HTML5 provides streamlined features that enable developers to use less code for a better result.

When it comes to embedding videos and audio into your web experience, which has historically been achieved using Flash or other 3rd party platforms, HTML5 has taken another bold step forward.

Now, with a little encoding and either a video or audio tag, you can simply embed your media directly into your site, no flash players or 3rd parties needed.

Each browser renders it’s own unique controls on the video. By removing a simple attribute you can remove the controls and use video seamlessly as part of your design.

I know what you’re thinking, “Why wouldn’t I just embed using flash, like I always have?” Well, as most people who own Apple mobile devices know, Flash is still unsupported on iOS.

With the power of HTML5 we can be secure in the knowledge that all up-to-date mobile platforms can view our media. The video showing above has a flash alternative embedded solely as a fallback just in case your browser is out-of-date and does not support HTML5.

Of course this bold step forwards has a sideways shuffle in respects to backwards compatibility, as older releases of your favourite browsers may not be compatible with HTML5. However your Apple devices that don’t support Flash will make up for it.

New Features

There are a huge amount of new things implemented with HTML5, including on the fly email validation on text fields and other form related features, multimedia as described above, the ability to work with vector graphics and much, much more! For a complete run down of all the new features I recommend reading up on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5 or on www.w3schools.com/html/html5_intro.asp

Depreciated Features

As the standards grow and change they drop some of the older tags that have become irrelevant. More often than not this is merely because there is a better way to achieve the same results with CSS or a new tag.

Here is a list of depreciated tags: Acronym, applet, basefront, big, center, dir, font, frame, frameset, isindex, noframes, strike, tt. As a general rule of thumb, these tags should no longer be used. They will however still work on most of your browsers for the foreseeable future.

Other Great Examples of HTML 5

Multimedia giant YouTube has taken the leap and is offering an opt-in trial for you to switch over to HTML5, which I know I’ll be doing! www.youtube.com/html5 to opt-in!

You may notice that YouTube’s mobile site at m.youtube.com has also moved over to HTML5 now supporting most mobile devices!

Grooveshark, a very popular steaming audio website has launched an HTML 5 version of it’s mobile player to reach more mobile users than ever before!

More information is available here

Hopefully this article will give you a better understanding of all of these questions. First off, I should explain why its important to upgrade.

For a hacker, its not just a matter of accessing files on the admin pages, or even files on the server. A hacker who gains access could conceivably deface the site, or even insert a malicious script which can affect anonymous visitors.

Hackers are always looking for and creating new ways to hack web sites. Security is extremely important to us and one hacked web site doesn’t just affect that one site’s owner, it can potentially affect all the sites housed on a single server (which is normal practice unless you have a bigger budget for a dedicated server).

We don’t want someone else’s hacked web site to affect your site, and vice-versa. Because of this we offer periodic upgrades to a CMS when they are released.

Upgrades available since January 2013:

(More is better)

Hacking techniques timeline

Knowing why you need to upgrade you site we can now move on to why it can be so costly. To do that you understand the steps we take to upgrade.

First you need to know we NEVER UPGRADE YOUR LIVE SITE! One of our first steps to upgrading is to take a copy of your site and put it on our computers.

As our next step, we start upgrading the copied site. If nothing goes wrong we upload your newly upgraded site and we are away laughing.

But that doesn’t usually happen, because we customise sites for our clients to meet your specific requirements. Every single site we produce has additional functions from plugins, modules, etc. Due to the level of customisation,  we don’t know if the site might will break while being upgraded, which is why we never upgrade your live site until we have tested the upgrade on a development site.

The whole procedure can be time consuming but is necessary to minimise the risk to disrupting your business and avoid possible downtime for your live site.

For more information on platform upgrades talk to one of our account managers about our security upgrade and maintenance options.

For anyone unfamiliar with this trend, parallax scrolling creates the appearance that various objects and layers are moving at differing rates as the user scrolls down the page.

This effect allows a sense of depth to be created within a website design, a format that otherwise seems to appear flat. While this popular design trend is a relatively recent phenomenon in web design, parallax scrolling was initially used in 2D gaming back in the 80’s.

When used well, parallax scrolling creates a sense of intrigue and wonder, providing a more memorable and engaging experience. People love to be entertained; some of the best sites that use this effect tell a story with animated characters and objects moving around the page as the user scrolls. Parallax scrolling is often coupled with photography to create a collage of images overlaying each other as the user moves down the page.

With the rapid increase of mobile devices, the use of gestures to navigate and interact with websites and mobile apps is becoming more and more commonplace. Parallax scrolling relies on interaction between the user and the site, creating a more explorative and exciting user experience.

This effect demands collaboration and conversation particularly between the design and development teams in order to implement parallax scrolling innovatively and appropriately. At hairyLemon we are excited to explore parallax scrolling where suitable.

There are many clever examples of sites that incorporate parallax scrolling. Here are a few of our favorites, starting off with the hairyLemon Christmas card!

Talk to us to find out more!

hairyLemon Christmas Card

Peugeot Hybrid4

Manufacture d’Essai

Every Last Drop

Northstar

Bagigia

Biamar

Spokes

Collins on Pine

We’ll delve into using Rich Snippets which includes the important details about you as a hotshot author.

What are Author Rich Snippets?

If you’ve heard this term being bandied about since last year, we know you are curious! So what is it, and how it will help ready you for Google Authorship? An Author Rich Snippet consists of a specific author’s image, their name, and a “More by” link. This link is added to a standard search result so give some thought into a nice photo and a succinct piece of info about yourself that will impress search visitors!

Apart from the head swell you may get pondering your new notoriety, there are multiple other benefits to using Author Rich Snippets.

Benefits of Author Rich Snippets

• becoming more visible amongst the general, bland text-filled mass of search results
• builds authority and trust for you and your site
• potentially ranking higher than content that doesn’t have any author rank authority
• it will drive and educate better quality traffic who now know more info about you as an author and will share it with the world
• helps potential followers or readers become more familiar with you and your work
• a potent combo of your image and info conveys a nice personal tone helping generate more leads and nurturing conversions
• adds to your point of difference – ideal for those individuals and business leaders in competitive niches, a win for early adopters!

Using Author Rich Snippets for your Company

Do you really want to be part of yet another faceless company blog? These are getting more stale and outdated. Google is starting to frown on anonymous corporate content and will soon leave it in the cobwebs.  We believe it intends to concentrate on authoritative spokespeople within your business who truly have the knowledge and talent to push out sharp unique content for its search engine. As of the time of writing, it’s not possible to add Google Author Rich Snippets to Google+ business or brand pages as they not actually an individual.

If you want to get your company on Author Rich Snippets, we recommend that you highlight employees as the authors of their own legitimate posts according to their expertise. If staff are already active on Google+, which after our first article we hope they are, their own circles will be then leveraged against to benefit the business in general.

Setting up Author Rich Snippets up on Your Website

Make sure you sort these key tasks first:

Have your public Google+ profile ready:

Remember to join Google communities. Also be sure to upload a distinguished ‘red carpet worthy’ profile picture! Don’t forget Google will use this when linking to your Author Rich Snippet. Verify you have an email address on the same domain as your content. If you don’t, go here.

Access to your blog:

If all of this sounds a bit tricky, talk to us about making the necessary some adjustments to your blog/template.

Go to ‘Contributor To’:

Once you have these prerequisites taken care of, the first thing you’ll need to do is edit your Google+ profile. Head over to the “Contributor To” section. Add the site or sites you develop content for, this will authorise you from Google’s point of view as the author.

Tweak Your Blog Posts:

Link each and every post with your Google + profile page. This helps the big G identify the relationship between the two. You then add the ‘rel=author’ query string parameter that you will see below.

• Now zip over to your Google+ profile, copy its URL from your browser.
• From there insert a link into your post using the above url as the destination (remove anything after the /at the end).
• The anchor text is your full name which is exactly the same as per your Google+ profile name.
• Make sure you add a byline to each post ie. ‘by Jane Blogs’ (your G+ name).

In the same vein as other Google ranking criteria, Google gives precedence to authority, now wanting to rank your blogging and content quality and popularity using its Authorship tool.

It’s a digital signature that must link in with your Google+ profile page, and if you start verifying now that you have in fact written or own your blogs it may do you some favours in Google Search in 2013.

Author Rank is an algorithm that has started measuring your online influence as a producer of authoritative content using a range of key factors including your reputation, popularity and ability to produce top-of-the-line original content.

How Will Author Rank Work?

When you write an article, an Authorship snippet code that you embed into each piece of content and link to your personal G+ profile will allow you to show up higher in Google search results with your profile image and identification.

As we well know, images really stand out in Search, so at first glance if you show up above the top fold of Google it looks like you know what you are doing – hence you appear to have more authority.

Add multiple +1′s to this (similar to a Facebook like) it then reflects on how popular your post is according to it’s +1 popularity. Instead of just ranking the site which you post from, you will get your own author’s ranking in Google’s eyes.

You can now become an online authority on Google using Authorship and get prepared for Author Rank.

Your Google + profile will be a way to verify your identity and key influences that measure, and therefore reflect your reputation such as:

• Your number of followers
• How popular your content is, measuring total shares (also +1′s)
• Your +1′s – which are like a voting system
• Your activity, how often you post, +1 others, and share other content too

Google loves great authors/content creators and believes they will generally produce fabulous content hence rewarding them for their efforts using the recent release of Author Rank. Google have quite cleverly integrated this with the Google + profile page for author identification, therefore providing even more leverage for their products whilst also confirming your credentials.

Where to Start – Gearing Up for Author Rank

Claim your Google + page first of all and fill in all of your details, and include your photo.

Develop Your Bio — Your G+ bio will begin with who, in a nutshell, you are. What exactly you do, and what type of content you choose to share with world. Consider also peppering relevant keywords into key places within your bio.
Build Friendships — Begin to follow people you know, and then develop relationships
throughout your network.
Share Your Content — Create original posts (include different media such as video) share links, and don’t forget to re-distribute content by other users on the G+ platform. Promote comments and other engagement by adding your own considerations and views to the content you are sharing.
Join Groups and Get Networking — Communities are great places in which to get your name out there into the G+ world. Get socialising!
Comment on Posts and Photos — Be active and provoke thoughts and opinions.

Hungry for More Info on Author Rank?

We’ve covered the initial bases on how to get started, soon we will be ready to optimise further for Author Rank. We’ll pay close attention to the “Contributor to” section, this is down by the bottom of your About tab. We’ll discuss this in another post on how to get this ready to roll, but in the meantime work that G+ Profile page of yours and build up your authority online.

There are three levels within each Google+ Community: owners, moderators and members.

Owners and moderators are responsible for content, deciding upon the nature of all the member’s posts and deleting spam. Members in a community are able to post acceptable content.

Google+ Communities vs. Google Circles

As an entrepreneur, Google+ Communities can be of more value to your business than Google+ Circles. In Google+ Communities people within a community are there because they have decided to join.

In contrast, with Google Circle when we circle someone we put him or her into a circle that we deem appropriate and that person sees only the content we share with that particular circle. Putting a person in a circle doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she is necessarily interested in the topic.

To join or create?

In the beginning, it is perhaps best to start by joining a few communities and taking time to explore within these established communities. You’ll see what others are writing about, answer questions and ask your own questions. This will give you a better idea of what it takes to run a community, as well as put you in touch with your area of interest.

Google+ Communities can benefit your business

Whether you start a community today or join a few and make creating one part of your business plan, there are many benefits of using Google+ Communities.

1. Build relationships

In the past, Google+ was a place for social media gurus, programmers and photographers (thanks to the great photo sharing interface, later copied by Facebook). Google+ Communities are now fast becoming a great place to increase your network and develop relationships. With the creation of communities, it is now much easier to find a following within your area of interest.

2. Understand your target market

Watch the conversations and questions people ask each other in the communities you join -  this is a great way to better understand your target market. Here you can gather ideas for blog posts, articles, products, teleseminars, courses and more.

Don’t be shy – if you know the answer to a question, jump in and share your thoughts. The more you are seen as a helpful expert, the more followers will connect with you outside the community.

3.  Start a hangout with members of your Google+ Community

Usually, when you start a hangout, you can invite people from a certain circle or hand pick people by clicking on their name or typing it in. With Google+ Community, however, you can start a hangout inside the community with other members who are online. A hangout is a great way to further network and build valuable relationships.

An Alternative to LinkedIn Questions?

LinkedIn brought an end to their popular Questions area at the end of January, and people across the net are looking for a suitable alternative. Many have found LinkedIn Questions and Answers a great source of links and traffic to their websites, particularly once they established “expert” status.

Google+ Communities also provide the opportunity to deliver targeted “answers” and content to groups who are interested in the topic, as well as links through to your site.

This Mashable post provides a great starting point around how to use Google+ Communities, complete with videos.

The winning cake was:

Nicky’s Meringue Stack (recipe by kitchen goddess Nigella Lawson)

For all those who want to try and make the champion cake, here is the recipe.

Ingredients

For the meringue discs

•    6 large egg whites
•    300 gram(s) Golden caster sugar
•    3 tablespoon(s) cocoa powder
•    1 teaspoon(s) Red wine vinegar

For the creme patissiere

•    6 large egg yolks
•    100 gram(s) golden caster sugar
•    2 tablespoon(s) cocoa powder
•    2 tablespoon(s) Plain flour
•    300 ml full fat milk
•    300 ml double cream
•    100 gram(s) dark chocolate (melted)
•    1 teaspoon(s) vanilla extract
•    20 gram(s) Pistachio nuts (chopped)

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 140ºC/gas mark.
2. Line the baking sheets with parchment and draw a 20cm circle on each one. The simplest way to do this is simply to find a bowl or cake tin with the desired dimensions, plonk it on and draw round it.
3. Whisk the egg whites until stiff, then add the sugar a spoonful at a time, beating in well after each addition. Believe me – and I speak as someone often criminally impatient – it does make life easier to go slowly here. Sprinkle over the cocoa and vinegar and then fold in gently but firmly.
4. Divide the dusky meringue between the 3 circles, spreading evenly. You don’t need to worry too much about beating the air out of them as you smooth; I find they withstand a modicum of brutality.
5. Cook for 1 hour, then turn off the oven, leaving the meringues in until cool. Often, I just make them before I go to bed and leave them in the switched-off oven overnight. It makes for less hanging about. And as long as you keep them airtight, with sheets of baking parchment in between, you can do these a good week or so in advance.
6. Now for the creme patissiere: beat the egg yolks and sugar together, then add the cocoa and flour, whisking well. Warm the milk and cream in a saucepan, then, whisking, pour this onto the eggs and sugar before pouring everything back into the saucepan on the heat and, stirring constantly, bring it to the boil. When the mixture has thickened, take it off the heat and stir in the melted chocolate and vanilla.
7. Let it cool now, but avoid putting it into the fridge as it will become too solid. You can stop it forming a skin either by covering with buttered baking parchment or greaseproof paper or by sieving a layer of icing sugar over. What I often prefer to do, however, and which cuts out more waiting around, is to plunge the saucepan into a sinkful of iced water and just keep stirring: it doesn’t take long to get cold.
8. To assemble the cake, place one of the meringue discs on a flat plate (I rather like those tea-shop cake-stands, though preferably in glass), spread with a third of the chocolate cream, then carry on layering. Scatter over the chopped pistachios, which will gleam out, a tender grass-green against the dark chocolate. Then just cut in: and you’ll find that it gives the illusion of a fine layering of multi-stacked, custard-bellied wafers; this is because each meringue, with its soft innards and crisp carapace, looks and tastes like three layers, not one.

I’m not talking about the rugby either – I’m talking about big budget action sports…!?!

Chances are you saw a new hero emerge… Felix Baumgartner broke the speed of sound with his amazing jump from space. And if you like cars going exceedingly fast, you may have watched the Formula One Korean Grand Prix on Sunday?

Talk about a weekend of WIN for Red Bull.

If you were part of Red Bull’s marketing team, I’m sure you would have been high-fiving and sloshing back RB’s with the rest of the staffies following the headline-pulling, social media-owning success of both events.

The Red Bull logo was on almost everything I could see for Felix’s jump: his jump suit, the crane which hoisted the balloon, the helicopters… everything.

And just hours before, Red Bull finished one & two at the Korean Grand Prix, with the ‘baby Red Bulls’ of the Torro Rosso team finishing high in the placings as well – and demonstrating their dominance in this sport of champion brands.

Even more than the human or engineering feats themselves, I was impressed by the success of Red Bull’s involvement. Remember, Red Bull’s ‘just’ an energy drink company… but with cunning brand positioning they’ve captured the action sports fan’s eyes and ears. What’s the message their brand relationships are building? Go higher and faster than everyone … with Red Bull? Felix’s flight certainly proved the literal illustration of “Red Bull gives you wings”.

Not everyone has millions of dollars to throw about on sporting adventure campaigns, but every company has the ability to put thought and planning into how their brand is represented in the market, and how it can go further with clever use of brand imagery, messaging and yes, maybe even event sponsorship.

Clever, effective branding doesn’t happen overnight – and it’s about much more than simply your corporate identity. Even small businesses can have highly effective branding that helps you punch above your weight. Our creative branding team are happy to help you develop a powerful brand that gets you remembered and seen in all the right places.

Talk to us to find out how we can help.

Although this is a proven model for business success, referenced by Jim Collins in “Good to Great” we have also been discussing it as a basis for determining your “voice” or persona in your blogging and social media communications.

You will all be aware of brands that do this well.

The Collective is a New Zealand dairy company that really has a handle on it.

The voice of their Twitter account for example, has a quirky, human, very kiwi feel to it, and the activities of “the herd” are part of the content inspiration.

There are other examples of businesses that have been very successful at determining what their brand is all about, and giving it a personality that can consistently be reflected through their marketing and communications activities.

If you want your brand to be memorable, engaging and ultimately successful financially, then spending some time thinking about what the personality of your brand currently is – and what you want it to be.

I would hazard a guess that for many New Zealand businesses, our brands don’t have a strong personality, and most of the communication is still in a form of corporate speak. In other words, quite formal, not particularly engaging, and probably not fun!

In the fast moving, personalised world of social media channels, filled with person to person communication that is casual, friendly, sometimes passionate, and at times downright obnoxious, finding the right voice for your brand amongst it all is essential.

If you don’t know where to start in creating your brand’s voice, we are happy to help. Have a chat to our digital marketing team and we can help start the ball rolling.

]]> http://www.hairylemon.co.nz/blog/whats-your-hedgehog-concept/feed/ 0