In case you missed it, here’s my article that appeared in the 5th February issue of the Bookseller, entitled ‘The Long Game’

Data.gov.uk represents a step change in the government's approach to data and public accountability. Find out more about the ways in which web based apps and data visualisation will change the way government interacts with us over the coming years.

Looking to produce a quick win for your team in early 2010? Look no further than this list of top tips for charities.

This week will go down as another milestone in the development of social media, with a major news story being shaped by hundreds of thousands of web users across popular networking sites

A recent climbing trip to Scotland allowed me to have a go at liveblogging on my iPhone. I found its a great way of boosting website traffic...

A round up of my key points and more on some issues I touched on at Chamtech09: Google Analytics discrepancies, link tagging, and defining your website goals.

Conversion rate is the most important metric for measuring the success or failure of what you do online. In this post I'll be talking about the what conversion rate is, why it's so important and how Chameleon Net can help you with it.

How to digitally attract, engage with and recruit international students, while mobilising your existing students to help with language translation, to overcome cultural barriers and give them valuable online marketing work experience.

Following on from the introductory post about Twitter by Ross, in this article I'll be looking at how big business can harness Twitter to present a more 'human' face online. Our case study is property consultants Drivers Jonas, who we have just hired Chameleon Net to consult on and launch their Twitter account.

Chameleon Net held a seminar on Digital Student Recruitment for the higher education sector yesterday, Tuesday 24th February 2009. "Stimulating & Exciting"; "Very well organised & professional"

Social Media is a fast-growing and rapidly evolving beast, and the latest website to be the darling of the Google Generation is micro-blogging site Twitter. The idea is simple, you have 140 characters, including spaces, to answer the question- What are you doing now?

My Dimbleby mission continues. Seriously, David, look over your shoulder and you will see me there…albeit with the need of the Hubble telescope.

Maybe it’s my age but for the first time ever I’ve found myself following the developments of the US Presidential Elections. With just five days to go, the coverage on the BBC has been up to its usual standards, but I’ve been intrigued enough by the characters of the main players to have a look at their websites and see how they’re using the web to spread their message.

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.

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.

When you offer a service or sell a product, either people are talking about you, or no-one is. If they’re talking about your brand, it may be positive or it may be negative. If no-one’s talking about you, perhaps they should be.

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.

We are currently running a free offer! If you are running a paid search campaign on Google Adwords then you might be interested in our FREE PPC audit. The audit will include bespoke advice on your Google account structure, the quality score and tips on how to make the most of your paid search spend. Take a look at the audit page for more information.

It is a misconception that email marketing is solely deployed to promote a company and/or its products to random people.

Having just got back from my round the world, (well, Vietnam and Cambodia) charity travels. I arrived back at work and like any good employee, headed straight for Facebook. I am really excited about Facebook this year (especially now I’ve posted the video blogs from my trip.) Actually it’s the advertising on Facebook that’s really caught my eye. I’ve been checking out Facebook’s advertising interface and the list of targeting parameters is endless,

2007 showed phenomenal growth for “Facebook”, by the end of the year it had 7.6M active UK users, that’s 12.5% of the population. With so many active users participating on the social networking site some form of advertising system to target these users was inevitable.

With some major shake-ups in the Online Marketing world over the last twelve months, 2008 looks set to be a balance of new strategy and contingency. As PPC advertisers grow in number, an increasingly crowded marketplace will force some to experiment with more niche engines to ensure a return while the search engines will all be tweaking their natural algorithms every which way they can (Google patenting new image reading technology for example). 2008 is going to be a year of surprises, but let’s see if we can foresee a few trends: