Australian Web Industry: Survey

Some of my many, many, many blog readers maybe interested in this little survey conducted by Micrsoft Silverlight via the Hopedell marketing agency.

Yes, the same Silverlight who seem to be trying to push their product to every living being on the .NET developer planet.

That said, it’s probably (I stand to be corrected) one of the first overviews / landscapes of the Australian website design and development industry.

Key factoids:

1.  3379 companies in Australia involved in internet publishing.
   • 91% do both website design and website development in-house.
   • 56% host “in-house”
   • 70% do EDM marketing

Here it is, enjoy. Australian Web Industry Survey

Windows Live Writer

Ok, so a friend on mine @ Ninemsn has put me onto this Microsoft Live Writer blogging tool.

I’ll be using it to post to my blog from now on….provided it’s not rubbish of course (I’ll let you know if it is, but if I don’t you can assume I love it).

Arc@UNSW: Update

Success.

The board loved the new IA:

and initial creative:

.

The site will have a number of key new functions (see current site here) such as:

• Membership section (with restricted content)
• E-commerce (membership payments)
• Custom navigation: use of combined smh.com.au slider and bbc.co.uk (new) allowing site users to add up to x6 sections, sub-sections or individual pages to “their” primary navigation…this, I believe, is the way of the future for large content sites (not inclusive of news sites though, they’re different).
• Calendar of Events: filtered based on the section of the site that the user is in.
• Middle Content Tabs: up to 6 CMS controlled content tabs, allowing “summary” of sectional content to be displayed, encouraging membership acquisition.

Inside, members will have access to an Online Shop, be able to download video/music content from events at the UNSW “Roundhouse” Venue from bands and the like (engaging content) and soon be able to listen to the UNSW Student Radio streamed via the web (potentially tie in later with the curriculum of the “Media” degree.

Now for the fun part: We have to the 3rd March to deliver…going to be busy!

Next entry I will (depending on NDA or other commercial restrictions) give an overview of the LJHooker processes and how we got to where we are today.

Arc@UNSW Pitch

We’ll it’s nearly time for me to go into the Board at the UNSW and deliever the outcomes, IA, spec and budget for their brand new Student Union website….6pm is delivery time!

Since the end of 2006, compulsory student unionism was abolished, so they’ve been busy through 2007 turning themselves into a commercial operation, based on membership.

2008 is all about acqusition, getting new members to pay yearly membership fee’s.

As part of this, their new site will need to be hot, and have engaging content suitable to the late teen/pre-full time work demographic (i.e. Students!).

Later this week I’ll talk through the process we went through to get to where we are,

I think starting with the freshest project for this blog would be a good idea, don’t you?

Then later, we can look at the LJHooker.com and LJhooker.com.au process…which is ongoing.

The current site is here.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to reviews, commentary and insights into the best of breed online website IA (Information Architecture, aka “wireframes”) and creative sites.

See Information Architecture on Wikipedia if you don’t know what I’m on about.

This blog is mainly about site navigation and how it evolves, new practises, creative & innovative implementation of navigation and the overall usability of my selected websites around the globe.

I’ll attempt (work and work permitting) to post a weekly review of the good, bad and the ugly from around the globe.

I start however with a few recent projects I’ve done in the IA space, before moving onto others work (hey, I’m more than happy to put myself up for critisism since I’ll be critiquing other work)…