http://creativehappy.com/ch/index.php/site/index/ en mike@creativehappy.com Copyright 2009 2009-11-13T00:14:14+00:00 http://creativehappy.com/site/querylife_to_become_part_of_your_life/ http://creativehappy.com/site/querylife_to_become_part_of_your_life/#When:00:14:14Z QueryLife launched Monday the 10th November and has been growing ever since. The site is poised to be one of the next big social community sites, linking in with Facebook, rather than battling against it. The idea came from two web developers, Stephen Beard based in Ellesmere Port and the other, Mike Bailey in North Wales, Rhyl. After chatting about new ideas, the idea for Querylife popped up. Very quickly a website started to take shape. Within the coming months, the site was designed, built and ready to go live. On go live the site boasted features such as Facebook integration, answers by video, image, text or link and also friend finding. Within the first week the site has picked up many users, and with people now starting to use Facebook to connect, the site stands ready to reach many more users. The site simply asks you a question daily, you can answer this with text, image video or a link. Your friend’s can then comment on this, and answer the same question. Feedback from the users is already starting to flood in, with new features being developed for the site.QueryLife launched Monday the 10th November and has been growing ever since. The site is poised to be one of the next big social community sites, linking in with Facebook, rather than battling against it. The idea came from two web developers, Stephen Beard based in Ellesmere Port and the other, Mike Bailey in North Wales, Rhyl. After chatting about new ideas, the idea for Querylife popped up. Very quickly a website started to take shape. Within the coming months, the site was designed, built and ready to go live. On go live the site boasted features such as Facebook integration, answers by video, image, text or link and also friend finding. Within the first week the site has picked up many users, and with people now starting to use Facebook to connect, the site stands ready to reach many more users. The site simply asks you a question daily, you can answer this with text, image video or a link. Your friend’s can then comment on this, and answer the same question. Feedback from the users is already starting to flood in, with new features being developed for the site. Going forward the site owner’s look to build the site progressively using feedback from the online community to create features that the user base wants. If you haven’t tried QueryLife.com then get on it now, the Stephen and Mike guarantee you won’t be disappointed. Blog, Design, Development 2009-11-13T00:14:14+00:00 http://creativehappy.com/site/a_more_accessible_high_street/ http://creativehappy.com/site/a_more_accessible_high_street/#When:21:20:26Z At Creative Happy we take accessibility very serious because if your site isn't user-friendly or accessible, future and current customers or users will struggle and generally wont visit your site again. So it was nice to read that the online high streets stores where taking this on board. M&S came out top this year from a report done by Webcredible. The Online High Street Report, from web usability consultancy Webcredible, finds the newly-launched M&S site much improved - last year it ranked ninth. John Lewis maintained its third position while fourth and most improved was Boots. The now online-only Woolworths brand improved its usability score from 65% to 80%. "No less than five have scored 80% or more for website usability, which is unprecedented," said Trenton Moss, director of Webcredible. At Creative Happy we take accessibility very serious because if your site isn't user-friendly or accessible, future and current customers or users will struggle and generally wont visit your site again. So it was nice to read that the online high streets stores where taking this on board. M&S came out top this year from a report done by Webcredible. The Online High Street Report, from web usability consultancy Webcredible, finds the newly-launched M&S site much improved - last year it ranked ninth. John Lewis maintained its third position while fourth and most improved was Boots. The now online-only Woolworths brand improved its usability score from 65% to 80%. "No less than five have scored 80% or more for website usability, which is unprecedented," said Trenton Moss, director of Webcredible. "This is no doubt, largely down to online shopping revenues continuing to increase despite the recession, that the user experience of retailers' websites is a key point of differentiation in such a competitive market place," he added. The criteria used to evaluate the websites includes browsing, navigation, the checkout process , searching and product display pages. - BBC News Despite the online high streets stores doing really well this year, there are still basic area's where the stores need to improve on such as: same form for logging on a registering, allowing customers to alter the number of projects displayed and changing of link colours on visited pages as reported in this post from the BBC News Website. Blog, Development 2009-10-21T21:20:26+00:00 http://creativehappy.com/site/the_redesign/ http://creativehappy.com/site/the_redesign/#When:22:18:34Z Creative Happy has come along way since the launch about 6months ago. I’ve worked with some great clients and some really talented people. For the last 5 month I have been working within a company and have been doing all work generated by Creative Happy on my weekends and evenings whilst working fulltime. I’ve now decided to leave my full time job and focus fulltime on moving Creative Happy forward and really letting people know who and what Creative Happy is. The Re-design For the last 6 months Creative Happy has been my portfolio website where I could showcase my work and a place for future clients to get in touch with me. Although the current design was great at the time, the web continues to move forward and so do I. I felt it was time for a Re-design and start focusing on the future and where I wanted to take Creative Happy. The new design and site will focus more on Creative Happy as a business rather than my portfolio as it’s not just me anymore.Creative Happy has come along way since the launch about 6months ago. I've worked with some great clients and some really talented people. For the last 5 month I have been working within a company and have been doing all work generated by Creative Happy on my weekends and evenings whilst working fulltime. I've now decided to leave my full time job and focus fulltime on moving Creative Happy forward and really letting people know who and what Creative Happy is. The Re-design For the last 6 months Creative Happy has been my portfolio website where I could showcase my work and a place for future clients to get in touch with me. Although the current design was great at the time, the web continues to move forward and so do I. I felt it was time for a Re-design and start focusing on the future and where I wanted to take Creative Happy. The new design and site will focus more on Creative Happy as a business rather than my portfolio as it's not just me anymore. The Site The new design has been designed in the browser and I didn't create any mock-ups as I normally do. I've been reading a lot about creating the site within the browser and thought I would give it ago and see what all the rave was about. After spending 3-4 days planning and working around my current freelance work and my fulltime job I had my spec for the new site. After 2 more days of reading through the spec in my head, changing and removing bits I didn't need or didn't feel needed to be in the spec I had a finished version. I then needed to decide weather I was going to use Wordpress or if I would move the site to Expression Engine as Expression Engine was more scalable and I could really build on top of the platform. I decide to download Expression Engine core and install after about 2 hours of messing with the core version I really fell in love with how the system worked and decided Expression Engine would be my platform of choice. First step I took after choosing my platform and completing my spec was to create the design and templates, this I found was really simple as I could add and remove bits I didn't feel looked right or didn't work. After I was happy with all my template pages it was time to do some reading about Expression Engine. I spent 2 nights reading the Expression Engine docs and running through the forums. I was now at the stage where I was ready to port the templates over into Expression Engine and start to get the site functioning. Another 4-5 days went by and I had ported all templates over and had all the dynamic areas working with the test data. Once I was happy with how the site was working and functioning I was done, all that was left was the content and porting some bits from the first version. Creative Happy People When I first started out Creative Happy was just me, but over the last 6 months I have acrued a fair bit of work and it's been a right task trying to manage myself and answer all the e-mails I get daily while working full time so I have built a small team of designers/developers that work with me on all kinds of projects. I also have Becky Vaughan who will be managing each project now, giving me more time to focus on development of clients projects. Becky deals with all the clients, such as quoting and invoicing, but her main role is ensuring that every project runs smoothly and the work continues to flow. Thanks to anyone who helped Creative Happy grow over last 6 months lets hope the next 6 months are even better. Blog, Design, Development 2009-10-18T22:18:34+00:00 http://creativehappy.com/site/Tweet_8/ http://creativehappy.com/site/Tweet_8/#When:16:27:25Z is working on v2 of Creative Happy. Tweets 2009-10-14T16:27:25+00:00