Organisations can no longer hide from the fact that the web now has the power to make or break them. The ‘blogosphere’ should be ignored at their peril.

Well it's nearly upon us. We knew it was coming, but here it is. On 31st October this year Chameleon will be 10 years old, and we're embarking on a whole bunch of fun to celebrate over the coming weeks. (Not least by behaving like 10 year olds on our temporarily kid-like blog ) In '98 the web was a different kettle of fish to what we see today. To kick of our 10th anniversary blogging, I thought I'd have a quick look at the web world circa 1998...

In my ongoing mission to become the David Dimbleby of the Web Industry (and beyond?) I recently spent an afternoon chairing a “Question Time” style event for movers and shakers in the UK publishing industry: “Digitise or Die” was the inaugural annual event run by The Bookseller, the leading trade publication for the book industry, with the sole intention of focusing on the issues facing the book business in the digital age.

This month we have re-launched our very own Chameleon Net website with a brand new look. When I came on board as Creative Director at the beginning of 2006 one of my first tasks was to undertake a re-working of the 'then' current branding. Far from throwing away everything that had come before and creating something completely new I wanted to capitalise on everything we had already achieved as a company, and the recognition we already had within the new media sector. I saw it more as an 'evolution of the brand' and in approaching the recent re-design of our website I really wanted to stay focused on the principle of evolving our online proposition rather than going back to the drawing board.

Our development team have spent a lot of time creating a flexible, scalable .NET and XML based solution that is robust and easily maintainable. Likewise we have invested many man hours, creating relevant copy to achieve a very search engine friendly, accessible site. So the design brief was quite simple; Bring the website in line with the current branding and communicate our design abilities without effecting any of the underlying code or foundation work already undertaken.

Interestingly enough this scenario is not uncommon among many of our clients. There are of course occasions when their current solution is too old to cost effectively salvage technology, but many of our projects have involved existing systems or required collaboration with an in-house IT team to effectively re-skin their offering. With contemporary standards based development techniques like CSS ( custom style sheets ) we can 'skin' just about any system.

So back to the new Chameleon Net offering. We have added a dynamic Content Managed Flash Banner to our homepage and in the long term we will be re-tasking this space with multiple promotional panels featuring video, animation and motion graphic work from the design team. We have further utilised flash, and specifically siFr, to convert structural headings ( H2, H3 etc.. ) into our brand font on the fly,  whilst retaining an accessible, standards compliant layout for users without the plugin.

I hope you like the new look Chameleon site as much as we do, and if you have any comments or ideas I would love to hear from you.

It is my first week with ChameleonNet and after reading about a Google employee putting Google in the firing line with a few opinionated blog entries I find myself approaching this post with much trepidation

 

My first week with ChameleonNet has been great; I’ve downloaded all industry standard messaging tools, RSS feeds and the essential Firefox extensions (that ColorfulTabs one is the best!) onto my shiny new lap top, improved my foosball game ten-fold, wagged my chin with adobe, channel four and the cream of the new media crop, and have delved ankle deep into ChameleonNet’s revolutionary Electronic PR (EPR) offering.

 

I have been working in New Media for 14 Months; I come to Chameleon as a Google Approved Professional and a Bid Management Tool Champion. In my role as Online Marketing Exec I work across PPC and SEO analysing websites and data and recommending web strategies to clients.  In addition to my marketing knowledge I am also a proficient web designer, building in html, CSS and Flash.

 

I’ll be keeping my eye on industry trends, news and the latest tools and hope to be sharing my findings with you on this blog.

 

I am sure that this first post isn’t as controversial as the Google blog, though I wouldn't want to be too opinionated, at least whilst I'm still new to the company!

Welcome to the new blog area. As you may know, we've been blogging in one way or another for nearly two years on the Chameleon website.

This is the new blogging section providing all the good stuff associated with today's blogs, including comments, RSS feeds and so on. We hope you find it interesting and that you get involved in the dialogue.

The old blogging section with plenty of interesting articles is still available; We've frozen it as an archive. So feel free to browse around http://www.chameleonnet.co.uk/blog.aspx for everything prior to 22nd June 2007.