• RSS

    Subscribe to our feed

  • Categories

  • Archives

  • Recent Posts

  • Recent Comments

  • Twitter Friends

  • Latest tweets

  •  

0

The Design Indaba 2010

BY Bryce Hancock

So my first Design Indaba has sadly come to an end, I know now that this will definitely not be my last. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I finally made it down to Cape Town for the conference but after hearing great reviews of previous years I was eager to attend.

For me the diversity of speakers were really good, encompassing most creative sectors – advertising, graphic design, film, fashion design, industrial design, architecture, performing arts etc. Being a Digital designer I hope in years to come we will get to hear from some international thought leaders in the online environment, but certainly this exposure to different creative thinkers opened my eyes to other design ideas and approaches. It was good to hear from designers that have faced similar problems to what we have but have found different solutions.

Some of the highlights:

  1. Michael Beirut with his inspiring and insightful talk about past experiences and lessons he learnt.
  2. The inspirational team of designers at Troika with some fascinating case studies of design challenges they have faced and overcome. I really enjoyed their unique approach to design and how they constantly look for alternative ways of doing things. Like their world clock situated at Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 -”All the time in the World” uses a very different approach to the conventional world clock that normally displays only well known capital cities, this clock allows people to view times at more interesting destinations like “The world’s longest river”, “The world’s highest mountain” etc. Or their very innovative digital cloud sculpture that they conceptualised built and implemented.
  3. Stefan G Bucher – Graphic designer, writer and illustrator. 
    A rather eccentric and slightly wacky designer that came across as hugely passionate for his work. For 100 days Stefan filmed himself drawing a new monster every night based on random ink blots, and quickly created a large online following that eagerly await his next Daily Monster.
  4. Alejandro Aravena
    One of the most thought provoking speakers at the Indaba spoke about his “do-tank” (as opposed to “think-tank”) and their involvement in a groundbreaking social housing project in Chile called Elemental that has revolutionized the approach to low income housing.
  5. Li Edelkoort, a world famous trend researcher spoke about up and coming global trends and finished with an interesting take on the “Bordello” of the future.
  6. Bruce Nussbaum – Gave great insight into how he believes design is changing the world economy. He also spoke of “the biggest technical change to the internet since it was created four decades ago” referring to the decision by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to allow domain names to be written in non-Latin languages which will allow people to type internet addresses in their local languages.
A little more on the fun side was the great team of Thierry Cassuto and Zapiro who spoke to the audience about ZA News a controversial series that is gathering a huge following online. This talk also featured a special live guest appearance by Madiba and Bishop Tutu (ZA News puppets) whose hilarious interaction with the audience left everyone in stitches.

So all in all a very worthwhile experience. Well done Design Indaba, I look forward to next year…

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook

 

6

Mobile Design and SEO Best Practices: Essential Tips

BY eMarketing Trends

The growth in the Mobile Industry over the last decade has made it paramount for all businesses to have Mobile Sites in order to reach this growing new target market.

Current local (South Africa) trends show that:

  • There are ten million mobile Internet users in SA (Five million PC Internet users in SA)
  • One in six Google searches in SA originates off a mobile device.
  • In South Africa about 40 percent of mobile phone users have WAP-enabled phones.
  • The top Mobile Applications currently in South Africa are: Mxit – with 15 million+ users – and Facebook.
  • Mobile search and eCommerce will be a large area of growth in 2010.

In short, this indicates an importance for businesses to target mobile searchers and users of mobile applications.

Some of the best Mobile Site examples I can give include BBC, the Goal mobi site, and College Humour (N/B: “these examples obviously look better on your mobile phone – feel free to suggest your favourite mobile sites below“).

However, when creating a Mobile Site it is also imperative to build and optimise the Mobile Sites so it is user-friendly and accessible on the Mobile Web.

Mobile Design and SEO Best Practices
When designing a Mobile Site one aspect to consider is that one must understand that mobile searchers/users are different from PC searchers/users. In order to cater for Mobile users designers must:

  • Provide an elegant experience by considering whether individuals possess a smart phone (for example an iPhone with fully featured web browsing) or a standard mobile phone (with stripped site features).
  • Consider that phones are not used like PC’s – users are usually on the go therefore the site should be more goal oriented – Relevancy and Simplicity is key.
  • Mobile designs are to conform to the new W3C standards in order to create mobile-friendly style sheets (CSS).
  • Mobile Sites must be small, lightweight and fast-loading site – (< 20kb / page).
  • Consider User Agent Detection –  this is another form of transcoding which takes into consideration the type of mobile phone an individual uses to search and provides more uniform browsing experience for various device types.

Once the Mobile Site has been built, Mobile SEO steps can now come into play. These include:

1.    Validating the page with the .Mobi Validator or the W3C Validator
2.    Following ‘traditional’ on-site  SEO Best Practices such as:

  • Major keywords in the title tagging
  • H1′s and body text
  • Rich keyword Meta Titles and Descriptions
  • Keyword-rich anchor text for internal links

3.    Mobile Search results tend to reflect ‘Local Search results’ – your site must be optimized for local type searches. Also submit your business info to local directories making sure your site is verified and included in sites like Google’s Local Business Center.
4.    Get the Mobile Site spidered and indexed – submit to major search engines:

In short, the above Mobile Design and SEO factors are to be strongly considered when building a Mobile Site. These aspects help provide a solid Mobile Site foundation for your Mobile Campaign or Strategy. For further Mobile Campaign or Strategy enquiries, visit our Virtuosa website.

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook

 
 
1