What is Digitally Supported Literacy?

Literacy and numeracy is a big problem in New Zealand, with 1 in 5 having low functionaly literacy. One of our clients, Adult Learning Support, is involved in helping adults who struggle with their reading, writing, spelling and maths.

We are working with them to create electronic versions of short stories that have embedded support for struggling readers. These take the form of videos with the text of the story on screen, narration by Nelson's Matt Lawrey, and visual cues to help them find the line they should be reading and "hoops", like slurs in music to help them read words in chunkys which is a skill developed by good readers.

The Work is being funded by AKO Aotearoa and will be released with the creative commons licence so that others can build on the work we have done.

We've been beavering away for sometime on a redesign for the Avoca Design website and wwe are finally showing it off to the world. There are still one or two small tweaks for us to finish but overall we are delighted.

Be on the look out for more additions to our training library over the next couple of months now that we have a good platform to display the videos on.

I just found this great interview with the Joe Pulizzi, author of Get Content, Get Customers, an expert in the world of content. He talks about why just creating content isn’t good enough, you have to create the strategy to get that content into your customers hands and then let it spread naturally because of the plan you put in place.

Listen to Joe explain why you must have a content marketing strategy before you have a social media strategy. Joe connects the dots between content and social media.  Be sure to check it out, I found it most enlightening.

This great article by Julie Niehoff  applies to us all and not just Not for Profit organisations.

For nonprofit organizations, exposure to potential donors, supporters, and volunteers is critical to success and sustainability. Social media marketing is a great way to gain that much needed visibility at virtually no cost. The biggest hurdles for many organizations are figuring out which social networks are right for them, getting started, and then maintaining their presence on a regular basis. She gives some ways to do all three.

Read the full article : Use social media marketing to spread the word about your organization and cause

Need a picture for your next blog post, webpage or mailing?

You could do what most people do: go to Google Images and grab an image there. But you should be aware that you are literally risking tens, maybe even millions in legal fees and damages every time you do so. But there is a way to get free images quickly, easily,  freely that you can freely use on and off line!

Check out Don Crowthers How To Find Free (And Legal) Pictures Online video here.

add blurb about Istockphoto here

This is an extract from an interview with Michael Stelzner, social media expert and ReelSEO's Grant Crowther. Michael also shared some exclusive Facebook video tactics and business success stories and gives 10 reasons you should definitely consider Facebook as part of your online marketing mix.

1. Audience – Facebook is the 2nd largest trafficked website, with over 500 million active users.
2. Referrals – Facebook is the 2nd largest referral source for video.
3. Mobile – 150 million active users take Facebook with them everywhere they go.
4. Time – Many people spend a lot more time on Facebook than on Google
5. Versatility – Many video formats are supported for uploading
6. Length – Facebook allows up to 20 minutes, 5 minutes more than YouTube
7. Connectivity – A wide range of sharing features and engagement opportunities. While Facebook doesn't let you share it's content onto other social networks (like YouTube and Twitter), because of its large member base, you will certainly have many more connections from the onset that may lead to better sharing potential.
8. Search Engine Visibility – Facebook videos are visible within Google Search.
9. SMO (Social Media Optimization) – Excellent keyword encoding (aka, "tagging") capabilities.
10. Conversions – Hot triggers around the video for taking an intended action.

Read the full article at ReelSEO

This article is a great reminder about what to think about when recording video to go online on Youtube or on your own website. It's written by Mitch Joel, who is the president of Twist Image, a digital marketing agency. And it's written—by the author's own admission—by a guy that doesn't do much video production. But he watches plenty.

Things to think about are:

• Lighting - don't need to spend lots, just be creative
• Audio - needs to be good
• Don't Fidgeting
• Keep Eye Contact
• Rehearsal before you record
• I'll add one of my own - if you don't have a tripod to keep the camera steady, sit it on a table, if you're outside sit it on a fence post or somethng so it doens't move all the time!

Check out the Joel's full article Do's and Don'ts for OnlineVideo Production

Just recently Limelight Networks shared some pretty cool data facts. The major one is the online video bandwidth usage is over half of all bandwidth usage in the USA! Online video is obviously the market to be in so get some videos online asap! If you need help getting your videos online contact us and we can help.

Check out the full article Online video is over 50% of Bandwidth Consumption in the US

We have quite a few new Joomla and WordPress tutorials online now. They are available via our our client pages. To access them you will need a username and password. Please contact us if you haven't received one yet. Most of the tutorials on how to use the Joomla editor are now up, how to create a Joomla menu item, how to upload images in Joomla are now compelete. Using the WordPress editor and a tutorial about how and where to use keywords effectively in WordPress are also online.

Coming soon are tutorials for uploading images in WordPress.

If there are special ones that you would like to see up there let us know and we will see what we can do.

If you are not currently a client and would like to access the Joomla tutorials and the WordPress tutorials online please contact us and we may be able to come to an arrangement.

CSSedit, by MacRabbit, is a life changing CSS editor that saves us hours every week. It is honestly one of the two major reasons that I switched to the macintosh platform in 2007. Live Previews and quick searching huge CSS files are just some of the beautiful features of this programme. 

How can one piece of software make all the difference?

The first piece of magic is the live previews and style sheet overrides. CSSEdit provides a browser window with a 'Xray' inspector that lets you easily browse the different elements on the page. This gives you the class or identifier for the element that you want to style. You can then override the CSS file on the server with a local copy. Magic, now you can make changes and see the results in real time and iron out any kinks before uploading it to the server. 

Once you have identified the CSS you want to edit the it does a fantastic job of exposing all the CSS options at a glance. It is a great reminder of the options available. 

Nothing is perfect

We do wish it would include some tools that are common in other solutions such as Firebug (for Firefox) like the computed style that tells you what the rendered size of each element is which is very handy for trouble shooting. We also use Xylescope a lot to find out where an element is taking the CSS commands from. This can be extremely useful in resolving conflicts between style sheets. It would be easier if it were rolled up in one tool. 

Daylite, from Marketcircle, is a great application for Calendaring and managing all the information that you need to keep about People, companies, projects, work opportunities and much more. Like CSSedit, it is the other key 3rd party application that convinced us to shift OS platforms from windows to OS X.

It's like Outlook on steroids

And not the 1980’s Eastern Block kind either but more the modern kind that provide performance without the hit to the looks….

I used Outlook on the PC (still do at my other work) and I must admit it does somethings really well, like customisable forms and views. However, the fact that it only really plays well with others via an expensive exchange server set-ups has always been a proverbial pain in the behind in the small office set-ups I have worked in.

I love the fact that Daylite works in a single user set-up but can scale to 50 users (both local and over the internet) without having to add greatly to the complexity of your hardware or software set-ups. Remote workers are catered for extremely well with off-line copies and synchronisation since version 3.5 is lightening fast.

Also anyone who has been stung by outlook creating but not exporting custom fields will understand the need for a real database. Also being a real database it has proper reports. The reporting engine is very powerful but has a little bit of a learning curve.