involved creating a company name (Halko is the Finnish word for logs), corporate identity, website design and construction to W3C standards, domain name registration and hosting, email and email stationery.

Blog Directory

Tweet Seek | Free Twitter search widget

Tweet Seek is a free Twitter search widget that you can embed into your website or blog, giving your visitors live results on any given topic.

It was developed by some friends of mine at Blueclaw, an SEO company based in Leeds, UK.

Tweet Seek is fully customizable, with a range of skins, and you can either choose the results or add a search box so people can explore for themselves.

Go ahead try it, just type in any topic into the search box and get live results as tweets are posted word-wide.

Some pretty fancy javascript dancing is going on here.

You can customize your Twitter search results, reskin and grab the code at the Tweet Seek website.

Permashield manufacturing website launched

Permashield is a wall coating manufacturing and application company based in Leeds.

They had three websites covering different aspects of their operation - however none were performing on the search engines and a fresh approach was required to generate traffic and convert visitors into contacts.

Rather than promote three separate sites, we proposed cutting costs and consolidating our campaign into one website. The 60+ page site is split into domestic and commercial services, each page individually optimised for key search phrases on the search engines.

Services involved in the production of this website included: web design, copywriting, SEO, email marketing and hosting.

View Web design case study »

View the Permashield website »

Customised eBay shop

Northstar was approached by Martin, who was looking to set up an eBay shop to sell off a range of items from TVs and cameras, to old LPs and furniture.

As he was new to eBay, he wanted to give potential customers reassurance of a professional and reliable service - as he had no longstanding track record.

Northstar developed the name “Electric Marketplace” and a logo and is in the process of customising his eBay shop.

Logo design »

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