VCLEVER BLOG
You’d think it’d be the simplest of things to create a centred heading with horizontal lines either side of it, but as is so often the case in web design, when you throw in lots of different browsers and devices, things aren’t so simple after all.
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The Government’s Growth Voucher scheme will be coming to an end soon, but there’s still time to save 50% on strategic advice that could take your business to the next level.
We’re an accredited digital technology adviser for the UK Government’s Growth Voucher programme, which means you could benefit from our personalised strategic advice and have 50% of the cost refunded to you by the Government (up to a maximum of £2,000).
Our expert advice on the internet and digital technology could help you win business, improve your customers’ online experience, simplify your sales processes, or ease your administrative burden. (more…)
We’re delighted to announce that we’re now an officially accredited adviser in the field of digital technology for the UK Government’s Growth Voucher Scheme.
Growth Vouchers
The UK Government’s Growth Voucher programme is a way to encourage small businesses to receive strategic advice to promote growth. A voucher entitles you to 50% off the cost of strategic business advice, which means you could benefit from tailor-made strategic advice on the use of digital technology and have 50% of the cost refunded to you by the Government (up to a maximum of £2,000). (more…)
The Heartbleed security vulnerability has been well-publicised, but advice on what to do varies wildly. We’ve been updating our clients and thought we’d publish our thoughts here.
What is it?
Firstly, if you haven’t heard about it (which would be quite an achievement), Heartbleed is the catchy but alarming-sounding name given to an error in the code of a bit of widely-used software called OpenSSL, which encrypts data on ‘secure’ websites. OpenSSL is used on maybe around two-thirds of secure sites on the web (so that’s two-thirds of sites that start with https:// and have the little padlock symbol displayed). The error allows an attacker to trick a website’s server into giving them a small random chunk of data from the server’s memory, which could be anything – something harmless, some sensitive data, a password, or an encryption key.
Some reports imply that hackers are just taking specific data at will, but they have to go through multiple attacks, getting little chunks of random data at a time and hoping they turn up something useful. It’s still not good, but it’s not the same. And the chances that you have been compromised are probably very slim (more…)
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Pepsi Max’s ‘Test Drive’ ad was a huge viral hit, but many called it out as fake. ‘Test Drive 2’ aims to silence the doubters. And one doubter in particular.
Chances are you’ve seen Pepsi Max’s ‘Test Drive’ video, which went viral to the tune of 40m views. A brilliant ad, but many questioned whether it was faked. One car blog writer in particular, Travis Okulski, claimed that Nascar driver Jeff Gordon didn’t even drive the car and that everyone in it was an actor.
Enter Pepsi Max and Jeff Gordon for a sequel, featuring none other than Okulski as its victim. (more…)
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Google have just rolled out a change to Gmail that has a few email marketers making ridiculously OTT statements like “Gmail blows up email marketing”. The update means that images within emails will now be displayed by default. Far from being a bad thing, as email marketers ourselves, we absolutely welcome the change. Here’s why…
Tricky Gmail
Gmail has come in for some stick from email marketers as a few of its features can make life a little difficult when you’re trying to make sure a beautifully-crafted email looks as it should and actually stands a chance of being read by the recipient. One such feature was the introduction of the tabbed inbox which has the effect of automatically filing away ‘promotional’ emails in their own special place where they can be easily ignored and may never see the light of day. In addition, Gmail also presents a number of barriers to measuring how effective a campaign is (i.e. tracking such things as who opened emails, which device or email client they used, and where they were located). (more…)
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There are a few basic rules to follow if you represent a brand trying to leverage the power of social media. Chief among them should be Don’t hold a Twitter Q&A session at exactly the same time as you deliver earth-shatteringly bad news to your customers. That’s what British Gas decided to do today when they got their Customer Services Director, Bert Pijls, to answer questions on Twitter using the #AskBG hashtag on the same day that they announced a 9.2% price hike. (more…)
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Photo by Sparkfun Electronics
Here’s some help (hopefully) for anyone who uses Avast and finds that it suddenly and mysteriously stops working from one day to the next.
The Problem
Avast stops working after a reboot for no apparent reason (no changes made and working fine before). The Avast system tray icon shows a little cross and gives a status that the system is unsecured. Clicking the ‘Fix Now’ button does nothing. Also, it says ‘Not yet registered, 0 days remaining’ even though it is registered and the future renewal date is shown correctly. (more…)
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Google recently unveiled Chromecast, which looks like it could really shake up the internet TV market or even the wider TV broadcasting market
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmpOis2UEJg
Chromecast is a little dongle with an associated app that will wirelessly stream media from phones, tablets and PCs to any TV with an HDMI port. That means you can watch Netflix or YouTube videos on your TV while controlling the action with your phone/tablet/PC (and you can even switch between different devices midway through). All for $35 too. Looks great to us and such a better direction than Google TV.
We wrote about Google TV here on our blog 3 years ago and it’s interesting looking back at our opinions then and what has transpired since (particularly the failure of Google TV to take off). (more…)
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Tired of the dated, fussy design of the Hootsuite dashboard? I was, so I created a new cleaner version, which you can use on your own Hootsuite dashboard (if you use Chrome or Firefox).
Restyling Hootsuite
Here at vclever, we’re big users of Hootsuite, a social media dashboard that makes it easy to manage multiple accounts on Facebook and Twitter, amongst others. But the hideous appearance of the dashboard niggles at me. While others, like Twitter and Google+, have been rolling out beautiful new looks, Hootsuite’s three themes are starting to look a bit tired and dated thanks to thick shadows and strong gradients plastered everywhere, and colour-schemes that are less than tasteful.
Although I had better things to be doing at the time(!!), I decided to dabble with Hootsuite’s CSS using Chrome’s developer tools to make the appearance fresher, easier on the eye, cleaner and brighter. (more…)
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