Legacy and building your Social Media Online Brand

Recently, a friend of mine went through a career change, one that seen her go from holding a representation as a regional Crown Holder to breaking into the world of Film Acting.  In the process of this transition, She deactivated her Group and Fan Pages that had been created as part of her Pageant Run.

The deactivation of these pages are perfectly ok for a user to do, but they also create a very interesting detail that may not have been taken into account at the time of their deactivation.

In the Technology world, there is a well known concept, known as Legacy Interaction. Legacy Interaction can allow for Designers to bring forward aspects of a program or application that has been beneficial in the success of a Company's existing success.

This same concept can actually be applied to one's Social Media presentation. be it Company who is being bought out by another company, or, as in the case of My friend making the transitioning from Beauty Pageant Contestant to Actress one thing that should be an important aspect to focus on is that you have created a presence online, and that presence has generated a collection of fans and supporters of said online presence.

When transitioning from one element of your online Social Media Presence to another, one of the strongest elements working in your favour is the supporters you have built with your existing brand, how you transition from one part of your social Media Presence to the new venture can either make or break the new venture.

People have invested in your online presence, they believe in it and have come to support it. They want to grow with you, continue to support you and become brand ambassadors who can give the public confidence in what you are selling.

That product can be anything from the newest Widget, a clothing line, Software App, or in the caee of My friend a successful career on the silver screen. What one needs to remember is that this can't happen if your audience is given the chance to follow your evolution and are invited to follow along before changes are made to the Social Media Platforms.

This means that to make a successful transition one really should do the following

1. Select a specific Date of when your existing Social Media Profiles will go dark

2. Set up your new Social Media Profiles-pages, groups, twitter etc.

3. Make the public aware of the new Profiles and invite them to follow you over to the new Profiles

4. Be thankful and make your supporters feel that you are grateful for their support, Let them come along with your established brand as you build it into a much stronger brand

5. Reap the reward of being able to walk into your new endeavour with a established audience that you can offer the support of to new contacts.

Using this five simple steps will allow your Social Media Presence, providing that  nothing already has happened to damage your brand, to leverage the legacy you have established as a foundation which will allow for a successful building of a very successful brand.

When Malware on Windows can cause a headache on OS X (and even possibly your tablets)

The idea of Cross Platform is a beautiful one. The idea of starting a movie on Netflix on one device and picking up on another, or being able to research something at the office, fire up your browser at home and continue to look at the same site through a feature that sync’s your browser over any device sounds great and can be very handy.

But, as with many other things in the modern cloud based connected world we live in, there is a underlying dark side to the force that every so often rises up and causes problems.

That very dark side hit me over the weekend when I launched up Google Chrome on my Windows based tablet, only to find that one of those nasty little silent drive by installs has performed a browser highjack.  

My search engine was changed from Google to some ad spewing site as well as my home pages being changed from a combo of Facebook, Google Plus and inertialzendesigns.com tabs to the website for this hijacking piece of malware.

Not a problem I figured, I’ll just log into the Mac and search up how to clean this little annoyance up, a practice I’ve been used to doing over the years as even with Anti-Virus and Firewall softwares, sometimes these little annoyances get through. But then it hit Me

My Mac got hit with the SAME CHANGES TO THE HOMEPAGE AND SEARCH ENGINE SETTINGS!!!

You see, Google’s Sync settings worked too well, without realizing it the checkboxes were set to sync the options for search engine and home page on all devices  along with allowing cross platform sync’ed tabs and history were checked. As such, the result were what they were.

So, just how do you, My fellow users of the Internet, make sure the same thing does not happen to you?

With these steps is how:

1. Open Google Chrome and type in chrome://settings into the search bar

2. click on Advanced sync settings

3. Change just what you want to allow Chrome to Sync, in the case of making sure that Malware remains isolated to only the infected device, the areas where is it wise to uncheck are your settings and extensions, consider your History as well if you are extra cautious.

Finally click ok and resume your activities knowing you are a little bit safer.

David for inertialzendesigns.com

Building a Website, or putting the puzzle together.

Since I first started getting introduced to Web Design, back in the mid 90's , I have heard many say the following

"Web Design isn't THAT hard to do..."

and they usually follow it up with something like

"All you do is drag that image here, place that youtube video there, write up some text and publish it"

If only the truth of Web Design was REALLY  that simple. What a Designer does is actually more like trying to build a fairly advanced puzzle from the ground up.  To help with understanding this lets just break down a few things about the anatomy of a Web Designer, shall we.

First, unlike many programers, Web Designer's do not have the ability to pick only one language to work with. Sure there are programming languages people know about, but here is a short list of the areas a modern Web Designer should have a working knowledge of

• HTML -Hyper-Text Markup Language
• CSS - Cascading Style Sheets
• Java
• Javascript
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• Sql
• Flash (although this is going the way of the dodo bird thankfully) 

Each of these languages carry their own formats on how they are written, and in the caee of some like CSS and Javascript the Designer can actually end up writing one language inside the carrier of another. Usually this is done as inline entries in the HTML document.

The next part of the puzzle that a Designer has to figure out is just how will the final Design be viewed. Sure there are standards in how the above languages are written, but deployment is not always handled the same way depending on options the end user picks from those listed below

platform: Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, Xbox 360/Xbox One, PS 3/PS 4, or Chrome OS

browser: Internet Explorer, Safari (Mobile or Desktop), Firefox, Opera, Chrome (mobile or Desktop)

connection speed: Dial Up, Mobile  or Broadband

screen size: Ranging usually from a 4" Smartphone Screen up to 80" Television screens thanks to System on a Stick computers that plug into TV's HDMI Port, like the Chromebit  and the Intel Windows 8.1 Stick

With sub categories for some of these, Windows 98 vs Windows 7 for example, the list goes on.  

Then there is the Multimedia aspects, Photos may need to be processed in Photoshop at different resolutions in order to deliver crisp looking images that load on a page in 5 seconds of landing so that a quick, accessible and eye pleasing experience occurs.

We Designers also have to stay up to date with what formats platforms are supporting, a long standing example of this being the fact that Google and Apple have different views on the now retired mobile version of Adobe Flash. Apple has always stuck to supporting HTML based implementation of graphics, electing to promote using things like GIF  files or embedded movie files in place with a linked embed code. 

On the other hand, Google elected to develop their own version of Flash, called "Pepperflash", to handle what Adobe's format used to.

Web Design does not stop with all the above back end coding though. With all this to take into account the Designer then has to reformat a Client's content, in the process coming up with an efficient layout which delivers said content in a manor which is both meeting the client's vision while delivering a usable and engaging website for the end user. 

Of course, we are not forgetting the detail of "Search Engine Optimization".  SEO, as has been discussed in other blog entries, is the practice of finding the correct search terms so that a Website ranks as highly as possible, coupled with factors like Domain Age and Link Back scores (the number of websites Google considers relevant that host links to your website).

Websites, in many countries, are expected to meet accessibility standards so that users with accessibility issues, like those who are visually impaired, can use the Website. All of the above also is expected to meet W3C Standards and be wrapped into a format that is visually pleasing to the end user regardless of the device used.

So, to bring us back to the original statement of "Web Design isn't that hard to do..." Permit me to say that by the elements, this is indeed true, and through the use of products that allow Drag and Drop design, or "What you see is what you get" results this statement is indeed correct. However when looking at using the WYSIWYG method the results are in line with expecting the quality of a high end  sports car at the cost of a entry level import.

-David for inertialzendesigns.com