Go black!

We’ve had a huge couple of months here in the studio with more work on than anyone expected. Unfortunately that didn’t bode well for our skiing, although I did manage to get out for a fish a couple of times.

Of all the work done, here are 3 impressive new webpages went live, in no particular order:

Film Otago Southland

MAP Productions

Rilean Evolution Series

All great projects.

It’s almost spring time! Take care out there.

ProActive gym in Wanaka has just gone live with a brand new webpage!

A slick new design going hand in hand with a lot of additional functionality which should make life pretty straight forward for their ever-growing clientèle.

Have a peek!

Our hearts and minds are with the good people of Christchurch as they struggle through this absolute disaster.

We have a strong client base in the garden city and will do everything we possibly can to make their business life as easy as is possible.

Please be with your families – any outstanding invoices that fall on the month of February will be extended until March for our Christchurch based clients.

God bless!

The launch party for a calendar and compilation CD entitled ‘Ink of Aotearoa’ was released on Friday with a launch party at Subculture in Queenstown.

I had the pleasure of attending and closely examining the 12 stills that make up the calendar – truly a stunning piece of work.

The calendar and CD (along with assorted swag) are available over at the Ink of Aotearoa webpage. A section of Jackie Gays Queenstown Photography business – Still Vision Photography.

Absoloot Value Accommodation are a super backpackers in Queenstown in the old Thomas’ building. They’ve just completed a massive $1M retrofit and have an outstanding product in every sense of the word (and we made their webpage!)

Take a peek at the newest queenstown backpackers webpage!

We’re fast approaching ski season, the perfect time to shave ones head – right?

I’m currently participating in the Foundations “Shave 10″ event – raising funds for folks who suffer from various blood diseases. I’m also slowly working on the lads over at Fluid Visual Communication – I hope to get at least 3 to shave for the cause!

I’m less than 48 hours into my fundraising which I have thus far only promoted via social media tools. Twitter, Facebook and ye old faithful Internet forums.

The current count is $353 in credit card donations, and a further $90 in “old school” bank transfers which have yet to clear – so we’re looking at around $450. Half of which has been gathered from folks I’ve never met before.

Do people care what you say online? is it so overcrowded that only the loudest of voices are heard? – Perhaps.

I guess theres a lot to say for having a great cause!

The donation page is here for anyone interested in putting a drop in the bucket.

Pictures will go up onto Facebook post-shave.

Fisher & Paykel are a large long-standing New Zealand whiteware company that recently launched a new marketing campaign to (I presume) increase awareness of their brand (amoung other things). Their promotion was called “Lost My Sock” and the basic idea is that you visit their special “Lost My Sock” webpage and they try to “Find” your missing sock.

The TV advertisements are reasonably well put together, a middle aged F&P scientist explains that they’ve put their best minds to finding your “Lost Sock” and they still can’t find it – but they’ll keep trying.

Naturally I visited their promotional website to see what all the fuss was about.

The result? A loading page. I’ve got a stopwatch running since I opened the site. The current time reads 9 minutes 43 seconds. I’ve been waiting almost 10 minutes for their marketing webpage to load and I’m on a 22Mb aDSL connection (seriously fast).

Whomever developed and managed the web-based portion of F&P’s “Lost My Sock” website seems to have fallen flat on their face. Surely disapointing for F&P executives given the hundreds of thousands they no doubt invested into the marketing campaign. No one wants to put the time and effort into producing a TV advertisement that directs the public to a webpage that doesn’t work. That’s akin to flushing money “down the toilet”.

So, I checked Twitter and mentioned the promotional page was still loading. Within a couple of minutes I had a reply from another Kiwi – it wasn’t just failing to load for me.

What can we learn?

Well for one – paying a lot of money doesn’t make you immune to poor quality work, or poor quality hosting. In this instance the server hosting the loading Flash file is simply too slow for the task at hand. I’m sure the Flash file is “very cool” – however being cool isn’t good enough if 99% of web traffic won’t ever wait for your page to load. The Flash file is 3.2MB in size which is large, but not huge. The problem is the speed of the transfer. Not enough thought has been given to the quality of the web host used.

This sits squarely in the category of “Webpage creation 101″. If your site takes more than a few moments to load, it’s worthless.

The F&P site has just loaded for me. It took 15 minutes and 8 seconds. Would you wait 15 minutes for a webpage to load?

I didn’t think so!

Update: they don’t seem to have uploaded their marketing material to YouTube either (this is a TV advertisement after all). Someone has, but it’s not F&P – Who’s running this campaign?

Computers slow down over time. They get bloated, infected and mistreated for years without any love.

PC shops/technicians make a bundle off of these sorts of problems. You take your laptop into ‘the shop’ and you get it back in a few days and $150 later it seems to be running faster. That’s great, and there will always be a place for that kind of service, but if you’re a little more conscious about your cash flow there are some basic steps you can take to keep your computer happy without costing you a cent.

There are 4 basic keys to keeping your PC (Using Windows) healthy and happy. Anyone can do this, even your mum – and it’s completely free.

1. Make sure you have at least 20% free space on your hard drive.

- You can go to ‘My Computer’ and click on your hard drive to see the amount of free space (or right click on the hard drive and go to ‘Properties’). If you have less than 10GB of free space you’re most likely in trouble. Clear some stuff off of your hard drive. If you have more than 1 hard drive then we’re talking about the system drive, normally called something like “Local Disk (C:)’.

2. Install an anti-virus program and have it run regularly (I recommend AVG)

-  You can download AVG here (you want the FREE version)

AVG is a fantastic anti-viral program and doesn’t cost you a cent. It’s also competitive with all the top end (and very pricy) alternatives like Nortons and McAfee Anti-Virus. AVG will update its virus definition files automatically (just say yes if it wants to update something, it can’t be bad – the same goes for Ad-Aware.)

Note: you only ever want 1 anti-virus program on your computer. If you have more than 1 you’re going to get yourself into trouble. They don’t play well with each other!

3. Install an anti-malware/spyware program and have it run regularly (I recommend Ad-Aware)

- You can download Ad-Aware here (again you want the FREE version)

4. ‘Defrag’ your hard drive regularly.

- This is a big one. No one does this and it’s your PC technicians secret weapon for speeding up computers.

Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter

When it starts up click on the defragment button. A defrag will take a long time (hours normally) and it works best if you’re not using your computer while it works. Setting up a defrag first thing in the morning or at night is a good option.

If you’re using Windows Vista the provided defragmenter sort of sucks. It works fine but it’s slow and gives you no visual feedback. If you’re keen you can grab a program called Defraggler here which is much better. (Most people just use the standard Vista defragger, and thats fine.)

That’s it! That’s the majority of what your PC guy is doing when he takes your computer off your hands to speed it up. You can also sleep easy knowing you now have full virus and spyware protection.

Here is a schedule for a good PC owner (this is what I do):

- Defrag your hard drive once a month.

- Make sure your hard drive doesnt get too full. (remember, try and stick to 20% free space)

- Run a full virus scan using AVG once a week. (you can schedule this using AVG so that it starts automatically)

- Run a full scan using Ad-Aware once a week. (again, you can schedule this)

Darkside makes webpages, but I personally offer free technical support to individuals and businesses. Feel free to flick me an email if you run into trouble. (chris@darkside.co.nz)