StudioTalk: Wellington Web Design and Branding Blog

Pinterest has been heralded as one of the fastest-growing social networks to ever grace the web

hayden — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 03:22:44 +0000

Pinterest, the pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, ‘re-pin’ images to their own collections and or ‘like’ photos. Pinterest’s mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting” via a global platform of inspiration and idea sharing. Pinterest allows its users to share ‘pins’ on both Twitter and Facebook, which allows users to share and interact with a broad community. Founded by Ben Silbermann, of West Des Moines, Iowa, the site is currently managed by Cold Brew Labs and funded by a small group of entrepreneurs and inventors. It is one of the “fastest growing social services in the world.” bringing in more referral traffic than YouTube, Reddit, Google+ and LinkedIn.

But according to digital analytics company comScore, the popular site has showed some signs of slowed traffic from unique visitors. Although the number of unique visitors is still up compared to recent months, Pinterest brought in unique visitors at a lower growth-rate during the February to March time period compared to January to February.

Pinterest is now the number three most-popular social network in the U.S., behind Facebook and Twitter, according to Experian Hitwise. Experian rep Matt Tatham says Pinterest beat its next-closest competitor, LinkedIn, in total visits in February. Tatham says the rankings by total visits for March is as follows:

1. Facebook: 7 billion
2. Twitter: 182 million
3. Pinterest: 104 million
4. LinkedIn: 86 million
5. Tagged: 72 million
6. Google+: 61 million

The report, which tracks visits rather than unique visitors, is based on web traffic and doesn’t factor in visits from mobile sites. According to Experian’s reckoning, Foursquare only got 2.9 million visits in March and Instagram got 10.2 million.

Development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched as a closed beta in March 2010. The site proceeded to operate in invitation-only open beta.

We have moved

hayden — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 04:48:47 +0000

Flushing the Facebook Cache

James Barnsley — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:24:09 +0000

Don’t you hate it when you post a link or video on Facebook and it decides to show your old pictures or thinks that your newly-launched website is all about “Under Construction, coming soon!”? Well we do, and as a web-development agency, it is important to understand and resolve the quirks and tricks of working with social media networks.

There is a nifty tool known as the ‘Facebook De-linter‘, which does make sense. Effectively it shows you what your website looks like, in Facebook’s eyes. But most importantly it also updates the Facebook cache to reflect your newest page content. So if you’re having trouble getting Facebook to recognise your new web content, throw your website into the De-linter!

Visit the Facebook De-linter.

100% New Zealand Tourism Website

James Barnsley — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 01:59:59 +0000

www.newzealand.com

New styles of presenting websites are taking shape, especially with the introduction of new technologies of CSS3 and HTML5. One-page websites have their limitations, but this particular website has one of the best site introductions I have seen in a long time.

The new (launched mid-2011) 100% New Zealand Tourism website, give it a peep here: www.newzealand.com

Facebook Timeline

James Barnsley — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 21:51:17 +0000

Facebook is always making changes to keep us excited and attentive to our profiles and pages. Often these changes are minimal tweaks to layouts and new applications, but there’s a big change that I think will change the way we look at the social media environment.

Since the dawn of the ‘Blog Era’, we have been able to delve into archives of posts, events, photos and videos to relive moments from the past in a moderately logical manner. But the concept of a visual timeline representing an archive of information has been left to museum displays.

Facebook Timeline

Facebook has recently announced Timeline. Timeline is going to work much how it sounds; by organising your posts, photos and videos into a visual timeline. In addition you have more control over how your timeline looks with a giant banner at the top.

To many this will be just a nifty new Facebook feature whose novelty will wear off in three post’s time, but how will it be useful to businesses and all those fanpages? Well that will be the real test of it’s success and I can’t wait to try it.

Keep an ear to the ground and StudioTalk for more news on the topic, or click here to find out more about building traffic to your website with social media.

Adobe finally embraces non-flash animation

James Barnsley — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 00:01:52 +0000

At long last, Adobe has realised the future of web-based animation! Flash is an amazing utility to achieve some mind-blowing effects and online experiences, no doubt about that. But with the debacle surrounding Apple’s iPad and iPhones lack of flash support, many questions have been raised about the future of Flash.

jQuery has been around quite some time, but with the recent uptake of HTML5 and CSS3, we can now achieve Flash-quality experiences without the dependence upon a third-party plugin. So iPad, iPhone, Android or PC – it doesn’t matter what platform you’re on, you will enjoy a web experience to rival even some of the flashiest Flash websites. This is of course if you’re sporting a CSS3/HTML5-compatible browser (Chrome, Firefox 5+, Safari 3, Internet Explorer 9).

It seems that Adobe has decided to embrace the growing popularity in such technology and has released a preview of it’s Adobe Edge application. Adobe Edge allows web designers to create slick animations and effects without knowing the code and all the guts behind the scene.

Adobe Edge uses a very AfterEffects-ey interface with the standard timeline, working space and intuitive tools. Have a play around with it with a free download of Adobe Edge Preview.

Joomla 1.5 vs 1.6 vs 1.7 – Which to choose?

James Barnsley — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 21:46:46 +0000

We support Joomla 1.7

Joomla! CMS has recently released an update to it’s heavy-weight CMS, and there is much debate as to which platform is the safest to develop with.

For the last few years Joomla 1.5 has been a solid option, with loads of third-party plugins, components and modules to get Joomla to work beyond it’s standard capabilities. And then in 2010 the developers of Joomla released version 1.6. This was a large-scale upgrade and much of the core functions and code was revamped. The result is a slick, well-refined CMS with power to boot.

The developers behind this popular CMS have implemented a 6-month release cycle, so every six months we will be hit with a new upgrade. While this sounds daunting, it is in the best interests of constantly changing technologies and website security. That is, of course, if our third-party developers can keep up.

Joomla! 1.7 has been released for several months now, and Joomla 1.6 reaches it’s theoretical ‘end of life’ this month, so it pays to consider an upgrade. More importantly though, we should all look to upgrade our Joomla 1.5 systems to at least 1.6 as it introduces much-needed core upgrades and a future-compatible system.

We have recently started a large-scale project in Joomla 1.7 and have been very impressed with the changes made. From multi-tiered categories and module activation within articles to interface design and a more considered menu structure, 1.7 is the way of the future.

With this new project, we also needed to develop for mobile platforms such as the iPad and iPhone, as well as the multitude of Android devices. With Joomla 1.5 all layouts were in a table structure which severely limited mobile layouts and general future compatibility. Introduced in 1.6, Joomla now uses HTML layouts allowing us to develop templates and websites with whatever structure we wish – heck, we can even develop an entire website in HTML5!

So if you’re looking at Joomla, 1.7 is a stable and confident release with a growing support from 3rd-party developers to extend your website. If you’re interested in upgrading to Joomla, then get in touch! You can also find out more about Joomla by visiting their website http://www.joomla.org/17.

All the daily deal sites in one place.

admin — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:25:40 +0000

All kiwis like a good deal, hence these daily deal sites have been going off. By the sound of it our Ozzy cousin have been going more crazy.
The problem is you had to visit 10 different websites each day to make sure you didn’t miss anything.

So we’ve decided to make you life a little easier – by bringing all your daily deal into one place http://stickyeyes.co.nz

The plan is if people like it we’ll keep making it better so take a look and tell your friends.

Arcade Fire: The Suburbs

James Barnsley — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 22:59:56 +0000

Arcade Fire’s latest album, The Suburbs, is their best work yet. Beautiful piano work and loose lyrics keep me coming back for more. A brilliant album to put on while you’re basking in the sun on your apartment balcony.

Check it out here: http://www.arcadefire.com/the-suburbs/

Element IDs cannot start with a number

James Barnsley — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:51:33 +0000

I was recently building a jQuery-based slider for our upcoming website re-launch and needed to identify a series of elements numerically. Naturally I decided a number that auto-incremented would be ideal, so I build a testing stage to do just that.

After about 2 hours of testing and debugging to try find out why it wasn’t working, I changed the numerical ids to “block-one”, “block-two”, etc. This solved everything! It turns out that CSS does not allow elements’ ids to begin with a number. But classes are.

Who knew? Now you do. HTML ids cannot start with a number.