brand development

Alloyfish brand development. {Part 1}

I get asked about this fairly often so I thought that I would write a little bit about why we chose to use Alloyfish as a name for our company. When looking for company names, we literally had hundreds of ideas, and also we decided that we wanted www.ourname .com if possible to give a professional and established feel, and also buy .co.uk equivalents. We played with a variety of names which were rejected for various reasons, the names which met the domain name criteria and had 'something extra' reached a later

Alloyfish brand development. {Part 2}

The form of a fish was stripped down to create a simple geometric form based on three dissected squares. The different parts and colours satisfy the requirement for the likeness different parts to make up an alloy. The following image shows the basic transition from concept ideas towards the final graphic.

Good is not good enough

"Every success is built on the ability to do better than good enough", or so the saying goes; and as sayings go that one will go far.  Good enough was only good enough when you were the only game in town and that town only had one horse.  Even then, good enough was never really very good. Today's world demands excellence.  Every sector can be neatly divided between excellence which generally has the lion's share of the market, and good enough which bumbles along just about making ends meet.  Gone are the days in which you could sell good-enough at the price of excellence based upon a lack of competition.  Welcome to the global marketplace where there is competition for everything, and your competition may well be paying just pence an hour.  Good, cheap and fast; pick any one to target as a market advantage, so long as it's not cheap.

AJAX, the mystery begins

Let's talk about true and false.  Ah, basic boolean?  No, not exactly.  AJAX is one of the most common buzz-words in website development today.  True.  Most web-developers are able to write AJAX.  False.  Most web-developers who create fancy 'AJAX-effect's know how to write AJAX.  False. Pick up a book on AJAX, and often as not it will start off by telling you that the key to AJAX is 'this' framework or 'that' library.  Ooops... that's not teaching you AJAX, that's teaching you how to use a tool for setting up dynamic interaction.  The AJAX was written by the guy who created the framework or the library. What's so special about AJAX?  To be honest, nothing.  It's elegant; but what it gains in elegance it loses in both speed and support. More true and false.  AJAX is the only way to set up asynchronous communication with a server.  False.  AJAX is the name for things which aren't Flash but look like Flash.  False.  AJAX requires ActiveX support to run on Internet Explorer, the disabling of which has long been highly recommended to all.  True.  AJAX is fast.  False

Multiple Sites in Adwords

Many companies manage multiple websites, each offering different services. In some cases, these services will be related to one another, in other cases they will be completely separate o…