31st
March 2010
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(((Hello and welcome to something we’re calling Web Wednesday. We’re going to try to bring you some ‘fun’ posts between articles on BaseKit, design and marketing, because the Internet isn’t just for work. We hope you enjoy it! – Team BaseKit)))
We’ve all been there – The project needs to be worked on, but try as you might, you cannot focus. Your frontbrain desperately tries to keep you on task while your backbrain gently moves your mouse to the address bar and you find yourself on one of the below sites.
You can try to justify it as research, or a break from your stressful task, but we know it’s just a time sinkhole and you’ll be there far too long. Here are some of our favourite enemies of productivity!
Wikipedia is a terrible sinkhole. You go there for completely innocent reasons, perhaps to look up a term for clarity or check that the guy you saw in that sitcom was that guy from that movie…you know the one…with the face. Anyway. You’ve gone there with a purpose and once your information is found you’ll be straight back to work. But..oh…what’s that? A link to another article…could be useful. Oh, this is interesting! I’ll just read it and get to work. All information is good!
Three hours later and you know everything about the history of the Battletech Universe. This is no use to anybody and no work has been done.
2.Twitter
Yes, we are on Twitter. We know it’s a great way to spread the BaseKit name and directly communicate with our current and potential customers. It is also an epic timesuck. Whether using an application like Tweetdeck and being hypnotised by the flow of updates from your friends, or constantly clicking the Twitter logo on the web version and watching the tweets come in like a rat hitting a button for food pellets in an experiment – the time is being sucked…
Wikipedia may discourage trivia sections. But TV Tropes is a trivia section. And a really, really big one. If you’ve ever watched a sitcom, a movie, anime or well, anything really and thought – ‘that plot seems familiar – I’m sure I saw it on Saved By The Bell’ – then TV Tropes is a terrifyingly compelling site. Every trick of fiction, from exotic weapon supremacy to animal jingoism every single thing you’ve seen on screen or read in a book is categorised and illustrated with often hundreds of examples. The internal linking is suburb, and really catches you out with the ‘one more click’ problem.
Just in case you’ve missed out on webcomics – they are essentially comics on the web. Ranging from one panel funnies, to the kind of thing you see in newspapers right through to crazy sub-sub-sub-genres for niche audiences and epic stories of daring-do.
They are like fatty foods or alcohol. They’re fine, good for you even, in moderation. But things can quickly get out of hand. I, for example used to only read xkcd, Questionable Content and Overcompensating. This soon grew out to include PvP, Penny Arcade, Nedroid, Hijinks Ensue, Dinosaur Comics, Goats, (the sorely missed) Nothing Nice To Say, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and a few others. All great, and hard to concentrate until they’ve all been read. Even worse are the times when you find a comic you love with a decade of daily updates archived. Days can be lost and eyes melted with that much screen staring!
5.Reddit
With its clean and simple user interface Reddit looks pretty innocent, but beneath it’s almost web.1.0 look lies the beating heart of a site that will suck your productivity out and leave you a dried up, work-shy husk. It’s a simple news aggregator with a great comment system (the best comments get voted to the top, like the best stories) and consistently beats its larger rival Digg at breaking news and spotting memes. It will keep you ahead of general internet trends, but you will keep going back to it to see what’s happening or if you’ve got an orange envelope (it’ll make sense if you become a user) A quote from a Reddit user sums it up…
“I think the day I found Reddit was the last day I ever worked…”
Good luck getting any work done today!
30th
March 2010
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Just a quick one – If you attend a webinar this week, we will send you an amzing, fashionable and ultra cool BaseKit T Shirt.
Pictured below.
What are you waiting for – get over there and sign up!
30th
March 2010
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After the excesses of the festive season (This post was written a while ago! Ed) – the alcohol, the food, the mania of controlling and clearing up after children (or older family members) – it’s quite possible that you’re feeling the need to freshen up a bit. Tidy the house, sort the rubbish out, make a haggard effort to lose a few pounds… perhaps it’s time to treat your website to the same regime?
A website can be a lot like a house – when you first get it, you want to arrange it perfectly and practically, and keep it nice and clean. Inevitably, however, it soon fills with excess furniture, odd bits and bobs, half finished DIY projects, and before you know it, the wallpaper has gone from ‘contemporary’ to ‘garish’.
So what started life as a trendy, tidy website has slipped into a malaise of dated style and old news. If a tidy house is a tidy mind, then a tidy website has to be a tidy business, and there’s a simple checklist to follow to see if it’s time to get it seen to:
1. Homepage
2. News Page
3. About Us
4. Traffic Analysis
5. W3C Health Check
6. Competitor Health Check
Over the next few weeks we’ll be exploring each section in detail – so stay tuned for some top tips!
Image from Donger’s Flickrstream used under Creative Commons attribution licence.
29th
March 2010
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Hello BaseKiteers and welcome to our first proper Monday Update!
Considering the last Monday Update was on Thursday we don’t have a huge amount to report. Some – not much!
- We’ve added a few new pages to the BaseKit site! Check out the Community page where you can interact with other BaseKit users and check out BaseKit all over the web.
- You can also check out the Support page – where you can find a FAQ and access our Get Satisfaction if you have any problems or suggestions. We’re happy to help!
- And if you’ve tried BaseKit and want to start subscribing – check out the Pricing page. (Although you really should check out the Offers first to see what you can save!)
Also, we havn’t mentioned this on the blog yet, but we’ve hooked up with the excellent people at iStock Photo to bring you a web design competition of epic proportions. All you have to do is design a website using iStockphoto.com images and build it on BaseKit. Then enter your design by 2 May 2010 to stand a chance of winning some enormous prizes including iPads, Wacom Tablets, iPods and iStock credits. Head over here for full details.
Webinars will be running this week at these times – Sign up to find out how to get the best out of BaseKit!
Monday March 29
18:00 GMT (11am PST, 2pm EST)
Tuesday March 30
16:00 GMT (9:00am PST, 12 midday EST)
Wednesday March 31
17:30 GMT (10:30am PST, 1:30pm EST)
Last Friday Team BaseKit headed out to the Forest Of Dean to celebrate the launch of the new site by climbing trees, swinging like Tarzan and clambering all over all manor of high ropes on a GoApe day out. We all had a fantastic time, Kudos to the GoApe team who made sure none of us died, and to BaseKiteer Sarah who organised the whole thing. You can check out some pictures here (more coming soon) and over at out Flickr account (more coming soon here too!)
