Toyota is having a rough time of late. Faced with having to recall millions of vehicles globally, its profit for the year is likely to be entirely wiped out by the estimated $2bn cost of the recall. However, the public relations story is causing further damage to the company. How it reacts over the next few days and weeks is likely to have a major impact on the severity of this damage.

That’s where the web comes into play. Shocked and dismayed customers are sure to pay attention to the media’s cries of horror, but they will also recognise that they need to pay close attention to the official line by Toyota. They will turn to the internet to find out the logistics of the recall and the way they need to interact with Toyota and its dealers in order to get their cars fixed up. Besides actually fixing cars quickly and efficiently, the web represents Toyota’s best chance to repair some of the damage to its reputation.

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Well, there we have it. The Apple iPad is officially no longer just a rumour. It’s a lovely new shiny device. There’s a lot right with it; go to the Apple website to see about that. However, there’s also a lot wrong with it. Three key things really disappoint me.

Firstly, in spite of the misleading name, this is not a ‘pad’. You cannot write on it. There is no handwriting recognition, no stylus. Surely one of the key functions of a tablet should be that you can write notes on it and do away with paper pads? A cleverly-designed operating system would help no end in managing pages and pages of scrawled notes by making them searchable, date-stamping them and adding other meta-data. OK, handwriting recognition is still a technology that has a long way to go but Apple didn’t even try to address this.

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Art by Kelly “Suuqin” Chan – Words by Geoff “NotWelshMan” Scaplehorn

Click here to see another cartoon from us!

Technology has made the gathering and storage of data easier but much of this data is useless unless it can be displayed in meaningful ways. Dashboards provide an engaging and interactive means of displaying and understanding data. Furthermore, data visualisation helps employees become more conscious of their performance and in turn, improve it.

There are various dashboarding tools available on the web. These can be effective but are sometimes hard to implement or do not provide the data view that you want to show. To get around this, we build custom dashboards for many of our clients for both intranets and websites.

Click to read more about the various types of dashboards

It’s not enough for a website to simply look good. It’s not even enough to have a good product. If a user can’t find their way to that product, the best images in the world won’t help your sales.

As designers it’s our job to take stock of the behaviour of typical users and position navigational elements where users would expect to find them.

Your navigation will be based on the Information Architecture (IA) – the structure and organisation – of your site. When choosing a navigation type you should weigh up its limitations and benefits. Will it be a series of buttons? Is it Flash-based? Does it use any special features? Where is it on a page?

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Nothing kills the authority of an intranet site – or any website – faster than obvious, avoidable errors. These errors can be factual (such as job titles or general facts), graphical (the wrong image assigned to the wrong person, for example) or grammatical (bad spelling or punctuation), but whatever the mistakes the effect is the same: users go elsewhere.

It’s not enough to make sure that your site owner is thorough. Everyone makes mistakes, and the best way to cope with the possibility of a slip-up is to ensure that you have a dedicated quality control process in place at all times. If you use an agency to run your site, then they should be able to work this out with you. If you work on the site yourself, read on for some key areas that you should focus on…

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A news item on the radio today caught my imagination. It made the point that many of us today suffer from a hitherto undocumented mental illness, the core symptom of which is an inability to focus one’s attention for any significant amount of time (have I lost you yet?). This often chronic condition is brought about by the ever increasing amount of digital disruptive media which we receive onto various devices around us: PCs, mobiles, telephones, and so on.

As I write this sentence Skype is bleeping an alert and a little bubble is popping up in the corner of my screen containing the first (meaningless) line of a chat conversation going on in the agency between a few people. Now an email alert (Subject line: Monthly newsletter: January 2010) is popping up and a text (minutes remaining on my price plan) has just arrived on my mobile phone. Someone tweets “an interesting article on the digital economy ”.

So far I am not struggling to maintain my concentration. The temptation to turn my alert-blasted attention to these items is small. Have I lost you yet?

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We’ve already written our top 5 resolutions for 2010 for intranet owners – but what about those of you out there on the Great Wide Web? Keep reading for our top 5 New Year resolutions for website owners…

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Maintaining an intranet can be a tricky business, but why not kick off 2010 with some New Year resolutions that will make your intranet fly? Read on for our top 5 tips for the year…

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It is, as everyone knows, best practice to use analytics code on websites to track visitors.

Pretty much every client we talk to expects metrics on their website (and we soon suggest them if the client doesn’t),  but no one seems to know that you can track visitors in Flash applications too.

Read on…