As Jude mentions below, we’ve just been given Official Honoree (horrible spelling I know!) recognition for Ping Pong Dim Sum by the 13th Annual Webby Awards from NYC.

We’re pleased as punch for this as it validates all our hard work and means we can give ourselves a quick pat on the back and raise a glass for all the work over the past 12 months.

The fact that Ping Pong is already a great brand gives us a helping hand but we’ve done some good work for PP in the past year and things are going to get even better very soon with a brand new Members Area with a viral launch campaign where punters can win a trip of a lifetime to China. The design is being updated and the rest of the site will follow at a later date. Watch this space.

Over the past year we’ve done all Ping Pong’s eMarketing, using a range of creative styles, we’ve created Ping Pong’s online tea shop, launched the new Careers website including online jobs application and CMS as well as facilitating dozens of small and large online campaigns centred around the core website. It doesn’t stop there either, we’ve now got a few thousand fans on Facebook and plenty of followers on Twitter … and more social media marketing to come.

Having worked as the Account Manager for Ping Pong for over a year now, the recognition from the Webbys is personally very satisfying but creds need to go to our great team of designers and devs who’ve had many great ideas, plenty of insight and functional genius which has resulted in successful campaigns and muchos online prettiness! Thanks for Ping Pong too for letting us loose with your online strategy!

For me it’s a great way to sign off from Magnitude with a smile. Yes, this is my last blog for Magnitude as I now have a new path to follow elsewhere. Thanks to all my buds at Magnitude, gonna miss you all. Wish me luck!

James Wray

We were still reeling from the news that we had won an incredible, two Webbys in 2008, for our work with wagamama, when we entered another one of our client’s websites to 2009’s international competition. Although we thought the work we had done for Ping Pong was just as good, we thought that ‘we should be so lucky’ and ‘lightning doesn’t strike twice’.

Well knock us down and call us Kylie ‘cos we have gone and been short-listed as official honourees in the Annual 13th Webby Awards (the “Oscars of the online world” – or so say Vanity Fair!) Look for us in the ‘Restaurant’ section here

So massive applause and kudos for all the team who have worked on the latest incarnation of www.pingpongdimsum.com and a personal thank you to David Bowie and Matt Groening (two of the Webby judges) who we’re certain are the guys who saw the Ping Pong work and thought ‘Now that site needs a good honouring’. Respect!

Jude Turner, client services director, Magnitude

As high street sales continue to suffer in the current economic climate and consumer habits fluctuate seemingly by the week, today’s savvy retailers are grasping the online mantle and putting the internet at the heart of their business strategy.

The potential of digital marketing continues to evolve with relentless energy, enabling companies to push the boundaries of their products and marketing activity while rapidly embracing trends and new developments.

Smaller retailers are finding this is a potent weapon to level the playing field. It means they can punch above their weight and give established names a run for every pound.

Retailers can embrace these advances to communicate directly to consumers at home and on the go, empowering the mobile consumer with marketing activity that utilises the abundance of devices and social media available. With the right strategy and tools, consumers are never out of reach, however niche the audience or remote the location.

Digital marketing can, like no other channel, create a genuinely two-way dialogue between companies and brands. By utilising viral marketing and targeted campaigns you can empower consumers and add substantial bottom-line benefit.

Yes, this does pose challenges to the retailer, particularly considering the sheer volume of online activity. Marketing campaigns must be bold and creative, adapting messages to be highly relevant to each audience and tailored to maximise the channels in which they are delivered.

However with the right digital marketing can give your business the edge on the global e-high street. Instantly adaptable and highly targeted – and backed up with highly detailed tracking and analysis data – online activity offers an unrivalled return on investment to businesses of every size.

Soon every consumer will carry with them a number of communications devices – giving you the opportunity to literally be ‘in their pocket’.

Just wanted to inform you all that we have another extremely tasty client to shout from the rooftops about – Daddy Donkey!

We can’t wait to start work on their new site but in the meantime check them out at www.daddydonkey.co.uk and be sure to pop to their stand in Farringdon’s Leather Market for a tasty burrito if you’re in that neck of the woods.

Kick ass!

One of the things we do a lot of here is design and build web form based interfaces. We’ve done a lot of them over the years. In fact we’ve got a box full of half finished ones out the back. Back in the dark ages of the early 2000’s there was not an awful lot you could do with your web form to make it stand out from the crowd. Cross browser compatibility issues with CSS and Javascript put an end to those fun ideas.

How things have changed though; browsers have largely sorted their differences out and we’ve witnessed the birth of some super powerful Javascript libraries (our personal favourite is jQuery). All this power allows us to spice things up and make our web based interfaces behave a little more like their desktop brothers and sisters.

There are some things we don’t have control over though. Reasons include technical design limitations, security or plain and simple lack of foresight. One cross we’ve had to bear for a long time is that of the file upload form element. We’ve all used them plenty of times (which social site doesn’t encourage you to upload your latest beautiful picture) and I’m sure a lot of us have come to take them from granted. You can imagine our excitement then when we saw the Mozilla 2009 Design Challenge which is to come up with a new way of doing things.

Mozilla describe the current file upload widget problems so well …

“Why does it suck ? Because there’s no drag-and-drop; Flash or server-side hacking is required to provide any kind of progress indication; you can’t upload multiple files; if you know what you want to attach you have to navigate there again with the OS file picker; you can’t even enter a path into the widget because of security issues; and the list goes on.”

So if we could do anything, anything at all and forgetting any security or implementation issues(!) it would be this.

Our file upload widget would

1. Have a progress indicator. This must be accurate and reflect what is actually going on. None of your inaccurate Windows Vista indicator nonsense.
2. Be sensitive to drag and drop. Grab a file from somewhere and drop it straight on there. Once you’ve dropped it, the progress indicator kicks in and you are free to continue with the other form elements. (Similar to how gmail does attachments).
3. Menu driven browsing functionality. When you click ‘upload’ you should be given a small menu with the following options
   • File system access points. Go to a preconfigured point in the file system. Chances are you work from one of a few places, these points should be configurable and easy to get to.
   • File system filters. How about something that lets you only browse preconfigured groups. So images will contain *.jpg, *.gif etc. Documents will contain *.doc, *.pdf. There is also an ‘all’ option.
4. Generate the file to upload. Sometimes you might want to actually produce the file you want to upload as you are uploading it. An example would be grabbing the computers camera, taking a picture or a short video and then uploading. This should all be done seamlessly and effortlessly. A decent solution to this would enable developers to build web apps around this functionality alone. With a fast enough connection the whole process of recording, uploading and viewing AV files creates all kinds of possibilities. I’ll leave this for another post.

So what do you think ? Can you add to this list ?