Sugar Blog

Social Media makes it’s presence felt in the UK

David — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:06:02 +0000

Earlier this week Hitwise released some new numbers that demonstrates how important Social Media is becoming in the UK. For anyone still wondering whether they should be taking a look at Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, blogging or any other social media service for their business the following graph makes for sobering reading:

Traffic to social networks during May 2010 passed the traffic to search engines. That is quite a milestone and from the looks of things it is not going to get reversed anytime soon. Despite the controversy surrounding Facebook’s privacy policies, the site continues to grow at an astonishing rate garnering 55% of all social network traffic in the UK. Youtube and Twitter are the other two standout sites in the UK with Bebo and MySpace falling away over the last year.

So what does this mean for your business?

At SUGAR we’re experiencing some great results with Linkedin and Twitter. With Linkedin’s ability to support a company listing getting your key people more exposure on this network is an absolute must. Using Cotweet for Twitter makes perfect sense for teams where multiple accounts can be setup easily with task assignments and “on duty” notifications. We’re still holding out on Facebook’s usefulness for B2B connections, but it’s growth and reach can no longer be ignored.

Contact David if you’d like more information on how to make your first foray into Social Media, these are online services you can no longer afford to avoid.

Searle & Taylor Kitchen Designers

David — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:05:38 +0000

Searle & Taylor are a Ropley based firm offering bespoke design, manufacture and installation of beautiful kitchens. Whether its the Austrian Contemporary range from ewe or the simplicity, understated Shaker-style Stockbridge range there is a design that will suit your new kitchen. If you’re looking for ideas for your next kitchen or simply want to take a look at some great kitchens visit their 3000 square foot showroom in Ropley, Hampshire.

SUGAR are very happy to be building a brand new site for Searle & Taylor in 2010 and look forward to spreading the word about this great local company.

Hiding unstyled div that shows on page load

David — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:03:28 +0000

In the spirit of sharing web development tips and techniques:

Have you come across a situation where you have a javascript carousel or accordian that is fairly content heavy? When the page loads the list items or the div content flash onto the screen until the page loads and then the whole page “pops” into place. Very annoying effect when you’re on a slower connection.

I dealt with this problem on the home page of the new auditel.co.uk site. On this page I’m using the excellent jQuery library and a modified version of the useful plugin called jflow that allows for autoscrolling. The technique below was documented on the Learning jQuery site and uses a combination of javascript and css to hide the extra content until the page finishes loading.

// The style below can be placed in your external css file

// Usual javascript loaded below, note the .addclass() method used BEFORE the $(document).ready()

// The javascript below will make your div content below once the page is loaded

// Included in the body of the html are the set of divs that make up the carousel or accordian

Show the content in the first div.

Hide the content in the second div.

Hope the code above helps someone, can be one of those problems that cause hours of frustrated searching around. Please let me know if you see any problems or can recommend a better method.

In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day 2010

David — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:09:11 +0000

Today is the opportunity to celebrate women in tech, as inspired by Ada Lovelace the person to programme the first computer algorithm for Babbage’s analytical engine.

This year I’d like to celebrate my partner Jenni. Besides working on her jewellery business Twinkleberry, she has steadily ramped up her involvement with SUGAR until today she is pretty much working with me full-time in delivering our web services to a growing group of clients. In this process she has had to learn to use quite a few new applications and generally increase her knowledge of the web and search engines. All I can say is that I am one very lucky guy to have her working with me and I cannot think of any other woman in my life who I’d like to celebrate more today. Thank you Jenni.

Do follow the ongoing adventures in comic form of Lovelace and Babbage published at 2D Goggles. Thanks to Sydney for reminding me to celebrate women in tech.

New website for Paragons Personnel

David — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:01:55 +0000

We’ve just heard the good news that we have been given the opportunity to redesign the Paragons Personnel website. Paragons, based in Romsey, have been offering recruitment services to Hampshire since 1985. We’re looking forward to working with Lyn Ebdon, Iain McCreath and the rest of the team to improve and enhance their web presence.

Welcome onboard!

Wordpress site for Shepheard-Walwyn

David — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:26:47 +0000

Shepheard-Walwyn are an independent publisher founded in 1972. Their catalogue covers a wide range of subjects including history, philosophy, poetry and ethical economics. SUGAR has been commissioned to establish a supporting website for one of their subject areas. The new site will make use of the Wordpress blogging platform to establish a state-of-the-art platform for author promotion and subject discussion.

We are very excited to be working on such a worthwhile topic (we won’t spill the beans here!) and will post more details once the site goes live.

Carla Vize-Martin

David — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:10:48 +0000

Carla Vize-Martin is an artist based in Winchester. Working with Piers Cross Design we’ve just completed the development of a new gallery site for Carla. She currently has an exhibition running at Green’s Wine Bar, Jewry Street in Winchester, we’re looking forward to seeing the real thing!

Wordpress for Hampshire Primary School

David — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:20:42 +0000

Upham Primary School is our local village school which our daughter Tessa attends. We recently offered to develop a website for the school and naturally turned to Wordpress for our content management system. The staff at the school are not very computer literate, so we thought it would be interesting to see how they would cope with the Wordpress UI.

The site makes extensive use of custom category pages to run the “From the Classroom” and “School News” sections. We were particularly excited about the “From the Classroom” section since it presented an opportunity for the students in the school to contribute to the site and use it as a showcase for their work.

Feedback from staff and parents on the design and functionality of the site has been very positive so far. We have dropped in to the school a number of times to check on progress and we’ve been very pleased with how the school has just been able to get on with posting content and updates. It is a testament to the excellent work done on the Wordpress project that the first experience a group of primary teachers have had with a CMS has been so positive.

A special word of thanks to Rob Schlüter and his excellent “Archives by Category” plugin for Wordpress. Our jQuery gallery is delivered via Christophe Beyls’s Slimbox 2.

Lifestyle Management from Splash

David — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:37:52 +0000

Recently a good friend of ours, Collen Skinner, decided to branch out on her own. Splash is her new company offering useful time-saving services to individuals struggling to keep on top of their day-to-day schedule.

Colleen approached us to help her come up with a suitable identity. After a few weeks of brain-storming we came up with the the name “Splash” and accompanying strapline “Get your ducks in a row”. We were looking for a name that would help Colleen stand out and give a prospective client some idea of what her company offered.

Once we had the name it was fairly easy to come up with a fun font, colours and layout for her logo. We hope you like it.

Contact Colleen for help with managing a special occasion, general administration, running regular errands or decluttering your office or home.

Hide or Remove the Info Window on an embedded Google Map

David — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:57:10 +0000

So for the last couple of hours I’ve been grappling with a small, thorny Google Map related problem. Since I’ve spent so much time finding an answer for this, I guess there might be others who are looking for the same solution.

When embedding a Google Map into a site you often end up with the big Info Window appearing above the place marker. This little window is useful if you’ve got the space necessary to display it, but most contact pages just don’t have the room.

On Next Communications I had limited space available for displaying a map, and thanks to a thread on Google Groups I found a quick and easy way to embed the map without the offending bubble.

Once you have your embed code copied over into your HTML, simply add the following parameter “iwloc=near” to the iframe call.

Below is an example of the complete code I used for the Next Site:

Note the “&” separator when adding the parameter.