In the Vizcom Office this week, everyone’s been waiting on tenterhooks for mail, and not just physical post but emails too.  Firstly, He Who Must Be Queried has bought Himself a bivvy for his weekend fishing jaunts so can’t wait until that arrives- in fact he’s been a bit like a dog with a bone, getting all excited about it arriving sometime this week.

Diet Girl had her beloved mobile phone stolen last weekend, and is waiting for her replacement to arrive, as in her words, she ‘can’t wholly function without it’,  and The Happy Man has ordered himself a new book about ‘Long Walks In The Lake District’ (sounds just up my street) and is waiting for that to arrive.

In between the building anticipation every time our postman’s due to arrive,  He Who Must Be Queried and Diet Girl have been working on The New Service for the customers. I’m not 100% sure what it all means, but from what I can gather, it involves the pair of them creating pretty little emails on behalf of people and sending them out to other people for some reason. As I said, I don’t really understand, but I saw one of them today on Diet Girl’s computer and it looked really nice. And she was dead pleased with it too, so she pressed send and then the pair of them got on with waiting for the postman to arrive.

I wish someone would send me something through the post…..

PS Diet Girl has just seen what I’ve written. The New Service I wrote about is apparently called Email Marketing. If you want to know anything about it, get in contact with the humans, they never tell me anything….

Anyways, nothing’s really changed too much back here in the Vizcom Design office- The Master, The Happy Man and Diet Girl are all pretty much the same since I lost wrote. I’m still sat behind the filing cabinet on my computer, although this may not be happening for much longer as I heard The Master discussing the fact that we may have another person joining our team, and thus, our office in the not so distant future. I wonder where their desk will be??

Otherwise, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my last couple of days of being back online and have been learning lots again- I’ve seriously felt like my brain’s switched off without my beloved internet access.

My latest ‘Big Thing’ is the history of Typography, geeky I know, but also so very interesting. It all started off when I heard an interview on the radio with a man who runs a website called Ban Comic Sans.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Comic Sans is a font produced by Microsoft in the early 90s to mimic the fonts used in comic book strips and to be used informally. However, with the rise of the internet and of course the evolution of home computers, Typography as a highly respected art form has been invaded as everyone who has the right software, and sadly, not enough design skills or common sense it seems, when it comes to using the right text for the job.

For example, the Ban Comic Sans website features a gallery that is just what I’m talking about.  If you are writing say, an advertisement for a job at your company, you would use maybe a Times New Roman font, maybe a Helvetica. You certainly wouldn’t use Comic Sans as, in the words of the Ban Comic Sans peeps, it  ‘conveys silliness, childish naivete, irreverence, and is far too casual for such a purpose. It is analogous to showing up for a black tie event in a clown costume.’

I cannot help but agree.

It’s all very nice having design software, Photoshop and the internet available to everyone to exercise their creative skills,  but it’s worth remembering that although you have the technology at your fingertips, you may not have the experience, ability or flair that you wish you had, and in the words of Diet Girl ‘if you’re messing around with the appearance of your business, one wrong font, colour, image, logo or could be devastating. It would be like turning up to a movie premier wearing a shell suit.’

You may remember that a couple of months ago, I gave a nod to Websites That Suck, which provides a catalogue of shockingly  bad websites for you to chuckle over? I’ve been through that site lots and it’s kept me entertained many an afternoon since, but the thing is that a lot of the websites listed there are owned by businesses that have obviously paid designers to create this monstrosity *ahem* I mean online presence for them.

And now I’ve seen all of those bad websites, I can’t help but critique every website I land upon, whether personal or business, and it’s all I can do to stop myself clicking the ‘Contact’ button (if you’re lucky enough for the webmaster to have bothered including one)  and saying ‘please don’t do that to your website!’

If you have the time today, have a read through the Ban Comic Sans website. It’s interesting, it’s informative, and it certainly makes you think about how badly selected fonts can affect the message you’re trying to put across.

Diet Girl here this afternoon, under duress I must tell you- that silly dog has pushed me in front of her screen whilst she turns my workspace upside down to look for Eric The Penguin. I’ve been reliably informed by Daniel (’The Master’ to regular readers of this blog) that Eric has been missing for several weeks now and Ruby is distraught. In fact, she hasn’t been on youtube all day, she’s that upset.

I guess it’s me for today’s update then folks…..

So back to Boyzone. I hate Ronan and his bunch of manufactured cronies as much as the next person, but the lyrics to that song have a valid point. As the author of a lot of the articles, copy and forum posts that are sent out from Vizcom, and as someone who spends at least three days a week floating about on the internet (actually that’s a lie- it’s more 24/7, 365, but I don’t want you thinking that I’m an anti-social anorak), I can’t help but notice that bad quality of writing on some of the sites that I visit.

If you own a website for your business, or are thinking of purchasing one- perhaps you actually build websites as part of your job or hobby, then please, read on.

I’m aware that when you construct your website pages, there’s a certain amount of keywords that you should use within the text to ensure that the site turns up in search engine results when a potential customers types in the write words and phrases.

So I imagine, if you’re anything like me, you have a list of words for each page, and try and ‘join them together’ which is the crux of my argument.

When I was a kid, I had a load of magnetic flash cards with words on each which I would chain together on the fridge to make sentances and stories and bore my doting parents to death with, and it’s it’s this, which is now being practised by grown adults, which makes their websites read badly. In fact, I’d even go as far as saying ’spammy’.

What I’m talking about is when the webmaster (or whoever it is has written the text) and done minimal work with the keywords. Sometimes, they just have commas in between each and you have to use the nav bar to work out where to go on the site, which is usually peppered with internal links like they’ve going out of fashion. Other times though, they’ve been a little more creative, and used ‘and’, ‘with’, ‘plus’ and ‘including’ in between each keyword to join them together under the guise that they’ve actually made some effort, but also creating the most boring text known to man.

For example, imagine a website that sells socks, and you need to incorporate the different ranges of socks available. What it should read like is something along the lines of:

“Huxleys Socks have been producing socks and slippers for over twenty years, and are suppliers to Woolworths and JJB Sports, as well as several independant retailers throughout the Glasgow area.

To see our Sports range, including socks for Football, Climbing, Diving and Basketball, click here….”

You don’t have to be Enid Blyton to make a sentance that is appealing to the reader- just remember that you’re writing for people, and not just for search engines.

An example of the kind of text that I’m complaining about, using my sock shop analogy would be:

“Buy socks, football socks, climbing socks, diving socks, basketball socks- click here!”

That doesn’t make me want to click anything, that makes me want to find the author and slap them with a wet fish.

Today alone, I’ve come across seven of these sites whilst researching an article I’m writing for one of our customers, and it’s so frustrating when you’ve got a mountain of sites to trawl though and your attention is waning as the amount you’ve read so far is ridiculous and there’s still a few more to go, and the style of writing is so unimaginative that it could sedate a small child.

Surely, in the words of Ronan, et.al, if ‘words are all we have’ then we should be using them to their best potential, not boring our potential customers to death when all it takes is a little effort to make your text incorporate your keywords and sound appealing to a human reader.

If you can’t write- then admit it, and find someone who can to supply the text to your website- please, don’t put people off by spamming your pages with strings of keywords in sentences and paragraphs that don’t make sense.

Plenty of website companies, including ours, offer writing services, and often for quite an affordable price. In a world that is becoming increasingly virtual, don’t let your companies’ online presence slide because you couldn’t be bothered to sort out your content; it leaves experienced surfers like me bored and frustrated and I won’t lie to you, we’ll click the dreaded ‘back’ button quicker than anyone else to get out of there.

Anyway, that’s my rant over with. I had planned to do some more work but now my desk is such as mess because of the dog, I shall ignore it until tomorrow. Presuming Eric is found, Ruby will be returning tomorrow, so thank you for putting up with my rant and no doubt I’ll be back again covering Rube’s holidays……

Anyway, the discussions between the humans have been making me chuckle today, as The Master is trying to teach Diet Girl about Website Design. Teaching her anything and getting her to retain the information is an impressive feat in itself, as Diet Girl is the kind of person who gets confused by sentences that consist of more than five words.

The interesting part of this process though, is that they’re both direct opposites of each other- whereas The Master surfs technical forums and can explain how the bones behind a website work, Diet Girl is an internet addict and although she can’t explain how anything works, she knows what it should look like. Also, the only forums she seems to read are related to poorly written 80s cartoon fanfics and shoes.

Now, in case you didn’t know, The Master is one of the leading companies offering website design in Bolton, Manchester, and the surrounding areas. He’s been coding, cropping and uploading since before he adopted me, and my earliest memories involve The Mistress trying to position me on a piece of newspaper on the kitchen floor whilst The Master sat at his desk, constructing websites for local businesses.

Now years later, I’m housetrained (seriously, it’s not easy ‘to go’ when you have someone stood in front of you saying ‘good girl!’ every thirty seconds) and he’s got an impressive portfolio of completed projects under his belt.

He’s specialised in affordable web site design services for small businesses, including eCommerce sites, Content Management Systems and custom web site designs; affordable to many, cheap to some, he provides a quality service with a lot of practical knowledge. What I’m trying to say is, he knows his stuff.

Diet Girl, as I said before, isn’t very technically minded but knows how things should look. She did used to have a website of her own she built as a hobby, and she confessed all about it in the office today. It seems she has committed several heinous crimes herself in the world of website design.

This was confirmed to her when The Master pointed out various forum posts on web design sites during lunch. As she ate her salad (Faddy Diet #39743), she paused momentarily to choke and splutter in reaction to the words on the screen.

Her crimes on her original website (which has now been taken down, sadly, otherwise I would’ve posted a link up here so we could all have a giggle at it) are as follows:

• Technicolour ‘True Type’ Fonts;
• Broken Links;
• Scrolling Marquee text;
• Flashing Gif. animations most of which were from free sites and thus everybody but everybody with a bad/cheap/unimaginative website used them;
• Overlapping, drop-down menus;
• No proper page titles- her home page was called ‘New Page Title 1′;
• A design which wasn’t uniformly adopted by every page on the site- the main design was an entirely black page with coloured text, however of the 8 pages- 3 of them were a totally different design;
• Overuse of ClipArt (cringe);
• Unimaginative stock photos;
• Massive images that weren’t resized from her trip around Thailand- that page took years to load apparently;
• And finally the icing on the cake- visitor counters ON EVERY PAGE.

Diet Girl is currently sitting in the corner wearing a dunce hat that The Master usually keeps in the Vizcom office for ocassions such as this. She’s been there for the last two hours, although The Master, in an attempt to make her feel better about the online monstrosity that she’d created, made her a cup a tea.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ He said. ‘There’s still people who come to me and ask for those same kinds of features on a site- it’s not bad- it just means that they know very little about the internet and how website design has moved on since 1999. At least you know to never use those features again,’

This seemed to make her a little better, and as I type, she’s eating a Mars Bar, which to her is a Cure For Everything. So, the moral of the here kids, is if you live near us in Lancashire, Bolton or Manchester, and you want a quality website designing and constructing which is not only aesthetically pleasing, but user and search engine friendly, look know further than The Master. He’ll set you straight.

Until next time……

The Master on the other hand, is well rested and has picked up a golden tan after spending his weekend drinking some stuff call ’scrumpy’ at Glastonbury and watching an old man call ‘The Boss’. The Master has a Boss? I’m not sure how that works in the human’s social pecking ordr, I may look that up on Wikipedia later on.

Anyway, Diet Girl, despite melting in the heat, has been harassing the pair of us for a song, to which she doesn’t know the band, or any of the lyrics it seems. All she knows is that it’s song by a man and the chorus goes ‘Hey! Hey! Hey!’

Any ideas? Please let me know, before I chew her ears off too….

I haven’t really done that much today, just moped about after The Master. He’s going on holiday with The Mistress to a thing called a festival on Wednesday, meaning I’m being packed off to stay with Pumpkin the Labrador for the weekend. I don’t mind Pumpkin sometimes, but other times she’s really high maintenance and talks all the time- and sometimes I just enjoy a bit of peace and quiet.

I did my first ever online personality quiz today. I’ve been sent loads of the application versions on Facebook, but to be honest, I didn’t really have much incentive to complete them; ‘Which High School Musical character are you?’ and ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ are hardly high up on my agenda. This one though, I couldn’t resist. I spent ten minutes on ‘How Smart Is Your Pet?’ to discover that I’m ‘Pretty darn bright, and if you work on trick-training and other mind-expanding games your dog will likely be even tuned in and fun to have as a companion.’

What?

I’m not fun to have as a companion in the first place? Like I need improving? I was quite insulted. I’m very likeable and well behaved, and I look nice. No improvements needed here.

I was also very impressed to find that another dog has commented on my last blog post. Hello to Lacey The Lurcher, I did try and follow your links to leave a ‘Thank You’ on your blog, but it appears you are running a successful print and framing empire! Are you allowed a blog? Have you asked your Master, or Mistress?

Thanks you for the comment anyhow if you reading this, and FYI, I am not a sheep, it’s simply the trademark of The Masters’ office, where I am most of the week. I did try to add some photos of myself to today’s entry to prove this, but for some reason my photo add-on keeps crashing! Ah the joys of the internet, eh?

I’ll be back hopefully before my imminent stay with Pumpkin- no internet for five whole days- how will I cope??

Until next time kids…..

When we got to the office and dried off a bit, Diet Girl arrived after her walk from the railway station and she was none too happy about the rain either. Then Happy Man came through the door, beaming through the atmosphere of dampness and grumbles, chattering about ‘teamwork’ like a motivational poster from the 90s. I am now inclined to agree with Diet Girl- there is something wrong with him- no-one can be that happy.

Anyway, I spent the morning mosying through the online press and discovered this little gem:

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3362630.html?menu=

Aaah! At last it’s been recognised the the humans don’t really understand us, although truth be told, I’ve known this for some years now.  My kind have over 100 different facial expressions actually, but most of those include the positioning of our ears. This means that bulldogs and pitbulls only have ten expressions, due to their breeding, and that’s also the reason they get into so many fights with other dogs- as they’re so easily misinterpreted. See? You learn something new every day!

Basically, from what I can gather, the page is written to help new and existing businesses to use networking sites and various other online resources to help optimise their website and promote themselves on the internet, but like with all things Diet Girl gets assigned- she can’t keep it simple!

I was watching her from my post behind the filing cabinet, for about an hour, but it was only when I sat on her desk and looked at the screen, I could see what the problem was.

You see, the idea was that she wrote a little about getting your business started on the various big websites, before detailing a few of the smaller, regional efforts, but what she had thought would be an easy job turned into a massive task, as it seems there’s a lot more to creating online profiles than there was a few years ago.

From looking at her screen, sure, some sites haven’t changed- such as Yahoo for example. Sign up for account, add your photo and minimal information, and that’s pretty much it.  The same goes for Myspace, Digg and Bebo, although they seem to be flailing in the overwhelming success of Facebook, which is where Diet Girl is now, head in hands.

You see, half her problem is that she has to write down what she’s doing, as she’s doing it- which is a problem for her. I know that most female humans can multitask, but for her that usually just involves breathing and walking- today’s typing and writing is getting her nowhere.

Anyway, apart from watching Diet Girl, I’ve spent most of this afternoon, clicking my way through http://cheezburger.com/ one of the many sites featuring Lol Catz and Lol Dogz. In case you didn’t know what this is, and you happened to be an animal lover (which of course I hope you are!), ‘Lol’s are photos of pets where surfers are invited to create funny captions for them.

Like Diet Girl on Hot Or Not, I’m drawn to this like a moth to the flame. It’s free to register for an account, and then you can flick through the images and rate them as you please, maybe even add some captions for yourself- seriously, it’s too addictive!

Anyhow, Happy Man’s gone home, and The Master’s shaking my lead so I’d best go and take my place in the car.

Until next time kids!

Seriously it is.

According to Wikipedia:

“The term Internet meme (pronounced /mi?m/, meem) is a phrase used to describe a catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet, much like an inside joke.^“

I knew there was a word for it! After spending literally months on the internet, I’ve come across several of these memes already, from Numa Numa, to the Starwars Kid, Ninja Kitty to Badger Badger, and have given them a brief nod in here before. And then today, I stumbled across this:

http://www.dipity.com/tatercakes/Internet_Memes

Every major meme from 1989 onwards!!! Oh my word!!

I’d write more for you all today, but I hope you understand I’m only up to 2001 so far, and there’s many more memes to be seen!

Until next time…..

The Master has managed to burn his legs whilst at out fishing as he ‘couldn’t be bothered’ to get his sun lotion from the house, and opposite him is Diet Girl who, being ginger like myself,  has been shirking away from daylight for most of the day and is hiding behind her desk, decked out in massive sunglasses and slurping a bottle of water like her very life depends on it.

I personally had a lovely walk in the park and have spent most of the day lazing about with my laptop enjoying the bit of sunshine coming through the window. I can’t understand the humans- they complain when it rains, and complain when the sun shines- are they ever happy?

Diet Girl brought a copy of The Metro into the office this morning, which I snaffled out of the bin and had a read through before shredding into tiny pieces just to pass the time. There was, however, one article which caught my eye, shortly before I transformed it into a grey, slavery mush.

It was about this website:

http://www.cardsofchange.com/display.php?id=2b590ff5a9dc30a2f271b690a9ecf693&page=

A brilliant idea, I’m sure you’ll agree, but not far flung at all from the fabulous:

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

Which is an art project that has been going for years now, producing many book in the process.

So I’m sat behind the filing cabinet, checking the sites out, when The Master and Diet Girl spy my screen and start talking shop- mainly business cards and stationery, which is one of Vizcom’s services:

 Business Card Printing

(Just in case you’re interested)

Then all of this talk of business cards got us all thinking- The Master and Diet Girl discussed making another video for the website- (which coincidentally he uploaded today):

http://www.vizcomdesign.co.uk/Search-Engine-Marketing/70/

With a second video being about business cards and stationery dos and don’ts- ie, don’t print your own using ClipArt, don’t get your friends to ‘design’ it to save money, etc.

And the talk of business cards got me thinking- I’m a dog- I’ll never have a business card to give someone. My species sniff bums, lick faces, chase sticks and run in streams- thankfully business networking is not something I’ll ever have to endure. But a Post Secret?

Now that’s something I’d like to do. There is some postcards in the desk, but I’ve spent the rest of the afternoon deciding what my secret would be- as without realising it, I’ve amassed so many!

‘When The Master frustrates me, I lie under his desk and fart deliberately.’

Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the winner right there!

I also have to say hello to Thieving Gypsy, a friend of The Master who works down the hallway from Vizcom. He left a comment in here and I got the hint he wasn’t ‘involved’ enough- but I suspect that’s because he rarely leaves his own office. So, Thieving Gypsy, hello to you

Until next time kids……