When it comes to classical music artist management HarrisonParrott are at the forefront. In 2010 we had the privilege of redesigning and developing their website – a site that was loved by the client and their peers and competitors.

Two years on, although the site still stood up against its competition, it was felt it was time to give the website a new lease of life, with a fresh design and some additional functionality.

The site was already full of engaging content and stunning photography, which made it a real pleasure finding a simple, stylish design to frame it all.

But we didn’t stop there. We created a carousel, which gave the client ultimate freedom to change images as well as feature site content such as relevant news and new artist signings.

The news section was revamped so that there is a hierarchy of content, and again here the client has the ability to change the order so that the focus is not always on just the latest item.

As well as added control and flexibility, we also integrated a series of players (including an HTML5 verison), so that all audio and video content played on iPads (extremely important as the artist managers like to use these to showcase their roster for potential bookings), mobile and desktop browsers.

All of which made for a great showcase at the IAMA industry conference in Budapest last month!

Original site post

Two geeks nerding out for 46 minutes.

Two geeks who have both founded incredibly successful social start-ups talking about funding, coding, user experience, killer functionality, luck, social networking, scalability, how to define your competition, the difference between building a product and building a company.

Kevin Rose of Digg et al talks to Kevin Systrom, founder and CEO of Instagram.

They obviously enjoy each other’s company and the content is clearly better and more revealing for it.

The interview ends with a deceptively simple piece of advice. Namely to focus on solving problems rather than focus on technology.

“Far too many start-ups are technologies in search of a problem.”

This is 46 minutes well spent.

As part of our ongoing work with Maxxium UK, we have been working with their wonderful Mixxit team to redesign and develop a new website. 

Mixxit is the brainchild of celebrity mixologist Wayne Collins. Along with his colleagues Andy Gemmell and Patsy Christie they set-up Mixxit initially as a training and education programme, with the aim of inspiring bartenders to make quality mixed drinks and cocktails. But they are so passionate that every drink can be perfectly made whether you are in the bar and or at home with friends, they wanted to spread their knowledge. 

Mixxit is unique in that every drink can be perfectly made in 5 easy steps. So how could we give people access to over 300 delicious cocktail recipes as well as offering guidance from three of the most prominent drinks experts in industry?  

Welcome to the Interactive Cocktail Mixer; you can search by spirit, occasion, glass, mixer or even colour in your quest to find the perfect drink. The cocktail mixer is built in Flash but utilises the site’s search functionality to find the right cocktail. Happy mixxing!

A lovely project for a great client.

We’ve been working with The Open University to develop some accessible, interactive content about the periodic table of elements for its Open Learn site.

Open Learn exists to provide free access to Open University learning materials. It is effectively an interesting, useful and “gentle” introduction to the world of Open University.

This periodic table content was developed to coincide with the International Year Of Chemistry. As with all Open Learn content the brief was to be interesting and informative and not to assume too much prior knowledge on the part of the target user.

Rather than develop a single interactive environment our approach was to break the learning objectives down into a series of single topic applications. These include an introductory video piece about the history and importance of the periodic table, “elements that changed the course of history”, “elements of the world”, and “body chemistry”.

To the extent that it was possible we wanted to recreate the immersive experience of the best science shows, where learning is achieved through interaction with single-topic experiments and displays.

We used rich imagery and illustrations to bring the periodic table to life and capture the imagination of the user. The navigation and hierarchy were both kept very simple and intuitive to allow easy access to the different applications. This simple approach allows the user to lightly browse topics or, if they prefer, delve deeper into the hard facts and data of the periodic table.

The following technologies were used to develop the apps…

HTML5 Video – By using the HTML5 <video> tag we made sure that the multimedia content in the application would be 100% compatible with the iPad and other mobile devices.

CSS3 – CSS3 was used to create interactive elements on the pages like the buttons – allowing us to reduce the number of assets (images) on the page. It was also used to create new animations and transitions supported on modern browsers

jQuery – jQuery was used through the site to allow users to interact with the data on the pages, and provide support for older browsers that don’t support CSS3 animations. Plugins such as jQueryUI and jQuery Reflections were used to add these effects. jQuery Scrollpane was used to support iPad style page scrolling.

It was a joy to work with the OU team on this project. The teaching staff should definitely write a book on this stuff if they haven’t already. Most of the really interesting content and periodic table facts that “make” these apps came from them.

Have a play. And learn.

Stories abound of server crashes caused by Stephen Fry tweeting links to good causes.

Well he hasn’t crashed YouTube, but he has tweeted a link to a new Young Scot film that Blonde (for which read David Hartmann) co-created with our sister PR agency Stripe.

The Storify below tells the story of the immediate aftermath of “the tweet”. You know when you’ve been “Fry’ed”.

I finally had a chance to play with my new Storify beta invitation.

Storify makes it easy to create stories from the social web. At least that’s what it says on the tin.

And, having briefly road-tested it with the somewhat frivolous story below, I’d say that it delivers.

You can easily pull in content from all the major social platforms, plus Google and RSS feeds. You can embed links, annotate the content to add colour and context, and select a master image to thumbnail the story when you publish.

To someone who has laboriously constructed picture essay blog posts about Facebook and Twitter in the past, taking multiple screengrabs and resizing to fit the blog column width, Storify looks like a godsend.

Once you’ve finished the story, the application gives you the option to notify the people whose (Twitter) content you have featured by tweeting the link to them. A nice courteous touch that also has built-in word of mouth potential.

The only minor quibble from this first trial is that when embedding the story in this blog, Slideshare-style, the formatting isn’t 100% perfect. But that’s what being in beta is all about.

I hope to give it a more thorough run-out in the near future.

The new Harrison Parrott website went live at the end of last month.

Harrison Parrott (“HP” to their friends) are one of the world’s leading classical music artist and project management agencies. As we have discovered they are also a highly principled, ultra-professional, appreciative and engagingly eclectic group of people.

The new site is the product of a rigorous development process that included Scenario Planning, persona creation and brand definition.

Scenario Planning is a proprietary tool that uses a combination of stakeholder workshops and spreadsheet number crunching to directly relate user goals to business objectives. This allows us to objectively prioritise functionality and content via a process that is jointly owned by all of the key decision makers.

The planning for this project included primary research amongst various audiences including orchestra promoters, record labels, journalists and musicians. These audiences presented us with a sometimes contradictory set of insights around attitudes to all things social, technology usage, and the role of agency websites in their professional lives.

The process of reconciling these insights has resulted in a site that is finely tuned (no pun intended) to be fit for commercial purpose whilst offering a clean, efficient and intuitive user experience.

It has also resulted in simple but innovative features such as a notebook facility that allows users to create a personalised list of artists as they browse the site. These lists can be saved, printed or shared by email via a unique link. The notebook is already proving to be a popular feature both within and outwith the agency.

So there you have it. We clearly enjoyed the project and working with the HP team. This is what they had to say about us.

“Impressed by their work for Sadler’s Wells, Edinburgh International Festival and Dilettante Music, we found Blonde to be an energetic and responsive agency. Their proposal for the redevelopment of our website was fresh and creative, but clearly focused on what we were trying to achieve. Asking the right questions to ensure they understood our business and our culture, they delivered – on schedule – a clean and striking site which is easy to use and features innovations that work for us and our users. We’re looking forward to continuing to develop our digital marketing strategy with this highly professional outfit.”

Antonio Orlando, Marketing and PR Manager

If ever you wanted an example of how great content underpins great search engine optimisation, this is it.

If ever you wanted proof that optimising your site for human beings is the best way to optimise it for search engines, this is it.

The Woodlands Junior School (Tonbridge, Kent) website isn’t the prettiest thing to look at…

… but boy does Google like it.

A post on the Hitwise Intelligence blog makes this point extremely well. It shows that the Woodlands site picked up over a third of all clicks on the term ‘mother’s day’ for the 12 weeks ending 13th March 2010.

I read the post with professional interest, but with a vague personal bell ringing in my head.

It was only when I looked at the site that I realised why. It is the self same Woodlands Junior School site that my daughter’s primary school teacher had recommended to me for its interactive times table games at a parents’ evening only last week.

In fact the site is a treasure trove of useful interactive educational tools. Wall to wall utility.

No wonder it has a reputation amongst the teaching profession as a valuable classroom and parental resource.

A reputation that translates into search engine authority.

I was the seven hundred and seventy second person to save the Woodlands site to Delicious, and the popular tags suggested by Delicious when I saved it tell their own story.

The content has been developed by teachers for teachers, and this is reflected in the recommended tags – resources, school, interactive, curriculum, junior, games etc.

Once the teaching profession grapevine kicked in, so did the inbound links to the site. Indeed, at the time of writing, Yahoo Site Explorer shows 86,541 inbound links to the site.

With that kind of Google-friendly authority, it’s not surprising that a short term Mother’s Day piece on its homepage outranks all other sites for that search term.

An excellent case-study showing that consistent development of useful content for humans is the best way to appeal to robots.

We have soft launched You Are What You App. The premise of this simple site is that your choice of iPhone applications probably reveals something about you.

And so it would seem. It’s the iPhone equivalent of having LLoyd Grossman looking through your keyhole.

The site appeals both to the iPhone exhibitionist and to the iPhone voyeur.

At the time of writing it’s early stages in terms of the number of active participants, but the average time on site is 7 minutes 30 seconds, suggesting that people are enjoying having a good nosey at other people’s apps.

I’ve already downloaded a few new gems as a result of seeing and reading about the apps that other people can’t live without.

There’s Byline, a mobile Google Reader app, which is perfect for keeping up with RSS feeds on the train.

Instapaper is an interesting looking application that allows you to save and read web pages offline at your convenience.

Around Me elegantly answers the question “where is the nearest x, y or z?”

And people are clearly sufficiently impressed with productivity applications like Omnifocus and Things to part with decent amounts of cash for them.

If you have an iPhone and a Twitter account please do add your apps to the site.

You Are What You App is our latest “hobby” project, following in the footsteps of WeMet for EdTwestival and EdTwinge.

What’s your poison?

We’ve been hired by Channel 4′s 4iP fund to promote a new iPhone application called You Booze You Looze.

4iP is an investment fund administered by Channel 4 that is designed to support non-broadcast public service initiatives.

You Booze You Looze (YBYL) is one such initiative . It is the brainchild of a game developer in Dundee called Digital Goldfish. DG is already responsible for “Bloons”, one of the biggest selling games on the iPhone ever.

YBYL is an app that keeps tabs on what you and your friends are drinking. In a fun way it also informs you of the short and long term financial and health impacts of your drinking. It has Facebook Connect technology built in to allow groups of friends to be acutely aware of what everyone else is drinking. It features various sobriety tests/games that measure the effect of alcohol on things like balance, co-ordination, reaction time and concentration.

What has this got to do with public service you may ask.

Well.

One of Channel 4′s core values is “Making trouble in the public interest”. (One of my favourite brand values of all time).

The aim for this app is that it will be fun. Being fun will lead to social use in bars etc. Social use will hopefully lead to discussion.

Anyone who has read Nudge will be aware of the Amerian campus survey that showed that students tend to overestimate what their peers are drinking, and increase their consumption accordingly. Once told that their friends are actually drinking considerably less than they thought, their alcohol consumption dropped markedly.

So this app approaches the issue of excessive drinking by accepting that social drinking is fun, in the hope that it will provoke discussion. It is very different in tone from your average public sector anti drinking campaign.

Blonde is working with Stripe, Opticomm and one of our EdTwinge friends, Andrew Burnett, to promote the app through various channels, with a heavy dose of social media activity in the mix.

Read more at http://www.youboozeyoulooze.com/.

And if you have an iPhone click the Buy Now button to get one. A bargain at only 59p.

Follow @BoozeLooze on Twitter too.