Blog of website & interface designer, Darran Morris.

Twitter is great. It allows quick messaging between people, without the pressing need for a response that you get with instant messaging. It is relaxed and easy to use. It is also a great way to network and do business.

Twitter has an incredibly sparse (but deliberately so), user interface. This makes it very easy to use but that doesn’t allow much room for personal information in the user profile. Having as much info as possible on frequently accessed profile pages like this is really valuable for businesses. 

Twitter background images allow you to get around this, in a way. You can create background images in most image editors. Photoshop (if you have it), Paint Shop Pro (paid), or GIMP (free!) would be some great examples. Now, I would recommend getting an experienced designer to create this for you, to create that clean, professional edge. But you can create it yourself. 

Basically what you want, is to create a section on the side of the image that contains a photo and some text  that gives a friendly intro to what you do. It is also a good idea to include some links in the text to any web presence that you and/or your company has. 

Here’s an example from my profile (click on it to see it in action on my Twitter page):

I have made the image quite large so that even people with large monitors will see a uniform background. 

Below you can find a template that will allow you to create your own backgrounds. This template is a basic guide to the areas where you should put elements such as your logo, photo, extended bio and links. It should get you started. You can download this template in psd for Photoshop, or png for most other editors.

So download the above image, change the style to reflect your brand and add your info.  Do this and you should have a great profile that will be both informative, useful in getting you more followers, could also generate some business relationships and even leads!

Dollymount towards Dublin © Darran Morris 2009

With the current decline in the economy, budgets of businesses of all sizes have been hit hard, especially SME’s.

In Ireland in particular, after the bludget (as it charmingly got christened on Twitter), things are looking particularly grim. Alexia Golez has great first reactions to the budget here and Damien Mulley also eloquently handled it in his bludget post. There weren’t any significant measures taken to encourage or even enable enterprise, tech or otherwise, in these difficult times. Not even a mention of broadband, a basic enabler for small businesses in all regions of the country. Its hard to see anything in the budget for new and current businesses to give them an edge in this climate.

How can anything look good right now?

Well, I reckon right now, its not all doom and gloom. I think there are some great opportunities open to forward thinking businesses. Amazing companies started during economic downturns, by being innovative and taking advantage of the situation at the time.

Moving some or all of a business online can really crush some of the obstacles that are in the way.

The big glaring obvious advantage is that you can run a huge amount of different small businesses from your own house, and quickly reach a much bigger audience than a high street store or office building. You have instantly just dropped the cost of rent and possibly even some employees. 

Dollymount to Poolbeg © Darran Morris 2009

Lets take the example of an online store, but much of the stuff below applies to all kinds of online businesses. Instead of having to employ customer facing staff, the job could be done by a finely crafted website, designed to attract a specific target audience. Imagery and text portray the kind of attitude that customers would expect walking into a store. 

Products can be offered at lower prices than brick and mortar shops due to lower overheads. This gives shoppers great incentive to shop online instead of the high street. 

But what about customer service? Where is the human aspect? Well, with the huge upsurge in the use of social media such as blogs and social networks such as Facebook, Bebo and Twitter, the human aspect is returning to business online. There is now this incredible opportunity to place a business head and shoulders above the rest. Businesses can leverage the social aspect of the web to easily maintain the personal touch with customers online. 

Blogs are a great place to present the face of a company online. If a blog contains regularly updated useful information, the copy takes the right tone and can generate some buzz around an intriguing product or service, then you got yourself some free marketing! Submission to online directories such as Technorati(and also Irishblogs in Ireland), can help to raise the profile of a blog, as can submission social bookmarking sites such as Digg or  del.icio.us. 

The new but intriguing and phenomenal rise of Twitter can also give a business great marketing opportunities. Perhaps even more than this, a great way to relate with customers. Twitter offers a chance to converse directly with potential and existing customers, with the world of Twitter users as an audience. Everything you and your clients say on Twitter is available for everyone to read. This allows savvy companies to create enormous good will by appearing helpful and willing to divulge helpful information on a frequent basis. Confrontation can be turned into kudos by simply quickly and effectively resolving customer problems with the world watching. 

As I discussed in a previous post, you can now tie a lot of the above elements together with string and sticky tape to present an all round web presence for your business. 

The point is, that with careful planning, design and a creative spark, businesses both young and old, big and small, can grab the bull by the horns and lead the way into the future.

Hit a weird IE snag lately. It turns out that if you use an image input type in a form, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 mysteriously send back the x and y coordinates of where you clicked on the button!

Not only this, but if you try to read these values in afterwards, it is difficult at best. In fact, we couldn’t work out any way to actually read them in. 

After a bit of searching around, it turns out that the best way to deal with this, is to style normal submit buttons so that they look like image inputs instead. 

Something like this seems to be the best workaround:

input#my_button {
background:url(../pathto/images/my_button_bg.gif) no-repeat top left;
border:0;
}

That’s what we have for now but we’ll be looking around for other solutions.

Amazing blue skies again this morning.. This is the view I got from the office window at 9am.. Gotta love starting work to that, does the heart good.

I know the rain is coming, so I’m sticking this on the blog to keep the feeling going!

There’s a bigger version on Flickr.

For someone that read a good deal of William Gibson and a host of other “cyberpunk” novels, this seems to be quite something! Google appears to have switched on an AI called Cadie, which is a “she”, and also has her own homepage. 

This got me to looking around at some Gibson links and I found some great book covers for Neuromancer over the past two decades. 

Best of all, I thought, were these three for the Brazilian published editions of the entire series.

I think I may have to grab these books again just to prepare for when Google’s AI goes sentient and tries to control our destiny. This being the first of April, I think we can probably relax a little. But still, you never know..