Just attended the FOWD conference which is the sister conference to the Future of Web Apps (FOWA).
I would recommend looking at some of the presentations from the FOWA site. Some interesting items on there. With regard to FOWD:-
Couple of really interesting presentation. Rei from AKQA demo’d some of the work the guys at that design agency are doing re: branding online etc… Some visually impressive material which costs a fortune to build and has historically been out of the reach of small businesses etc..
However the best presentation was the one where Adobe demonstrated their soon to be released Apollo project which promises (if the Ebay example was anything to go by) to offer some very cool development functionality for web designers to self build cool web apps. You can download an alpha release at Abode site and view examples of whats possible here.
The most interesting thing for me about Apollo is that it starts to blur the distinction between online and offline apps quite nicely - and this is a technology which needs to be kept an eye on. Expect a launch date towards the end of the year and loads of buzz in the trade press / blogs on this product soon.
regards
Dean
I’ll be at the Future of Web Design (http://www.futureofwebdesign.com/) and the Internet World (http://www.internetworld.co.uk) conferences in London this month.
If anyone wants to meet up for a chat / beer - drop me an email at dean@plus.net
regards
Dean
After having last week off, I’m now back in the office this week and am planning on spending about half the week looking at bug fixing and investigating the issues that have been raised over the last week with the community site. If you have any more, be sure to add them to the forum!
I also intend spending the other half of the week looking at new features, in particular, OpenID.
As mentioned recently in the usergroup forums, the last time we tried to change the way links are displayed it caused an uproar! However one of the main recommendations of my usability report was that visited links should change colour. This is particularly important in the support section so that you know which pages you have already looked at (either so you can avoid looking at them again or so you can find them more easily if they were useful). It is less important in places such as the member centre.
Blue underlined links are certainly the easiest style to recognise but they are not necessary in all situations. As long as link presentation is consistent and links are easily differentiated from text, even on a first visit, then that’s fine. Currently, however, neither of those requirements are met.
What are your thoughts on links presentation?
The Internet really is coming of age when the MoD decide to focus on browser based technology 
“The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is spending £4bn on the Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) project, which once fully installed will provide secure browser access to its information centres, at more that 2,000 sites globally. Two applications are being developed. The Joint Personnel Administration (JPA) and the Joint Asset Management and Engineering Systems (James) are the first test applications to make use of the DII.
The ultimate aim is for personnel on the battlefield to have access to the same information as MoD headquarters.”
You see businesses becoming more web aware and applications being built to offer services to small businesses which were once the domain of enterprises, but when you see this level of technology deployment you just know that the future is web based.
Regards
Dean
If you make use of LiveJournal, you can now add the 4 blogs that we currently have on this site to your LiveJournal account, keeping up-to-date with the posts, directly from your Friends Page.
PlusNet Comms Team Blog
PlusNet CSC Blog
PlusNet Web Portal Team Blog
Innovation and the Internet Blog
Every month, we send a Customer Satisfaction Survey to a selection of customers who have contacted the Customer Support Centre. This enables us to guage how we are performing and allows us to identify areas where we can improve the customer experience of dealing with our support teams.
The results of our Customer Satisfaction Survey for March 2007 are now out!
To download the Powerpoint Presentation :-
Click Here (400KB, PPT)
(if you can’t open this, get the viewer here!)
The Problem
The Help & Support page is both a section index and a section in its own right. Therefore where should it appear in the tabbed navigation?
Thanks to bradley8131 for raising this issue in the forums.
The (possible) Solution(s)
Unfortunately none of these are fully satisfactory.
The first option requires users to think too much and we all know that’s not a good idea!
The second creates two links that point to the same page and would be very confusing.
The third would take up a lot of room if it has to be present on every page.
The last option is the most logical and is consistent with the way the rest of the site is organised but unless it adds something useful then the index page just becomes an obstacle to reaching the support pages quickly. Eventually we plan to create a new help section index page that summarises your open tickets/questions and attempts to predict what you are looking for based on your viewing history… but we’re not there yet.
So over to you. What do you suggest?
We are pleased to announce that the future of Broadband arrived this morning in the form of ‘Broadband Your Way’. Broadband Your Way replaces our existing product set for all new PlusNet, Force9 and Free-Online customers.
For more information, see this post on the Comms Team Blog.
Hello folks. My name is Wojtek and I work as Web Designer in our PlusNet Production Team. I’d like to tell you a bit about one of our main targets for the upcoming months – SEO, which is nothing else but Search Engine Optimization.
New technologies and strategies – you’ve seen Broadband Your Way coming, and you are also experiencing simplified sign up journey for all our main products. But that’s not the end of the story; we’re experimenting with SEO now. Good search engine positioning is essential now; our Referral Model has proven itself to be very efficient, but today if you don’t exist in Google – you don’t exist at all. Simple as that. Type “broadband” into google.co.uk – and where will you find PlusNet? Well, let’s close our eyes and imagine that we’re somewhere on the top… Because we’re not. We want to change it and we will do it. There are some steps to achieve this.
First of all, our content needs to be optimized. And we’re working on that; there is a special group of people here – we call them Content Writers or “The Portal Pirates” (don’t ask why, as we don’t really know either 
The job of these folks is to sit and to write good, user-friendly and SEO optimized text. And they do their job pretty well, which you can see for yourself more and more with every single project delivery. Keywords, hypertext links connecting pages all together; pure, semantical structure and minor navigational tricks - this is a major improvement and it will be progressing even further. Our Support System, which is a core of our knowledge base looks even clearer and better with every day.
Secondly, our codebase is heading towards what I would call “half-way decent XHTML code”. XHTML and CSS are the technologies used for separating the visual layout from the content description level, and are replacements for old-fashioned table HTML. The major advantages of migration to these powerful hypertext solutions are better accessibility, faster rendering time for the webpages and – what is probably the most important – much better cross-browser availability. It is also affecting SEO a lot due to delivering simpler, semantically oriented data structure for the engines. Stuffing Google and friends with nested tables and image maps is not really what hardcore web coders and marketing gurus do We’re still far from the ideal, so forget W3C validation for example – but give us some time and somehow this monstrous codebase of our three portals will get optimized to deliver you much better user experience. Navigational structure is also being improved on the fly, so each move requires less clicks now, and our aim is to lower this number much further.
So, my dear friends, wait and you’ll see PlusNet raising from the depths of unknowing Our main target is clear: our name and products needs to be better known amongst the crowd. And they will. It’s just a matter of time!
Here at Plusnet we're always trying to use clever open source things to make our lives easier. Sometimes we write our own and make other people's lives easier too!
We sell broadband, phone, VoIP and more to homes and businesses in the UK. Winner of 9 out of 11 Categories in the 2008 USwitch survey. Winner of "Best Consumer ISP" at 2008 ISPA awards. Voted number 1 in the Broadband Choices 2008 survey.
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