We are pleased to announce that the updated Dragon Brands website we have been working on recently has now gone live. While we worked on their last version, it was hamstrung by legacy systems and databases. Working closely with the design team at Dragon we have developed a flexible, but simple, content-managed system that kept the distinctive ‘letterbox’ design.

For those of you who may be interested in such things, here’s a sneak peak of what the BBC may (or may not) be doing with their homepage. Personally, I like the retro clock. (Found via Plasticbag).

“Look for things that are evil, broken or stupid. These are usually great opportunities.” Paul Graham, Y Combinator

Last Monday I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford event at the Saïd Business School, part of Oxford University. For those of you unaware it does exactly what it says on the can: it brings a wide range of entrepreneurs, thinkers and investors from Silicon Valley companies. It was a fun, stimulating and inspirational day, infused with a great enthusiasm and optimism imported directly from California.

Guests included Chris Sacca from Google, Biz Stone from Blogger/Twitter, Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from Y Combinator, Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn, and a whole host of others.

The most exciting element to all this was the pervasive sense of excitement that everyone speaking at the event still had for the web and it’s possibilities. Their were many events throughout the day, but in particular Paul Graham and Jerry Sanders stood-out. It made me yearn to move out to Silicon Valley and soak up some of that pure optimism.

The most depressing element was realising what a terrible place Britain is for starting web companies and gaining investment relative to Silicon Valley. It was made clear that access to possibilities are so much greater there than here. A group of ex-pat ex-Oxford students from Auctomatic and YouNoodle were there discussing their start-up experiences in the UK and then Silicon Valley. They tried to find positives about the UK culture, but they were not easy to find. Why is this? No one seemed to have a clear answer, but themes of fear of failure, cynicism, bureaucracy and lack of ambition kept on coming up. Sadly I can only find this too easy to believe. Maybe that’s just the way we are.

The culture of the UK media and the web is still so different to the US. While this is clearly a good thing in some respects (we should not become homogenous with the US or indulge ourselves in ‘groupthink’), we appear to fixate on gimmicks and tabloid-style stories. Meanwhile, the US mainstream media takes the web business and innovation much more seriously. In general (and what FoxLand mainly caters towards), the UK’s web business is based around what existing organisations are doing with the web. For our own Silicon Valley-style business culture to really take-off, we need to start acting and thinking big, with more ambition and less concern about failure.

As an aside, the day included a ‘garage’ event wherein I sat in with university students brainstorming the conundrum of how to make start-ups more attractive than large corporates. While this was not a problem I would have anticipated – I would have guessed that to students a start-up would have been an easy choice over a giant anonymous company – I was wrong. Apparently it is hard to persuade Oxford graduates of the benefits to do anything beyond law, accountancy and the big consultancies.

More about the event can be read on the Guardian’s PDA blog, The Telegraph, and New Scientist.

Many thanks to the journalist Sarah Barrell who I came with as a guest.

Update: the BBC on the event.

We are very pleased to announce that we have just won a significant project to update the brand and website of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) - “the kitemark of medical journals”. COPE are an international organisation working towards high ethical standards of biomedical journals. Founded in 1997 their goal is to educate and advance knowledge in methods of safeguarding the integrity of the scientific record.

Jeffrey Zeldman explains web design: “The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.”

We regularly research Content Management Systems, and in a recent spate of Googling I came across an article by Jeffrey Veen called “Making A Better Open Source CMS” from 2004. Sadly, most of its points are still completely relevant. Three years later and it is still hard to find a system that feels it is put together with the average user in mind (i.e. not techies). While Wordpress is not in any way perfect (what is?) or powerful enough (what is, unless custom built?) for all situations, it is relatively easy to comprehend for the user, which is why we so often recommend it.

Not the most exciting of titles, but the The Web Standards Project discusses the UK’s drive for accessibility in government websites. It is bizarre and also shocking that so many content management systems in use by government agencies, ministries and quangos seem unable to generate good clean accessible and semantic code. 

Using Apple’s recent release of Leopard as an example, Scott Stevenson discusses how user interface design isn’t always a logical process backed up with user research and rigourous thinking. Sometimes it’s just because people need to feel new stuff is ‘new’.

Apart from the hype about the iPhone and social networks, the other thing that the web industry has been obsessing about is the gPhone: Google’s mythical mobile phone. In fact there is no gPhone, or actually, there could be 1000s. Google has just announced Android, a mobile phone operating system that will help developers integrate the mobile experience and the internet. At least, that’s the theory. While interesting, many people may be surprised there is even the need for this. It will be interesting to see what exactly this will mean for us, the users, as well as Nokia, Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft, and the rest of the technology sector as it tries to grapple with the mobile world.

Ever since MySpace, and then particularly Facebook, took off, the industry has been thinking about where social networking should go next. Most importantly, people have become increasingly unhappy about the way social networks keep personal information locked-up in their ecosystems. The web became as pervasive as it is today partly due to its ‘openness’ (look at and contact anything), but conversely social networks are popular partly due to their ‘closed’ nature (look at and contact only your contacts). So, how do we balance these two elements? Google has come up with the OpenSocial concept – a way of making the whole web your social network. See these articles on TechCrunch announcing the strategy, Marc Andreessen’s blog discussing the concept, and Wired does a good job of making the idea accessible. Update: Read/WriteWeb brings up three concerns about the OpenSocial strategy.