Web Design Articles - web design tips and advice

Facebook “Privacy”

Are you sharing more than you realise?

Almost every business we have spoken to this year wants to know how to use Social Media to market their business. It’s a powerful marketing tool, but while businesses are scrambling to get on Facebook, almost 25,000 personal users opted out on Monday due to Facebook’s seemingly casual approach to privacy. (See http://www.quitfacebookday.com)

26 year old Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg admits “I know we’ve made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve.”

We are at an interesting time in history, where on the one hand we have the Australian Government pushing to introduce a national Internet filter and on the other we have large corporations like Google and Facebook collecting every minute detail of our lives on the premise that their intentions are in the right place. Both scenarios are removing our right to choose.

Danah Boyd, a Microsoft researcher and top tech blogger, wrote: “The battle that is under way is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent.”

Openbook Bares All

Facebook has been in the news for most of its five short years for privacy abuse issues and it is now reaching fever pitch.

The current bone of contention with Facebook is the amount of data that it makes publicly available by default. You have to decipher their lengthy privacy area to lock down your comments and photos so only your friends can see them and not the whole world. Unfortunately, many people have no concept of how or why to do this.

Two young lads from San Francisco, Pete Burns and Will Moffatt thought it was about time this was exposed and have built a site that displays all the publicly accessible information from Facebook in a site called Openbook. It received 665,252 hits in its first weekl! Search for a key phrase and you can see all the public profiles that mention that phrase. (If you are easily offended, don’t follow the link, although the results are much less interesting than the searches.) Read more about Openbook here.

Burns and Moffatt think Facebook should take more responsibility for the privacy of its’ customers by educating us and making it easy to use. This is their proposal:

  • Make it easy to control and understand your privacy settings.
  • Promise that they won’t change them behind your back.
  • Make new accounts private by default.

Doesn’t sound that difficult for a $5+billion company.

What Can We Do?

When things go wrong, the finger pointing begins, but for the same reason the Internet filter is ridiculous, blaming Facebook for loosing your job/girlfriend/dignity is equally so. As the Openbook guys have demonstrated, Facebook definitely needs to help us help ourselves, but ultimately, our privacy is our responsibility.

Unfortunately, the very reason these behemoth web services are a success is the intimate nature of the data we share. And, for this reason, they also make very effective marketing tools. Social sites are here to stay for good or bad. When Facebook eventually meets its’ sticky end, something else even more engaging and insidious will replace it.

As consumers, we need to get smart with how we use the Internet because the law certainly can’t keep up and  Facebook offers no legal or police assistance.

5 Step Internet Privacy Guide

All online communication should be treated as ‘public’. Whether its email, social sites or instant messaging, all of it can be made public in just a few clicks.

  1. If you share private things, do it offline.
  2. If you don’t want to be found, stalked or spied upon, don’t use your real name, age or contact details online
  3. Get a lot of spam? Try using a temporary email address – http://www.guerrillamail.com
  4. If you think Facebook is using your details wrongly, opt out. Go to Account / Account Settings / Deactivate Account
  5. If you think the Australian Internet filter is a bad idea, say so – http://nocleanfeed.com

Watch the Facebook Trends

A look at last week’s headlines shows the trend:

ICT Award Finalist

KND is proud to announce we are a finalist in the ACS Queensland ICT Awards for the release of OurDisk 2.0. The awards are presented on March 30th, so we are looking forward to mixing with the competition at the awards dinner!

We are incredibly proud to be delivering eBusiness web software to the globe – from our Queensland base!

Social Media Kills Email Marketing

My wife says I don’t communicate. Well, I beg to differ. Today my email program upgraded itself and imported 29,540 email messages messages over to the new version. You can’t really say I don’t communicate with those sort of numbers.

too-much-email

I am going to print this out and stick it on the fridge.

As a rough calculation, KND send and receive about 80,000 emails per year. 70,000 of that figure would be managed by only four people. Based on our server stats, that only accounts for 15% of all our mail. The other 85% is spam. 453,333 spam messages per year. That’s a lot of viagra!

These numbers sound big, but they would reflect most small businesses with a team of more than five. It also explains the steady decline in e-newsletters and increase in social networking. [Read more →]

Intranet, CRM and Document Management Software Review

stickyNoteManAre you one of those people that have sticky notes all around your screen? It begins with only a few things to remember – call designer, eat lunch, pants first then shoes, but it rapidly gets out of control. Pretty soon you can barely see the screen and you are stuck to your desk with fluorescent paper squares.

You need a better system, so you start using your email as a to-do list. 4653 emails, 3000 files and 31 billion spam messages later; this method also begins to crumble as an effective task management system.

Email is messy and unreliable. The real issue with email occurs when a team member leaves. All their valuable communication and IP is lost with their email account, not that you could find anything anyway. If that person was a project manager, suddenly you’ve lost all history of their projects. Not an ideal situation.

Here’s the answer to your sticky, fluorescent hell – Get yourself an Intranet. [Read more →]

OurDisk is turning 2! (V 2.0 that is)

Version One of our document management software, OurDisk has been very well received across a range of different markets with our client base growing every day. Thanks to valuable feedback from our customers over the last 9 months, we now have a whole bunch of feature requests that have gone into the melting pot for OurDisk V2.0.

We are very excited about the result getting closer to release as we continue to echo our passion for building user-friendly web software that makes doing business easier.

Whilst the core of the app remains the same, improvements include;

  • revised file navigation to cater for hundreds of categories, files and users,
  • smarter communication tools for notifying your clients of file updates,
  • and, rich reporting for administrators are also added to the mix.

For the techies out there, we are also adding 2048bit file encryption – the best on the market – to ensure security of your documents.

So, when is the release I hear you ask? Early November is the target.

To find out more visit the OurDisk website

Reality TV and Internet Marketing Strategy

Web Content and the ‘Hard Sell’

absloute-reality-tvOur information is no longer ‘manufactured’ for us in behemoth news factories, then filtered by the government’s opinion and played out in full colour HD dramatisations for us all to passively feed on. We are becoming blind to advertising and keenly astute at detecting agendas. We are numbing to high-gloss news and current affairs and turning to ‘reality’ for entertainment.

This is reflected in our penchant for reality TV and flash-in-the-pan celebrities like Clare Werbeloff, the Chk Chk BOOM girl. We are more engaged in the lives and (mis)fortunes of ordinary people because they seem more believable than manufactured and scripted celebrities. [Read more →]

Check out our HUGE package!

DonkeyAustralia’s most well endowed Web Hosting Packages

KND have just upgraded their web-hosting servers and are proud to whip out their package and offer it to businesses that are just not being satisfied by their current provider.

Web hosting can often be inadequate with out you even knowing it. If your site is choking, going down or your mailbox fills up regularly, these are telltale signs that your hosting provider is just not doing the business.

Erecting a web site on substandard hosting will only result in flaccid performance with no happy ending in sight. Large hosting that shares its services with too many clients often has gaping security holes with wide-open back doors for hackers.

KND Web Hosting is a boutique service. We won’t shove unwanted features down your throat or lead you up the dirt track. Our depth of service is well rounded and if you have an issue, call us and we’ll jump right on it.  When we get to the root of the problem we’ll call you and explain it in plain English until you have a firm grasp on the thrust of the solution.

Packages start at …

Dwarf Package
$30/month
1GB space / 10GB transfer
Learn more – http://www.knd.com.au/knd-web-hosting

and go up to the

John Holmes Package
$99/month
5GB space / 50GB transfer
Learn more – http://www.knd.com.au/knd-premium-web-hosting

Hosting so good, you’ll need a cigarette afterwards.

Call today to get your hands on our package

1300 228 100

Social Media in Business

The value of small talk

Which would you prefer: a blind date or a night out with an old flame? Chances are the old flame will be more fun because you can relax with the familiarity you share. First dates can be tedious as each person tries to assess the other person’s knowledge of axe wielding or fluffy toys (both equally as scary). Breaking the ice is difficult. If it were easy it would be called ‘breathing the air’ or ‘cutting the cheese’.

Doing business is the same. Sifting through a prospect’s ego to find their true nature can be time consuming and costly, especially if you get it wrong. It works the other way, too. Try putting yourself in your prospect’s shoes. They are about to spend their hard-earned money on your services and want to know that you can deliver. They need to trust you, but they can’t until they like you, and they can’t like you until they know you. [Read more →]

Is Google down?

Problem-solving your Interweb.

When your car won’t start, the first thing you would do is call a breakdown service, and rightly so. After all, you wouldn’t call the main roads department or check if your neighbour’s car is working to figure out what’s wrong. But when your email stops working, it is connected to a number of things that need to be checked before you throw your arms in the air and declare the Internet is broken.

There are a few simple things you can and should do before calling your web developer when a web site or email problem occurs. The whole Internet thing is incredibly complex, in fact, I’m not even sure that anyone actually knows exactly how it all works. It just does. I think, if enough people want something to work, it just will. (Possibly another reason why I should not be your first port of call in a crisis.)


[Read more →]

News Travels Fast in Iran on Twitter

I remember when, a regime could wipe out half a country and kill literally thousands of people without the rest of the world even knowing. They could create a media blackout by shutting down the television and newspapers, which the regime usually already owns anyway, and no news would escape the country’s tight lips. Unfortunately (for them), things have changed. [Read more →]

Document Management has a New Name

OURDISK logoWe’ve had an interesting couple of weeks in the complex and tedious world of trademark ownership. We have had to change the name of our newly launched document management software, FileSight. Apparently FileSight is not as original as we thought. Apparently, FileSite is the same as FileSight.

Semantics!

With a looming deadline for some magazine advertising, we were forced to think of a new name … a good one … that is still available … and design a logo … a good one … that doesn’t look like anyone else’s … in two days … bugger. So, we did what any self-respecting business would do – we went to the pub.

Unfortunately, that produced a lot of names like Fileasaurus and DocuMentalCase, but nothing actually useful. Finally, Dan saved the day at the eleventh hour, with OURDISK™. We’ve registered it in every possible way that something can be registered and the logo is a vast improvement on the FileSight artwork. (Sorry Hawk. )

Existing FileSight users will be switched to the new name over the next few weeks. Don’t worry; nothing will change except the name.

And so, without further ado, we smash a bottle of something bubbly on her bow and shove her off down the slipway and back out into the wild blue yonder.

…Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange…
Shakespeare

Check out www.ourdisk.com for more info.

Web Design at the End of the Earth

Chris Garrett bailing waterLiving in Brisbane, you will understand what good weather means. We enjoy almost 300 days of sunshine a year. However, when it does rain it’s like the end of the earth. At the moment, I’m thinking we’ve got about 38 days left.

As you can see from my bailing efforts, our courtyard is filling up fast and threatening to flood our office yet again. We’ve had to change the carpets once already this year and would like to avoid it again if possible.

To combat this, we will be converting the KND office into a raft. There are several advantages of this method of flood management -

  1. No more bailing (yay)
  2. The office can rise and fall with the flood water
  3. If we grow tired of the view, we can just paddle down to the bay
  4. We can visit you for meetings while still utilising our boardroom and coffee machine

Should you have the misfortune of working in a large multi-story building, floating it may not be an option. This link to eHow will show you how to build an ark in seven simple steps. http://www.ehow.com/how_2120468_build-ark.html

P.S. If you need a second drongo to make a pair for your ark, you can have Dallas (Pictured here using his iMac to balance the iBucket to catch the iWater dripping from the ceiling).

KND launch Online Donation Software

Add your own online donation software

eDonations is a fast, secure eCommerce solution that provides quick and easy way to donate to your cause. No ‘shopping carts’ or confusing processes.

eDonations provides a three-step process on a single page. It fits seamlessly into your website, so your customers will feel reassured that they are donating directly to you.

Ideal for not-for-profit organizations, charities, churches and schools.

The easier you make it, the more likely people are to donate. eDonations is the most effortless way to collect donations 24/7/365.

The system connects directly with your bank and processes all payments in a completely transparent manner. Receipts and paper trail are recorded in four places – your website, your customer, the bank and the payment gateway.

[Read more →]

 
icon for podpress  Donations Software Preview [2:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Downloads 125

KND launch Ourdisk – Easy Online Document Sharing

File upload, sharing and collaboration

Ever needed to share some files with a team and wished there was a better way than email? OurDisk does just that. It provides a secure, easy way to share files of all types and sizes.

OurDisk is the perfect solution for remote teams and business-to-client document collaboration.

OurDisk is a central location for your key documents like PDFs, Word docs and project material. Your documents live in a highly secure environment and you control who sees each document. Files too large to email are also easily uploaded and stored within your secure web system. [Read more →]

 
icon for podpress  OurDisk Overview [2:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Downloads 70

Web Graphing Solutions, CSS Graphs & Online Graphs

KND have recently launched a range of graphing solutions for displaying business intelligence data. Our expert team have created a lightweight interactive graphing tool built using CSS, KND’s custom PHP framework, Mootools and Canvas. Histograms, Line Graphs, Bar Graphs, Drill down views and multiple datasets. Data can be updated on the fly by using AJAX calls – perfect for stock price movements.

Inspired by Google Analytic graphs, this framework is a great example of the work our capabilities. Please contact us if you would like to discuss licensing.

 
icon for podpress  Online Graphing solutions [2:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Downloads 116