Gary Mac's Gallop

QR Boards

2011-11-15T06:33:00.000-08:00

Great new website we launched today for estate agents. www.qrboards.com to instantly put property details into the prospective purchaser's hands at the property board.

So if you know an estate agent looking to utilise qr codes in their business then check out qrboards.com!!

Cheers!

Online pet shop!

2010-05-21T09:21:00.000-07:00

It's been a while!!

I thought i'd just update you with a quick link to my new business; Online pet shop .... called We Are Pets it's a fabulous resource to buy over 6000 natural and innovative pet products.

From Natural dog food to biorb service kits we're stocking everything!!

Take a look and give me some feedback!!

Enjoy the sunshine!

Cheers Gary

Design is Dead!!

2008-02-21T08:29:00.000-08:00

We've made a decent living out of it for the last 10 years but now it seems the good times are about to stop. The cat is out of the bag - you don't need designers to do your website ..... I may as well be the first to let you know .... all the help you need for design is now here;
http://www.makemylogobiggercream.com/

Anyone need a dedicated, motivated and passionate Managing Director around the Leicester area????

Gary McCarthy,
www.eazytiger.net

Huge Website Improvements Minimal Effort!

2008-02-19T02:58:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

Sorry my blogging has been tardy recently.... we've been busy re-branding the city of Leicester along with some major work for clients like Xerox and Tesco!!

This lack of time extends to updating our website - but I've learnt some valuable lessons (or remembered some) so i thought it would be good to share....

About two weeks ago I lost patience with the fact that we are web designers and yet we had a home page i hated.

It really needed some "wow factor" adding to the very informative layout that we had. One of the two images we had on a very visible part of our home page was very poor and i particularly disliked. So in the absence of a good portion of time to think through a strategy and make a proper job from day one we did things in a "maximum impact" way.

The theory being make the changes that take the least time but create the most impact and keep the train rolling in the right direction. The first thing we did was to remove the annoying image, creating more space and instantly giving everything else on the page more room for impact. Cost? A few minutes.

Next we re-jigged the layout and gave more impact to the navigation, we did this at the next available opportunity a few days later. Cost? about 6hrs.

This new layout relied on the impact being made by a flash movie in the centre of the screen - but we didn't have time to develop one that we'd be proud of - so we placed a placeholder static image in there for a week or so. Again not ideal but still meant that the site improved even though we hadn't got time to fulfil everything we wanted to.

To come are the first iteration of a simple flash movie that will have a shelf life of a month and will take about 3 hrs. Then we'll make a real high impact flash movie that will take 2 days over the next month or so.

So what we have acheived is a constantly improving home page that will be transformed into the one that we wanted just not in one step.

Somebody told me once that the only way to eat an elephant was to make burgers out of it ..... seems to be a good way of achieving constant improvement too.

Take Care,
Gary McCarthy

Web Accessibility

2008-01-02T02:13:00.000-08:00

Happy new year!!!

And guess who has reprimanded himself for sloppy blogging and has committed himself to more regular posts?? Well it's easier than going to the gym!

Interesting article on the BBC website today - apparently 10% of all websites are not accessible .... you don't say!!!

For as long as I remember we have banged the accessibility drum at Eazytiger. We certainly aim to have all sites accessible in all browsers, operating systems and devices, and only where serious technical issues limit the commercial reality of this dream do we compromise. And by compromise i mean move an item a few pixels, or change the design slightly to accommodate. It seems the world is cottoning on to the fact that Microsoft only supplies 85% of web browsers and that this is being eroded steadily.

It's interesting that most web designers design for IE, and commercially quite sensible if you are playing the quantity game - design as many sites in a week as you can and just get them out there - stack them high sell them cheap mentality. Our philosophy is quite different and summed up in 3 words - quality, quality, quality ... initially built to web standards (W3C) our sites will render in any standards compliant device. We then test in IE6 and 7, which aren't standards compliant but form the vast majority of browsers.

By taking this alternative route we can ensure a greater degree of future friendliness for our sites as the standards that they comply with are adopted by new devices and browsing environments.

The link to the full article is here .... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4115806.stm

Enjoy! And if you have an Eazytiger site - sit back and have a well deserved coffee for a great decision that you've just had another reason to feel ever so slightly smug about!!

Speak soon,
Gary McCarthy.

eCommerce product catalogs ...

2007-10-18T03:30:00.000-07:00

eCommerce (never started a sentence with the word before - should it have two capitals!!???) sites are extremely difficult to design in a new and creative way every time. The constraints of content management for the catalog mean that they tend to follow a familiar route of having a product and it's details within a box. No bad thing as users don't like surprises and this can make them less likely to part with their hard-earned.

However I thought I'd show you a couple that I've come across recently that have creatively displayed multiple products within a catalog without regard to this convention. Unfortunately they are not likely to be accessible so would actually be illegal if the government ever got round to enforcing it’s own laws. But they are fun and inspiring none the less…..

http://www.etsy.com/time_machine.php

https://www.cicatriz.se/

Have you seen any better examples?????

I’d love to see them.

Take care, Gary.

Web design of the future..

2007-10-11T03:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry it's been a while since my last post. A great holiday to Gran canaria was followed by two weeks at work with my head dissapearing somewhere!

I gained a fascinating insight into the future of web design last night. My 8 year old son has been telling me all week about his great new discovery - club penguin.

It's a social networking site for young people - the idea is that you make a character, a penguin, that you can explore the club penguin world with, interacting with other penguins as well as games, fun and educational activities.

I told someone about this who has a 2 year old daughter and they were horified that I was encouraging him to spend time on there .... a clear differentiator between a web native and a web immigrant???

Well, I would have thought so - but I'm 38 and an immigrant and she's 28 and much nearer to being a native. Oh, by the way, the term web native is someone that has known the internet at school and used it as part of their daily lives since early adulthood. Obviously web immigrant is someone that hasn't. The current cross over point is 20 - 23 years old.

It seems not. It seems that it may have been more to do with a security issue. Personally I think that the time to educate someone that the internet and web persona's are real people and a manifestation of their imagination, and to be aware of the risks whilst still enjoying the experience can't happen young enough.

And I'm delighted that my son, who isn't particularly academic, or motivated towards reading or writing for fun has found an activity that will help his keyboard, spelling, typing, reading, and social interaction skills!

Viva penguins!!!

Take care. Gary.

Back Ups..

2007-09-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

You'd think that working in new media, building websites that need to be delivered 24/7 I'd be used to the concept of backing up essential data.

When it's on a webserver it's a given and I don't need to think about it - but over my (fantastic) holiday to Gran Canaria last week I had my phone stolen. Yep, my personal phone, not the business one that is synchronised and backed up!

What an idiot. At least I can't contact any ex-girlfriends at 3am on a friday night out now!

Are your phone numbers backed up??? You seriously wouldn't believe how inconvenient it is without those numbers!

Have a great weekend.

Gary

The inevitable has happened

2007-09-04T06:12:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it. It's finally happened. And a couple of years before I wanted it to.

I've been to a beginners golf event run by the chamber of commerce in Leicester, hoping that I wouldn't enjoy it and I could put taking up the inevitable for a few more years..... How frustrating. I loved it!!!

Have booked my lessons and start next week. So now my time will be mostly made up creating killer online marketing strategies with clients from the rough!

So if you fancy beating someone fairly easily give me a shout I want to play as many courses as I can!

Take Care
Gary.

Research and Passion

2007-08-31T11:12:00.000-07:00

My life at Eazytiger (http://www.eazytiger.net/) is currently taken up in interview after interview as we recruit for a new Account Manager (either online PR, Traditional PR, or New Media experienced), a creative designer (new media / web), and a web developer (PHP, MySQL, Javascript).

What strikes me meeting 4 or 5 people each day that would like to work for us is the astonishing lack of knowledge that many of the candidates have. Not about their role, but about the company they are pitching to work for. In the old days it used to be quite hard work doing interview preparation, but now the internet gives us it on a plate, some people seem to be getting even lazier!

Oh, and one tip if you are attending an interview at Eazytiger - a grey suit and tie are really not the things to wear. An outstanding knowledge of internet marketing, a passion for your role and self improvement would be much more welcome!

Take Care,
Gary.

The Wacky World Of LCFC

2007-08-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

As a lifelong fan of Leicester City - not an armchair one either - I've been a season ticket holder for 15 years and went to every home and away game for nearly five years without missing one in the late 90s... I am simply dismayed today!

You would think that the foxes would be the talk of the news and that we'd have enough media attention having a player die twice in our half time changing room away at Fo^&st on Tuesday.

But no. Just to really turn up the media attention and give the Leicester Mercury something to fill it's summer news void - we sack our manager. Not because he's done anythign wrong - but because the chairman has decided he made a mistake in taking him on in the first place - he's too strong. A manager that's too strong - now there's a new one!!!

Anyway, it's happened, and I want to record to the world that my prediction for the new manager is ........

Stuart Pearce.

You heard it here first.

In a tribute to Martin Alan (who i rated) .....

Take Care,
Gary.

The usual over reaction ...

2007-08-30T04:30:00.001-07:00

Just a quick note about the news story today about the banning of Facebook and other social networking sites by certain larger companies.

About two years ago stood in front of a group of local business people that I network with (http://www.the-regency-group.co.uk) and informed them of the impending importance of online social networking and blogging. It was really a heads up - but I was shocked by the reaction of some individuals who seemed to think that this was the end of the world. They didn't see the point and one particularly vociferous individual thought that it was a big rip off, suspicious of commercial exploitation, as well as saying that it was a pointless waste of her time - it turned out that as a travel agent she spent most of her day on sites like http://www.tripadvisor.com/ - strange how people can be so vocal about their dissaproval voiced loudly and aggressively in front of twenty people - but when i talked to her afterwards and asked if she used trip advisor she admitted to using it 60% of her working day and that she was sorry (in a quiet tone to just me!) .... We'll park the PR repercussions and the lesson for positive PR here as we really only advise on online PR!!!

Anyway .... this was going to be short, so I'll get to the point.... Most people in that room reacted in the same way that they did when I was selling website design in 1999 - It doesn't affect me - I don't need it - It's going to be a fad that i can ignore..... It was obvious then that Facebook and Myspace will be part of our lives and will have commercial impact, and now the big companies are starting to react in the same way that they did with web browsing back then..... They over react and ban it.

And in a year or so - they will wake up to it's potential and start thinking about how they can benefit by their employees using social networking environments, until then the narrow mindedness will percolate through commerce, make the news, become insanely politically correct, and then the pragmatists will win out and people will realise that Facebook is just like a cigarrette break -if an employee is going to take liberties they will take them.....

If your company culture encourages innovation and excites staff to want to work, and your managers support and encourage positive attitudes towards working for the good of the company and your colleagues, then facebook will be something that you may dip in and out of during the day - but like a quick fag or a wander to the shops will be a break between some hard work. That's our attitude towards social networking sites at http://www.eazytiger.net/

Rant over.

Take Care,
Gary.