Web Development

Gamification - Do you understand what it means and how it could help your business grow?

Published: August 24th, 2012

While not yet a word in the English dictionairy, gamification is a term that could help promote and grow many online businesses and services.

Wikipedia describes gamification as “the use of game design techniques, game thinking and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts.”

There has been a stack of SEO debates this year about the relevancy of links, social, content, good content and creativity. What is the best way forward and what will give you the edge moving into 2013?

I still believe you can’t beat a combination of everything; however, creativity, for me, will most definitely give you the edge.

Most people who use Facebook will have at some stage come across the ever evolving game “Farmville”, where millions of people around the world engage in building farms or trading animals to grow their online agricultural empire.

What a lot of people don’t realise is the amount of users who also departed with their hard earned cash, purchasing products and services (my girlfriend included) to earn extra points within the game so they could build a new barn or pen for their online animals.

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Web Designer Vacancy Apply Today!

Published: July 20th, 2012

Due to expansion Blueclaw are looking to add another enthusiastic web designer to their team. This is an excellent opportunity for a creative individual passionate about front-end web design.

The successful candidate will be expected to liaise with clients and design websites and various other projects (such as infographics) to match their tastes and requirements while keeping customer experience and sales conversion in mind.

The ideal candidate will have two years experience in web design preferably working in an agency environment.

You will work with a fantastic team who will help push your design skills to the next level!

REQUIRED SKILLS/EXPERIENCE

2 years+ experience in web design
(candidates with less experience may be considered if they are backed with a strong portfolio of work)
Experienced Photoshop user
HTML, HTML 5 & CSS

BENEFICIAL SKILLS/EXPERIENCE

Experience working with open source packages such as WordPress
Experience with Illustrator
PSD to HTML/CSS Execution
Basic understanding of SEO
Design of Facebook and Twitter pages
Infographic and data visualisation design

Location: Central Leeds - The Calls
Salary: Competitive

To apply please call our office on 0113 234 3300 and ask for Fergus Clawson or David Wilding or send your CV and covering letter to fergus[at]blueclaw.co.uk

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The explosive growth of mobile commerce- Blueclaw builds mobile-optimised ecommerce site

Published: August 9th, 2011

We are very pleased to announce that we have recently completed a mobile-optimised ecommerce website for our client Direct Golf (www.direct-golf.co.uk) which you can see by visiting the site on any smartphone including iPhone and Andoid handsets.

The growth in mobile commerce or “m-commerce” has been staggering over the last 2-3 years. eBay posted gross merchandise sales of $2 Billion in 2010 via mobile commerce for example and by 2015 it has been projected that mobile shopping will reach $165 billion worldwide. Forrester has projected that mobile sales will grow annually at a rate of 39% over the next 5 years, and will account for 7% of all ecommerce sales by 2016. For some Blueclaw clients we are already seeing mobile sales accounting for over 10% of online sales.

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Firefox quickly follows up Internet Explorer with a new version

Published: March 22nd, 2011

Hot on the heels of Internet Explorer 9′s release last week today saw the final release of Firefox 4 (another browser that seemed to be in beta / release candidate stage for ages).

With an updated UI making it look very much like Opera the latest Firefox version promises improved speed, more CSS3 support and a host of new features. Last week Microsoft were attempting to claim IE9 was the most advanced web browser, it will be interesting to see if they continue to keep up this claim when FF4 offers arguably more.

Download firefox4 now

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IE9 launches so upgrade now

Published: March 15th, 2011

Microsoft have been working very hard in the last couple of months working on their reputation, just a few years ago they were the big evil giant of the tech industry with their anti competitive business practices not winning them many friends. However times change and their seemingly unsurpassable dominance in home computing has been eroded most notably when it comes to the web browser. Where once they had a 95% market share it has now slipped under 50%, as faster more feature rich alternatives such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera have chipped away at their lead. Well the men from Redmond are fighting back with their latest offering Internet Explorer 9 and it is a big step in catching up in area they were being left behind.

Having learnt from previous launch issues (such as the much criticised Windows Vista) this has not been a rushed job. There have been a number of beta versions leading up to this official launch with Microsoft looking to involve web developers throughout the testing process. They have made use of social media channels and even throwing a big party at the South By Southwest conference in Austin Texas, their hope is no doubt to attempt to build a better relationship with the web development community who have been suffering for years now to deal with IE6′s incompetency. It seems they have realised that the key to the success of this latest iteration is that the developers get on board and make their HTML5 web apps compatible with IE9 and I for one applaud them for this.

So if you are still using IE8, IE7 or are even IE6 (god help you) then please please please, if you are not going to make the switch to chrome/firefox etc. then at least upgrade to IE9 and let we the web development community take full advantage of CSS3/HTML5 functionality.

Get IE9

 

On a side note it’s not been all good news for Microsoft however as they PR took a big hit the other night when they attempted to get twitter coverage by offering to donate aid to Japan earthquake victims for every retweet. This attempt to capitalize on the tragedy and suffering of the Japanese people seem to be a hark back to the bad old days of the evil empire and the twitter backlash resulted in the trending of the hastag #fuckbing.

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