B1BLOG

When you’re build­ing and test­ing sites there are a lot of things to con­sider. “God is in the details” and all that. You can save time, heartache and avoid hav­ing angry clients by set­ting up your browser with a few lit­tle tools to help you check some of the basics.

Fire­Bug

For when you absolutely, pos­i­tively have to go into the code your­self and have a dig around. Indis­pens­able lit­tle add-on when trou­bleshoot­ing sites, giv­ing you (the tech-savvy PM) the abil­ity to check the code that builds the site. Also has a handy “Net” tab telling you which files are load­ing (or ever hand­ier, not load­ing).

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We’re con­stantly look­ing for ways to improve our vis­i­tors’ expe­ri­ence and have recently made a few small tweaks to the B1 Blog which we hope you’ll like.

First, we’ve added a ‘related posts’ sec­tion to the bot­tom of every post (using YARPP). It’s incred­i­bly easy to install and use and depend­ing on the weight­ings you choose, can tighten or widen the net as necessary.

Sec­ondly, we’ve added a ‘Tweet’ and ‘Like’ but­ton to the top of each post as we felt that the but­tons on the left-hand side­bar were per­haps not promi­nent enough. What do you think?

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ChangeThis has been invit­ing peo­ple to nom­i­nate their top busi­ness books, (the ones that actu­ally made a dif­fer­ence rather than the ones you picked up in an air­port and didn’t get past chap­ter four). Now, in a delight­fully post-modern twist, there’s going to be a book about the books – The 100 Best Busi­ness Books of All Time. You can see the list of those that made it here.

Are these the best busi­ness books of all time?

All the usual sus­pects are there Good to Great, In Search of Excel­lence, Tip­ping Point, Get­ting Things Done (which I own and have never fin­ished to my wife’s con­stant amuse­ment). It’s a good list.

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It’s not too often I get com­pletely wowed by a new piece of tech­nol­ogy but Prezi has com­pletely bowled me over.

In a nut­shell, Prezi is a Flash-based pre­sen­ta­tion sys­tem that allows users to cre­ate incred­i­bly dynamic pre­sen­ta­tions. Pre­sen­ta­tions where you can zoom in and out across a large area (no slides), cre­ate motion paths, embed images and video and do things that pre­vi­ously needed a pretty com­pe­tent Flash devel­oper and a whole chunk of time. It kicks tra­di­tional slide­ware way into touch.

And it is very, very easy.

Here’s a quick snapshot:

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Every year, we run a series of inter­nal train­ing ses­sions called the Ban­ner Acad­e­mies. These are to help us share insights and infor­ma­tion across the com­pany. But, we fig­ured, why stop there?

So below is the pre­sen­ta­tion I gave yes­ter­day on writ­ing. It’s designed to be a prac­ti­cal col­lec­tion of tips and tricks – basi­cally, use­ful stuff I’ve learnt over the years from peo­ple far clev­erer than I.

The fast and dirty writ­ing academy

Should you wish, you can down­load a PDF of the pre­sen­ta­tion here and get the notes (which will make the most sense of it all) here.

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I’m get­ting ready to run one of our in-house train­ing ses­sions (Ban­ner Acad­e­mies). This time it’s devoted to offer­ing tips, tricks and tech­niques to help our peo­ple write better.

Regard­less of what you do in mar­ket­ing, the writ­ten word is pretty fun­da­men­tal to how effec­tive you’ll be – whether with peers, cus­tomers or part­ners. And, if you write in Eng­lish, you’ve got plenty of words to choose from.

Give or take a few thou­sand, there are about 170,000 words in active use on a daily basis. Not bad when you con­sider that the vast major­ity stem from a palette of just 26 let­ters.

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As a writer by trade I have a habit of try­ing every word-processor I can get my hands on. For day to day work, I still use Word – although a heav­ily cus­tomised stripped back ver­sion. But I have this per­pet­ual feel­ing that there’s a bet­ter option out there. Of course, today, there are more options than ever before (even for a Mac user).

So to date I’ve tried a vari­ety of desk­top options:

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• Word – good but bloated
• OpenOf­fice and its Mac vari­ant NeoOf­fice – pretty much as good as Word if not quite as pretty (and still pretty bloated)