The site is the brain-child of Maura Donohoe, who’s got lot’s of experience in the area – she’s been a teacher for over 20 years, and running a school-book shop for over 6….so she’s going to be able to help anyone that runs into any school-book related problems.

They wanted the site to be a little different to the school-book sites that are out there at the moment. Be sure to keep an eye on the easyschoolbooks blog; they’ve also got a home on Facebook & Twitter, so check them out & say hello.

This was one of those enjoyable projects. Not only were the team in Social Bits easy to work with, they knew what they didn’t want, and were very open to hearing options & alternatives on things that would work. A great mix.

One of the joys of this type of work is that you get to know the business & services of the people you work with quite well; semantic web technology is one of those things that I had heard about, but never spent any time trying to understand. Having worked with the Social Bits team, learning more about it has definitely become more of a priority.

Social Bits have a number of events coming up, with one in particular that struck me as being a nice idea: a discounted workshop on Social Media for the Unemployed.

Putting it all together

With these type of posts, I’d normally leave it there, but I’ve recently read some useful posts that have given a bit more depth on how the design came about.  As this was one of the (admittedly uncommon!) cases where the design of the site didn’t change radically from the first set of sketched drawings through to the live version. I though showing how it came about would be nice.

On paper

After talking with the team about what was needed, I spent some time coming up with some layouts on paper, and trying to figure out how to get the messages across. For the homepage, there were two that seemed to work well (the one that’s closest to the end result is below). And no. Drawing isn’t my strong point.

To Balsamiq

When I had a few different directions that I wanted to try out on paper, it was off to Balsamiq. Balsamiq is a tool for quickly creating mock-ups of interfaces. It’s really simple to use and is excellent is what it does; if you do front-end web work and haven’t checked it out, you really should.

So, I grabbed a 12 column 960.gs grid for Balsamiq and off I went. After I had played around with the layouts I had in mind, it came down to two that had some slight differences, but they were both headed in the very similar directions; the main difference was in the amount of information being presented.

After having a chat with the Social Bits folks, we ended up with a layout that was mix of the two versions. Once that was decided, I went to work on developing a look for the site.

Looking good

As this was a re-design, there was a logo already. So using that as the starting point for the look of the site made sense. From there, it was about coming up with a look that put across the message we wanted in as clear a way as possible. So we ended up with:

Not just skin deep

We had some of the copy worked out early on, so at this stage it was all about pulling it all together and polishing it up. This was done while I got my hands dirty coding up the custom WordPress theme for the site & blog.

Fin

And the end result is live at socialbits.net. Go. See.

Spotify Playlists

One of the nice features is the ability to create and share playlists – it’s a great way of discovering new music. However, Spotify don’t (as far as I know) give subscribers a place to share their playlists. I’ve started using a Twitter search to find playlists, and it’s working great – because so many people tweet their playlists you’re never stuck for some good music to listen to. It’s how I’ve been starting my work day for the last couple of weeks: open spotify, search on Twitter for a new playlist to kick things off , start work…

Discovering Playlists via Twitter

To make the whole thing easier, I’ve done a little Twitter search app to look for Spotify listings (you can find it at spoteye.ambientage.com. If you check that out, you’ll get 100 playlists that people have shared through Twitter to keep you entertained. It’s storing playlists for about 10 minutes, so there is usually a good turnover of new music.

More features….maybe

This was a short project that solved one small problem for me (finding playlists), so there is some room for improvement. At the moment it’s displaying only the first 100 play-lists found.  I have a version running that loads more automatically from a database. It also collects the hash  tags people use to describe their playlists too – they could be published to give a way of narrowing down the playlists.

Building Small

Building this was a one day project that was part experimentation, but mainly just solving a small problem for myself.

Taking on small projects like that are a great way of learning things that may not come up in a paid project. In a way it goes against the fundamental idea of business (creating a product or service with a business model capable of generating revenue), but sometimes value can come in other ways. The experience of creating something new can sometimes be just as valuable. I’ve done a few small Twitter search applications, and the access Twitter give to huge amounts of real-time, user-generated content can lead to really useful things (this may or may-not be be one of them!).

I also want to credit longUrlPlease for providing a great service that expands the many shortened urls found on Twitter. Without it I would have been wary of publishing lots of shortened links without any way for the user to see where they went. I came across longUrlPlease when reviewing the applicants for Outvesting (I didn’t give them any of my points, but I wish I had now. Sorry guys!).

As always, any feedback & ideas for improvement would be great – leave a comment here or through the app’s form, or get me on Twitter @davkell

The idea was for something that was easy to use and let people play using a service that they’re already familiar with. Playing is as simple as following the Twg.ie Twitter account where each day you’ll get an anagram to solve; be the fastest to solve it and you hit the top of the leader-board.  Told you it was easy.

Even though the game targets quite a niche audience, Alan’s idea of a word game like this on top of the Twitter platform seems obvious now. There’s a large enough user base on Twitter to make targeting a narrow niche possible, it’s a text-based interface making it suitable for a word-game, and Twitter’s real-time search makes it possible for players to interact on Twitter & see a near real-time leader-board of others playing the game on the twg.ie site.

You probably won’t be seeing my name on the Twg.ie leaderboard too soon – I discovered when developing it that solving anagrams quickly isn’t a talent I have (even in the 24 hours Twg.ie gives you). If you fancy testing yourself, check out the Twg.ie site.

Golden Egg wanted a way to replace their old family of sites which were originally designed as static brochures for each of their magazines.  As a producer of high-quality content, these static sites weren’t doing them justice, and weren’t giving readers a reason to return to the site. Instead, they wanted a site that was clean & easy to use, that put the magazines’ articles & readers to the fore, and was easy to update with new content daily.

In addition to the sections they’ve traditionally done in their magazines (like Beauty, Style, People & Parties, Food & Wine and What’s On), Golden Egg have started to embrace the web by getting more interactive with their readers by using features like a blog by their Deputy Editor, a monthly newsletter, and some other new features that will be making an appearance over the next few weeks!

There’s a separate design for the Fashion Innovation Awards section of the site – the finalists for each of the award categories were announced last week, and tickets for the Awards ceremony in March also just went on sale – more details are available on the site.

If you’re interested in keeping up with what’s going on, need some style in your life, or fancy a read of some of their features, check out the new Golden Egg site!

… buildings will be open for a time for special tours given by hundreds of professionals and enthusiasts, who generously volunteer their time. All events are free, and entry is on a first-come basis, with certain events requiring pre-booking. This is your festival and what you think matters.

You can preview the buildings on the site, and make bookings for any that may require it. If you’ve got a young family, there’s also a Children’s event being run in the Galway City Museum to keep them entertained!

It’s a simple & effective idea – users take a simple (eh, little) quiz every week. Get the 3 questions correct, and win a nice prize. Sign-up to the mailing list, and if you’re name comes out of the hat…win a prize.

For businesses, if you sponsor a quiz you’re getting access to the student market in a way that gets them engaged with your website.

There’s also a Littlequiz blog, packed full of money saving tips & tricks to help poor students through the college year. So, what are you waiting for? Go. Now. Win things.

TwitEye is an outstanding app that can help you find ideas for new applications, services, software and plugins based on tweets looking for something to fill a need.

The UI scrolls with tweets from users. It would be great to have a pause feature! You also can find a selection of ideas plucked from the stream in the Ideas Blog.

The pause feature is certainly something I’ll be looking into adding.

You can see the TwitEye listing, and their full directory of twitter applications, over on the Twitdom site.

From looking at how it’s been used so far, there are return visits and people arriving through search. To make it easier to get at the good ideas, I thought an RSS feed with some of the better ones would be helpful. You can grab the feed, or look at the published ideas, on the TwitEye Ideas page. Over there you can also look at different categories of ideas, and search the daily archive to see if there’s anything of interest. Or, if you’re intersted in taking a look at the full stream, check out the TwitEye homepage.

Something I’ve heard quite a bit is how difficult people often find it to come up with ideas for new products and services, and it can be a difficult process. One of the pieces of advice often given in response is to solve a problem that exists. Well, the thinking behind TwitEye was to  make identifying these problems a little bit easier. It’s not going to solve the problem for you, but it might spark an idea for you to run with and develop something new and useful (and I’d love to hear about it if you do!).

TwitEye is built based on the Twitter API; it uses the services that Twitter provides (very kindly) to search for problems people are having, or requests for software & services they asking others about. As I’m told almost daily, figuring out the market is always critical – and if you see something float by on TwitEye, at least you know you have a market of one!

I was watching the stream as I was developing it, and often there are existing solutions to the questions being asked. What you need to figure out is how you can solve the problem more efficiently, more cost effectively, or with more added value than anyone else.

Happy hunting (and, as it’s new, any feedback would be great). Now, go see it in action.