Search Engine Optimization Experiments

Monday, 4th February

Apologies for the lack of recent updates but we've been pretty busy with a few other projects lately taking us away from the usual Double Down actvities. We've been doing some serious experimenting with Search Engine Optimisation lately, trying to upgrade our skills in this area and rank up a few of our own personal site projects. It's an interesting process seeing how changes to content, titles and links affect your pagerank and the timescales over which google works when monitoring and acknowledging changes to such things. In particular we've been optimising a couple of brand new sites to test the timescales over which it's possible to get a decent number of hits and some of the results have surprised us.

Anyway, enough of that. We'll update this a little more regularly with news from our other projects so check back for some interesting reading. Thanks for keeping in touch!

Colin Gray

e-commerce Shop Development

Wednesday, 14th November

Double Down Media is now moving into the ecommerce area. Colin Gray is working on a project which aims to produce a high quality, accessible web shop which is going to be easy to manage for anyone. Once our first shop is up and running we'll promote it here as an example and anyone can then come to us to have their own shop built. So many people are now trying to get into on-line trading but don't have the knowledge or expertise to create or run a complex shop. Hopefully our solution will fit that gap and give people a unique, customized shop that is still easy to manage.

e-learning Flash Animations

Tuesday, 18th September

We've been working on a lot of flash animations lately for a course on Napier University's e-learning portfolio. They will be used to brighten up the normally quite dull course handbook in an attempt to get students actually reading the thing. We've had to keep the animations very accessible and usable as you would expect for an educational institution but we've put some work in to make sure they're pretty stylish too. They'll be added to the animation section soon so be sure to check back!

Education Websites

Thursday, 26th July.

Colin has recently finished a number of education websites which include a few new flash animations and applications. Check out the web section for new website additions and look out for flash animations and applications appearing on the relevant sections soon.

Mobile phone applications and multimedia

Tuesday, 29th May 2007.

Colin Gray at Double Down Media is on a high at the moment after finishing his MSc dissertation on E-learning on mobile phones, or m-learning to pick up the new, fashionable vernacular. He has been working part-time to earn this qualification while still working both on projects for dubdown and on e-learning work for Napier University. His dissertation was titled "Testing design principles for multimedia learning when creating e-learning content for mobile telephones". Typically long winded for an academic paper but it describes the content! Anyway, it means that we now have a member of staff at Double Down Media who is adept at creating multimedia content for mobile phones or devices whether it is for e-learning purposes, for work or just for fun. If you require a mobile phone application get in touch and we can see what we can do.

Web Standards and accessibility

Friday, 25th May 2007.

At Double Down Media we pride ourselves on creating great multimedia but keeping it accessible to all no matter what that user's limitations are. In the case of web design this means using web standards which involves CSS and HTML built to meet accessibility and usability guidelines. Paul Boag at boagworld.com has always promoted web standards in his podcasts but he's now just released a presentation aimed at businesses to try to pursuade more people to use them. It's a really useful presentation for any web designer that wants to pursuade a business that this is the way to go even if it takes more time and money to set up initially. You can check out the presentation using this link to the Boagworld.com web standards presentation.

E-Learning Changes at Dubdown

Monday, 12th March 2007.

Sorry for the lack of updates to the dubdown site since Christmas but it's been pretty hectic! Cue list of excuses....

Colin, the main man behind this site and all of it updating, has recently started working with Napier University in Edinburgh as an e-learning developer. Colin has always been interested in e-learning having done a fair bit of research in the area and he's now working with the university to develop content for a number of new e-learning pedagogy masters (MSc) courses due to be delivered next year. Anyway, the big shift has been handled now so updates should resume as normal. There's plenty of upcoming material to be posted on the site, a lot of which has an e-learning slant, so keep checking in!