Get Roused!

The short answer is no, not any more. The battle between web designers and places with IE6 installed is nearly over and I’m delighted to report that the web designers are the assumed victors.

Approximately 2% of users in the UK now browse websites using Internet Explorer 6 with the rest either using version 7, 8 or Firefox. Google Chrome is making great strides in market share.

Here at Roused we dropped all but basic support for IE6 some time ago and will not design specifically for this platform. With figures showing such a small user base hopefully there will be even less pressure to accommodate it.

Recently we’ve been working on a landing page for a website that will be visited by millions of UK users and for the first time we faced no resistance from the client to only offer basic IE6 support. Surprising, especially as they have IE6 installed on their entire estate.

We’ve now got 5 Members of Parliament taking up our services and one of the increasingly popular ones is our mass e-mailing services.

We provide a bespoke solution based on each MP’s situation and ensure it’s the best fit both in terms of technology, usability and cost.

Please email Mike Rouse via mike@roused.co if you are an elected member and would like us to propose our solution for you.

We can also provide solutions to law firms and City firms.

Here’s what the current Rouse Media logo looks like:

We also have some favicon versions you may have seen on other people’s websites:

It’s not a bad logo and it has gained recognition over time. However, we’re moving away from the ‘media’ part of the name and just calling ourselves “Roused” (pronounced as in ‘rousing’ as in to awake somebody).

We could just keep the logo and drop the ‘m’ out of there, but I thought I’d share some other logos that I like the look of. I’m linking to them rather than reproducing them here for copyright reasons. They all open in a new window.

• Jungpark - a bird and the company name. Dark blue background.
• Netpower - a leaf with a lightening bolt going through it.
• Scientifc Conservation2 - another leaf.
• Modo - some kind of circular vortex.
• BPO - simple and modern.
• Curly Anna - no ‘device’ but nice.
• Zorros - web app makers, hence why they’ve got a ‘device’ similar to what we’re looking for.
• Brella - we’re not adverse to using an everyday item to represent us, but it would have to align to what we do or where we operate.

What we’re trying to do is convey ‘Roused’ as a fresh brand with strong impact. We want our brand to be as rousing as the work we will be producing. However, we have to balance a rousing design against the background of the sectors we operate in: Law, Politics and The City. Brand in these areas tends to be corporate in style and though we don’t want to blend in we do want to convey professionalism and trust and not come over as a bunch of crazy kids or hippies.

In terms of words used to describe us we previously heard: “cheap” and “quick” fairly often as well as “responsive”, “helpful” and “knowledgeable”. We want to keep the last three and work on the first two. We’re not keen on being seen as “quick” but would rather deliver to the client’s planned deadline instead of in a rushed way that compromises quality and long-term objectives. We’ll be industrious, diligent, flexible and efficient, but not just rushing the first passable design out of the door. The “cheap” association is one we also want to change because it carries an essence of low quality, perhaps going hand-in-hand with “quick”. We want to remain good value for money and provide our clients with affordable solutions, but we also want them to have the confidence that their money is going in to a solid, stable and trustworthy company where they know it’s being invested back in to their best interests.

We’ve commissioned a graphics designer who is working with us to establish a new brand and it’ll take some time to go through the conceptualisation phase, but as a friend once said to me, “what’s worth having is worth waiting for.”

If you want an intro to what Firefox 4 is all about check out this list of features or check out Steven Dent’s excellent tumblog for a perspective from a power user in the UK political world. I’m going to focus on its support for CSS3, a very important part of what we do for our political (and other sector) clients.

CSS3 Calc() Support

This one is more popular with developers because it lets them compute a length value using arithmetic. In the example over at hacks.mozilla.org they use a mixture of percentages and ems to show how you can get your elements to fit just right. No more overlaps or headaches trying to work out exact values for elements or having to use JavaScript to calculate and adjust.

CSS3 Transitions

CSS3 Transitions is probably the biggest bit of CSS3 that Firefox has implemented in terms of impact for designers, and rather overdue it is too. WebKit has supported this for about 3 years now, for example. Hopefully the final release will have a complete implementation.

In a nutshell, CSS3 Transitions will allow designers to create some funky effects on a web page. For example, a load of pictures of a candidate in a pile of Polaroid-style shots that move or come forward when the visitor hovers over them.

Here’s some further reading for you fellow geekazoids:

• CSS3 Transitions - W3C Working Draft 1 Dec 2009
• 24 Ways Demo and Tutorial
• Robert Nyman’s CSS3 Transitions Tutorial
• CSS Fundamentals: CSS3 Transitions by Dave Sparks

Resizeable TEXTAREA Elements

Users will now be able to drag and resize text areas by default now - giving them more space to provide further information in feedback forms, for example.

Selection of a Section of a Background Image

You can now use the new -moz-image-rect selector to pick a part of a background image to show inside an element. A very neat feature that, if I understand rightly, will allow me to create a single background image and just pick the various sections from it to show in various given elements.

Side Note: Windows 7 Thumbnails

Aside from design now. Good to see Firefox 4 supporting Windows 7 thumbnails along the task bar. Click on the Firefox ico and see all your open tabs at once. Smooth.

Side Note: Multiple Monitors

Again, off from design focus, I have a monitor hooked up to my laptop and Chrome allows me to drag a tab from the main window to the other monitor smoothly. Doing this in Firefox 4 Beta causes the tab to open in a new window, but on the same monitor. When I drag it over I have to manually refresh the page. Chrome therefore is still the best for me in a multiple-monitor environment. As Mozilla are promising new beta releases every 2-3 weeks they might fix this along the way.

Dear Reader,

The feedback to setting up this blog has been positive. Some points about the tone of voice and how it should be a bit more professional that I’ll take on board - sorry, I was trying to sound ‘fun’ and probably became the digital equivalent of an embarrassing uncle at a wedding.

I was due to meet a potential graphics designer today, but had to postpone because one of our biggest clients had a sudden change to a large programme that needed some input immediately. I always have mixed feelings about this kind of work. I love the pressure, but hate the havoc it causes to my diary.

We’re going to invest more in the graphical side of the business. Both me and Chris are pretty talented in different ways when it comes to graphics, but we’re both so busy now with the broader aspects of the business we need someone to come and pick up the workload and deliver for our clients. Besides, the web is changing so much that constant revisiting of graphics is required to keep them fresh.

I’m pleased with the progress that we’re making so far. We’ve agreed on this brand and are putting together our brief for the new logo that you will see popping up on the sites we look after for our clients. Look out for it in the favicon area or at the footer of a website. It’s a sign of quality and great support. 

We’re continuing to work with existing clients as well as putting finishing touches to our packages and full service offering. Even though they’re not quite finished yet we’ve got people signed up to them so they must be good. 

This weekend and early next week is going to be dominated by work for a client based in the City of London as we approach the crucial launch phase for their website. Everything is pretty much done and we’re just adding the finishing touches to what we hope will be a good package for them and a nice site for their visitors.  These are special clients to us as they were probably the biggest influence from a client to kick-start our growth plans. We’ve had to grow to deliver for them and in the process we’ve found that the company is actually something pretty damn good. 

I’m going to repoint www.rousemedia.co.uk over to this blog until the new Roused website is up and running. That should help keep people informed about what’s going on and allow us to start moving away from the Rouse Media brand.

Have a good weekend!

Mike Rouse

“Subversion” is a system that allows multiple people to work on your website at once and in a way that establishes clear versions between every tiny change of code. In practical terms it allows us to go back to a previous design, recover from security threats quicker, and helps us to remember what we were doing with your code when we come and look at it again some months later. 

Subversion is like a member of the team here. Without it the business model would quickly fall apart. It’s got its quirks, like leaving the toilet seat up and making it difficult to just pop in an make changes to themes on the fly, but we wouldn’t change it for the world.

What benefit does Subversion have to you, our client?

By choosing an agency who uses Subversion you are able to have a little more peace of mind that your website is in safe hands. If something goes wrong we can just roll back to a previous stable version of the website. If you want to make changes we can test them out first and make sure they’re working before we put them on your live website. In all, you get a much more professional and accountable operation than you’re used to. 

That’s right. Accountable. Because every bit of code has comments added by the person that was working on it and is checked-in securely we can be ready to explain what was happening with a particular part of the website at any given time.

It also allows us to log how much time we’ve spent working on your website down to the minute, meaning that you get an accurate bill and can more accurately plan how much you want to spend on maintenance hours. 

Whether you’re launching a new blog as en elected member or a full website for your latest campaign you need to sit down and think about the type of people that are going to use the website and then break it down using ‘personas’.

Let’s say you’re a candidate in a parliamentary constituency - it’s not accurate to believe that your website is going to be visited by every single registered voter. With the best will in the world it just won’t happen. You need to focus on getting the best out of the people who will visit, be that a vote or a donation.

Start by looking at the make-up of your constituency. For instance, do you have a large hospital that employs a lot of people in the local area? If so, you can call your first person ‘the hospital employee’. We can make some assumptions based on this persona: they are not likely to access your website at work, but instead will likely look at it in the evening or morning so think about the time you publish your news and blogs. That’s just one example. You might have mostly commercial offices in which case you can assume that people will look at your site whilst at the office and shape your site around that knowledge.

Check out what the penetration of broadband internet is like in your area. If it’s mostly dial-up connections then forget about doing YouTube videos that nobody locally will be able to enjoy. Likewise, if you’re in a broadband-rich area you should think about getting your camera out.

Breaking down the type of people that are going to visit your site is essential. It will allow you to determine which features are a priority, which will then help you build your design and development brief that you will give to the person or agency who will design your website.

We’d like to believe that there’s not a politician, lawyer or investment banker* out there who doesn’t realise the power of social media when it comes to their own campaign, product, service or brand.  Instead of harping on about the virtues we’ll leave it to fellow Twittering and Tumbling politico Steven Dent who’s got the stats and a write-up.

Part of the services that Roused will be offering in the near future is social media management.

• We’ll provide you with some kick-ass tools, techniques and training to get the most out of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and any other social network that comes along.
• We’ll also be rolling out social media integration in to all of the sites we manage and you’ll soon be able to log in to update your blogs and websites using your Facebook and/or Twitter account.
• Our clients will benefit from our support in establishing social media campaigns, such as to improve fundraising and increase membership, where applicable.

* We picked politicians, lawyers and investment bankers as these are people from the 3 markets we operate in.

One of the really exciting and cool things we’re doing for our new website is building it using HTML5 and CSS3 standards so we can use the @font-face technique to show any font on a web page. Before you switch off because you saw an acronym hang in with us for a minute whilst we explain why this is relevant to you.

1. It’s cool. You will be able to choose from an enormous range of fonts to show in your titles and for your text. No more boring Arial, Tahoma and Times New Roman. You can now have a web site that looks glossy and appealing to visitors. The more appealing your site looks the more trust the visitor is going to have in what you’re trying to say to them.
2. It’s not a graphical file. You won’t need an expensive graphic design session to make all the words and then find that you can’t change them without paying yet again. The fonts put on a page using what’s called the @font-face technique that is hopefully going to be part of CSS3 are rendered as text, meaning you can change the wording yourself.
3. The mobile market is going to be massive. The Apple iPad has already sold over 3 million units and counting. It supports HTML5 and CSS3. With more people expected to view websites on mobile devices than desktops in just a short couple of years you really can’t afford to be behind your more glossy competitors here.

The technique is supported on most modern browsers. We can even get it to work with Internet Explorer. Yes, we were surprised about that too.

Now for the science…

@font-face {
    font-family: Base02;
    src: url(‘http://c1990232.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/Base02.ttf’) format(“truetype-aat”),
         url(‘http://c1990232.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/Base02.ttf’) format(“opentype”),
         url(‘fonts/Base02.ttf’) format(“truetype-aat”),
         url(‘fonts/Base02.ttf’) format(“opentype”);
}

The above code doesn’t deploy the Internet Explorer-friendly solution, but it does do several things.

@font-face allows us to make a new font available. We can have as many of these as we like. One for each glossy font that we’re going to use.

font-family lets us define what it’s called later on in the normal CSS. We can assign the font to multiple CSS selectors.

src is simply where to find the file. We’ve got multiple sources here because we need one truetype, one opentype and because Firefox 3.5 doesn’t allow us to call on fonts that our off-server we’ve provided duplicate localised font files. The idea is that if Firefox allows us to link to our CDN-hosted fonts we’ll drop the extra lines in a later release.

To deploy for Internet Explorer compatibility we would need to convert the font to EOT format and use a special @font-face set of code that doesn’t have the “format” bit in there otherwise Internet Explorer will ignore the whole definition. This is highly annoying because it means we’ve got to have extra lines of code plus different font files to accommodate.

Hello, Mikey Rouse here. Your loveable web designer to the political giants. I’ve been in this game since before 2005 and since then I’ve made some friends, some enemies and some business partners. It’s been a roller coaster to be honest and anyone in business would probably say the same. We’re no Facebook and we’re nowhere near to living out the dream in Silicon Valley, but we’re bigger and better than we’ve ever been.

And that’s why we’re dropping the “media” part of the name. It doesn’t fit any more. We’re not a media company, we’re a firm of astute web designers and developers offering a fantastic service. We also put our marketing hats on one day and decided to add the letter ‘d’ to the name to make “Roused”. You can see where we’re going here, can’t you, you cheeky little monkeys.

Roused is going to be amazing. It’s going to take everything we’ve learned from this game in the past 5 years and package it all up into one bundle of delicious corporate goodness.

This blog, this humble little Tumblog, is not our new home. We’re still building that. This is where we’re going to be writing about our new home and the new business as it grows and develops. Some of the posts are going to be technical mumbo jumbo about how we’re using HTML5 and CSS3 to rebuild our website and some posts are going to look at the business side of things like who we’re working with, projects we’ve got going on and all that sort of stuff. Oh, and then there’s going to be some entries about the fun we’re going to be getting up to along the way.

It’s going to be a hell of a ride.

Mike Rouse (and the rest of the ever-growing Roused team)

PS: Larry the Legal Eagle says: “Roused” is a spanking new trading name of Rouse Media Ltd, an awesome company registered in England & Wales under the prestigious number 06798888. Our regal registered offices are at Marlborough House, Warwick Road, Solihull B91 3DA but that’s just for the post and the accountant so don’t bother popping in for a cuppa or a beer there. If you want to get roused with us come down to Coventry and we’ll sort something out. Bell us on 02476262214 or make our Blackberry’s go nuts on info@roused.co