We've learned from our work with SharePoint for various medical devices clients that creating "pretty" functionality means thinking quite a long way past "Out of the box" and applying some "outside of the box" approaches. Content Formula have developed several good looking and interactive applications using a combination of Flash, JQuery and HTML/CSS. None of these required any SharePoint development, instead using standard SharePoint features and some creativity from our developers! Because of this, they cost our clients a lot less to develop than if we'd used the in-house development team.

This is just a little taste of the sort of things you can create with some good SharePoint knowledge, lateral thinking and just a dash of wizardry. Read on...

Last week, Facebook revealed their latest tool to help webmasters “Socialise” their sites – Facebook Open Graph.

Open Graph is Facebook’s latest foray into search engine functionality and if all else fails, it’s best to think of it simply as the first step towards a social search engine. Facebook is hoping that as people browse the web they will “like” pages by clicking a Facebook button which then informs their friends via Facebook.

Open Graph will enable sites which you’ve never been to before display recommendations and information tailored for your tastes based on what you or your friends have previously “liked”. At surface level then this is just a slightly more powerful version of those buttons you see around the web which enable you to share stuff you like with your friends. But the story of Open Graph is going to be so much more than that.

Read on…

A client asked me the other day to provide a cost estimate for some creative work. He wanted a concept that clearly communicates the unique benefit of his product. Something simple, powerful and persuasive. Something like the old Araldite ad with the car stuck to a billboard (ok, we might not come up with something quite as iconic as this but who knows?).

This concept would be used on the website, on newsletters and potentially offline too. Nothing strange in that… but then I realised that this request was actually quite unusual.

The product in question was a medical device to help prevent deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in hospital patients. I thought I’d try and find some other examples of medical devices that use a creative concept to get across their USP. I found very little indeed (there’s a list of the best examples below). Most medical device websites launch straight into the product features, often ignoring the benefits. If you’re lucky, you might get a big photo of the product on the homepage.

Read on…

Navigation is of utmost importance to your site: visitors expect to achieve their goals in very few clicks, whether those goals relate to contact information, products, or services. If that information isn’t reachable in a short space of time, you are not only wasting your own time, but that of your visitors!

I highlighted examples of well-thought-out navigation in a previous post, illustrated by a handful of sites that were a mix of e-commerce and blogs.

Since then, we have seen a number of new trends in site navigation. We look at three of the most interesting.

Read on…

The internet has been abuzz recently with talk of a new kid in town: HTML5. There has been a slew of articles detailing the new features that this version of HTML offers and what they mean for the web, but the real question is whether or not HTML5 can topple Flash from its position as the king of rich media.

What is HTML5?

HTML is the coding language that the internet is built on. With this in mind, HTML5 is just an upgrade providing some new tricks and features as well as some judicious trimming of the fat and old outdated code.

Read on…

The observant consumer abroad may have noticed patterned squares on their purchases. In Japan, these shapes now take up space on the side of whole houses, and seen teenagers whipping out their mobiles to take photos.

Of course, these codes contain more than just obscure patterns. Devised in 1994 for industrial use, ‘QR codes’ were employed for tagging boxes as a more information-heavy barcode. For example, the German Post uses them to keep track of packages.

Read on…

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

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…

Read on…

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…

Stuff the turkey, set light to the pudding and have an egg nog on us
while you play the most traditional of festive games:
Charades!