We’re growing!

06-07-10 | Posted by: Malcolm

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We're delighted to announce that Robin Hodges has joined Electric Putty.

Robin has been creating/designing and generally being a geek since 1996. Before joining the team he worked as a freelance web developer for wide range of companies and business start-ups so comes with a raft of experience.

We feel very lucky to have Robin on board, not only does he code to an incredibly high standard but he is genuinely passionate about the web. His expertise will help ensure that our projects deliver the best possible experience to their users and the best possible results for our clients.

When he's not behind a computer screen Robin can often be found on the beach racing the kite surfers in his inflatable dingy.

New office, comes with chandelier

23-04-10 | Posted by: melanie

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We've moved office. We're still based in that hub of activity known as The Werks but we've upgraded ourselves to a new home and it comes with it's very own chandelier.

Apparently our new place was once a bank manager's office, hence the fancy lighting. I don't think bank managers get perks like that these days. Still, we're enjoying looking at them and they tinkle in the wind.

Happy belated New Year!

15-02-10 | Posted by: melanie

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Yep, we're six weeks late in our felicitations but it's been busy in Putty Towers.

We've launched a couple of new sites; the CFS portal for the Money Advice Trust and a wee microsite for Fair Train which was launched in record time (about four days). We're busy on the final push on two other sites which we're hoping to get complete by the end of February too.

So, happy Easter - thought I'd get that one in a little early.

Happy holidays

23-12-09 | Posted by: melanie

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It's been an interesting year with a number of exciting new projects as well as plenty of ongoing work with some of our longest standing clients. We'd like to say a big thank you for choosing to work with us throughout 2009 and we look forward to more of the same in 2010.

Office hours over the festive period

Our office will be closed from 24 December 2009 and reopen on 4 January 2010. If you have an urgent support query during this period please use the contact form on our website.

Christmas donation

We won't be sending Christmas cards this year, instead we will be making a £50 donation to the wonderful resource that is Wikipedia, a truly useful website. You can read why Wikipedia needs money here.

Some of our favourite things of 2009

January: Inauguration of Barack Obama as first black US president.

February: It snowed, and snowed, and snowed.

March: Inspiring Le Corbusier exhibition at the Barbican.

April: Political satire In The Loop film released featuring the one and only Malcolm Tucker.

May: MPs called to account on Question Time over the expenses scandal, one for people power.

June: Our shortlived Summer, remember the predictions for a heatwave?

July: The brilliant Blur gig in Hyde Park.

August: Usain Bolt breaking his own world 100m record.

September: The very yummy Brighton Food Festival.

October: The 4th plinth art event ends after 100 days.

November: Fall of the Wall celebrations in Berlin.

December: Rage Against the Machine beating the X-factor winner to number one.

Are you up or down?

16-09-09 | Posted by: melanie

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Let's face it, monitoring your website's uptime isn't a particularly interesting job but it is an important one. You should be in the know if your site goes down and for how long but you can bet your hosting company isn't going to make it their business to tell you. Luckily there are website monitoring services that send you an alert in the unlucky event that this happens.

What you need to know about monitoring

You'll need to keep an eye on your uptime. This is the amount of time the server your website is hosted on is available. You want this to be around 99% . Some hosting companies will guarantee 99% and over uptimes.

You also need to look at response time. This is the amount of time the server takes to respond to a request, giving an effective performance measure. This will be reported in milliseconds. Jakob Nielson, the usability expert, recommends response times be no longer than 1 second.

Monitoring services

We use a service called Pingdom which sends us an email alert whenever our site goes down and another email when it is back up. We can also login to our account and view a number of nifty reports. Here's the overview report, which you can make public. Pingdom recently began offering a free service for monitoring one website, you can sign up here.

Is it down or is it just me?

Sometimes you are not sure if a website is down or you are having connection problems. Now you can check any site's uptime with this handy tool.

DIY website user testing in three days

16-07-09 | Posted by: melanie

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User testing has got a bad reputation in some circles as being expensive and time consuming. After all, don’t you need a lab, moderators and fancy equipment? Fortunately, times have changed and it is possible to carry out simple user testing on a budget. Follow the advice in this article and you can do it in 3 days.

What exactly is user testing?

User testing involves getting together some typical members of your target audience and asking them to carry out tasks on your website whilst you observe. Watching how they get on, and listening to what they say, will help you improve your site.

Benefits of user testing

Increase customer loyalty by improving the satisfaction people have with using your site.
Target your budget on developing features and functionality that people actually use.
Make informed decisions about strategy based on real data.
Gain valuable insight on issues you may not even have considered.

Taking the plunge

So, you’ve taken the plunge and decided to do some testing. Where do you start and how do you keep time and costs down?

You’ll need to:

Decide what to test
Decide who to test with
Recruit participants
Create context and tasks
Test and capture the results
Analyse the results
Start all over again!

Planning stage - day one

What to test

Firstly you need to decide what it is you are going to test. To keep it simple you should focus on key issues, areas of the website where you anticipate problems or any complicated processes.

Example areas/issues for testing: homepage, the navigation, the sign up process

Who to test

Who should you recruit to test with? Ask yourself;

Who uses your website?
What are their motivations?
What particular needs do they have?
What problem are they trying to solve?

Answering these questions will help you build up profiles of your website users. If you've got time you can flesh out the information for each user to create a series of archetypal users, in user testing circles these archetypal users are sometimes called personas.

Example persona: John works for a law firm based in the City of London. As CSR Development Manager he is responsible for all corporate social responsibility policies and strategy in the company. Part of his job involves researching CSR partnership opportunities with non profit organisations based in London and abroad.

Recruiting participants

In an ideal world you would use an external recruiter to find your test subjects but as this is testing on a budget you will probably end up doing it yourself. The reality is that the recruitment process can't be completed in a day so you should start looking as soon as you've made the decision to do some testing. Remember, it is better to test with people who don’t perfectly match your personas than not to test at all.

To find people to take part ask around, send emails and above all, provide people with an incentive to get involved. This could be a nominal monetary payment, a prize draw, or simply the opportunity to help your organisation. Make sure you give people the full details of when, where and what so they are fully informed.

Don’t recruit too many subjects; you will need no more than 5 people to get useful results. If you manage to find more participants keep them on file for your next round of testing.

The length of each test should be no more than 45 minutes; this means you can easily carry out all your testing in one day. Keeping tests short is more convenient for your testers and won’t give them time to get bored.

Creating context

Next you'll need to come up with scenarios that explain the context of why your testers are visiting your site. You can create any number of different scenarios. They can range from quite specific to very general.

Example scenario: You are responsible for your company’s corporate social responsibility plan and you are looking for a charity for your company to sponsor. You want to partner with an organisation that offers on-site projects for your employees to get involved in.

Creating tasks

Create specific tasks around each scenario. Aim for around 10 tasks taking into account your 45 minute timescale.

Example tasks:

Does this organisation offer corporate fundraising?
What kinds of projects do they run?
How do you contact them?

Testing stage - day two

Capturing the results

Expensive testing often involves using a lab, two way mirrors and lots of equipment but all you really need is a quiet room with a table, two chairs and a computer with internet connection. If you want to record the testing you’ll need some additional equipment. You can either use a digital camera or software like Silverback (for Apple Macs) or Camtasia Studio (for Microsoft Windows) that allow you to record the mouse movements and the person’s face.

If you can afford it then you will benefit from hiring a usability professional, if you can’t then it is better to do it yourself rather than not at all. The best case scenario would be to record the tests and have one person facilitating. If you aren’t going to record the tests it is best to have two people conducting the test, one as the facilitator and one to take notes.

Practice makes perfect-ish

Before you let loose on real, live subjects you should practice the test on a colleague or other willing person. A practice run will draw your attention to any inconsistencies or other problems in the way you have presented your tasks or the test itself.

Carrying out the tests

Before you start the test you should explain to your test subject what the test is about, making it very clear that you are testing the site and not them. You can also ask them some background questions which will give you some insight into their level of experience or any notions they have about the site. It is useful to ask the subject to ‘think-aloud’ throughout the test, this will help you in understanding any problems they have.

During the test you should read each of the scenarios and tasks to your test subject. It might help to provide them this on a printed sheet too. Don’t interrupt or try to help them complete tasks, regardless of how frustrating watching them might be! It’s important that you remain calm, friendly and impartial throughout.

Reviewing stage - day three

Analysing the results

You should analyse the results of your testing as quickly as possible, preferably the next day.

There’s no need to write a long report, or to cut together expensive videos (if you recorded the tests). Simply get all those involved in the project together and debrief them on your findings. If you need to write it up keep it short and sweet, a bulleted list should suffice. You should concentrate on the issues you found, recommendations on how to fix them, how easy they are to fix and how important the fixes are to your overall strategy. This will help you prioritise the right issues.

Starting all over again!

Once you’ve solved the immediate issues it’s time to start all over again! Studies show that running 3 tests with 5 users will yield better results than running 1 test with 15 users because you are able to test the work you’ve done to resolve the first set of issues.

If you are in the process of developing your website include user testing as part of the development cycle, this will save you making expensive mistakes.

If you already have a website, include user testing as part of your ongoing website maintenance. Testing regularly will keep you in touch with your user’s needs and keep your site relevant. It will also help you to decide on which new features you should implement.

Test early and test often, you can do it.

Shorthand blogging in five minutes

11-05-09 | Posted by: melanie

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How would you like a blog in five minutes? I recently created one using Tumblr. Even better, it's a free service.

Tumblr is like shorthand blogging, you can easily share all the interesting images, videos, links and quotes you find around the web, creating a varied tapestry of content without needing to write time consuming blog posts. You simply see something you like and ‘tumble’ it and by magic it appears on your blog. If you are so inclined you can also write traditional blog posts.

How can a Tumblr blog help my organisation?

A Tumblr blog can be a good way to give your brand a personality, tell a story about a specific issue, be a mood board of inspiration or act as a simple reference tool. You can share what you find funny, cool, creative, inspiring or just down right weird!

Blogging strategy

Before you dive in and set up an account I’d recommend spending 5 minutes (so that’s 10 minutes in total) thinking about the strategy for your blog. What’s the point of it? Is it going to help your overall business objectives? Who is it aimed at? Importantly, how are you going to maintain it? There’s nothing worse than coming across a blog that hasn’t been contributed to in a while. However, I’d also balance these concerns with the idea that sometimes you need to try something out and see how it works to find out the best way to use it.

It is pretty simple to create an account and start sharing, which I think is what makes it so attractive. Once you are logged in there are lots of different ways you can 'tumble'. I use the Firefox plugin, each time I find something I want to publish I just click on the 'Share on Tumblr' in my browser. If you have an iphone you can download an app which allows you to share pictures you’ve taken on your phone. Here’s one I made earlier.

Publicising your blog

You can add a badge to your main website, embed the blog or keep it as a stand alone address. You can choose a look and feel for your blog from a number of different themes (we’re using ‘minimalist’) or you can create your own.

Other stuff

Tumblr is an evolving tool, they have social networking elements where you can follow other blogs a la Twitter, you can ‘like’ posts on other blogs and tag each of your items. I’d recommend reading the FAQs and Goodies for more info.

If you are interested in creating a blog and would like some advice or help setting this up please get in touch and tell us your plans.

Have a look at our Tumblr blog below:

Tools we use

15-04-09 | Posted by: melanie

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One of the great things about using the interweb a lot means we come across all sorts of useful tools which help us get things done and manage our projects effectively. Some of these tools we use pretty much every day and most of them we'd have a hard time doing without. Here's a list of just some of them.

Project management - Basecamp
Task management - Remember The Milk
Accounting - FreeAgentCentral
Web analytics - Google
Email & calendar - Google Apps
Email campaigns & newsletters - epMailer
Chat - Skype
Mobile communication - iPhone
Website content management - Expression Engine, WordPress
Server monitoring - Pingdom
Hosting - OpenMind Hosting
Ideas, concepts, thoughts - pen and paper

One of the things about most of these little beauties is that you do need to put the time in to get the best out. Luckily we've already done that for you so we will be publishing an occasional series of three tips on using these services to help you do just that.

Three tips on Basecamp

Basecamp is a web based project management tool which you pay a monthly subscription to use (there is also a free service for just one project). We use it for managing all of our website projects as it creates a central space where all communication around the project can live. Here are our three tips;

Get your project team members buy-in to Basecamp by a bit of hand holding at the start rather than just expecting them to login and find their way around. We've found that this approach improves the adoption of the system by the team.
Give as many people as possible access to the project area to improve the opportunity for collaboration but be quite specific about what you need feedback on and when you need it. We've found that collaborating doesn't come naturally to some people so they do need 'prescription' initially.
Assess your needs for a project management tool, if you are looking for something with a lot of detail such as scheduling, dependencies and time management then Basecamp might not be right for you. We've found it the loose flexibility to be just right for our agile approach to web development.

Wowing with word clouds

11-03-09 | Posted by: melanie

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Wordle is a word cloud generator. You add some text, a URL or an RSS feed and it will create a beautiful cloud of words. The cloud is like a word picture, giving a visual representation of the information. Once you've created your cloud you can choose different colours, fonts and shapes for your words. It's a fun tool to use and there is something very addictive about watching the words appear on the screen.

We used it to create some simple business cards;

word cloud representing electric putty services

It's such a joy to use I came up with a few practical uses so I've got legitimate reasons to play with it!

Presentations - convey the main ideas of your presentation
Mood boards - create a textual mood board to convey a theme
Analysis - distil information from blogs, speeches or articles into main topics

I'd be interested to hear about any other ideas you might have or ways you've used Wordle. You can see what other people have done in the Wordle Gallery, pop over for some inspiration and then have a go yourself.

Other wordle stuff elsewhere:

Word Cloud Analysis of Obama's Inaugural Speech

Tweets during Presidential debates

Presidential candidates weblog analysis

Business benefits of Twitter

11-02-09 | Posted by: melanie

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It seems that Twitter has finally reached the tipping point and everyone is talking about it, if not actually using it themselves. But what exactly is it and what business benefits can it bring?

What is Twitter

Twitter is a 'micro-blogging' platform where you can publish what you are doing or thinking in 140 characters or less. Anyone who is following you will see your 'tweet' in their twitter stream or on their phone.

Who follows me?

If your account is public then anyone with a Twitter account can follow you. Twitter sends you an email notification when someone starts following you and you can choose to block that person if you wish.

Who can I follow?

You can follow anyone who has a public account. People with private accounts will have to approve you before you can get their tweets.

Should I go public or private?

That depends on what you want your Twitter account for. Private (or protected) tweets don't appear in the public timeline. twitter public timeline

What should I use Twitter for?

People use Twitter for many things; to share, collaborate, network, have fun, meet up, show off, complain, publicise, the list is endless. How can you use it to benefit your business?

Listening to the conversation

For any organisation it is vital to know what people are saying about your brand, product, service or idea. You can use Twitter Search to monitor the conversation, you don't even need a Twitter account to do it. Handily, you can set up an RSS feed so that you'll receive all updates of this search in your feed reader. You can also follow topics through hashtags.org. Hashtags are a kind of tagging on Twitter, tweets can be tagged and these conversations are aggregated on the hashtags.org website. Here's the recent conversation around the Australian bushfires, tagged with #bushfires. To have your own hashtags indexed you need to follow http://twitter.com/hashtags. There is a great introduction to hashtags here.

Contributing to the conversation

The next step in using Twitter is to respond and contribute to the conversation.

Set up an account using your company name.
Respond directly to questions, complaints and issues raised in tweets, make announcements about new services or products, link to your blog posts and share information.
Publish your Twitter feed on your website and encourage people to follow you.

Twitter can be a great opportunity to make connections with real people who are engaged with your business, to learn about what your customers think and to give a more personal face to your organisation.

What next

There is a round up of industry specific uses for Twitter here.

Read about the 5 stages of Twitter acceptance.

Learn how Twitter made Guy Kawasaki's website better.

Read the Guardian guide to Twitter.

Website redesign for Ambulance HART

27-01-09 | Posted by: melanie

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Ambulance hart homepage. We're very pleased to announce the launch of a website redesign for Ambulance HART. We'd been involved with the previous incarnation as technical suppliers (we built the website and provided the CMS). When HART were looking for a redesign and some new features they approached us to do the work.

The HART project recruits ambulance personnel for the Hazardous Area Response Team (HART) and the website is aimed primarily at these frontline staff and managers. The redesign needed to accomodate much more information and also be more visually appealing to the audience. It needed to meet both W3C and NHS accessibility guidelines.

The website has a number of new features including; a news feed with up to the minute ambulance information, an image bank and improved resources section. It also uses the Google search facility. We're really pleased with the results, take a look!

Happy new year 2009

07-01-09 | Posted by: melanie

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Best wishes for the new year. It's jolly cold here in Brighton with temperatures around freezing!I

We've got lots of exciting work coming up in the next few months. We are in the planning stages of development for a new online information resource for librarians providing library services to people with sight loss. The website is a joint iniative between the RNIB, Calibre and ClearVision. We have also been awarded the contract for a new website for Villiers High School in Ealing which we'll begin work on next week. With all our existing client work and pitching on a number of other projects we're busy bees. It's always good to have lots to do at this time of year as it takes your mind off January being a pretty miserable month in the weather stakes. Roll on the Spring!

Happy Christmas everybody

19-12-08 | Posted by: melanie

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We wish you a happy and successful 2009. We have made a little e-card for you which we hope you enjoy.

Follow this link to see our christmas card and to build a snowman. (Humbug alert - contains a christmas song!)

We've given a £50 donation to a charity called Living Paintings rather than spend money on sending Christmas cards this year. Living Paintings create special versions of pictures with raised surfaces and accompanying sound recordings for blind and partially sighted people. The packs, specifically designed for different ages, provide access for those who cannot see to interesting, stimulating and enjoyable pictures.

Opening hours over the festive period

post it note saying 'closed for the holidays'. The Electric Putty office will be closed from 24th December and will reopen on 5th January 2009.

Should you have an urgent support request between these dates please contact us by email during office hours at: .

Your email should clearly outline the nature of the problem you are experiencing and contain a link to the affected pages(s) of the website or CMS. If urgent, we will endeavour to fix your problem within 48 hours or advise you when it will be resolved.

See you next year!

Electric Putty

16 ways to increase your website traffic

02-12-08 | Posted by: melanie

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You’ve installed an analytics tool on your website and you’ve been reviewing your website traffic. Now you want to increase the traffic to your site. Where do you start?

Understanding & analysis

Begin at the beginning. Take time to understand your current situation and what you want to achieve.

Comprehensively understand your analytics and make informed decisions about what metrics you want to improve. Aim for better rather than more traffic.
Know your target audience. Find out why they are visiting your website and what they want to do when they get there.
Monitor your website search and analyse the results to make improvements to your content. You’ll learn what people can’t find, what is popular, and whether you are using the right naming conventions for your content.
Put together a list of key phrases that you expect people to search on to find your website, make sure these phrases appear throughout your site. Use a keyword suggestion tool to help you make decisions about which phrases to use.
Make sure page titles contain the keywords you’ve identified, page titles appear on the search results listing page and will be the link the user clicks to visit your website. This blog post has a good explanation of why page titles are important.
Research the competition. Search for your chosen keywords in Google and review the websites that are listed first. What are they doing better than you?
Monitor buzz about your brand or subject area through tools like Google Alerts, Twitter and other reputation monitoring tools so you can get the 'lie of the land'.

Content creation

Forget whizzy features, content is the most valuable asset your website has. Always aim for better, high quality content.

Review all your content, making sure it is useful, timely and relevant for your target audience.
Write content that gets linked to by other websites, for example; useful articles, how-to’s, opinion, statistics, facts and fun stuff.
Write a blog, focus on posts that contain the kind of information and news your audience wants to know about. Here's a list of 17 types of posts for inspiration.
Write newsletters, focussed on key areas of interest to your visitors, make sure your newsletters have lots of links to additional information within your website.
Get involved with the community around your subject or brand. Write comments on other blogs, respond to discussions in forums, and write articles.
Create profiles or pages for your brand on social sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Squidoo. Register with online directories and listings site relevant to your sector.

Link building

More links to, from and within your website will increase your search visibility if they are genuine and relevant.

Increase the number of links to your website. Put together a list of relevant sites that have the potential to send you traffic and get in touch with them to link to your site. Prioritise sites with a better link 'equity' and make sure the link adds value to your content. You can find some useful link building tactics here.
Increase the number of links within your website. This provides a useful route through the information, helpful for people browsing and robots indexing your site. There are a couple of good tips about creating descriptive links.
Increase the number of links out of your site. Make sure links describe the destination and are embedded within the content on your page. Link directly to relevant content rather than to the homepage.

Is there anything I’ve missed? Do you have any great ideas for increasing your traffic or have an example of something you’ve done which has helped? I’d love to know what you think.

If you need any help with increasing your traffic or you want to know more please do get in touch.

What’s the buzz? Using reputation monitoring to improve your website

07-11-08 | Posted by: melanie

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Everyone is talking about ‘buzz’, in fact as someone said, there’s a buzz about buzz. But, what is it and what can it do for you?

In the age of the social web not only does everyone have an opinion but often they are publishing it online. Buzz (or reputation) monitoring is the activity of tracking those online conversations about your brand. Google Alerts is one of a growing number of free tools that can help you keep your eye on the ball. It’s a good place to start out your monitoring endeavours.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts sends you an email whenever there are new google results for your search terms. You can set up any number of alerts, for example; your company name, ‘electric putty’, a competitors name ‘other web company’ or for a topic ‘web design for third sector organisations’. You can set your alerts to be received once a day or as they happen.

Tracking your company name will give you an insight to your reputation online, if you don’t get any alerts it is an indication that you don’t have a reputation. In this case you’ll have to decide if there really is ‘no such thing as bad publicity’! I hate to use the word spying but keeping an eye on what your competitors are up to and what people are saying about them can also prove fruitful. Tracking topics of interest to you can provide you with intelligence and insight and can be useful if you are responsible for generating content such as news stories or opinion.

Buzz and your website

After monitoring should come managing, now you know what is being said you need to act on it.

Some of this comes down to good old PR and publicity but information will arise that can help you make decisions about how to use your site effectively.

Here's some examples of what you could discover;

People are commenting positively about a service you provide that isn’t highlighted on your site. By making this content more prominent you could increase the number of people using your service.
Your competitors are publishing useful content on their site that you aren’t. Including similar but better written information on your own site can it more ’sticky’, earning you repeat visitors and credibility.
You gain a greater understanding of peoples views and beliefs around a particular topic of interest. You can use this to write more informed news stories on your site, establishing your organisation as a resource for knowledgeable, trustworthy information.

As buzz monitoring becomes more established and more tools become available there will really be no excuse for not knowing what conversations are taking place and taking action to improve the users experience of your site. The next post will discuss using Twitter for buzz monitoring.

King content

29-10-08 | Posted by: melanie

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Your content really is king, I know it’s been said a squillion times before but I’m saying it again because it’s true! So often, the content is the last thing on the client agenda when a website is being built, when it should be first. The content is the very essence of why you have a website at all.

Writing your content should be central to your ongoing web strategy. Here are some tips which should help you hone your style and keep writing.

Write about things people want to know.
Always think about your audience when you are writing content and ask yourself if the information is useful and appealing. Understanding your audience and knowing what interests them is the most important part of successful writing on the web.
Write useful headings (and lots of them).
Use headings throughout your site to lead your audience to the content and break up the text. People are more likely to ‘skim’ through content on a screen, searching out the information they want. Headings for important sections of content assist your audience in finding what they are looking for.
Use language people will understand.
Make sure that you are using the words and terms that your audience will understand, these are the words they will be searching for on your site. Use these key words and phrases in the headings and also within the text.
Write one idea per paragraph.
People read information on a screen more slowly than on paper. They tend to prefer smaller chunks and find long paragraphs of text off-putting. Use short and to the point paragraphs with all your content.
Use a less formal style and don’t waffle.
Try to use a more conversational style in your writing. People are less prepared to wade through formal, wordy text to find the information they want so get to the point of what you want to say. Follow a journalistic style which puts the most important information at the top and the least at the bottom and don’t write an essay. Read what Jakob Nielson has to say about blah-blah text.
Use a clear layout (like this!)
- Make sure your content is easy to read.
- Use bulleted or numbered lists where appropriate.
- Use bold text for important information.
- Use a consistent style with headings throughout (see 2. for more on headings).
Update content a little but often.
Keep your website content fresh. Following the ‘little and often’ maxim will make sure you are not overwhelmed by having to write but will keep your site up-to-date, fresh and interesting. Block out some time in your diary each week to spend writing.
Link to relevant content elsewhere on your site.
People often search out links in the text as a way of finding the information they need. By creating lots of links to other relevant content on your website you are providing a useful route through your site.
Create lots of links to information outside of your website.
This demonstrates that your site is a reliable source of information and will increase the usefulness of your website for your target audience. Choose your links carefully and link to credible sources.

What is RSS?

21-10-08 | Posted by: melanie

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An RSS feed is content that can be delivered from a website, often a blog, into an RSS reader. When new content is published the RSS feed reader is notified and downloads the content to be read within the reader. Instead of having to visit all your favourite websites to find updates you can read them all in one place. You’ll often see the words RSS (really simple syndication) and the orange RSS icon where content is published as a feed.

What is an RSS reader?

An RSS reader is the tool that automatically gathers and displays a list of all new, unread items from all your different feeds. You can subscribe to new feeds and unsubscribe from existing feeds using your reader. Just to confuse matters, RSS readers are also known as feed readers, news readers and aggregators. Here is a screen grab of my screen reader.

How do I get an RSS reader?

Many newer web browsers now have built in news readers. Some examples are Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE7) and Safari. Other readers are web based, the advantage of these types of reader is that you can access them from any browser once you've logged in. Some examples are Newsgator and Bloglines and our preferred reader, Google. There are also a number of desktop readers such as Feed Demon (Windows) and NetNewsWire (Mac).

How do I subscribe to a feed?

Subscribing is usually as easy as clicking ‘subscribe’ or the RSS icon. This will usually launch your reader that will automatically add the latest feed to your list of subscriptions.

Watch a video explaining ‘RSS in Plain English’

This video explains RSS in a simple, enjoyable way, watch and learn and then get reading!

New Electric Putty site goes live

17-10-08 | Posted by: melanie

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Well, it's finally here, our new and improved website. We've taken the opportunity to revamp our visual identity and include our mission 'making websites that make sense'.

Now you might think a mission statement is a bit of a tired old concept and previously I might have agreed with you. It sounds like advertising or worse, business jargon. Either way it somehow doesn't seem relevant today.

Once you think about a mission statement as something that in one sentence encapsulates your purpose and what you strive for, it can become an incredibily powerful way to tell people your story. On the web this becomes even more important. A study in 2006 found that people make decisions about your site in less than a second! Put that statistic into the mix and a bold, clear mission statement prominently placed on your site becomes essential.

So, we hope you like our mission statement. It is what we are.

We’re closed for a week

02-10-08 | Posted by: melanie

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The office will be closed from 6th - 10th October while we take a holiday. We're off to North Norfolk which is a very beautiful spot with stunning beaches, lovely seaside towns and cute pubs. We can't wait!

If you are an EP client and you have an urgent support request between these dates please contact us by email at: . Your email should clearly outline the nature of the problem you are experiencing and contain a link to the affected pages(s) of the website or CMS.

If you want to talk to us about a project then please drop us an email to . We'll get in touch as soon as we are back.

Archive

Categories

We’re growing!

06-07-10 | Posted by: Malcolm

New office, comes with chandelier

23-04-10 | Posted by: melanie

Happy belated New Year!

15-02-10 | Posted by: melanie

Happy holidays

23-12-09 | Posted by: melanie

Office hours over the festive period

Christmas donation

Some of our favourite things of 2009

Are you up or down?

16-09-09 | Posted by: melanie

What you need to know about monitoring

Monitoring services

Is it down or is it just me?

DIY website user testing in three days

16-07-09 | Posted by: melanie

What exactly is user testing?

Benefits of user testing

Taking the plunge

Planning stage - day one

What to test

Who to test

Recruiting participants

Creating context

Creating tasks

Testing stage - day two

Capturing the results

Practice makes perfect-ish

Carrying out the tests

Reviewing stage - day three

Analysing the results

Starting all over again!

Further reading to get you started;

Shorthand blogging in five minutes

11-05-09 | Posted by: melanie

How can a Tumblr blog help my organisation?

Blogging strategy

Publicising your blog

Other stuff

Have a look at our Tumblr blog below:

Tools we use

15-04-09 | Posted by: melanie

Three tips on Basecamp

Wowing with word clouds

11-03-09 | Posted by: melanie

Business benefits of Twitter

11-02-09 | Posted by: melanie

What is Twitter

Who follows me?

Who can I follow?

Should I go public or private?

What should I use Twitter for?

Listening to the conversation

Contributing to the conversation

What next

Website redesign for Ambulance HART

27-01-09 | Posted by: melanie

Happy new year 2009

07-01-09 | Posted by: melanie

Happy Christmas everybody

19-12-08 | Posted by: melanie

Opening hours over the festive period

16 ways to increase your website traffic

02-12-08 | Posted by: melanie

Understanding & analysis

Content creation

Link building

What’s the buzz? Using reputation monitoring to improve your website

07-11-08 | Posted by: melanie

Google Alerts

Buzz and your website

King content

29-10-08 | Posted by: melanie

What is RSS?

21-10-08 | Posted by: melanie

What is an RSS reader?