Xtremax - Web Design

Recently I have been researching on websites developed with SharePoint and I found Recovery.gov, a US government website that “provides access to data related to the Recovery Act spending and allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste and abuse”.

Personally I thought this website looks pretty cool. At least it didn’t give me a ‘bleh’ or ‘hmm’ sort of feeling. I actually do like it. But that’s not the point.

What makes this website truly jaw-dropping is the fact that it is made for US$18 million!

For a website so expensive and with the US government quite broke, it is no surprise that it caused such a hoohah.

What is initially known about the project is that it would cost $9.5 million through January 2010 and up to $18 million if all options were exercised until January 2014. But nobody knows what is in the contract that made it so expensive.

Later, some of the project’s requirements are revealed:
- The website must be visually attractive, user-friendly and highly interactive
- Creation of a mapping capacity that allows user to search for spending down to the neighbourhood level
- Provide the capacity to store and easily download massive amounts of data
- Build a state-of-the-art security platform that will protect the integrity and availability of the data and a backup system in the event of a major catastrophe such as a terrorist attack or large-scale power outage
- Provide contract support for an array of hosting, maintenance and operational services performance

Do you think this website is worth $18 million? What other requirements do you think could be in this contract that makes it so much more expensive compared to other government websites? If you are to build a similar website, what do you think is the suitable budget?

Let us know what you think!

Colour contrast is an integral part of web designing because it determines how readable your text is. The main purpose of a website is to relate information and most websites do so with text and hyperlinks. When your hyperlink is almost the same colour as the rest of the text, it is likely they will be missed. So if your text is unreadable and hyperlinks undifferentiated from normal text because of poor colour contrast, the meaning and purpose of the website and hyperlinks are lost.

Good colour contrast will not pose a problem to people who have poor vision or are colour blind and they will be able to differentiate between text and hyperlinks, text from background colours. And all that without having to squint their eyes or forcing the eyes to do strenuous exercises.

The most standard good colour contrast are black text on white background, and white text on black background. That’s why they are the standards.

What about red? They are real flashy and looks hot on both white or black backgrounds!

Wait, let’s go back a little. Remember the squinting eyes and strenuous exercise bit? That’s what red does to you after an extended time. Don’t get me wrong, I love red and is a Red fan (although I’m no angel) but red is a bright and passionate colour. There is sufficient colour contrast for red text on black background, but it does not pass the most stringent standards. Hot, yes. But it’s about how much you want to hurt your visitors’ eyes.

Still, it can’t be worse than red text on a white background. Even brighter and more passionate than on black background, red text on white background doesn’t give sufficient colour contrast. If you use this colour contrast, I’d suspect you have some eye-terrorism scheme going on.

To sum it up, good colour contrast should make text highly readable for everyone, including those with vision problems. Good colour contrast should also play a role in protecting your eyes (mine could never adjust to Windows’ contrast themes). And good colour contrast is one of the silent but important thing that could help sustain user interest in your website.

Social marketing is not just about putting banners on a social site. Rather, it is about conversations, listening, learning, interacting and engaging on a ‘together’ level.

Think social media doesn’t matter? Think again.

Facebook’s vast popularity brought it out from its initial exclusive American university access to its current huge international presence.

Twitter is growing at a rate of 1,382%.

And YouTube needs no introduction.

Let’s also not forget that social media marketing has played an important part in helping Barack Obama in winning the presidency race (who doesn’t like a president who is technologically-savvy?!), and it is now helping him constantly connect with the Americans on the ground.

All these show the sheer publicity power of social media. Now let’s look at how social media power has greatly benefited some companies.

Case Studies

Ford Motor Company

As the American automobile industry faces a crisis, companies badly needed marketing strategies that could get it back on track with consumers. A series of financial problems destroyed Ford’s brand image in 2009 and Ford launched a social media marketing strategy in a bid to rebuild brand trust and business.

The effort generated online buzz about Ford - mentions on the Internet experienced a sharp spike, achieving posts and repostings by the thousands and even millions! Imagine the sheer amount of publicity generated! This also helped to build greater awareness of and interest in the campaign and the brand.

As Ford works hard to develop a social media personality, its competitors GM and Chrysler opted for a more traditional branding. The outreach strategy clearly works for Ford, as its social networks are much more popular and interactive than its competitors, which translated to higher media coverage.

Case Study: After the news broke (on Twitter) of Croatia’s Prime Minister’s sudden resignation, one internet marketer quickly set up a related Facebook group that drew the attention and coverage of mainstream media. The result: coverage from multiple mainstream media outlets, growing the group from 300 to 100,000 (the largest Facebook group in Croatia).

Case Study: By monitoring (and responding) to brand mentions in social media, HubSpot was able to gain valuable insight into the effectiveness of their communications. The result: improving their sales process to communicate more effectively with prospects.

Case Study: Dell built a community that allows customers to participate in the development and enhancement of Dell’s products and services by sharing their ideas online. Users can also upload their own videos. The result: more than 7599 community generated ideas, an improved brand image and increased sales.

What It Tells the Public

By developing a social media personality and presence, it tells end-users that you are willing to listen and talk to them, and enable the chance to learn from each other. This creates an effective platform and a level playing field where there is mutual interest and mutual benefits.

Finding the perfect complementary colours for your web design can be hard. Adobe Kuler will help you solve the problem and we love it.
You can access Adobe’s Kuler here http://kuler.adobe.com. It may be worth your while to register so that you can save your colour themes. If you need color inspiration, you can view Kuler themes created by others.If you are up for it, you can also share yours, and help contribute to the color community. The best thing is Kuler is a free service.

Kuler

Create your Colour Theme

Kuler in Illustrator

On April 1, 2010, our team sat through a launch ceremony of a website that we have painstakingly taken few months to do – a community portal that aims to engage the fathers in Singapore to be “present” in their children’s lives. The website - www.dadsforlife.sg - is sponsored by Ministry of Community, Youths, and Sports and, designed and built ……by Xtremax!!!!

The website, launched by Vivian Balakrishnan, is designed with web 2.0 tools, such as Forums, Twitter, Youtube, Widgets, Facebook to create a thriving Dads’ community. It is a resource portal that provides fathers with tips and tools to stay connected with their children.

Before this web design project for Dads for Life, I didn’t realize the seriousness of the problem of Father-Absence. A society built on uninvolved fathers is often plagued with problems like “a higher rate of poverty, failure in school , teen pregnancy , substance abuse, violent crime, depression, and ultimately loss of hope.” (source : National Center for Fathering.) Wow, that is very serious.

So fathers, go to www.dadsforlife.sg and make your commitment today.

Was just rummaging my old tired brains on all the different programming languages and frameworks that we have worked with in Xtremax in the recent years.

Hmm.  Just came out with an interesting Mind Map….

Just the other day, a web design client asked us whether we knew about their survey campaign that was advertised on TV recently. Our immediate response was “errr…..we don’t watch TV.”

Whatever we can get on TV, we get even more on the Internet. So why bother using that remote?

Times are changing. To reach us, the young working adults, who prefer to have a higher level of participation with our mediums, you need to be where we are - Social Media. You need to work this in when designing your websites  if you want your websites to have stronger user engagement.

We are where we can interact with others on line - the Social Media and it takes on many forms: Blogs, Microblogs like Twitter and Plurks, Social Networks like Facebook and Friendster, Podcasts, Vodcasts Wikis, Social Aggregators, Virtual Worlds, Photo Sharing Websites like Flickr, Video sharing websites like youtub and vimeo, just to name a few.

Still clueless? I found an excellent video that explains Social Media in Plain English.

Enjoy.

I am not the tidy soft of person.  In fact, I hate doing housework.  But something about untidy codes really irks me.  Recently, we adopted the use of crucible as a code review tool.  It revealed a whole lot of badly formatted codes in our projects.

Read the rest of this entry »

After doing quite a bit of development in Joomla, I was getting used to the very friendly J!Dump to list out all the objects value in a dhtml tree format.  Recently, I have been tasked to customise some e-marketing product codes.  Hmmm… sounds like I needed something handy like J!Dump…

Thankfully, there was Krumo.  Once Krumo has been installed properly, you can do a dhtml tree dumb of an object values with 2 simple lines:

require_once(’Krumo/class.krumo.php’);
krumo($dumpObject);       

Some screenshots to illustrate the power of Krumo:

Tada… the entire dhtml tree of the object:

The installation is also mightily simple.  Just download the entire Krumo project and dump it into your php include path.

Needed to help a client retrieve certain files from the web server through FTP and the default Windows FTP just does not work…

Decided to download a ftp client, FTP Voyager for the job.  For the 30 day trial version, it can be downloaded here.

Step 1:  Click on the Connect Link

Step 2: Click on Create a NEW site profile and Finish

Step 3:  Enter Profile Name and click Next

Step 4:  Enter either IP Address of Domain Name to connect to and click Next

Step 5: Click Next Again.  Do not check Anonymous Login

Step 6:  Enter FTP User Id and Password and click Next

Step 7: Select the folder which you will want to transfer your file to and click Next

Step 8: Click Finish

Step 9:  Just click and drag across the files between remote server and your computer.