Now that the Christmas festivities have finished and the New Years Eve hangover has fully worn off, a certain sense of deflation seems to have settled over the UK. No one’s got any money, there’s no celebrations left to look forward to and the emphasis is very much on cutting back on the booze, getting to the gym and getting early nights. However, even if you are currently in a state of detox, there’s no need to be glum because spring is just around the corner and there’s a whole range of spring festivals and events in Sussex to look forward to.
Why not learn a new skill this spring? It could be the most exciting thing you do this year! If you’re thinking of a career move in 2012, want to dust off some old skills, pick up that new talent you’ve been thinking about for a while or even flourish in your current role then training courses are the best way to start. If you want to get your creative juices flowing then our Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator courses are all perfect. If you want to take the web by storm then our Web Design courses are all tailored to different skill levels and SEO and Social Media are both important as well. If you are looking further up the career ladder or want some help in the corporate environment our range of Business and Management training courses are all very useful. We run everything from Management Skills Training and Leadership Training to accredited PRINCE2 and Six Sigma Training. Spring is not just for learning though! In your time off why not attend some of these great events…
Sussex Beer Festival takes place on 8-10 March and if you’re having a bit of a dry month at the moment then this is something to really look forward to. The festival has around 230 beers on offer, including a range of British and foreign beers, as well as other mouthwatering tipples, such as ciders, perries and wines. Tickets cost between £4 and £7, depending on the day you go, and include a free souvenir glass and programme.
2012 sees the 45th Brighton Festival taking place between 7 and 29 May, guest directed by Vanessa Redgrave, and celebrating themes of liberty and freedom. The festival is an important annual event for the town and is the largest multi-art form festival in England. You can expect to find a broad selection of dance, music, art and film on the programme and a wide range of events for all the family. Read the rest of "Spring Festivals & Events in Sussex"
So you’re thinking about coming down to Brighton for some training. Perhaps for our Mobile App Design courses? (We’re one of a handful of mobile training centres in the country) Or for our fantastic and ever popular SEO Training, Photoshop Training or PRINCE2 Training courses? If you’ve never been to Brighton before and want to train somewhere different to London (who hasn’t been to London before?) then have a read of this guest post that runs through many of the wonderful reasons to visit Brighton. We thoroughly recommend making the most of the city either side of your training and sample everything it has to offer. Check out our Top 12 places to eat lunch in Brighton and plan where to eat while you’re down here!
Britain has traditional seaside resorts and cosmopolitan cities. It has destinations that are individually historic, cultural, offbeat, fashionable, entertaining and picturesque. And then there’s Brighton. If one city could be described as more than the sum of its parts, it has to be the exhilarating and ever-surprising Brighton. A settlement on Britain’s south coast since the Middle Ages, Brighton’s popularity flourished in Victorian times thanks to the advent of the railway and the emerging notion among the moneyed middle-class that bathing in seawater was beneficial to health. Rapidly developing and expanding in response to its new status as a desireable holiday destination, Brighton has never looked back.
Part of the secret of Brighton’s undeniable and enduring year-round appeal is the city’s quirkiness and carefree ambience. Brighton gives the impression that ‘anything goes’ which makes it accessible and enjoyable for every visitor regardless of their personal tastes or circumstances. Families, couples, celebrities, city slickers and country bumpkins are all equally warmly-welcomed in Brighton and all will find plenty to amuse and entertain them here. Unashamedly multicultural and multigenerational, Brighton’s denizens are as varied and colourful as the city itself and contribute to its harmonious and vibrant atmosphere. Read the rest of "All Things Brighton Beautiful"
Welcome to Part 2 of our BrightonSEO 2011 round up. We hope you enjoyed BrightonSEO Part 1 featuring our round up of round ups! Once again we’ve provided either the slides or video for each talk for those who missed the conference. These presentations are all from the afternoon session and include the six 20 : 20 slide talks where each speaker had 20 slides which changed automatically every 20 seconds. After a great morning the afternoon session had a lot to live up to – but that it did with some interesting talks featuring Mad Men, James Bond and internet cats.
Neil Walker – Links – SEO Value vs Client Expectations vs Cost
Neil Walker - Brighton SEO 2011
Neil was the first of the afternoon speakers and was presenting his findings from research he had conducted on both SEOs and clients to find out if they shared the same expectations on links.
He found that clients didn’t often know what links they were after and so it is the job of the SEO to be transparent with the client and explain the cost of links and link strategy.
Neil Walker gives his opinion on the conference along with his slides here.
Roger Warner – What Can Social Media Learn From Mad Men?
Roger Warner - Brighton SEO 2011
This proved to be a very popular talk with Roger using the TV show Mad Men to compare traditional advertising to SEO with the emphasis on learning from traditional methods to improved social media relations. Roger has posted up his talk in a nutshell using the following points:
Social Media is not a spaceship – it’s a communications tool.
It’s been a week since BrightonSEO 2011 now organised by Kelvin Newman of Site Visibility. The round ups and takeaways have come flooding in so fast we thought rather than simply providing the same we’d give you a list of the best ones. We even had a look around and filled in all the gaps so this is the most complete round up and roundup of roundups there is! Even the elusive Toby Barnes, and Dom Hodgson videos are included in part 2 of our Brighton SEO 2011 roundup
The following is our round up of the day. We’ve included slides and/or videos for all the presentations where we can as well as a summary of the talk with links to any additional content provided by the speakers.
The first talk was from Jonny Stewart on how the Google Panda update affected ReviewCentre.com. He used the site that he works for as an example of a site that suffered due to the update and then established how they were able to recover and avoid future penalties. Jonny mentioned that you’re not a good SEO until you’ve been hit by a really big penalty and that it can take up to 4 months to recover from a big loss in rankings. However, as shown in the slides below, he offers some great tips on how to avoid being hit by penalties and turn your rankings around if affected. Read more about the Google Panda update.
So – here we are at BrightonSEO 2011 - the last in a long week of conference attendance for us – but one of our favourites, which always attracts some really useful presentations on SEO and Social, thanks to the diligent efforts of Kelvin Newman.
The full BrightonSEO 2011 Round Up is the most comprehensive available. We feature our pick of the best round ups alongside our own round up with video, slides and comments.
As I (start to) write this we’re at the first coffee break – we’ll publish a write up of the whole of Brighton SEO in due course, but so far the morning session has provided a useful Panda case study from Jonny Stewart (which I was going to write up, but my effing laptop restarted and ate my notes – so if you want to read about Panda – check out our Panda survival tips).
We also got some tips from John McElborough on the slighly ‘grey-hat’ practice of building a private blog network, and my favourite presentation of the morning, which was Dave Peiris’ well delivered piece on attracting links with quality content and apps that people will want to share – so I’ve written up the main takeaways from this session below:
Brighton SEO 2011 – Attracting Links – Presentation by Dave Peiris – @sharkseo
We all know that creating great content will help you to attract links – but knowing it isn’t as easy as actually doing it. And even better than writing great content that people want to read, is developing great apps that are useful tools – which is even harder!
Dave has spent a lot of his time doing just that – and had some great tips which he’s learned from his successes (and failures)
He kicked off by giving us some great examples of sites and apps that attract a lot of links because they’re genuinely very useful – this is the sort of thing you’re aiming for:
Hackerbuddy – an app that helps startup coders get help from other start up coders.
Justbuythisone – gives advice on the best products in a range of categories to save you time researching
Uptime Robot – a tool that pings site every 5 minutes which lets you know when it goes down
Not all of us can code apps though – so there’s also the option of trying to write really killer content – Dave gave the example of this brilliant article by OK Cupid – a dating site. It’s quite a geeky article using data from submitted user photos to generate advice about the best camera and time of day to take your profile picture to be as attractive as possible.
One key point that we can take from this article is to think about the headline if you want to get shared – especially via the bigger news networks. The element that all of the news channels picked up on from the OK Cupid article was the “iPhone Users Have More Sex” angle – which just screams “read this article”!
This is the third and final part of our review of the Update 2011 Conference in Brighton on mobile development and usability on Monday 6th September. You can also check out our posts on BrightonSEO Friday 9th - see #BrightonSEO 2011 – Attracting Quality Links
Are you looking to get into mobile app development? If so it is unlikely you’ll be able to as you need a whole new set of skills. Lucky for you we’ve just launched iOS App Training, a practical course that teaches developers how to create, style and market iPhone and iPad apps. Don’t miss out on the exciting and lucrative world of mobile app development by booking yourself a place on our course today.
Following the enthralling interview with Apple co-founder Ronald Wayne, we heard from Joachim Bondo – who Chess fans may be interested to hear is the creator of the Deep Green game – originally for the Apple Newton, and latterly for iPhone and iPad. So a clever chap!
Joachim Bondo at the Update 2011 After Party
As with some of the previous presentations at Update 2011, Joachim’s focus was on user experience. He stressed that ‘delicious’ apps give users more pleasure and are likely to be used and shared more than those that are ‘undelicious’
Joachim is a watch collector, and his presentation essentially used watch design and manufacture as an extended metaphor for app design and development.
In his view – although Apple’s products are designed by ‘dudes’ in California and manufactured on production lines in China where ‘people kill themselves’ (rather than being hand crafted in Switzerland like the watches he loves) – that they are on the right track with their attention to detail and ‘delicious’ product design and user interfaces.
However Joachim maintained that app developers have the opportunity to go beyond delicious – i.e. to look further than just a sleek user interface, and make sure that every component and every line of code is perfect.
His overriding point was that quality takes time – like the manufacture of a carefully crafted wristwatch, if you want your app to go ‘beyond delicious’ take the time to test every component, and that users will flock to a great product.
If I’m honest, I think Joachim’s presentation took rather a long time to make one point via an extended metaphor – and many of the other presentations at Update 2011 provided much more in the way of practical advice. However he’s clearly passionate about attention to detail in both watches and app development, and I’m sure his passion made some of the developers in the audience think twice about rushing half-baked apps to market.
Closing Keynote – Cennyd Bowles – The Things of the Future
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So… having enjoyed a very pleasant lunch in a nearby cafe we returned to the Dome refreshed for the afternoon session.
Jonathan Hammond - Kinect Jam
The afternoon kicked off with another music act, this time from Jonathan Hammond – a musician and developer who has developed a really innovative live performance tool which uses the XBox Kinect.
With a music video playing behind him, along with a wireframe of his own body, Jonathan played along to a dance tune using the Kinect to play virtual instruments and apply effects by grabbing them out of thin air.
Whilst the performance seemed a little bit glitchy – the concept is brilliant, and when it worked well it looked and sounded stunning.
People tend to be a bit lethargic just after lunch at a conference so this was a great bit of scheduling to wake everybody up. As was…
Seb Lee-Delisle – Angry Birds Corona Workshop
Graphics from Seb's Corona "Angry Birds" clone
Local coder Seb Lee-Delisle treated us to a hands on demonstration of Corona, a mobile app framework and simulator.
Corona is especially effective for game development – with its built in physics engine making it easy for coders to move vectors and bitmaps around fast. The simulator also allows you to see your work represented real time on a simulated device – and what’s more it allows you to develop for both iOS and Android.
In his 30 minute slot, Seb managed to hand-code a simple Angry Birds clone from scratch – starting from a blank page (albeit with some pre-prepared graphics) and demonstrated it live.
I’m not a programmer myself – so to me Seb made this look really easy – first creating some objects (a ball, the floor and some blocks to knock over), applying the built in physics to them all, and then added If events to the circle to enable it to be manipulated and fired at the blocks.
He then added some simple graphics that his nephew had drawn for him, and in 30 minutes had made a passable effort at a (very) simple Angry Birds type game. Impressive stuff indeed.
This post contains our review of the Update 2011 morning sessions, including:
Matt Gemmell – Unusability
Jeremy Keith – The One Web
Chris Evans-Roberts – Ithaca Audio
Debate – Geek Ninja Battle – Web Apps vs Native Apps
New Course Update!… iOS App Trainingis our brand new Mobile Development course. This 5-day, hands-on course teaches developers how to design apps for iPhone and iPad. Take advice from all the speakers at the Update 2011 event and enter the mobile app market.
Closing Keynote – Cennyd Bowles – The Things of the Future
Subtitled “The Human Touch: iOS and Beyond” the event featured a range of presentations, debates and workshops around mobile development and design, both native and web based – a subject we discussed on this blog recently.
The day was brilliantly organised and compered by iOS app developer Aral Balkan, and as the title of the conference suggests, an overriding theme of the day was keeping user experience at the forefront of all mobile design and development work.
We shot lots of video and took lots of photos, and we’ll be writing up a lot of the presentations in more detail in due course. You can also check out our Update 2011 Photos on Flickr - more will follow soon.
After milling about the foyer of the Dome for a while and chatting to some developers (and admiring the floating balls – pictured above) – we took our seats. The lights dimmed, and the Update 2011 video played.
We couldn’t have had a livelier start – as Aral took to the stage with his backing band and belted out a rocking rendition of Fifth Dimension’s Let the Sunshine In.
Aral’s enthusiasm is infectious, rather like Steve Jobs in his presentation style, and he set the theme for the day nicely – asserting that mobile developers and designers are ‘makers’ with the skills to influence, empower and inform.
No sooner had he finished, then on strode Matt Gemmell’s evil twin, and shot him! As Aral exited stage left, Matt took the mic – smoking pistol in hand….
We’ve already written up our summary of Matt’s presentation, which was a really entertaining illustration of how to achieve great usability in App design, by looking at the exact opposite – Unusability!
Matt is a freelance iOS developer, and delivered the presentation in the guise of his evil twin, who gave us a “worst practice” toolkit on how to “really piss off users” with clumsy, useless, non-user-centric apps.
This was a really entertaining way to deliver some good advice, and he flipped things round at the end with some really useful best practice takeaways, that were of course the opposite of his evil twin’s advice! Read the rest of "Update 2011 Brighton Conference Review: Morning"
Brighton SEO 2011 – Attracting Links – Presentation by Dave Peiris – 
This is the third and final part of our review of the Update 2011 Conference in Brighton on mobile development and usability on Monday 6th September. You can also check out our posts on BrightonSEO Friday 9th - see 
So – continuing our review of the Update 2011 Conference in Brighton – here’s our summary of the afternoon’s first few presentations including:
Intro – Aral Balkan
