Last week’s SPARKies event was Bath’s first tech awards ceremony and part of the first Bath Digital Festival - and we were shortlisted as finalists for the Best Digital Design Agency.

For the second time in as many weeks, I have found myself talking to business owners about the lack of care they have been shown by their agency. I’m pleased to say neither related to projects we had delivered!

We send a variety of email marketing for various clients. Recent activity has prompted questions about ‘open rates’ and ‘click rates’ and what constitutes a successful campaign. ‘Open rates’ are expressed as a percentage of emails opened from total emails sent. ‘Bounces’ are different kettle of fish which can be discussed at greater length another time.

Although similar in terms of principle and process, there are different rules that should be observed when designing for the web as opposed to designing for print. These new rules came as a bit of a revelation after 10 years of designing with printed media in mind. Luckily, team moresoda have been on hand to gently suggest how I might better change my mindset from print to web.

A few weeks ago Mike Boyink posted a great article entitled Show, Don’t Tell, where he put out a plea to all those writing articles about ExpressionEngine (EE) addons to show how they implement their must have addon as opposed to simply writing about how great they are.

We totally agree with Mike on this one, and as part of our initiative here at moresoda to "open up” about how we develop EE sites, we decided to start  by writing about one of our must-have addons, morePreview.

Currently the web development world is alive with discussion surrounding technologies like HTML5, CSS3.  I won’t go into what those technologies are, since that’s not the focus of this post, but I do want to bring attention to a dilemma surrounding what is known as Progressive Enhancement, which is currently how many web developers are (quite rightly) tackling the transition to these two new technologies.

Progressive enhancement is not a technology like HTML5 and CSS3, but merely an ideology.  It allows you as a developer to ensure your website/application works across all browsers, however, certain features (such as drag and drop, animations etc) and only shown to browsers that support them.  Many developers refer to this as graceful degradation.

When I get a new mac, or do a clean install of OS X, there are a number of applications I install by default, apps such as Adium, Adobe Creative Suite, Chrome, Firefox, Skype and VirtualBox are all a given, but in the last few months I’ve found myself using the following applications regularly, and wanted to share them.