Make Your Movies Pay With Vimeo’s New ‘Tip Jar’

 interface, Internet News, Marketing  323 Responses »
Sep 202012
 

Popular video-sharing site Vimeo has added a tip jar, which allows Vimeo users to accept payments from anyone who enjoys their movies.

To use the new Tip Jar you’ll need to be a Vimeo Plus or Vimeo Pro member, but provided you’re already set up with a paid account, enabling it is as simple as adding a PayPal account and checking a box on the video’s advanced settings page. Once that’s done a “Tip This Video” button will appear underneath the video player on Vimeo.com, allowing viewers to leave tips in appreciation for your cinéma vérité efforts.

MORE:  Make Your Movies Pay With Vimeo’s New ‘Tip Jar’ | Webmonkey | Wired.com.

 

Twitter’s new profile headers slammed

 interface, Internet News  266 Responses »
Sep 192012
 

Today, Twitter announced all-new header photos, which appear to be rather similar to those Facebook introduced some months ago and that Google+ also uses. In Twitter’s case, the argument for the introduction and inclusion of such images is to “make your presence on Twitter more meaningful”, and to “help you get to know people better through their pictures,” according to Product Manager Sachin Agarwal. The reality is the profile now takes up more space, forcing down tweets. Worse, Silktide founder Oliver Embarton argued Twitter’s poor design potentially makes it harder, not easier, to discover more about someone:

MORE:  Twitter’s new profile headers slammed | News | .net magazine.

 

Make a scalable newsletter with Fireworks

 Design, interface  414 Responses »
Sep 182012
 

There’s a preconception among designers that email clients’ lack of support for web standards means you can’t get creative with newsletters. James Parker is out to explode this theory

In the current economic climate, firms across the globe are looking to maximise their return on investment from slashed marketing budgets. With customer information databases bulging, and the ability to target people genuinely interested in what they’re selling, it’s no surprise email newsletters have become the marketers’ new weapon of choice.

But even with demand at an all time high, there are still a vast number of designers hesitant to offer newsletters to their clients. Put off by the lack of support for web standards in email clients, many feel restricted as to how creative they can be.

I want to put that theory to bed. Designing in this format can be great fun, and the technical limitations of working on emails can be a blessing in disguise because they get us back to thinking about basic design principles.

In this tutorial we’ll use Fireworks to design an email newsletter for Love Barista, a social project for coffee lovers. Focusing on a sleek, scalable layout, and by considering the weight given to core elements in the design, you’ll build up an email that’ll stand out of any mailbox. At the end of the tutorial you’ll be ready to build, and as our layout would be perfect for a Campaign Monitor template, I’ll give you a few tips to help get you started.

MORE:  Make a scalable newsletter with Fireworks | Tutorial | .net magazine.

 

How Facebook Timeline measures up for brands

 interface, Internet News  154 Responses »
Sep 182012
 

Timeline best practices

  • Design and build compelling engagement apps that speak in a meaningful way to the brand’s audience and capture the brand’s essence.
  • Don’t expect fans to “find” the apps from clicking the tiles below the cover photo. Drive traffic to that engagement app, post about it in the Timeline every day, and drive through other media.
  • Make sure apps are mobile-aware. Visit your favorite brand page on the Facebook mobile app. Find a link in the Timeline to an app. In most cases, the link doesn’t work. With extra effort, it’s possible to ensure that engagement apps run optimally on both Facebook desktop and Facebook mobile.
  • Strive to deliver fresh, engaging content every day (questions, challenges, daily prizes, sweepstakes entries, comments) to entertain fans and keep them coming back.
  • Include engaging media (photos, videos) to grab attention.
  • Incorporate user-submitted content if possible. This not only gives the fan a personal feeling of participation, but also gives the brand interesting content that can be used as the subject of future posts.
  • Look at ways gamification elements, like leaderboards, can juice engagement.

Bad Timeline habits

  • Engagement apps that pull fans away from the Facebook page and funnel them onto a website cause fans to lose the social context and limit the potential of word-of-mouth sharing on Facebook.
  • Facebook is special, yet many brands don’t offer Facebook fans something unique they can’t get anywhere else. Leverage the highest share possible — one from a valued and trusted friend — and give Facebook fans something unique.
  • Brands tend to be averse to tapping advocates to learn and connect deeply. There’s a huge amount of insight to be gained from the fans that are willing to talk about what they’ve bought or experienced.
  • Brands that don’t maximize the full potential of Facebook ad products (ads, Sponsored Stories) to drive more traffic and maximize reach miss out on engagement. Those ad products are designed to amplify good social behaviors to a wider audience and can be highly leveraged.

MORE:  How Facebook Timeline measures up for brands single page view – iMediaConnection.com.

 

I cannot design or code a responsive website

 interface, Web Design  277 Responses »
Sep 122012
 

Don’t listen to the voices in your head, advises frontend developer Nick Jones. Here he explains how he got stuck creating his personal site and learned to trust his instincts instead

There’s this fallacy of a right way and a wrong way to design and code. If you spend enough time looking for it or reading about it, you’ll end up paralysed. It happened to me. But in early 2012, five years after the launch of the iPhone, I decided it was time to suck it up and create a modern website for myself. What follows are my doubts about making narrowdesign.com.

Responsive?

(INTERNAL DIALOGUE) You know nothing about ‘responsive web design’. You have no business making a responsive site for yourself or anyone else. It’s too new and untested. You aren’t capable of pulling it off. You’re not even a real programmer. In the event that you do pull it off, you’ll immediately wish you hadn’t. Something new will replace it by this time next year. You’ll look stupid for jumping on the bandwagon with every SEO expert and web guru who now drop its name. Remember what happened with microsites?

MORE:  I cannot design or code a responsive website | Opinion | .net magazine.

 

12 of the World’s Most Annoying Technologies

 interface, Tech News  305 Responses »
Sep 122012
 

Most consumer technologies, when wielded correctly, are magnificent. But so are bagpipes. In the hands of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, technology can be an annoyance enabler. These 12 technologies are not the future we were hoping for.

Camera Flash

Here’s the deal with the flash on your camera: Most of the time it doesn’t help. You’re either too far away from the action or you’re too close. That photo you shot at the concert? Still dark. The flash didn’t help, and everyone within a four-foot radius is nightblind now. That photo from the girls’ night out where your friends were two feet away? The flash made them look like ghouls. Go to your smartphone or camera’s settings and turn off the flash. Do it now.

MORE:  12 of the World’s Most Annoying Technologies | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

 

The Best Way to Comment Your Code

 interface, Tech News  322 Responses »
Sep 102012
 

We’ve written before about the value of writing your README before your code, but what about when it comes to the actual code? Terse one-liners? Paragraph-long descriptions? How much is enough and when is it too much?

How to comment code is a perennial subject of debate for programmers, one that developer Zachary Voase recently jumped into, arguing that one of the potential flaws with extensive comments (or any comments really) is that they never seem to get updated when the code changes. “We forget,” writes Voase, “overlooking a comment when changing the fundamental behavior of semantics of the code to which it relates.”

Voase thinks the solution is in our text editors, which typically “gray out” comments, fading then into the background so we can focus on the actual code. We ought to do the opposite, he believes: Make the comments jump out. Looking at the visual examples on Voase’s post makes the argument a bit more compelling. Good text editors have configurable color schemes so it shouldn’t be too hard to give this a try and see if it improves your comments and your code.

Another approach is to treat comments as a narrative. Dave Winer recently mentioned comments in passing, writing about the benefits of using an outliner to handle comments since it makes it easy to show and hide them:

MORE:  The Best Way to Comment Your Code | Webmonkey | Wired.com.

 

5 techniques to turbo-charge your Facebook page

 interface, Marketing, Your Brand  524 Responses »
Sep 062012
 

Every startup dreams of building a thriving Facebook page, with millions of loyal, engaged fans who actively take part in contests, post comments, and share regularly — creating a viral buzz. But if you’ve managed a Facebook page, you know it’s not that easy and at times can be extremely challenging.

Here are five techniques that I’ve used to turbo-charge our Facebook strategy; we’ve grown to 14,000 fans with very little advertising, almost doubled our weekly total reach over the last 10 days (up 98 percent), and recently doubled our “people talking about this” measurement, increasing it by 113 percent.

Create a leader board and recognize your top fans

In addition to your ordinary posts and photos, it’s key to enable your fans to create a community. Give them a reason to interact with your page. We implemented an app powered by Booshaka called “Top Fans Pro.”

MORE:  5 techniques to turbo-charge your Facebook page

 

Twitter enables embedded timelines

 interface, Internet News  163 Responses »
Sep 062012
 

Twitter has launched a new tool that enables you to embed interactive timelines on any website. According to the company, the tool provides the means to place any public timeline on any page. “With one line of HTML you can deliver any account’s tweets, favourites, a list, search query or hashtag directly to your website,” explained Twitter’s Sylvain Carle.

The timelines work much like the Twitter website, providing the means for visitors to reply, retweet, follow and tweet directly, but without leaving the page.

MORE:  Twitter enables embedded timelines | News | .net magazine.

 

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