Which is starting to confirm my theory that we only win when we don’t turn up to these awards :)
Spoiltchild / Toddle.com won Best Internet & ICT Award at tonight Chamber of Commerce Awards. It’s brilliant to get and thank you to all involved. Thanks also to Denise who called live from the event when they announced it.
I am currently at home minding a sick baby and about to break out some Farley’s Rusks and milk to celebrate :)

Comment [1] | Spoiltchild | 09/11/08 01:52 AM

Chuffed to find out today that Toddle has been shortlisted for the Best Internet & ICT Award and Spoiltchild for the Best Small Business in the Drogheda Chamber of Commerce awards.

The Internet award recognises companies that have a strategy to reduce costs, grow sales or improve their focus on customers through innovative and effective use of the Internet and ICT. While the Best Small Business award is for the company who has demonstrated significant strategic growth, innovation entrepreneurship and sustainability in its market sector.

Fingers and toes will be crossed on awards night on November 8th.

| Toddle | 24/10/08 11:17 PM

A fantastic night was had last weekend at the Irish Web Awards 08.
It was the first one of these awards and a huge congrats to Damien Mulley for having the vision and drive to pull it together and to everyone who pitched in. It was one of the first award events I have attended where I felt it truly represented the current web industry in Ireland.

Our own Finetuna.com was up for an award for Most Innovative Website but lost out to the excellent Pixenate. Also shortlisted for the awards were:
Zignals
Decisions For Heroes
Pumps.ie
The Big Word Project

Thanks to iQ content for sponsoring the category, Moviestar.ie for sponsoring the Awards and Peter Donegan Landscaping, Atfar Construction and Priority Engineering for sponsoring the drinks.

It was great to meet and chat to everyone there and I was sorry I didn’t get a chance to chat to so many others.

Bartek took along his camera and you can see the results here
.

Check the official site for links to other photos and videos of the night.

Comment [1] | Spoiltchild | 19/10/08 04:00 PM

Finetuna.com has been getting some great coverage around the web recently. The great thing is we didn’t have to bribe anyone, they seem to be finding it by themselves. Below is a small selection of the sites and comments.

Chris Pirillo

The Video Blogger and Author did a live video review of Finetuna on his show here.

You won’t believe how simple this is to use. Simply upload an image or design, then add your comments. When you’re finished, you can either email it to another person(s), or send them the direct link to what you’ve done. That’s it… seriously.

CNET Webware

Josh Lowensohn over at Webware did a nice review.

Finetuna is a dead simple collaborative image annotation tool. Meant mostly for casual designers, it lets you make a few short notes on an image and send it off to someone else. As soon as they get it, they can view your edits, make their own, then send it back. This keeps the paper trail out of your e-mail in-box, and in a single place.

Lifehacker

Great for choosing logos, helping a photographer friend out with style points, and other types of editing help.

Freelance Switch

Freelance Switch listed Finetuna in its article “9 next generation collaboration apps for sharing images documents“.

Designers Toolbox

Overall, this a great tool for anyone that needs specific feedback from a client that does not have Acrobat Professional. We found the entire process to be quick and easy.

The Next Web

Ernst-Jan Pfauth wrote a nice review in Finetuna: discuss a design in detail without any hassle

No, this has nothing to do with tasty fish, the name of this service refers to the process of fine tuning a design. Irish design agency Spoiltchild Design came up with a handy tool that helps you and your colleagues to address every detail in an image, without bothering to describe the spot you’re talking about. You just put a note on the desired spot and email the image to a colleague, who can also easily edit the picture as well.

Kim Komando Radio Show

Kim featured Finetuna in her Cool site of the day.

Once at Fine Tuna, you can add comments quickly and easily. The comments are tied to specific portions of the photograph. So, you can point out a detail others may miss.
Once you’ve added comments, you’re ready to share the photos. Just send a link to your friends and family. They’ll love the personal touch that your comments add!

Alexia

The great Alexia posted a nice review after a recent Photo walk.

For example, I have a snap I took last Saturday. Suppose I wanted to get one of the photo blogging rockstars like Red Mum or Gingerpixel to give me advice, I could upload that snap to Fine Tuna and send them a link using the Fine Tuna site. I would then wait nervously as they grade my efforts and dole out sound advice. Feedback is registered on the image using Post-It notes-style comment bubbles, highlighted regions and underlining. Intuitive controls that any email user can easily manage.

And thanks also to the sites who mentioned Finetuna for its great design. Inspiredology, Most Inspired, CSS Mania, CSS Vault, CSS Loaf and My3w.

| Spoiltchild | 19/10/08 03:03 PM

Ages late on this one.
I am going to try something a little different with this feedback and do it visually with some of the reasoning Spoiltchild uses when approaching a UI design and selling a site.

But first about eWrite-lite.

eWrite is a simple web based tool that lets you edit the content on your own website. And that’s it. Did you need something more? It does exactly what it says on the tin.
Give the demo a try.
Log in to eWrite, give it the address of your website, choose from the list of your web pages which one to edit and then you are presented something similar to a Microsoft word page where you can edit your content. It costs 200 euro for the year which is worth it but may be a hard sell in its current form. More on that later.

Start marketing inside your product.

Marketing and selling a product does not start and end outside your product.
The traditional thinking is advertise, talk about your product and even now the push is to engage with your potential customers in social media such as Social networks, blogs and forums. The goal being to get customers to try your product.
That’s great so far but it is only half the battle.

You have to Sell to them when they are in the product.
Make them think they are brilliant that they find your app so easy to use (they are brilliant, they bought your product didn’t they) Let them feel powerful and in control of this technology lark by allowing them to always know where they are, what they are doing and what to do next.
Make it look and feel easy to them.
And if they do have any difficulty make it easy to find you, explain their problem and get a solution.

This is the part of the marketing loop that you have complete control over, doesn’t keep costing as time goes on.

Once a user has found a great product that makes them feel great, they will tell their friends. People love sharing great products and services to others. It makes the look smart, helpful and generous. So while the list of functions might include stuff like Import web page, text formatting, image uploading etc. At the top of that list needs to be “Makes user look and feel smart”.

Good marketing helps sell your product. Great product helps sell your marketing.

Without this you have twice the fight and 4 times the expense in marketing your product. Marketing within your product is actually remarkably easy and its a one time job of which the benefits far outweigh the little effort.

I am a big fan of Seth Godin as you can guess and his book on this subject “Purple Cow“ is a must read for anyone building and selling a product.

So back to eWrite. While it is a great, really simple tool that does exactly what it says. It looks like a developer made it. It looks functional. It is missing the marketing within the product that will make it easier to sell.

Redesigning eWrite

Its all good and fine talking about it so I am going to put my time where my mouth is. I am going to take one of the pages from the application and do a bit of reworking to the style and UI. As you will see functionally it does exactly the same but it becomes a much easier sell and a product a customer will find much easier sell to friends and colleagues.

This is the current dashboard screen of eWrite.

My main problem is the gray
Makes it look like a really technical dry product. Which it is not.
And it is not how it is being sold.
Texty, gray, unorganised = Difficult and technical.

With all the colours available in the colour pallet why choose gray.
I do know why. It is a neutral colour. An easy inoffensive choice that no one could ever have a problem with. But as you see neutral and inoffensive is very hard to sell. What’s more you look like a huge number of other similar neutral and inoffensive products out there. No one wants to blend in.

Free advertising for all!

When building our own products within Spoiltchild our design is our easiest, cheapest most effective form of online advertising for our products. And I don’t mean that in an “our design is fabulous and pretty ra ra ra” way but in a very quantifiable way.
Everyone loves lists. The top 10 of this, the very best of that etc. They have been around forever and most likely will always be. This exists for design as anything else. Design gallery websites are a hugely popular version of this. Sites like CSSMania (CSS everything else), Smashing Magazine, FWA etc all boast thousands of visitors daily.
Taking CSSMania as an example. A side bar banner would cost 1250$ a month.
Our app Finetuna.com was featured for free on the CSS Mania site on 9th of June,08 as an example of good design. Top spot on the home page. As a result it then got featured on a host of similar CSS / gallery sites around the world and picked up and reviewed by individual blogs.
We reckon if we had paid for that exposure on those sites alone it would have cost over €5000. Which is more then it cost to build and host the entire application. We have submitted and got it featured on a whole heap of other sites on top of that. I wrote about this before.

Now traffic like that is great and ideally targeted for a product like Finetuna. But it they are not your target market they still generate huge link love to help your page rankings. Its a great initial boost and sticks around for the long tail.
So its worth spending a bit of time on the design.

Below is a small bit of time I spent on the dashboard screen. Followed by some of my reasoning behind each change. Click to view larger.

1. Frame removed. There was no need for this to take up screen real estate and the Photoshop bevel made it look dated.
2. More colour added to make it appear easier, lighter and friendlier. This scheme taken from their new logo.
3. The logo. eWrite are obviously aware of what can be improved within the design as they already commissioned this logo.
4. Terminology and Icons. I adjusted some of the terminology used within the interface to make it more accessible to a non techy user.
5. Added written and visual cues to let a user know where they are and what they can do next.
6. The resource limits of the account were previously at the bottom of the screen. This makes sense if you are a new user and have hardly used any. But as a user approaches the limits its importance grows so I thought it best to make a user aware of their status from the get go.
7. I de prioritised the news section. On the original it seems like it has equal billing to the actual application which is certainly not the case. I would even suggest a way to hide the new after it has been read.
8. Overall more attractive, better spacing, more friendly. LOOKS easier to use.

I believe it targets the core market better and makes it easier to sell. Would you be more tempted to click TRY at http://www.ewritecork.com/ if you seen screens like this?

This is just one screen but this reasoning can be applied site wide and should cut down on the effort needed to get that next customer, and the next …

That’s the application itself. The home screen also needs to be looked at.
Gordon can correct me if I am wrong but the space I see eWrite targeting means it is sitting alongside the following companies and products. Not by functionality but by target user.
A simple side by side comparison shows how the home page compares to the competition.

The home page

Its difficult for a start up to hire design expertise if they don’t have it in house. This is not to be an advert to hire a designer but as you can see above it can more then pay for itself if you do.
However, there are lots alternative options out there. This is where I use the dirty word that gets hate stares from designers. Templates. In the last few years templates have come on in quality that they really are a viable option now. And while I don’t suggest using them exactly as given, use them as a starting point. Once you apply your own branding and content needs on them they should end up suitably changed that they don’t look the same as everyone else and you are displaying your information clearly.

* Just a note that a redesign like this is just a starting point. To make it truly effective you need to test it, measure, tweak it, test it, tweak it ….

Comment [4] | Design-work | 06/10/08 08:32 PM

A big thank you to all the Judges of the Irish Web Awards who have shortlisted our latest web app Finetuna for Most Innovative website.
There is some pretty stiff competition in the shortlist.

• Zignals
• Decisions For Heroes
• Pumps.ie
• Pixenate
• The Big Word Project

Congratulations to all and see you on the awards night on October 11.
If anyone is thinking of attending move fast. Places are almost full.

| Spoiltchild | 27/09/08 12:22 AM

As the title says we have move office into a larger space here in Drogheda.
You will now find us in Units 1 & 2 in the new Chamber of Commerce building on the Dublin road. It’s directly across the road from our favourite eatery The Black bull but I am not sure that is a good idea :)

Our new contact details are as follows.

Phone: 041 9830152
Skype: spoiltchilddesign

Address:
Units 1 & 2, Broughton house
Dublin Road, Drogheda
Co. Louth, Ireland

View Larger Map

Comment [3] | Spoiltchild | 29/04/08 11:40 AM

As Toddle gets closer to going live and the trip to Silicon Valley looms we have been looking closely at what kind of investment we might look for and how exactly should we structure ourselves in preparation. Our goal for Spoiltchild is to build great products, grow them to great businesses and then spin them out on their own. An internal incubation space. With Toddle coming out we would like(but don’t need) a cash injection to help bring the application to market relatively quickly. If we do pursue investment in Toddle how should we structure the company to do that. If its to be just Toddle should we spin it out to its own Limited Company now with Spoiltchild Ltd as the main shareholder . What would be the Tax implications of transferring a new product with no revenues between companies. Or do we look for investment in Spoiltchild Ltd itself combined with the other products we have in the pipeline for future release? Is BES attractive to all Irish investors or only some. If we look for more then the current BES limits would an investor invest some through BES and the rest outside it?

I guess its time to talk to an expert. Any suggestions?

Comment [1] | Spoiltchild | 29/10/07 06:48 PM

Unfortunately I am going to have to miss Design Week this year. We won the Web2Expo competition run by web2ireland.org so myself and Bartek will be over in Berlin for the conference. Thank you for the tickets guys and if you are attending and want to meet up give me a shout.

| Spoiltchild | 29/10/07 06:25 PM

I was honoured to be spending last weekend in the Dublin offices of Irish International BBDO as one of the judges for the 2007 Irish Creative Advertising and Design (ICAD) awards.
The process of narrowing down the entries was carried out over 2 day with Saturday spent choosing the awards short-list and those for exhibition only and Sunday spent in some heated debate over who should go home with a Gold, Silver or Bronze Bell or none of the above if the standard was not there.
As part of the New & Mixed Media Jury we had to look at work in the following categories:

Below the line
Ambient Media
Direct Mail
Sales Promotion
SMS/Mobile Campaign
Miscellaneous

Interactive Advertising
Banners
Viral Commercial
Viral Commercial Campaign

Interactive Design
Website
Interactive Kiosk & Installation
Electronic Publication Design (DVD, PDF etc)
Miscellaneous

Experimental New & Mixed Media

I found the whole process very interesting to see from the inside. I had heard rumblings in previous years about awards for the boys and how it was more who you knew then the standard of your entry however the reality was very different. The agency who submitted an entry was not revealed, and one judge on each team was brought in from an international agency to ensure impartiality and oversee the process. Of course Ireland being a small country its impossible not to have some connection somewhere but where that happened the particular Judge was asked to leave the room for the duration of that piece being marked.

The winners will be announced at the end of November at the awards event in Dublin and an exhibition will follow.

Oh I must mention ITSA4 restaurant in Sandymount. We were kindly treated to dinner there on Saturday night and I have to say it was some of the most delicious food I have ever tasted. Recommended.

| Design-work | 29/10/07 06:08 PM