Twitter’s design options make for an interesting challenge, allowing you only to change your background image and basic colour scheme; can you come up with a creative design despite the limitations?

A good design not only brightens up your Twitter page, it also helps you draw in more followers and makes you stand out from the crowd.

I’ve put together a list of my favourite 20 designs to give you some inspiration, remember to post your own for comparison!

@andybudd

@bartelme

@gopalraju

@iamkhayyam

@luckymurari

@marcofolio

@mayhemstudios

@missneela

@MrTweet

@mycophobia

@nourayehia

@rogieking

@styletime


There’s no such thing as wasted space. These guys prefer getting the most out of the little space given to them, using it more as a marketing tool to present more information about themselves to their devoted followers.

@chadengle

@briancray

@graywolf

@dani

@justcreative

@theleggett

@obox

A collection of our favourite CSS Gallery Websites!
What's your favourite CSS Website?

You might already know this, but I think it’s important to reiterate how important it is to keep track of your online visitors. In offline business, gauging interest from clients and customers is as important as making the sales and it’s the same online. Business interest needs to be recorded to track trends in sales and predict future performance. You must treat your online business the same as your offline business!

So what can we do with Google Analytics?

With Google analytics you will have the ability to track every visitor on your site over a period of time. You can have these reports emailed to you and saved online for you to view wherever and whenever you need. Daily reports by email are a favourite amongst our clients.

 

Google analytics uses graphs and charts (which you can customize) to show you the data. As you can see, the subject website has had a consistent flow of visitors. With the help of Google Analytics, new pages and changes to the website would show a change in this graph over time. Google Analytics makes the improvement and promoting processes of using a website for online business a much smoother experience. 

It’s not just the number of visitors we can track, Google Analytics also allows us to track;

• Traffic Sources
• Top Landing Pages
• Top pages browsed by visitors
• Traffic Geography
• Visitors connection speeds
• Visitors Internet Browser
• Bounce Rates

 

In addition to many other tracking features Google Analytics also allows us to setup goals and filters which can help refine the data so you can see specifically the best performing pages. If you have targeted a specific product on your website, it helps to use the goals feature to understand which parts of your website are funnelling visitors to your goal and optimize accordingly.

Google Analytics should be a key weapon in your arsenal to tackle online business effectively.

If you don’t have Google Analytics you can sign up for a Webmaster Account here. Checkout some other Google tools like Google Street View.

Twitter – The star of Micro blogging and the next revolution, says Bryan Adams, managing director of Ph Creative

 
So when Peter Fenton from Benchmark and Todd Chaffee from Institutional Venture Partners investment company knocks on your door and offers you $35m, the chances are you’ve something pretty good going on.

Twitter is certainly beginning to gain momentum beyond the web geeks – it’s got past the IT industry, it’s poked its head into the social networking crowd and now it’s firmly in the public domain and its not going to stop until your granny is tweeting with the best of them.

We’ve seen the mobile phone industry singlehandedly become responsible for evolving the dexterity of the human thumb with the introduction of the texting culture -even to the extent of creating a new language amongst the masses – as if teenagers weren’t hard enough to understand without introducing a completely new texting shorthand language. Anyway, I digress… my point is… Get ready for the next revolution!

But first, it’s worth acknowledging a sign of the times…the phenomenon of what is essentially, a socially driven culture virally spreading across the world for social purposes then, because of its momentum demands the attention of the business world and soon dictating the future of commercial communications.

We could all soon be tweeting to the same tune, keeping everyone updated with our goings-on and connecting to more people more often.

From a marketing perspective, we’re going to see more and more of this ‘next generation’ technology and culture merging the lines between personal/social and business sales and marketing. If it’s embraced and harnessed properly it can open up a vast new world of exposure for your message and your brand.  It’s happening already but we’re only just getting started – the possibilities are endless.

What tweeting demonstrates for me is the power of the individual to affect the masses in the sales and marketing sphere.

Why? Think of it like this. A teenager in Alaska using Twitter can easily hold the attention of a global audience of billions - easier and quicker than a global brand traditionally spending £m’s to broadcast to a fraction of the audience burning a monumental hole in their advertising and marketing budget to little effect in comparison.

The beauty of this shift is the kid in Alaska is building a following due to merit and credibility. The advertising between movies, corporate banners on websites and full-page glossy messages in magazines are increasingly becoming the noise we tolerate, whilst looking for the kid in Alaska…. It’s probably not so surprising that that ITC investment company came -a- knocking with $35m on offer.

 

We’re no kid in Alaska but by all means follow our tweets

 

Happy Tweeting!

Whether we’re designing the most basic website or developing a large dynamic content managed website, attention to detail is always our main priority, as well as a happy client of course!

Organisation
We always plan out in stages what needs to be done... starting with a basic sitemap of the site so it is organised and easy to follow. This helps during the design process, so navigation looks right throughout the site. It will also help when building and developing the site limiting the number of changes at a later stage.

Overall Appearance
Consistent design throughout makes a site work well, avoiding using multiple fonts. It helps to stick to the brand of the client, using a couple of selected colours from their Corporate Identity, and using web safe fonts such as Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Georgia, Comic Sans Serif and Trebuchet.

Little extras always help add to any site such as Breadcrumb Navigation, Social Bookmarks and even Google Maps on a contact page.

Good content
From an SEO point of view, content on a web site is probably the most important, so writing good content that’s relevant to the page helps improve ranking and generate more relevant traffic to your site. Good use of Header Tags/Page Titles and avoiding spelling and grammar mistakes, not just for search engines, but also for web users viewing the site makes the website more of a user friendly experience.

If a page doesn’t have content, we don’t like to include it in the site until the content has been written for that actual page. Try to avoid using ‘Under Construction’ signs on a blank page. Search engines will only delay their next visit which is not what we want.

Testing
Test, test and test again before and after a website goes live, including browser compatibility, working links, form validation and any functionality that may be in a website.

 When building any site using our Content Management System PhUse™, we also think about how to make it as simple as possible for a client to up-date their own website. Giving them the freedom to develop and grow their site while sticking to the original format and layout.
 

Here it goes, this is my first blog for Ph.Creative since joining the company as an Administrator in late January. I decided to write about how I’ve found my first few weeks, luckily I don’t have to stretch the truth to keep the boss happy because the truth is… I love my job!

When I was offered an interview I got straight online and started to research the company, to ensure it was somewhere I could really kick start a career and put some roots down. I must say this is the first role I have applied for where I’ve seen my potential boss on YouTube and featured in the local press before even meeting him!

Like most people new in the job, I spent my first few days being terrified of doing something wrong, trying to remember everybody’s name and working out the Krypton Factor-like puzzle of who has which cup in the kitchen. Thank god for Pantone coloured mugs and Ph.Green.

There are lots of things the team have in common, their passion for all things creative being the most obvious, the Everton FC / Liverpool FC divide which is normally the main topic of conversation on a Monday morning (Come on You Blues!) and their ability to answer the same question I have asked a hundred times before, without looking even slightly annoyed. Yet their individual talents and personalities make our Rodney Street office not only a diverse place to work, it’s also really fun.

Guiding our clients through their individual projects, from the initial meeting and a coffee, to sending their websites live and watching them grow, that’s the job satisfaction we all work so hard to achieve. What I think sets Ph.Creative apart from the rest, is that every single person is involved in every single project. We’re a team.

I’ve become so much more aware of the amount of time and effort invested into networking around the city centre. The idea of simply meeting up with a fellow local business to discuss how we might be able to help each other is fantastic. Even if there is no scope at the present time, it doesn’t matter; we made another friend and forged a new business relationship.

During these first few weeks I have learnt so much about the industry, where we’ve been and where we’re going to, our clients and their needs and aspirations, and I’ve learnt about myself.

I’m not afraid of making a mistake because I’ll get it right next time. I don’t get anybodies name wrong anymore, because I drew a named seating plan and stuck in on my desk. Also, it’s not really the end of the world if you get the red cup when you know yours is always the green one.

I realise that in writing this blog I am going to have to write a follow-up to prove its still fun and I’m making new mistakes. Maybe I can tell you more about the characters here in another few weeks, the adventures of Google Dave, Disco Steve and of course ‘Internet Marketing Genius’ Bryan Adams is enough to write a book.

But for now I’m still the new girl. 

In the last few weeks, more and more statistics have revealed a surge in people shopping and buying things on the internet.

Big players such as Littlewoods, Argos and Tesco have seen the number of extra online shoppers increase by millions, but how is this affecting smaller businesses within Liverpool, and how does this change the way creative industries should be working?

I believe that there should be a more consultative approach – seek first to understand, then design a strategy, and then execute the plan.

As a company, we have recently been approached by a well-known business who had spent a lot of money on their website.

Their business model relies upon visibility online to generate revenue, along with some functionality.

We were amazed to find that what they currently have simply doesn’t deliver what they want.

Yes, they had a professional looking website and brand, but no attention had been made to ensure the site was visible to their target audience. Surely, as an industry, we can’t allow this to happen.

If we’re serious about helping local businesses make money online and thereby adding value through investment and creating more jobs in the city, we must help them win online.

A lot of work happening in our industry is too transactional, eg, “we provide this, you get this” without any perception of value or what the client will get during and after the work. The web is transparent. If people know what they are doing, we can track, test, learn and apply what is happening when we attract, capture and convert leads and customers for the site 

In the current climate, we have to go that extra mile and provide a service that delivers results more than ever, ensuring that local businesses have just as much of a chance as the big players

Here’s a cool little CSS 3 trick for hiding messages within your text. We’re going to be using the ::selection declaration to change the colour of the text on selection. The ::selection declaration is a new tool used in CSS 3, but currently isn’t supported by Internet Explorer. The idea is that you can change the default blue colour when you select text on a web page. It’s very easy to implement:

p::selection { background: #f00; }
p::-moz-selection { background: #f00; }

The ::-moz-selection is for Firefox support, so you should always remember to use both. The code above will change the background colour to red when you select any paragraphs on the page. So how can we use this for hidden messages? Easy. Simply change the font colour and the text colour to be the same for the non-important text and use contrasting colours for the words that you do want to show. To distinguish the hidden words, wrap them in a <span> tag. For example:

<p>These are the words I want to hide.
<span>And these are the words I want to show</span></p>

p::selection { background:#000;color:#000; }
p::-moz-selection { background:#000;color:#000; }
p span::selection { background:#fff;color:#000; }
p span::-moz-selection { background:#fff;color:#000; }

You can see this method being used on our demo page here. Just highlight all of the text to reveal the hidden message!