A report led by Experian suggests that User Generated Content will have a major role to play in the lifes of people in the UK - Post-recession, as consumers are looking for trust.

As disposable income is tightening across the UK and the world, internet users are spending lesss time on transactional sites and more on social networking sites. Analysis into the report by Hitwise suggests that in March 2009 “content-driven websites attracted 138 per cent more visits than transactional websites. Furthermore, brands that have incorporated UGC and social media into their sites are seeing increasing web traffic and conversion rates compared to those yet to embrace Web 2.0.”

If this reports is as accurate as they are suggesting it brings up a great debate on UGC for brands. I bet that over half of the content that is generated by users for brands will not see the light of day, pity as I would love to see a Big Name Brand have some balls and take UGC as far as possible.

Students in Swansea are trying to break a world record for the highest number of smurfs in one place at one time.

The current record of 1,253 was set in none other than Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan last July and the students of Swansea think they can out-do this.

The Smurfs were a global hit due to the animated series which was beamed across the globe in the 1980’s.

I hope they beat the record then the people of Ireland get together again, and we beat theirs!

As many of you may have read over the last week or so, Fine Gael have made a massive blunder when  it comes to their online profile. They basicaly have taken creative inspiration from bbc.co.uk , (which i think is fine) but to actually use the exact same code as the BBC and not even attempt to change CSS class names, that’s just the epitome of plagiarism and down right laziness.

As @cloudsteph posted on their blog, the CSS class name values were exactly the same as the BBC  website, which another developer from the BBC has said “the ‘blq’ class names refer to the ‘Barlesque’ container uses to roll out the central masthead and footer across all BBC sites so it’s very unlikely they also used this obscure class name by co-incidence.”

SITE: myeverestchallenge.com

ROLE: Wordpress Developement, design and implementation.

As we are seeing a dramatic rise in the smaller, low cost laptops that have been primarily built for web browsing, netbooks are taking over the fastest growing laptop sales category. We as designers need to take into account the smaller screen resolutions that are now on the market. The typical netbook screen resolution (although improving) is between 800 x 480 and 1024 x 600. With most designers and developers common practice nowadays is to design for a fold depth of 768px. This means a decrease in fold of around 22% leaving less creative real estate. Will we as designers/developers take note of this and incorporate it into our designs?

I personally think that netbooks, although cheap and effective for their set purpose, that’s all they are good for. Word Documents, PowerPoint’s and web browsing, but with a lot of them their battery life is extremely poor, taking away from the portability you would expect. I would recommend going for a more powerful laptop like my very own Samsung Q45. Tiny but runs like a trooper with Photoshop, Flash and Illustrator all open at once.

I think that although it is defiantly worth bearing in mind, it certainly depends on the client and their target market whether we design for netbook resolutions or not.