For everyone who thought Eurocrats sat around all day discussing the precise curvature of bananas and the exact differences between Belgian buns and Chelsea buns, You were wrong!

Our friends in Brussels have been spending a lot of time discussing how we can protect our unsuspecting citizens from cookies. Don’t worry they don’t have their sights fixed on your favourite Chocolate chips yet. The latest zany legislation to emerge from the hallowed halls of Europe is the European ePrivacy Directive 2002/58/EC.

At it’s heart the new legislation which becomes enforced in UK on 26th May 2012 is well meaning.  It sets out to protect web users from unscrupulous harvesting and use of their personal details, that’s got to be a good thing right?    Unfortunately, the legislation really hasn’t been thought out particularly well, and in reality the legislation can only lead to a degradation in web usability.

Basically the gist of Directive 2002/58/EC requires that before any website places any and all cookies on a users computer, the user is first asked if they consent to the placing of such cookies.  On the face of it this seems fair enough.  But how do we implement such an option on every single web page out there on the web? do we really want pop-ups appearing all over the web asking if we want this cookie or that cookie?  and how many web users know exactly what cookies do or how they should answer the pop-up questions?

Then there is the question that will be obvious to most web developers if not to European lawmakers,  How do you store each particular users answer to the big cookie question on your website?  You guessed right you store it on a cookie stored on the users computer.  But what if they say no to the cookie question?

Furthermore their is very little information available on the enforcement or indeed the precise requirements of the legislation.  The following video produced by Oliver Emberton over at Silktide pretty much sums up the present situation.

One thing we do know about the legislation is that fines for non compliance can be up to £500.000.  Various options that attempt to meet compliance requirements without totally destroying a users enjoyment of your site are available and we at Pixelbox Design will be happy to assist any of our clients past or present in meeting compliance free of charge.

Well it’s been a long time coming and a lot of work in between client projects, but it’s finally here.

We are very proud to unveil to you all the brand new, all singing, all dancing Pixelbox Design Website.

The new website has been built using the very latest cutting edge technology made available through HTML5, CSS3 and JQuery with a liberal sprinkling of PHP. We are very pleased with the results, what do you think? let us know in the comments.

It gives us great pleasure to announce the launch of our latest project creative82.co.uk.

Creative82 is a small, creative graphic design and communication studio based in Edinburgh. They specialize in producing work of exceptional quality that offers a practical solution for their clients.

They have a holistic approach and strive to produce materials that work for you.

We were contacted by Stephen at Creative82 and invited to undertake a project to re-design and modernise the company’s website. In discussion with Stephen we agreed that the look and feel of the existing website presented the company’s portfolio and services quite well and that the new site would maintain a similar minimal design with lots of white space and subtle greys, ensuring that the visitors attention was not drawn away from the subject matter by excessive web design graphics.

It was also extremely important to Creative82 that their new website would ensure full access to their portfolio and services to everyone regardless of how they connected to the web, their Hardware/software configurations or any disabilities.

The final result is a very clean, accessible website with intuitive navigation and built-in dynamics ensuring the website is responsive to browser choices and screen-sizes.

It is a fairly common belief that facebook is “just for kids” or for “families to keep in touch with each other”.

However, here are a few facts that you may not know about Facebook from a business marketing angle:

• Over 400 million people have an active Facebook account (active is based on a login at least once a week).
• The average facebook user spends 55 minutes per day viewing the Facebook website.
• Facebook is localised for over 100 different languages (including pirate).
• More than 200 million Facebook users view the Facebook website every day.
• Facebook hosts over 1.6 billion active fan-pages. Over 700,000 are for local businesses and these pages have generated over 5.3 billion “likes”.
• Facebook takes the second largest amount of web traffic in the world (falling just marginally behind Google).
• Facebook users collectively spend an average 8.3 billion hours on the website each month.

These statistics make Facebook one of the world’s most effective marketing mediums for Small to medium businesses to advertise their products and services and also one of the most cost effective.

It is accordingly almost essential for your business to be represented on facebook or risk losing such a huge captive audience to your competitors.

In recognising, this phenomenal marketing opportunity, Pixelbox Design have created a “Facebook package” which gives your business a fully customised Facebook Fan page (or business page), professionally designed to match your corporate identity and effectively market your products and services to this huge audience.

As well as getting your products and services “out there” your new Facebook page will also provide direct links back to your own website from the Facebook website which will dramatically improve your website’s traffic and search engine exposure.

Access this huge marketing opportunity with your own Facebook for only £54.99. Get in touch with us now and your Facebook page can be up and running in 24 hours.

email : hello@pixelboxdesign.co.uk

Telephone : +44 (0)1506 668607.

Why YOU Must Participate: The World Blogger’s Awards

There are actually tons of excellent bloggers and publishers doing amazing work, and those who stand out deserve to have their work recognized, connect with each other, and see their readerships grow. That’s why the World Media Awards exist- to recognize and reward great contributions to media from bloggers and publishers.

In my own career, I’ve learned and benefited so much from others that I wanted to help establish some way to give back to an industry I love show appreciation to the up-and-coming leaders. The World Media Awards will culminate in a 1 day event in San Francisco that will celebrate the best in blogging, forums, publishing and media from around the world.

So if you are a first class blogger, why should you enter? 

1. Get Recognized- You Deserve It !
You put a lot of effort into making your blog remarkable. You understand it and your readers know it. The World Media Awards is a way for you to get authoritative recognition from other bloggers and industry experts. That recognition will help you develop your readership, make new collaborative connections, and hopefully have great moments that make all the late nights even more worthwhile. 

2. Meet Other Bloggers Who Care
Blogging, forums and most other on-line media is about conversation and interaction, but sometimes it’s easy to end up trying to hide away behind a monitor in your office or home all alone. Meeting other bloggers and publishers keeps the fire lit and the conversation going. When you enter the World Media Awards, you’ll be listed alongside other bloggers and publishers who put the same level of pride, attention and work into making their blog great. 

3. Expose Yourself to New Partners
If your blog or forum is part of your business, being part of the World Media Awards will increase your exposure by putting your name in front of the thousands of visitors to our site and the award ceremony. That means you can find out who else is doing great work, strut your own stuff, and expand your network of contacts and collaborators. 

4. Make Yourself Irresistible to Clients

What helps your chances at being victorious that next pitch more than extending your network? Telling that network that you are the winner of a World Media Award. Winning an award shines a light on your achievements, and it serves as an example of the commitment, engagement and exacting standards you apply to your work. 

5. Be Part of the Beginning of Something Big
Because 2012 is the first year for these awards, you have the one-time opportunity to be the inaugural winner and set the standard for the World Media Awards in your category. Getting in on the ground floor of these awards will open opportunities for you as a blogger and a publisher.

The bottom line is, the World Media Awards will shine a spotlight on the year’s most successful bloggers and publishers, and on the companies that serve and interact with them.

Now is your chance to be one of them.

The sponsors include Growmap, Pace Lattin, VigLink and Trancos.
World Media Award judges include Steve Hall, Sarah Austin, Chang Kim, Julie Wohlberg, Pierre Zarokian, Ivka Adam, Cheryl Contee, Krystyl Baldwin, Adrian Harris, Jeremy Wright, Rob Bloggeries, Dave Duarte, Tanya Alvarez, Dana Oshiro, Tom Foremski, and Judith Lewis. hashtag #wmads on Twitter.
Media partners include Adrants, Bloggeries, MediaVision, The Affiliate Marketing Awards, Read Write Web, My Blog Guest, Web Traffic Control and FeedBlitz.
Murray Newlands is author of How to Make a Blog Book and Online Marketing; a User Guide. He is also founder of the Affiliate Marketing Awards. Born in the UK, he now spends his time in San Francisco and New York. Murray works for Audience Mindshare and consults for Trancos Ins as well as being an advisor for VigLink. Actually he is working on his new book: The Email Marketing Book.

It gives us great pleasure to announce the launch of our latest project, endoxasolutions.co.uk.

Endoxa Solutions Limited is a business operations and process improvement consultancy located in central Scotland. They deliver enterprise standard services to the SMB market but without the associated high costs and protracted delivery times.

It has been a true pleasure for us working with Endoxa Solutions’ Managing Director, Gary Lessels to produce his vision of a clean professional website to promote his business to his target audience.

As part of the project we also produced a customised Facebook business page for Endoxa Solutions to further promote their services and solutions through the world’s largest social networking site.

Through the massive growth of the interweb, companies have realized the benefit of building a strong online presence. By publishing a website to the Internet, companies are able to build their brand, market their products, support existing customers, release publicity pieces, and even take orders. Lost in the feverish pace of growth however, has been an eye on the effect that their current web-building practices have on the bottom line and the future of their online presence. Not only does the website content itself have an impact on the company’s income but so does the way the site itself is created.

Building your site with a commitment to web standards – and continuously testing to ensure it maintains its adherence to those standards – can save your company money and even increase website related income.

What are web standards?

Web standards are, for purposes of this discussion, carefully designed sets of rules and protocols that drive web-based content throughout the Internet.

Specifically, web standards revolve around:

Structural Languages – such as HTML, XHTML, XML, SMIL, SVG, MathML
Presentation Languages – such as CSS, XSL
Document Object Model

These web standards have been defined by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standards bodies to ensure the interoperability and access of documents placed on the web. Documents that follow the established standards will benefit in many ways:

Lower maintenance effort and cost
Lower cost for redesign
Improved usability and accessibility
Broader compatibility across platforms and devices
Reduced hardware demand and cost

Site wide look and feel consistency

Designing to current standards enables the site to maintain the same look and feel theme throughout the site. Standards also allow the site’s look and feel to change rapidly with little additional load on personnel resources.

Improved usability: smaller document size loads faster

Designing to current standards means that – by proxy – the documents will be smaller. Because of this, the pages will load faster for the user. Download times have been shown to be a factor in website usability. A perceived delay in site presentation undermines users’ evaluation of the site. Users systematically rate slower sites as less interesting and having lower quality content. In addition they report that delays interfere with task continuity, their ability to remember the site, and use flow. Exceedingly slow sites can lead users to believe an error has occurred.

Better cross-platform compatibility

As browser manufacturers come closer to adhering to web standards, it is becoming clearer that creating standards-based pages can be an increasing assurance that the site will operate across multiple platforms. “Rendering fine” is a myth born of misunderstanding. Considering that 5 different rendering engines are used to surf the web using dozens of browsers (and versions of those browsers) on 3 platforms, attempting to test the site for rendering in every configuration is next to impossible. Coding to standards then, is the only practical solution for ensuring compatibility – now and in the future.

Prepares for the future

“Rendering fine” on current browsers is no guarantee that a site with invalid markup will render fine in the future. Moreover, it is no guarantee that a site will render fine (or at all) in the growing number of non-traditional devices such as PDAs and cellular telephones. As browser manufacturers make further efforts to make their products adhere to standards, the point of “rendering fine” in target browsers becomes moot, anyway. Standards-compliant markup will be even more of a guarantee that it will work on all platforms than error-laden and proprietary markup.

Extensibility

Designing to the current standard means sites should be marked up using XHTML – an XML-compatible version of HMTL. Using this format will enable the company to venture into the inevitable world of XML without the need for major modifications to the site structure. XML features can be added quickly and painlessly.

Lower maintenance and easier troubleshooting

Personnel can come and go – but the code they create will stay behind. If that code contains error-laden, invalid markup and “work-arounds” for rendering in target browsers, it will cost the company money in personnel time to find the bad markup and make it right. Because standards are very well documented, another person taking over some standard-compliant code can hit the ground running – and will not need to become familiar with the previous developer’s coding practices.

Regardless of who does the site maintenance, designing to standards ensures shorter time spent hunting down problems. While poor rendering may very well be a buggy browser, in most cases “rendering improperly” usually means “something is wrong”. Validation is one of the ways to uncover exactly what the issue is. By maintaining a standards-compliant site, you are providing yourself with insurance that if something goes awry, you will be able to more easily and quickly get to the possible cause. Simply put, if you know everything else is OK, you can focus any troubleshooting efforts on what has been changed instead of looking at what else already existed that could have caused or exacerbated the problem.

Accessibility

Designing with web standards makes accessibility an easier goal to achieve, as standards have been created with accessibility in mind.

Proper markup goes beyond “validity”. Each element in (x)HTML has been created with a specified purpose, and so creating a standards-compliant site also means using the most appropriate element for the task at hand. Doing so increases accessibility. Proper markup gives alternative access devices the ability to provide context to the page’s content.

Reduced bandwidth cost

Last, adhering to standards-based markup can reduce the amount that a company pays for bandwidth. As stated above, adherence to standards has the effect of reducing the size of a document – by up to 50% or more by some estimates. This can lead to big savings in bandwidth charges for high-traffic websites.

Standards just make sense

So what does all of this really mean? As the company’s website becomes more important to its bottom line, standards can help position the company as a leader. Those who choose to make the commitment to quality will find a payoff that begins immediately and lasts into the future. Right now, you’ll save on development of new content. In the future you’ll benefit from reduced maintenance and increased agility. Standards compliance just makes sense.

It gives us immense pleasure to announce the launch of our latest web design project.

The Scottish School for Complementary Therapy (TSSCT) is the second project we have worked on with the School’s Director Carol Bain, and as always it was an absolute pleasure working with Carol on what was a very interesting project.

We would like to wish Carol and her team every success with their new website, and we hope it brings them the marketing results they are looking for.

You can view the new site at http://www.tssct.co.uk/

Google’s new social networking service is currently undergoing “field tests” by a limited number of users and the first impressions are largely positive.

Dubbed Google+, the service is still a bit rough around the edges but it appears to show promise. Sadly, you can experience it firsthand only through invites, so most users will have to wait for the official launch.

The user interface is intuitive and it can import all your information in various Google services with ease. This is good, as it shouldn’t take much time to set up your account and import Picasa photos. Setting up a personal profile is also pretty straightforward, nothing to brag about.

Unlike Facebook, Google+ organizes your contacts into circles and for a start it imports all of your Gmail info. The circles concept is rather interesting, as it is designed to closely mimic real life relationships. For example, it allows you to organize your friends into various groups or circles, i.e. family, work, drinking buddies etc.

One of the issues plaguing Facebook revolves around security and privacy concerns. Google intends to do things a bit differently and provide more privacy options and levels. It could have an edge over Facebook in this department, but then again Facebook could simply improve its own system to cope with the competition from Google.

Google+ is a rather interesting service and with Google behind it probably won’t fail. However, it seems rather unlikely that it will manage to unsettle Facebook as the daddy of social networking anytime soon. Speaking of time, one question comes to mind. What took Google so long?

You can check out a comprehensive preview of Google+ at PCworld.

We are very pleased to announce the launch of our latest web design project, Auld Reekie Photography.

Auld Reekie Photography are professional wedding and portrait photographers based in the beautifully photographic old town of Edinburgh.

Initially we were picturing a clean website with lots of whitespace and silver flowing texts but Tommy at Auld Reekie Photography had totally different ideas and was thinking of something far more colorful and intense to showcase his work.

Putting our heads together as web designer and photographer we think we came up with a very appealing photographic website which definitely met with Tommy’s approval.

We had a great time working with Tommy and his wife Debbie whilst developing the site and we would recommend Auld Reekie Photography without hesitation.

Take a look at Auld Reekie Photography | Wedding and portrait photographer