I will also do a live demo of Squarespace, showing just how easy and quickly you can put together a great little website. In fact, I am hoping to be able to create a full website within the 55minute session, so I’m setting myself a big target! If you are in London next Tuesday and want to see how it’s done, learn more about to the tools out there, hear my tips and pitfalls to avoid, then pop on over to NetSquared and sign up. Everyone is welcome so please do stop by!

It sure is nice to be recognised out of the millions of bloggers/designer-developers out there. And speaking of Squarespace, I have set up a showcase of my Squarespace projects, so hop on over to UsingMyHead on Squarespace if you fancy learning a bit more.

Web Designer Magazine

I was thrilled and honoured to find that one of my client websites is featured in Web Designer magazine this month. The Festinho website is listed as number 4 in their top 24 fave Squarespace websites, which is rather nice. The Festinho site has been a collaboration between myself and Raz at Auralmassage, so we are both chuffed to bits to find that our fellow web geeks think the site is pretty special. Pop on down to you local newsagents and pick up issue 162 if you want to see for yourself (we’re on page 70). Yay!

I’m quite excited to be working with this client, as they are doing some really mindblowing work on Alzheimer’s disease. They have discovered some rather groovy things about brain cells and the cell cycle, and are working on ways of diagnosing and treating this disease BEFORE the symptoms start showing. Wow. How cool is that?

The website is chock full of science-y things I don’t quite understand, but I know they are lovely people doing great work at the cutting edge of their industry. It’s been another quick-turnaround project for me, with the whole thing being built and populated within about 8 working days. Once again, like my Festinho clients, they already had a website but couldn’t make changes, and they really wanted to be able to control the content themselves. They liked the sound of Squarespace and the speed at which I could translate their existing site into the Squarespace system, so whizz-bang* and we were done. I quite like doing these quick problem-solver projects, as both the client and I get nearly instant gratification in seeing the results.

We’re hoping to work together on another new site in future, as well as some rebranding, but for now I’m pleased as punch to be helping these guys get their message out online.

* Not the official technical term for design, build and content population of a website… but seems to be my slogan of the moment

The winning concept was to have the website designed as though you were looking down at one of the Vivid designers’ desks, with some of the elements they might have there: scraps of paper, a sketchbook, masking tape, slides and photos from a mood board. I really like the end result, and feel the dark grey sets off the client images nicely, with the red accents adding the right amount of Vivid punch. Have a look for yourself and let me know what you think

This is my 7th Squarespace website to go live in 6 months, and  I must say I am really pleased with the speed at which I can deliver polished, custom websites to my clients. I can’t imagine having been able to deliver this quantity – and quality – of sites with all the features in the same amount of time using any other system. So far, all clients have fallen in love with the ease at which they can edit their websites, and we are both impressed with the sophistication and broad feature set that you get, for around the same price as regular web hosting that comes without a CMS.

Naturally, there are some limitations and things that Squarespace could do better… if I can find time to breathe I will try to summarise them in another post. But overall, I am pleased as punch – and in fact I’ve got to get back to work on yet another Squarespace site due to launch next week. Whew!

It’s a great cause, so I was happy to help out, and because Squarespace makes it so easy to design, build, and edit a website, it seemed the right tool to use. They already had a visual design, so I was able to translate this into a working ‘empty shell’ website in the Squarespace content management system within 24 hours. Within 96 hours, they had a fully-functioning website with all 43 pages of content in place, including blog, photo galleries, and contact form. Within 98 hours they had been trained on how to edit the site through the simple Squarespace CMS.

We’re still finetuning a few things, but the great news is that we were able to launch before their deadline – how often does that happen, especially when the deadline is less than a week?! Have a look at www.festinho.com and while you’re there, why not get yourself a ticket to the festival? It’s a magical weekend in the countryside, with all proceeds going to support Brazil’s needy children.

Although I didn’t get much of an insight into the programme’s projects and output, I did enjoy Rohan Gunatillake’s intro into the film, especially the tag clouds he had made based on the first names and employers of who had registered for tickets (no surprise that ‘Miko’ was a tiny speck in the cloud, dwarfed by ‘Paul’ and ‘Sarah’!). Rohan is the new member of NESTA Connect who is looking after the Web Connect side of things. I look forward to finding out more about what Rohan has in mind for NESTA.

The film itself was an hour-long series of interviews and case studies on various social media projects, based mainly in the UK. The intention of the film was to demonstrate how social media is not just a side activity people use to waste time and gab with their mates, but that the very nature of exposing connections and allowing for easier connection and collaboration between individuals could have a profound impact on society as a whole. Ivo Gormley introduced the film by stating:

more people can say more things to more people than ever before

- and there’s no way something as big as that can’t have an impact. I agree – there’s no denying this has had huge impact on the way business, governments and individuals now communicate. Transparency is now more critical than being ‘on message’; timeliness is now more important than dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. This was touched on in the film, but the core messages of the film were about connectivity, participation and trust.

I was glad to see some case studies I hadn’t already heard of, and I particularly liked the inclusion of an offline case study: that of Morecambe Council, who decided to let the town citizens choose how to spend £20,000 of taxpayer money on a project of their choosing. The projects ranged from improving playground facilities, to cleaning up the churchyard, to building new track for the model railway. Each project had a live 5-minute pitch, and the audience (town citizens) could vote on who got the money – a real return to town hall meetings of not-so-long ago.

It would be interesting to see if Gormley would have made a different film today, knowing what we now know about the Obama campaign and his commitment to returning power to the people. I think an interesting parallel could be drawn between the Morecambe case study and Obama’s decision to empower his constituency to canvas for votes using their own language in their own time. I think examples such as these set a precedent in which people expect to be involved, and once that’s set, it’s hard to go back to the old top-down ways. It’s this increasing expectation of participation that will create lasting, real change. The more we can collaborate, edit, re-write, comment on, vote, rate, review, participate, upload, remix, mash-up, link up and create content online, the more we will come to expect it as a baseline part of the deal, whether online or off.

It’s hard to convey the sense of hope and positivity the film embued, so I suggest you check it out for yourself. There’s loads of clips and info over here on the Us Now site if you can’t make it to a screening. And if you fancy seeing what impact the film had on the audience, Rohan has put together a Slideshare deck made up of people’s written response to the film on the night. Warm feelings just in time for Christmas!

Haque explained that the reason for the huge crash in the financial markets was that Wall Street had sliced, diced and rebundled securities and sold them on, to the point where it was no longer sustainable. What made them fall is that they were doing this ‘remixing’ within an old paradigm. He drew a parallel between this scenario and the new online trend for widgets: after all, most widgets simply take existing content, and slice it up, mix it up, chunk it up and then spit it out for consumption. According to Haque (and I’m in pretty close agreement), most widgets today are just glorified redistribution methods for the same old junk, just streams of ads no one wants, repackaged with the shiny badge of being ‘widgetised’.

Haque went on to say that the media needs to shift out of its old paradigm if it is to survive; the old paradigm being the practice of shoving ads down customers’ throats. In an age where consumers don’t have to watch ads anymore, using widgets as ads just doesn’t fly. Tomorrow’s ads need to give value to consumers, tomorrow’s communication needs to improve or enhance the customer’s skills, not dull them with ’stupid passive zombified entertainment’. That’s a shift indeed, but I do have (perhaps naive) faith. I’m just not sure how long it will take for media to catch on to the idea.

There are some great widgets out there – for example, the last.fm / Google Maps mashup that shows where the bands you listen to on last.fm are playing live. But widgets like this are usually created by the developer community, not the big media companies. And with services like Widgetbox allowing people to create widgets without the need for a developer or any understanding of code, the ratio of rubbish to brilliant widgets is only set to get greater.

What media owners need to do is take a leaf out of the book of Creative Commons and the blogging community, where people regularly give things away for the sheer joy of giving or being helpful to another human being. Take for example, the coolest thing since free wifi itself: Londonist’s free wifi map of London. It’s been created and made public for free, is constantly updated by the steady stream of reader comments in the original post, and is the sheer essence of sharing something useful: ‘giving back‘ without needing to be ‘given to’ first.

Whether or not this concept will fly with the business and revenue models of most media companies, is yet to be seen. I guess that’s what Umair Haque meant when he called for a paradigm shift. I only hope that it happens before the days when today’s young people, who have grown up living their lives online, take over. Because I will probably be too old by then to even remember what the hell a widget was in the first place.

Part 2 in the ad:tech London Follow-up posts

If you’ve never understood what this term means, have a look at my definition and let me know if it makes sense to you. Because I predict you’re going to hear a lot more about it soon.

A post I wrote on the NESTA blogs about the winner of Microsoft’s Design IT competition, which is a screensaver created by user-generated content designed to help Alzheimer’s sufferers store their personal memories:

The screensaver is a simple application with the “why didn’t I think of that” factor: a carer and person with dementia can upload text, video and photos to the screensaver to help them remember important people, moments and facts about their lives. It’s great when an existing technology like this can be adopted and put to good use…

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>